We've spent much of the last few years working with foundations--and whining about them (with our partners and with many of the people we know who work in foundations). From time to time we have reflected on what it is about the foundations that often makes them frustrating to engage. Our conclusion is that usually it's not a particular individual or an irrational process; it's a particular type of modern organizational culture. And, we've learned from philosopher Ken Wilber, the culture reflects a certain level of consciousness (the "Green/Consensus" level) that impedes strategic decision making. We thought our friends in Foundationland might be interested in this analysis of the "power and pathology" of foundation culture.
The Meeting
Let's plunge right in. Wilber describes a meeting run on green-consciousness principles. See if it sounds like an experience you've had with foundations:
- Everybody is allowed to express his or her feelings, which often takes hours.
- There is an almost interminable processing of opinions, often reaching no decision or course of action, since a specific course of action would likely exclude somebody.
- Thus there are often calls for an inclusionary, nonmarginalizing, compassionate embrace of all views, but exactly how to do this is rarely spelled out, since in reality not all views are of equal merit.
- The meeting is considered a success, not if a conclusion is reached, but if everybody has a chance to share their feelings.
- Since no view is supposed to be inherently better than another, no real course of action can be recommended, other than sharing all views.
- If any statements are made with certainty, it is how oppressive and nasty all the alternative conceptions are. (This is why one of pluralism's main activities is not advancing its own constructive conceptions, but criticizing and deconstructing everybody else's.)”
Seems familiar? What drives the meeting behaviors is "Green/Consensus consciousness"--a way of being that is one of more than a dozen "levels" of consciousness through which people and societies evolve. (For more on the levels, click here.)
Green Consciousness
Green/Consensus culture, says Wilber, is "aware of the many different contexts and numerous different types of truth (pluralism)." Thus, "it bends over backwards in an attempt to let each truth have its own say, without marginalizing or belittling any. As with the catch words 'anti-hierarchy,' 'pluralistic,' and 'egalitarian,' whenever you hear the word 'marginalization' and a criticism of it, you are almost always in the presence of a green [worldview]."
The power of the Green/Consensus worldview is that it represents a significant evolution in human consciousness – as Wilber notes:
“It has acted with sensitivity and care in attempting to redress social imbalances and avoid exclusionary practices. It has been responsible for basic initiatives in civil rights and environmental protection. It has developed strong and often convincing critiques of the philosophies, metaphysics, and social practices of the conventional religious (blue) and scientific (orange) memes, with their often exclusionary, patriarchal, sexist, and colonialistic agendas.”
The culture of many large, professional foundations is deeply grounded in the “Green/Consensus” worldview (not to be confused with traditional environmental “greens,” who are, however, also part of this world view). Green is the dominant worldview of most charitable, philanthropic and non-profit organizations. And it is the core of traditional “liberal” political ideology.
The dark side of the Green world view (and the source of much of its pathology in foundation culture) is this: Many participants in this worldview have engaged in a vicious “transcend and dissociate” strategy and seek to deny the validity of any other world view (and their associated competencies) and end up in a self-destructive and unproductive “group grope” approach that finds it difficult to actually do anything useful. This works against being strategic or innovative, which requires making choices, ruling out certain options, on the basis of analysis.
The Problem With Being Green
Recognizing this underlying worldview--both its power and potential pathology--helps us to understand both “why thing are the way they are” and what one might do about it. A dyed-in-the-wool Green/Consensus culture leads to a predictable set of behaviors. We have seen these in many different organizations of all types. They include:
- A focus on feelings, inclusion, participation, representation and “voices.”
- An aversion to making qualitative judgments (unless they are linked to judgments about the bad qualities of repression/exclusion and the good qualities of inclusion/empowerment).
- An aversion to serious strategy and intellectual discipline (the “inclusion ethic” extends to strategic options, not just people; statements of strategy are usually so broad they can encompass virtually anything rather that express choices made).
- A preference for talking and engaging over doing.
- An avoidance of tools for measurement and performance.
- An aversion to many kinds of hierarchies (both good and bad)
- A valuing of intentions over results
Another problem with the Green/Consensus world view is that it dismisses the strengths of the Orange/Strategic worldview (the dominant capitalist business worldview) as well as the Blue/Authority worldview (the dominant conservative culture worldview).
What This Means in Practice
Using this consciousness framework to assess one foundation's strategies, we provided a top executive with this analysis of the strategic weaknesses caused by the foundation's Green/Consensus point of view:
Several consistent characteristics of your strategy materials reflect what we would call the “green pathology syndrome.”
- Strategy becomes so broad that it verges on being meaningless. Good strategy is also clear about what you won’t do, and allows you to make choices about what is in/out of your “target zone.”
- There is an effusive “aspirational” tone to much of the material that makes one inherently distrust its seriousness and objectivity. This, of course, reflects the beauty of the moral aspirations of the Green worldview: social justice, equity, de-marginalization, inclusiveness, access, diversity, participation, capacity building, opportunity. The problem is that this eloquent discourse on bad things that have happened (and the alternative good outcomes that should happen) somehow obviates the need to have serious, detailed, complex and disciplined strategies to move from one to the other.
- There is a tendency to value relationships over results. Listing who is engaged, connected, linked, enthusiastic, etc. takes precedence over describing what was actually done, how it worked and what the results were.
- There is a tendency to mistake root cause analysis for solution analysis. For instance, much of the analysis of structural exclusion uses words that refer to “a lack of access.” The strategy is then posited as “increasing/securing/creating access.” The difficulty is that there is no real hypothesis about how this might happen – i.e. what the innovations are that can reverse the structural forces that create exclusion in the first place.
Why These Green Tendencies Matter
For foundations to gain more impact, they must develop strategies for systemic change and for scaling up. The process of large-scale systems change requires several steps:
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Understanding the system and its dynamics
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Identifying leverage points for change
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Creating hypotheses for how you might “move” a leverage point
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Developing the competencies required to move the leverage point
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Trying out repeated experiments
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Developing scaling strategies
This process requires serious analysis, differentiation, measurement, clarity about what impacts are sought, and more--all of which are anathema to Green/Consensus consciousness.
Transcending Green Culture
The solution to this problem is what Wilber refers to as “transcending and including”--meaning embracing the positive side of the Green worldview, while also not disassociating from the powers of the Strategic and Authority worldviews, and ultimately transcending Green consciousness to move to the next level (what he call an “Integral” worldview).
In practical terms, this means making sure there are people in the organization who embody these other approaches and bring their skills to the table. You can do this in several ways:
- Deliberately bring people who reflect these other skill sets into the organization.
- Make these other competencies core parts of your organization.
- Continuously push the organization's culture to transcend its limitations.
Evolution of Consciousness/World Views
Wilber’s approach is based on the work of Claire Graves and Don Beck, who wrote the book Spiral Dynamics. (They worked with Nelson Mandela in the design of the post-apartheid governance design.) The basic idea is that the evolution of human consciousness proceeds in waves of development:
- The waves represent fluid, living systems rather than rigid, hierarchical steps.
- Each subsequent wave is more inclusive of other consciousness than the previous ones, and capable of responding to higher levels of complexity.
- Each prior wave is a fundamental ingredient of all subsequent waves, and thus each is to be cherished and embraced (“transcend and include”).
- We all have all these waves of consciousness in us. Each expresses a unique dimension of human need. Healthy individuals and societies satisfy the drives of all waves.
- The imperative is to care for the health of the entire spiral of waves – and honor the unique contribution of each wave.
- Each new wave/world view tends to discount the ones before it (“transcend and dissociate”), and deny the ones that emerge, believing it is the only “true” world view.
- Social systems must match the developmental level of the population to be successful.
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