or: Why the old must be preserved, not changed, and why it must eventually die.
...or at least rendered dormant or ineffective for as long as necessary.
Peter Diamandis just recently said something very useful at the a360 2024 that I wish I had known years ago to the effect that -
You cannot use your old company to do something brand new and innovative, NO MATTER how good it would be for society, how necessary it is, how profitable, and how much the world needs the technology.
If you try that, you'll get an immune response.
If you want to take advantage of the new opportunity and vision, create a skunk works on the side, isolate them, and then tell them that you DON'T want conventional thinking, but 10x thinking, and fire everyone who tries to install traditional ways. And make sure they have no contact with the old firm, because the colleagues in the old firm will try to discourage them, laugh at them, maybe even thinking they are helping.
Keep the old firm, treasure it, but just use it for what it has always been used for.
Now, I never had an old firm that wasn't nimble enough to change, because the firm was basically me and a few partners/contractors, but of course, knowing this makes a huge difference in who you try to PARTNER with and who you try to INFLUENCE. If they are a huge firm, don't try to sell them a new extended vision - they won't be able to adapt and will react with an immune response - NO MATTER what the SUBJECT OF THEIR COMPANY is.
Even if the mission of the company is to HELP PEOPLE CHANGE or adapt, it doesn't mean the company can, especially if the format of how they do this is highly effective but has been in place and fine-tuned for decades. Circumstances around people change, but people, and their physical wiring, have not changed for hundreds of thousands of years - if their subject matter is changing people, their subject matter hasn't changed in the last 100 years.
It is tempting to think that it will be the perfect organisation to teach people to adapt to changing circumstances, like climate change, and that the leadership must know that. But changing people, psychology, and coaching were designed in the past to make people fit society. It is based on tradition. You can even mention this and use such an organisation to help people adapt to gradual change, but it won't be useful for a radical change, especially, if in the past, a high number of their clients came from traditional, conservative backgrounds and some may even still be honestly convinced that the earth is flat and 5000 years old.
If they haven't switched to Newtonian physics by now, then don't try to sell them quantum physics and climate change, no matter how real it is and how much the latter needs to be addressed.
Use them in the field in which they excel.
If you must, beach them, at least for a time, when they shouldn't get in the way.
But don't try to use them to adapt a society to rapid, much-needed change - they'll just end up fighting you.
Start fresh.
And be aware that only because one person is the founder and face of the company, it doesn't mean that it is a) a small company and b) he still has the power to lead and change it. He may have withdrawn from the day-to-day day running if the company decades ago, and even if you managed to convince him of the necessity of the change, the leviathan of that company that was created in the meantime will still not be able to follow and will likely create an immune response even against him.
If he is nimble enough for the change you are proposing, you can try and partner with him in a new venture, if he doesn't just see you as the avatar to try out his products on but really listens to you. But if you get an immune response in the new skunk works, too, be aware that a) he is likely not able to lead, or even follow the change and b) no matter what it looks like, he is not seeing you as a partner, may not even hear what you are really saying if it doesn't fit into the universe in his mind.
It may be hard to see that if they use matching/mirroring techniques to convince you that they are just like you until they try to pace and lead you back to where they are and if you don't have direct access, especially if your own wishful thinking is in the way because in your future vision they would just be perfect.
You can't change a man to be the perfect match for your vision even if only a few tiny changes, or even just expansions of his vision would be necessary if he doesn't want to change. He'll contract and go in the other direction just to show you that HE is the boss, especially if he gets a lot of immune response from his environment. He'll adjust to them, no matter how little useful it is to the whole - he won't even see that, because he doesn't see your whole.
And you certainly won't be able to change an organisation full of such men.
Why is Al Gore different?
He isn't really, or may not be.
It's just that he already saw climate change 35 years ago when he was a young man. So he was so far ahead of his time that he didn't have to change, time just caught up with him.
And, that's also why he focuses on teaching young people now, as they all do, because young people are still nimble enough to change, or they don't have the old ideas firmly installed yet in the first place, and this is why the old guard focus on them, too - to make sure they preserve THEIR ways.
So young people have now become the mental battleground between the old and the new. And because the old has now found ways to perpetuate themselves, instead of allowing the renewal to happen, which was installed by nature to avoid calcification of structures, the old may well end up destroying the world for the new, or even THROUGH those who were supposed to carry the torch for the new.
The old may want to take a leaf out of the old sage's books and not inhibit the changes necessary - but instead just focus on instilling truths that are timeless.
And that's where metaphors are so useful - because the message can be made timeless.
"And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins, and both are preserved. And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.’ ” Luke 5.37-5.39
Of course, the problem with metaphors is oftentimes that you understand them AFTER you learned the lesson...but at least you can double-check your results.
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