The title for this video, 21st
Century Enlightenment is aimed giving us insight on where we were not long
ago, and where we are now. According to
RSA’s Chief Executive, Mathew Taylor, we need to life differently in the 21st
century and to do that, we need to think differently. (2010) We have new
insights in human behavior and can now see more clearly what we are doing in
the present, and how we can adjust for the future. According to Taylor, we have new insights
thank to the emergence in scientific disciplines and social sciences, which can
help us to become more self-aware and self-sufficient. In the early enlightenment, people believed
that which they felt was true because it was spoken as truth at the time, transitioned
to discovery and enlightenment. This
further helped to change the way the world and it’s inhabitant’s work with one
another. We are now in a world where
change has occurred faster than we have realized, which encourages us to become
more self-aware and empathic citizens.
In the video when Taylor discusses the need to
“resist our tendencies to make right or true that which is merely familiar and
wrong or false that which is only strange”, I believe he is referring to new
change and new ideas and our unique ability to question why. It’s like the idea
of wanting something you never have means you have to do something you’ve never
done. We need to stop sticking with what we know to be true, which is causing
us to remain static and slow, and to start embracing new challenges and ideas
that are ahead of us. I used to work for
a very big company that has been around since the 1800’s. It is one of the oldest companies next to
Coco Cola that is still around today.
Back in the day, they were innovative and successful, but once the
market changed and our culture shifted, they failed to shift and innovate with
it, causing the company to struggle, declare bankruptcy, and attempt to pick
the pieces back up. While on the other
hand, their competitors figured out new ways to improve upon their brand and
their attitude, making it that much difficult for a turnaround of this
company.
Taylor argues that our society should eschew
elements of pop culture that degrade people and that we should spend more time
looking into what develops empathetic citizens. The question is whether or not
this would be possible. It’s difficult
to say because I feel there is definitely a “counter-culture” forming recently
within the past few years, but that in and of itself is in a sense, creating
another pop culture or anti-pop culture.
In order for us to be successful at this, we would need to not fight pop
culture, but instead marginalize it. I
feel this would be very difficult to do in a world where so much is shared
through social media and networking. Pop
culture is no longer designed and picked; now anyone and everyone can work to
become a pop culture icon through YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, blogging,
tumblr, etc. There are more platforms to
encourage pop culture lifestyles now and it is continuing to grow. While I
don’t think this is bad, as it is helping us develop new aspects of our lives
we didn’t know we had access to, it can also be a dangerous tool as well
because we can now spread more messages that could hurt the opportunity to
develop more empathetic citizens. For
every opportunity to help, we have the same opportunity to hurt, so I think the
change for my empathy lies in another aspect of our culture and of our lives.
At the end of the video, Taylor talks about
atomizing people from collaborative environments and the destructive effect on
their growth. What is the implication of these comments for organizational
change efforts? I am a big believer that
the more people the better ideas and chances for success. When you think about big companies, like we
discussed in the module this week about Google, they focus on the need to
small, interrelated teams within the company, all working together and thriving
together. They are successful for a
reason and I think for us as a society to gain progress, we need to work as a
society to get that progress because what is progress, really, when it can look
1,000 different ways to 1,000 different people, suddenly our definition and our
goal seems impossible. By working together,
we can develop and grow together in our own ways, but still remaining a
cohesive unit.
One of the biggest takeaways for me from this
exercise is the notion of recognizing that you are in control of your own
thoughts, abilities, happiness, and path.
This is very relevant for me right now as I have been struggling with
determining what the right choice is for me both career, education, and
personal life. There are so many paths
that are open and available to us, we shouldn’t feel that we need to stick with
the one that is familiar. I feel like we
will only be looking back asking “what if?”
References
Brown, R. D, (2011). An experiential
approach to organization development (8th edition.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Taylor, M. (2010). The 21st Century
Enlightenment. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo&feature=youtu.be
No comments:
Post a Comment