The Worldview Paradox
Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 specific ways an organization must act and behave to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.
The Worldview Paradox is a concept in Leading at Light Speed described in Chapter 9 along with three other Leadership Paradoxes. Buy the book to read about the other three.
Through an advanced understanding of different worldviews, you can lead the way in this time of increasing globalization and diversity. Each worldview carries with it a specific and definable mental model of how the world works – and how it should be. Through the school of Western thought, we are taught to look rationally at everything. Our initial instinct when facing an issue is to examine the specifics and find a way to solve it. Assuming the world is inherently ordered and rational, that’s not a bad strategy.
The Western worldview, which teaches rationalty, is only one of many~The Western worldview of rationality is but one of many~The Western worlview, which teaches rationalty, is only one of many}. Philosophers and sociologists have identified at least four different worldviews: the Western, the Eastern, the Existentialist, and the Religious.
The Western worldview emphasizes rationality and individual free will. It stresses individual initiative, getting things done, and tackling challenges on our own. This worldview favors certainty and rationality. This goes a long way to explaining the appeal that tidy plot lines which are so suited to television hold to Westerners. It’s comforting to see sixty-minute solutions, easy outs, and resolvable dilemmas. This worldview unfortunately does not encourage us to open our eyes too wide, and does nothing to prepare us for the complex chaos of reality.
The Eastern worldview, in contrast, focuses on the unknown. It holds that intuition and insight can help us tap into deeper areas of spiritual meaning. It assumes that the unconscious mind has access to deeper and more meaningful insights than those available through rational thinking, and that this non-conscious awareness can be improved through training. In the Eastern worldview, people act under the influence of unseen spiritual forces, and their lives are suffused with this unseen spiritual world. People with this worldview have a deep psychological need for meditation, for quieting the rational mind, for a personal experience of the unknowable. Simple solutions to complex problems are distrusted.
A third worldview is the Existentialist, which holds that life, as it is experienced by human beings, is fundamentally unexplainable, but that we owe it to ourselves to make the best of the hand we’re dealt, both in terms of our family and the world into which we are born. This worldview holds that the highest goal is to be authentic to one’s own beliefs, to act on those beliefs, and to create a life built on being true to those beliefs. Existentialist thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard or Jean-Paul Sartre view human beings as forced to deal with circumstances way outside their control – and having no choice but to find meaning by discovering what’s truly important to each individual. A corollary to this worldview is that what’s important to you has no bearing on what’s important to me. Each must find their path to individual truth.
The fourth worldview, the Religious, holds that knowledge is conferred through faith, and that a kind of mystical power is vested in God or a system of gods. People living according to this philosophy allow their decisions to be influenced by beliefs and religious traditions, and are drawn to prayer and religious experience~People who follow this philosophy are drawn to prayer and religious experience, and use their beliefs and religious traditions to influence their decisions~People living according to this philosophy allow their decisions to be influenced by beliefs and religious traditions, and are drawn to prayer and religious experience}. This worldview confers great power on religious leaders who interpret events in the external world as the manifestation of God’s intent and try to impose their interpretations through religious training and teaching.
All four of these worldviews mingle together in today’s organizations. At one of our client companies, for example, teams of software developers from the U.S., Europe and Asia routinely work together on projects. All four worldviews co-exist within the team. The team’s manager is a gifted communicator, but even he admits to frustration when deadlines approach and people react in different ways. "We had one guy praying, another yelling obscenities to the sub-contractors, and another merely chuckling away at the ridiculousness of the situation" he said.
A true leader must be able to manage the differences exhibited through these worldviews. A well-developed sense of humor helps. But it’s also important to establish a framework of core values that can provide people a focus and serve as a bridge between different worldviews. A true leader must head discussions of the difference between indiviual values and those of the organization (the first quantum leap). They must be prepared to teach others how deeply, frustratingly complex the world is. How you decide to navigate and lead through this disparity of convictions is a test of how capable you are of engagement, communication and the building of a high-performing organization.
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