When you are living in times of breakdown, it is a dangerous illusion to believe that you can hold on to the old ways. Failure to adapt is high-risk or even fatal. When in chaos, stasis is death.
Whether we like it or not, transformation is taking place in our societies and our organisations. Systems are visibly cracking, under tension from multiple pressures, from health to ecology to economics to political division. During the COVID lockdowns, some people talked about the new normal. There is no such thing unless we are willing to think of chaos as the new order and learn what it takes to live and even thrive in that reality.
It is possible that the above paragraphs will make some uncomfortable. Maybe your first response will be to deny the chaos. It is well-known that denial is the first stage of our response to death and grief.1 If you are not seeing the breakdown for yourself, I invite you to bear with me and live in the discomfort of this analysis for a while longer, and also to watch what happens over the coming months as the strands of tension continue to compound one another. What if I am correct?
Another form of our human response to such discomfort is to double down on our attempts to restore the old order, to keep things the way they were. We like to feel in control; it provides a sense of safety. It is the external circumstances that must change, not us. For sure, this is often a viable response and may restore balance and calm but it can also be a habit that leads us into rigid behaviours, to anger and blame towards the unidentifiable “them” who are assumed to be responsible and expected to fix things. Anger and blame are also part of the grief cycle.
Psychiatrists would say that it is normal to reach for certainty, and so it is. But what do we do when there is no certainty available? The next two stages in the Kübler-Ross cycle are depression and bargaining. That we see an increasing narrative around mental health and depression is therefore no surprise. And bargaining is not possible when there is no one to bargain with. No one can take the discomfort away.
The modern alternative to bargaining is escape. There are many strategies for avoidance. Alcohol, overeating and recreational drugs are easily available. I have to restrain my liking for chocolate. Prescriptions for Prozac have become routine and the Fentanyl opioid crisis is no coincidence. Those at least involve personal choice and choices can be changed. Discussions of the evolutionary significance of serotonin to all living systems will have to await another article, but there is an argument to be made that we have been Prozac-ing the planet to death because it is not only those on prescription, not even only humans who are affected when SSRIs are increasingly present in our water systems.
In the grief cycle, the final stage is acceptance. That is something to look forward to, a light at the end of the tunnel when we are dealing with the loss of a loved one. In the conditions I am describing, it is only the beginning, the point at which we accept the reality of the breakdown. We see that control is not possible and let go of the search for certainty. Only then are we ready to look for a new and more viable response. I suggest that we need to engage with that reality.
We are capable of such adaptation even if we are not educated for it and it may not come naturally to us. Biological adaptation to new or changed ecological circumstances comes through our genes. Psychological adaptation depends on our thinking systems and our mindsets. Fortunately, new ones are available. Less fortunately, they do not coexist well with the old, which means that a nonlinear shift is called for where we cannot simply add the new ways in the manner of learning a new skill or language.
While it may sometimes be true to say “change your mindset and you may change the situation”, that way of thinking loops back again to the notion that it is the outside that needs to change. However, I am not talking about an internal accommodation either. A lot of what is offered around mindfulness is highly valuable in supporting us to calm our emotional responses and to avoid the damage caused to our bodies and our behavioural strategies by stress. That is not enough either. It makes us like the frog in the warming water, contentedly boiling to death.
What’s the Alternative?
We must intentionally embrace the chaotic conditions and accept that change will be the new normal. This involves making the choice to view our emotional signals, our grief, fear and anger, merely as signals rather than as determinants of our choices. We need to live as surfers of the wave, accepting that the joy, excitement and success of the ride depends on our willingness to live in the moment. We cannot control the wave but we can choose where to go on it.
The alternative combines internal and external perspectives in both our awareness of what is taking place and in our choices of what areas of change are available to us. The question “What else is possible?” must be continually present in us as our way of life. Our training in linear thinking and in simple cause-and-effect relationships pushed us into thinking that we can find single answers that will be reliable not only today but also tomorrow. In the chaotic world of multiple interacting systemic relationships, yesterday’s best response may no longer be optimal today.
The world is paradoxical by nature, so the history of humankind’s search for “right” choices led us to seek an unachievable homeostasis in our conditions. While homeostasis is a valuable aim in biological systems where an excess of body-heat or a deficit of oxygen may be catastrophic, larger-scale living systems such as societies or ecologies do not function that way. A corporation may choose to shift its product line in response to market conditions. Such changes are necessary for survival. What we are seeking is homeodynamic, the capacity to maintain continuity alongside instability.
When we work with single cause-and-effect relationships, we inevitably isolate one element from the system and fail to see the system as an entirety. When we are looking at living systems and particularly ones involving human beings, the system is not only composed of the mechanical relationships between things, and actions on things. It is also inhabited by its contexts, shared beliefs, guiding purposes, established human relationships and much besides that we may struggle to identify or even to bring to conscious awareness.
As we change our awareness and see more of the system as a whole, we are likely to encounter the ways in which our previous ways of thinking have been turned into processes, rules and structures. The blend of interior and exterior change calls for the recognition that it is not enough for us to change our attitudes; we also need to free the constraints so that the system has greater freedom to develop its homeodynamics from within as an expression of its collective intelligence. This, too, involves letting go of control in order that the system can become increasingly self-organising, extending the practice of agility, functioning from principles more than rules, acting less mechanically and more organically.
The mindsets and behavioural choices that I am describing already exist. In saying that they are no longer optional I am not presenting the impossible, only that which we have been reluctant to move towards and dangerously slow to adopt. We have to be quicker in our forgetting of the caterpillar lifestyle and more open to a different proverb: willing to burn our bridges behind us. We must be correspondingly rapid in our ability to develop the new and more flexible ways of relating and systemic structures that will be our future alternatives. This presents each of us with a question:
What am I willing to let go of that no longer serves me, damages us, or fails to equip us for the future?
What’s your response?
There are many sources related to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s work on the Five Stages of Grief. Here is one example: https://grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief.