No More Gold Stars: Regenerating Capacity to Think for Ourselves

We begin to develop our capacity for systems-actualization by imaging the whole of a system and the way it works when it is healthy and operating in harmony with its nature or essence.

We develop the ability to be an evolutionary instrument in an evolving world when we dedicate our will to serve the potential of the larger wholes that seek to express themselves through us. This is what it means to be a living expression of life on the planet. It is an ancient spiritual insight that a person becomes truly themself, and therefore s

The dominant contemporary theory of thinking in the United States assumes that it is possible to build knowledge over time, along with the answers and certainty that it provides. From this point of view, everything about the world can be known, and our job is to acquire enough of this information to establish a working relationship with things as t

My premise about change is that building people’s independent thinking capacity is, in and of itself, a social responsibility, one that will have more far-reaching and enduring consequences than any targeted effort to change material conditions.

Behaviorism presents a double impediment to this development. It substitutes conditioning for genuine self-management, and it uses an array of rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behavior, most of which have as their subtext the implied threat of nonbelonging. The need to belong to coherent social groups is a core driver of human behavior

The guiding principle for all of this was the activation, development, and nourishment of personal agency, informed by deep caring about and commitment to the effects this agency would have on the lives of other people.

I realized that providing expertise is antithetical to cultivating agency, and I began seeking new ways to engage my client organizations. For example, I stopped offering organizational models and started emphasizing the use of living systems frameworks, which provide the structure for thinking but require participants to supply the content and do

Why did so many people accept (or reject) the things I said without subjecting them to rigorous examination? I was beginning to be seen as a source of solutions and best practices, and this disturbed me deeply. I was contributing to the collective illness, whereby we never learn to think for ourselves, and I knew that something had to change.

My insights about the degenerative effects that a dependency on expertise produces in society have been hard won.