Reality What a Concept
By Peter Block
Every change effort
is a political act. Whenever we create teams, redo a work process, or
change the role of managers, we are touching a control structure that
would rather be left alone. Change is difficult because it requires that
we raise our political consciousness about the subtle ways power is
exercised.
The Name of the Game
Those who define the rules, control the game. Power becomes the ability
to define reality for others. When we allow others to define reality for
us, we have yielded sovereignty and lost the game before it has begun.
And we do this all the time.
 I
was in Nassau, Bahamas last fall
and lucky to
hear a local
architect, named Jackson Burnside, talk about how the British had
defined the Bahamian culture during their colonial period. He described
how the British maintained
power by enforcing the British definition
of what was true and false. The most vivid example was about how you
draw the color of skin.
When Burnside, a
person of color, went to school, he was taught that flesh tones were
pink. The crayons labeled "flesh" were not brown, they were pink.
When the students filled in a coloring book, they were expected to use
this pink "flesh color" on the face and arms of the children in the
book. Burnside remembers how upset he and the teacher became when one of
the other students used brown to color the face and arms. Despite the
fact that his skin was brown, the color of the colonial British skin,
pink, defined what color to use. The message was not subtle: the
institutionally approved color of skin was pink, not brown. Pink became
the standard against which skin was measured. Pink skin was "normal",
brown skin was not.
Power
is claimed by the capacity to define what is real and to determine the
standards against which we are measured. We yield power by believing
those definitions of reality and standards. Some examples in our world:
Government is in
Charge
If you listen to the media, it seems that politicians actually govern.
We are sold the idea that Washington, D.C. runs the country and so what
happens there is important. Governors are supposed to run states, mayors
and city councils run our city. If we as citizens ever decided that we
governed, we might change our perspective on politicians. We might even
treat them as if they were not so important.
Technology Rules
We are told that technology is going to define our future. Bill Gates is
the prophet who knows what tomorrow is going to look like. Just because
I can place a television, a computer, and a telephone on my wrist does
not mean that my life is going to improve. It may be that technology
causes as many problems as it solves. Yet we let those who have an
economic interest in the importance of technology make it the
centerpiece on the table.
How Much Is Enough?
We allow top management to define the economic game we need to play. The
CEO of a large regional bank announces that earnings need to reach $10
per share and therefore $40 million dollars in cost savings are
required. We immediately begin to look for the money. When do we start
to respond by saying, "show me the numbers." It is through our
collective silence that we end up trying to justify a year in which
thousands of people were laid off and the institution had record
profits.
Behavior Training
If you have been to a training session in the last ten years, you have
filled out a questionnaire that told that you that you were an INFJ, a
control taker, a support giver, a socializer, an integrator, and that
you are either task or people driven. We let this characterize our
tendencies and in the same breath, by omission, define our deficiencies
and what we need to work on.
Stock Market
Finally, because corporations dominate this culture, we have come to
believe that the stock market is the measure of our success. If the
market is doing well, and corporations are making money, we must be
doing well. What is lost in this definition of what is real are the
millions of people in low pay and low value jobs and the pockets of the
population where the unemployment rate stays in double digits.
--The
problem is not that others wish to define reality for us. The problem is
our consent. When we say yes to management or the dominant culture's
definition of what is real and important, we have yielded sovereignty
over our sense of ourselves and our capacity for self-directed local
action. When I believe that pink skin is more appropriate than brown
skin, I have supported the colonists and surrendered my ability to
define for myself who I am, how I define success and what cultural
values I would choose to create and live by. And if you think the
colonists only fly a foreign flag, how about the days when pink
Band-Aids were also labeled "flesh."
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in March 1998
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