We have a great need to remember the fact of human goodness. Today, human goodness seems like an outrageous “fact.” Every moment we are confronted with mounting evidence of the great harm we so easily do to one another.
We are bombarded with global images of genocide, dislocations caused by ethnic hatred, and stories of individual violence committed daily in communities around the world. The word evil comes easily to our lips to explain these terrible behaviors.
And in our day-to-day lives, we are directly confronted by people who are angry, deceitful, and interested only in their own needs. In organizations and communities, we struggle to find ways to work together amidst so much anger, distrust and pettiness.
But I know that the only path to creating more harmonious and effective workplaces and communities is if we can turn to one another and depend on one another. We cannot cope, much less create, in this increasingly fast and turbulent world, without each other. We must search for human goodness.
There is no substitute for human creativity, human caring, human will. We can be incredibly resourceful, imaginative, and open-hearted. We can do the impossible, learn and change quickly, and extend instant compassion to those suffering from natural and political disasters.
And these are not behaviors we only use occasionally. If you look at your daily life, how often do you figure out an answer to a problem, or find a slightly better way of doing something, or extend yourself to someone in need? Very few people go through their days as robots, doing only repetitive tasks, never noticing that anybody else is nearby. Take a moment to look around at your colleagues and neighbors, and you’ll see the same behaviors—people trying to be useful, trying to make some small contribution, trying to help someone else.
We have forgotten what we’re capable of and let our worst natures rise to the surface. I believe we got into this sorry state partly because, for too long, we’ve been treating people as machines. We’ve tried to force people into tiny boxes, called roles and job descriptions. We’ve told people what to do and how they should behave. We’ve believed we could “reengineer” organizations to be efficient machines and treated people as replaceable parts in the machinery of production.
After so many years of being bossed around, of working within confining roles, of unending reorganization, reengineering, downsizing, mergers and power plays, most people are exhausted, cynical, and focused only on self-protection. Who wouldn’t be? But it’s important to remember that we created these negative and demoralized people. We created them by relying on organizing processes that discount and deny our best human capacities.
If you look around at most organizations and communities, people are still being kept in boxes. They are not invited to contribute, to create, or to care about each other. Instead, it’s assumed that people must be policed into good behavior. Endless policies and laws attempt to make us behave properly. Yet very few people tolerate this disrespect and constraint on their personal freedom. We become rebellious, hostile, cynical—or we shut down and look as if we died on the job. Whole cultures and generations of people become deadened by coercion, but underneath, the apathy and withdrawal still live human spirits that aspire to live lives of their own choosing.
It is time to become passionate about what’s best in us and to create organizations that welcome in our creativity, contribution, and compassion. We do this by using processes that bring us together to talk to one another, listen to one another’s stories, reflect together on what we’re learning as we do our work. We do this by developing relationships of trust, where we do what we say, where we speak truthfully, where we refuse to act from petty self-interest. These processes and relationships have already been developed by many courageous companies, leaders, and facilitators. Many pioneers have created processes and organizations that depend on human capacity and know how to evoke our very best.
In my experience, people everywhere are longing for new ways of working together, and for more harmonious relationships. We know we need to work together, because daily we are overwhelmed by problems that we can’t solve alone. People want to help. We want to contribute. We want to feel hopeful.
As leaders, as neighbors, as colleagues, it is time to turn to one another, to engage in the intentional search for human goodness. In our meetings and deliberations, we can reach out and invite in those we have excluded. We can recognize that no one person or leader has the answer, that we need everybody’s creativity to find our way through this strange new world. We can act from the certainty that most people want to care about others and invite them to step forward with their compassion. We can realize that “you can’t hate someone whose story you know.”
We are our only hope for creating a future worth working for. We can’t go it alone, we can’t get there without each other, and we can’t create it without relying anew on our fundamental and precious human goodness.