The Zulu greeting Sawubona means ‘I see you’ and the response, ‘Ngikhona’ means ‘I am here’. Inherent in this greeting is the sense that until you see me, I don’t exist and that by recognizing me, you bring me into existence. Nowhere is this more evident today than the urgent cry people are increasingly expressing for simply feeling heard. Throughout social discourse, today people are literally screaming at each other because it feels evermore challenging to feel that anyone out there is actually listening.  

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It’s obvious to anyone who is paying attention today that our civilization is at an epic turning point. What we are witnessing in graphic detail in the daily news--disastrous weather events, mushrooming poverty, escalating wars and famine, poisoned communities, weakening social protections, corrupt political and economic systems, and global environmental collapse--appears to be nothing short of the start of a cascading failure of what passes for  civilization today. The question is if present-day civilization is failing, what will take its place?  

Spawned by social movements, grassroots groups, social entrepreneurs, worker collectives and visionary innovators and leaders; new models for how we organize and manage campaigns, projects, businesses, organizations, economies, and governments are taking hold across the globe today and in many cases already achieving remarkable results. As these collectives write the social code for a new global operating system, our job is to participate and do everything possible to amplify their successes to ensure this revolution takes hold on a global scale.

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Cultural debt is a term to describe the deep hole teams and organizations fall into when problematic cultural and interpersonal dynamics constantly derail “real work.” The term stems from the concept of technical debt used by software companies to quantify the hidden cost of reworking code caused by always choosing shortcuts instead of better fixes that take longer.

Teams and organizations experience culture debt when they have repeatedly avoided dealing with the human dimensions of their work life, and then find that conflicts, poor communication, and low morale are increasingly inhibiting their effectiveness and derailing their mission.  

What is culture? Culture in teams and organization is the construct of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that shape how people behave when they work together.

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As we witness the tragedies around the events in Charlottesville many of us feel we are watching the world seemingly spinning out of control. It feels like we are living in a real life version of a disaster film that just keeps escalating. Along with deep pain, there is also a quality of mass hysteria mercilessly hyped by the endless news cycles and social media threads.

To find my ground in these times I’m always drawn back to a few core questions: Why this? Why now? What is my part in this situation? What must I learn from it? How must I respond and act to meet this situation with the full force of my heart and being?

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