Mama! Why the Aeroplane cant land on our door step? The Untold Story of Culture Change

One day a small child in the neighbourhood asked his mother “Mama, can the aeroplane land on our door step?” The mother replied no dear, it can’t. Then the child continued asking “if the car, bus and bike etc. can come to our door step why not aeroplane?” Mother smiled and said “dear it is too big and requires a different type of landing space”. This probably explains why great ideas fail to find their place. The great ideas often crop up from the dissatisfaction with some of the existing system or sometimes these are so great visionary ideas that visualises system many years ahead of time. Hence, in no case the ideas don’t belong to the current system hence fail to find their place if someone does not take the initiative to create a place for these ideas.

Creating a place does not only mean that few people have to buy in the idea. For example, in case of many technological inventions it has been found out that there have been many buyers and hence the diffusion of technologies have been found to be much faster than any other invention. However, owing to lack of development in the corresponding governance and legal system, technologies had trouble landing. Such phenomenon is often coined by sociologists as “culture lag”. When one part of the change fails to keep up with the other part of the change.

Most of the time existing culture becomes the roadblock to the great ideas that can drive the society/organisation to a new horizon. However, cultural or structural change is not as easy as building an airport for aeroplane. It involves human beings with their past, present and future aspirations, it requires shift in power structure, it involves giving away their own value systems and so on. Without these changes, harbouring a new idea in the policy level has several consequences. An incremental change often creates a situation of duality of system. Those who are swayed away by the new ideas are caught in the existing system. For example, the system that has been measuring growth in terms of number, wants to adopt a system that measures growth in terms of quality. What would be the consequence? The network built around the number system have also to be transformed overnight? Is it possible to make this change overnight? Another challenge in the change process is “condemning the past too much”. However, the case when the idea comes from the experiences of a person, it requires “digging out the dead” to explain the relevance of the idea.

Social and organisational systems are built around conformity values. Hence, harbouring an idea which is ahead of time makes the idea owners branded as rebel and often they find their place in prison. Is it because the idea simply hurts the pride of many conformists? Threatens the status and power of some privileged? In the past it has been seen those who like the idea but want the change at their own pace, also no way supported the rebel as somehow they made the progress slow till the rebel gets frustrated and gets caught in the existing system. This is probably why most of the time rebels are worshipped after their death when people realise the benefits of their ideas. However, when the system encourages and fosters new ideas, the growth gets balanced, people’s satisfaction increases and a healthy culture is created.

When there is so much discussion about sustainability, many organisations are coming up with great ideas of sustainability. However, the roadblocks are: myopic view about sustainability, existing rigid system that fails to adapt, deep conditioning of people to excessive aggressive competition, prejudices and dogmas that negatively influences the achievement of couple of sustainable goals. By tagging some industry as sustainable/unsustainable based on only few criteria is not the right way of thinking about sustainability. At the present context it is a balancing act as all the SDGs are interlinked. Hence, a multifaceted, multidisciplinary action is more beneficial. Still much more to ponder over how to safe land the giant spaceship of sustainable goals.