“You must be the change you wish to in the world”, is a quote from Gandhi used as a banner headline by business professionals and NGO’s to show the fundamental characteristics required of top leaders.[i] Yet I would argue that it is misunderstood and used widely without analysis and forethought.

Our current scientific models have excluded subjectivity as a domain open to the scientific method, and our world of experience is seen to only to have its origination in the external environment. Science has little to say about what it means to be human.[ii] So when people read Gandhi’s message they focus on delivering external change and changing the external environment to improve the lot of the world and avoid the real premise of his invitation to start the journey of all journeys, which to examine who you are. And in a business world where human imagination and human potential are the foundation of competitive advantage then I would suggest that the business world needs to put the mind back in business.[iii] Because not doing so could put you, us and the world out of business.

At the heart of Gandhi’s message is a call, an invitation to deeply examine the nature of your internal experience, your dreams, your aspirations and the world we live in. And yet through what lens do we do this? Time after time we miss this internal turning and follow the highways and byways of groupthink which maintain us in a state of “learned incapacity.”[iv]

One way in which to unpack Gandhi’s message is through the use of a story. Clarisa Pinkola Estes the Jungian analyst and Cantadora (keeper of stories) uses stories to unlock and explore internal landscapes. So though the story takes place on an external plane… the first task is to move it to an internal plane and through a Socratic process of questioning, map the story to your world of experience, to how you think, talk and act. And it is through using each character and interaction within the story as an internal symbol or archetype that you can uncover human truths and human insights.

The Lost Keys is a famous story and appears in many different places and cultures. And it is a story that reveals and unravels the principles embedded in Gandhi’s message.

The Lost Keys
It is night, and a passer-by is walking down a lamp lit street.
He stops at a lamppost, where he sees someone crawling about on the floor looking for something. He asks:  “have you lost something? Is there anything I can do to help?” “I have lost my keys,” replies the person. “Where were you when you last had them?” “I was over there,” says the man, pointing over into the darkness beyond the lamppost. “So why are you looking over here?” asks the puzzled passer-by. “Because it’s light over here.”

The first thing to do is fix the story internally. So who is the “passer-by” and who is the person “crawling” on the floor?  When personal disaster strikes us, illness, relationship, work, loss, regret they can put us in a position where we feel like we have been cut in two. The emotional intensity breaks the bubble of ordinary life and allows for a sincere moment of reflection.

Here the passerby can be seen as the archetype protector of your mind and the person crawling about is the “you”, the subject that is experiencing the crap and looking frantically for an answer, a way out, a solution to the intensity of the pain and desperation. You are observing you. Some writers say these moments are to be treasured because they are like internal calling cards, a wake-up call if you will to see the opportunity for real change. I have to say that it requires courage to do that. To transform suffering into golden opportunity requires you to really seek out the nature and origination of the pain. So the next question is what have you lost? You have lost your keys and you are knowingly looking for them in a place where you didn’t lose them. Confusing.  Paradoxical.  You bet. It is meant to be.

Light and darkness are metaphors for what? Well light can mean good and darkness bad. But that is a bit easy. It still doesn’t get to the heart of the paradox. Why are you looking for something in a place where you didn’t lose them because it’s easier to look in the light? Right? It is nuts.

Light can be seen from another perspective. Here light can be  a metaphor for status quo, comfort zone the place where you can hide from yourself.

So what is the dark? Bad. Evil. No. It is our fear. Our fear of what?  Our fear that haunts our daily life. Our fear of being different, of making mistakes, of getting it wrong, of being wrong, of not making it, of being rejected, of being excluded, of being embarrassed, of not knowing enough, of knowing too little… In organizational culture fear, uncertainty and doubt are the forces of emotional blackmail which bloat into “group-think”. And we can see that from the Bay of Pigs, to Enron, to the current set of Wall Street disasters, from the particular to the general these examples demonstrate that staying in the light is where it is safe, where it is comfortable. In fact, one of the major rules of groupthink is to reject any information that may threaten your first principles, like how got here in the first place.

Chris Argyris, in his seminal work on skilled unawareness and the Left hand page exercise described the process of how business executives get really good at remaining skillfully unaware of reality, while all the time thinking that what they are doing is in fact the opposite.

In the Left hand page experiment you think of a major problem that you face at work, or at home and then having split a piece of paper in two and marking  one side a. and one side b. On side b. you write down what you said and the other person’s responses to what you said rather like a film script. And having completed this you then go back and write down your unsaid thoughts and feelings on side a. alongside what you actually said.

Boy does that open a can of worms; people don’t really say what they feel. There are three principles of communication at work that maintain skilled unawareness, consensus, self-censure and self compromise. What does this mean?  It means that where possible we get everybody to think the same, agree the same, talk the same, and so as a result no one genuinely thinks, or talks or acts.

This is the world of the light, where  Groundhog Day meets Alice in Wonderland, where everybody is skillfully not looking, while all the time looking in the wrong place while everyone thinks that they are looking because to really think, talk and act is to confront the  land of the dark, where fear, uncertainty and doubt reign.  And we don’t want to go there. Too much like hard work. So we maintain a schedule of active laziness, draw dropping busyness that ensures we never stay still long enough to “turn around to face ourselves” (à la Dave Bowie)

Earlier this week I was with two top advertising professionals who told me how careful they must be in talking about organizational innovation and strategy with their top directors. Because if they really told them what they felt and thought they would get sacked. Their ideas would be considered heretical so they must be re packaged, deconstructed so that it in its newly emasculated form they can continue on with business as usual. In another example they pointed to a presentation on new technologies that they give to clients, which mapped out new technologies such as RSS, Wordpress and Twitter, and they said that not one of the executives in hundreds of presentation could explain what these technologies do. And yet these very technologies are the disruptive technologies which will change their business future. It reminds me of the highly successful typewriter company in the USA called SCM who in the late 90’s were still making typewriters with no plans to diversify or change. Karl Albrecht, in his book The Power of Minds at Work, wonders what the conversation must have been like at SCM corporate HQ as they discussed those new fangled devices being created by Gates and Jobs, Microsoft and Apple respectively.

So what is it you’re looking for, okay  a “key”?  Well what do keys do? They open things… what sort of things, well boxes, windows and doors. Right.  Well what could the archetype for key be here. Well it could be a question. And not just any question, but a question of vital importance. Well then what type of opening, what type of door could the key open. Well there was once a time when the only doors that could be found were the doors to funeral mounds. Well the key could be the question “who am I” and that by using this key to open the door of death then, then a real journey of self-discovery can begin. Tough huh. Not easy stuff. Well it doesn’t get better.

Imagine yourself dying, really dying, dying in the next two minutes, and then as your life ebbs away ask yourself what did you regret not being, what did you regret not doing with your life? For Clarisa in the story of the skeleton woman true human potential cannot unfold unless you have made love to the skeleton woman. Made love to death. The objective in facing death is to face the king of all fears and in doing so, in mastering death, then you master fear. Most martial arts hold this as their sacred truth that the real enemy to be defeated is yourself and that the path the “Do” is by facing and defeating death. And then you are alive again. Breathing. Living. Kicking. How would you live your life now? What North Star would you now follow? Would you go back to the old self? Well some do and are forever bitter and disappointed.

You will discover that opening the door to death and asking the question who am I, cuts the umbilical cord which fastens us to skillful unawareness. That death, the question of death, and the question of who am I, when joined in our minds unravels our habitual modes of thinking and talking and reveals a wholly different landscape of potential and fulfillment. When you meet people who travel this path then you just know where they are coming from. Your internal radar tells you whether you are facing an authentic human being, ready to live their mistakes in the full glare of life, or whether they are playing with masks and trigger your bullshit detector..

Gandhi’s call to connect being and change has to be seen in the context a journey of self-investigation from which the iron clad habits of indifference and selfishness - our groundhog day - are shed by rediscovering genuine thought, speech and action. “You must be…” means that right now, right here we are not being, being what, being ourselves. Moving from skilled unawareness to skilled awareness means to change your orientation to the world and a fundamental re-orientation of the values by which you live your life. It is about moving from consensus, to learning to be different, from self compromise, to living your dream, from self censure to a refusal to accept a distorted truth masquerading as practical reality. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world” comes from a man who transformed himself from a timid colonial lawyer to someone who embodied the highest values of human life and changed the course of history. Gandhi’s message is a call to affect a personal revolution, an everyday individual heresy, a call to create real change, huge change, world change. The business challenge of the future is to move from a naïve model of economic determinism from which freedoms trickle down, to a model of organizational change that actually frees human beings from learned incapacity and co-create their futures and design legends.

Tom Peter (Re-imagine) has often used this quote in his slides as have many others… just Google it.
“If we examine the current situation today, with the exception of a few largely academic discussions cognitive science has had virtually nothing to say about what it means to be human in everyday, lived situation”, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: cognitive science and human experience, MIT Press, 1993, p.15.