Response-Ability

On a metaphysical level, this old wise saying has always seemed obvious. But these days, it is becoming increasingly tangible in our lived experience, and it is approaching the reality of the world we live in. The shoes we wear were delivered by a Turkish-born man in his late thirties, whose delivery vehicle was assembled by people and machines in factories and supply chains across many countries. The diesel that powers the vehicle was produced in the Middle East before being transported through pipelines and diplomatic entanglements to Central Europe. The leather for the shoes comes from a manufacturing plant in Romania, and the animal that supplied it was not raised on regional pastures. Without the pasture fertilizer and antibiotics from a pharmaceutical livestock supplier, the cow might not have survived in its environment. And without the rain that made the grass grow, it certainly would not have. In the end, the origin of the shoe itself is ultimately hidden under its tongue. Globalization has exponentially multiplied worldwide connectivity in recent years; mutual dependencies and degrees of interpenetration have massively increased. Our actions are woven into the chains of action of millions—or even billions—of other people. But if everything is connected to everything, where does our action begin and where does it end?

Anyone who acts consciously bears responsibility. But in a globally hyperconnected world, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to determine the beginning and end of our responsibility. Are we responsible for the crisis of democracy if we do not engage in ongoing debates on social media? Or are we responsible precisely because we do—and thus unintentionally fuel the dynamics of those discussions? Are we responsible for climate change if we use car-sharing out of convenience instead of taking public transit? For working conditions in Bangladesh if we don’t actively ask about the origins of our clothing? For resource exploitation because we use a smartphone? Are we responsible for undignified animal husbandry if we eat meat?

Closing our eyes to these questions is also made impossible by global real-time communication and information. Connectivity strikes a second time, relentlessly: we are forced to engage with the immediate and indirect consequences of our actions and our responsibility—whether consciously or unconsciously.

If we tend toward a broad understanding of responsibility, we inevitably end up in a “rabbit in front of the snake” syndrome—or in responsibility burnout. A creeping sense arises that “you can only do it wrong.” If, on the other hand, we tend to define our personal sphere of responsibility narrowly, it results in withdrawal and isolation from the world. That, in turn, leads to the realization that global and transnational problems like climate change will eventually catch up with even the last self-sufficient individuals.

To avoid becoming completely overwhelmed in this world of dependencies and interactions—and at the same time not simply burying our heads in the sand—we need access to a resource that goes beyond mere reactivity. So how can we relate to the demands of the world?

The English language gives us a helpful nudge with its subtle distinction between “react” and “respond”: while the gap between stimulus and reaction is relatively short and often unconscious, the gap between stimulus and response is longer and includes other levels of perception. You could also say: the space between stimulus and (conscious) response is expanded. In recent years, several authors from the perspectives of management theory, organizational theory, and self-management have engaged with the concept of response-ability. As early as 2001, Rick Dove wrote his book on the language, structure, and culture of the agile organization under the title (link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274074484_Response_Ability_The_Language_Str

This ability for response-ability does not arise from merely reacting to external stimuli—there are far too many of those already. It is also not satisfied by purely logical analysis, because breaking down the multidimensional complexity of our environment into two-dimensional cause-and-effect chains will always neglect certain senses and meanings that the code “logical/illogical” cannot describe.

Response-ability expands the logical cause-and-effect level to include aspects of empathy, relational connection, and intuition. It is a subtle capacity—more the result of personal maturity and development than a measurable skill. It often requires a moment of pause, even if only a fraction of a second. Response-ability is therefore also a neighboring competence to emergence. Only by not immediately following our instinctive or purely cognitive decision reflex do we open a space in which second-, third-, and nth-order solutions can emerge.

In recent organizational development, the need for responsiveness is frequently emphasized. What is usually meant by this is that organizations should be prepared—structurally, procedurally, and culturally—to treat change in the external world as a normal condition and to continually reshape themselves in response to those changes. The demands for being agile, lean, and anti-fragile are—each with slightly different meanings—common variations of this same theme.

This also changes the paradigms regarding organizations. For a long time, organizations were viewed as output machines—entities whose behavior could be predicted and controlled. This image stems not least from the dynamics of advancing industrialization.

But the more interconnected global societies become, and the more we find ourselves caught in the paradox of ever-accelerating change on one hand and the increasingly tangible limits of our resources on the other, the less linear and predictable developments become. And the less effective the aforementioned paradigm of “prediction and control” is.

That is why the “organism” paradigm is gaining importance: it describes organizations as living systems. Open and self-organizing, they adapt through feedback mechanisms to internal and external changes, and they process new information quickly and reliably in order to create meaning and context. Mike Arauz, founder of responsive.org, expresses it like this: In the past, organizations optimized themselves to create the greatest possible security; organizations that want to be successful today deliberately optimize themselves for uncertainty and learn from it.

In this sense, responsiveness is more than just a frantic call for flexibility. It is not about reacting to market changes by becoming simply faster, more flexible, or more competitive. Rather, it is about understanding—on a deeper level of the life process—and aligning oneself with perpetual change and uncertainty. Stability exists only as relative stability on the canvas of the general instability of life.

Response-Ability could be described as an essential software competence for living the principles of responsiveness understood in this way. Response-Ability does not refer only to the level of adaptive structures and processes. It opens collective spaces in which people agree on how they—as a group (organization, company, institution, association, or whatever container)—want to respond to life. Or, put differently: what responsibility they want to take on toward life.

Meeting Complexity with Collective Intuition

This is anything but easy, because this kind of exchange is still not very common in many organizations. And it is far from becoming a social habit. How do we open spaces where people can collectively agree on what the next step should be? Where subtler perception is invited in order to find answers? Where not only “thinking into” a situation happens, but also “feeling into” it?

When asked how people can respond to complexity, the organizational psychologist Peter Kruse—who passed away in 2015—distinguished four main strategies: trial and error, ignoring complexity, trivializing it, and collective intuition. But collective intuition requires spaces where the connection to the evolutionary impulse of life is practiced. How these spaces might look could be one of the most important development questions of the future—not only for organizations, but for entire societies.

In the face of rising complexity and simultaneously increasing tendencies toward simplification, it is our responsibility to open our state of mind to further levels of perception—both individually and collectively.

It is paradoxical: we can no longer penetrate all dependencies—and precisely for that reason, we must at least try. But not on a purely logical level; rather, by including the bigger picture in our small reality. Only from such an open mind can we succeed in listening more closely to life, understanding the questions life is asking us, recognizing the relativity of reality, and developing answers beyond our own ego. That would be a new kind of responsibility—one that enables new solutions.