Day 13: Hitler was a call centre agent

Recently when Volker and Dina tried to explain the dynamics of second world war to their son he gave this wonderful insight. In his world, call centre agents are truly horrible people who keep bombarding you with unwanted propaganda. As a young child growing up in Germany today, never directly exposed to any form of violence, this must be the closest thing to horror.
My take on it is that he may well be onto something. A young Hitler growing up today as a struggling artist would most probably be working in a call centre to support himself. Every day the world is spared such horrors because modern living standards and the leveling of the world is making it harder for personality cults to ferment real political action. Somehow "Outliers" + "Black Swan" = "Hitler is a call centre agent."

If we look at the Occupy movement, or any general uprising over the last years for that matter, the striking attribute is the absence of galvanizing charismatic leaders. The diffuse, unclear general sense of discontent does not find a lightning rod in one handy man (or woman). If anything the togetherness and sense of unvoiced belonging is the real galvanizing force. A quality that is felt, and everyone finds a different way to express it in their words.

This reminds me of an experience I had at a rave many years ago in South Africa. The whole crowd was blissing out and dancing with joy. A few people tried to cause trouble and their anger was apparent. In some way the dancing crowd acted like a giant organism expunging the negative elements and maintaining the feeling at the core. No rules, no words, just a dynamic shift in collective energy. If your friends don't dance then they ain't no friends of mine, as they say. The collective sense of belonging is a quality that is felt, not a rules based system. And definitely not a leader dependent system. Steven Fry may have more than a million followers but won't be able to whip them into a rage.

Our twitter-web holon of awareness does not allow one point of view, or one way of seeing things to dominate. (Except if you are part of the american political machine in which case you still believe that one 'man' can fix the problem and one point of view explains the truth) The fragmented media landscape and excessive ability for competing messages to reach even the most isolated communities means the myopia needed to believe unconditionally that you are right, cannot be sustained. We have to accept a constant shift in the landscape, yet be true to ourselves in whatever comes up. The power vacuums in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt et al have not degenerated into chaos just because CNN couldn't find the fast talking king of the sound byte to elevate into popular focus.

Is this indicating a shift in the way we organize around work as well? It used to be "plan the work, then work the plan," where smart experts could foresee exactly was was needed. This assumes that the future is constant and knowable when the plan gets written. It reduces the power and influence of people acting in a dynamic reality where crashes happen and new insight brings the plan to naught. The misplaced trust, that CEO's and charismatic leaders can understand and guide the complexity of a large organism, is becoming really aparant as CEO tenure shrinks to all time lows. What is the new model of leadership? What can we learn about purpose based systems that self organize and deliver momentum without clarity? In a world where we can safely relegate dictators to call centre jobs, we can elevate the value of every job to a meaningful contribution.