By Gitta Peyn, 2021 – revised 2022
Most organizational consultants certainly began their careers with a desire to help shape a better world. Conformity to the conservative processes of our world in the here and now destroys any chance of this desire to be fulfilled.
Society, organization and individual depend on reflectiveness, on the ability to criticize, to remain critical and to reflect on one’s own processes against the background of the question of (crisis) functionality.
If the ability to reflect is lost, the ability to manage complexity sinks to a lower level.
Since Karl Popper we know: We can only falsify, validation does not work. In practice, this means that we cannot put models into the world that we do not question further. Since we do not know whether we can validate models, we have to keep sharpening our critique in order to arrive at functional models.
In the course of societal change, individuals, organizations and society are currently losing not only innate curiosity, reflectivity and critical faculties due to an outdated educational system (which must be understood in terms of society as a whole and should not be limited to educational institutions alone). They also lose through momentary efforts to strive for more constructive approaches without creating methods, models and measures that increase criticality and reflectiveness.
Companies and Consultants may destroy their own markets
In the course of postmodern truth-telling, capacities for fact-oriented, science-based, and crisis-functional analysis and discussion are lost. As a result, and contextualized in systemic and wicked problems, many counselors no longer dare to address facts and focus on the problems given to them by their clients – even if, from the counselor’s perspective, these problems are not the ones the clientele should be dealing with.
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Add peer pressure, apparent market constraints, financial opportunism, systemic entanglement, conformist rather than critical-discursive organizational design, wicked problems, and some prosperity comforts to the education problem, and we are faced with individuals, organizations, and society whose loss aversion is greater than their enthusiasm for innovation, whose communication skills are limited to emotional relationship design, and whose concepts no longer ask for facts but for feel-good acceptance and confuse that with advancement.
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Those who focus on this make less money in the long term, even if it seems lucrative in the short term, because in the long term this creates companies that can make less profit and lose out to other companies that are more resistant.
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Companies and consultants that focus on consulting in this way are destroying their own market in the long run. The consultants who continue to consult like this are destroying the market for the consultants who recognize the future that society will have to face.
Postmodern problems to which formwelt/weltform research provides answers
Communication by understanding
Concept clarity is self-competence, is relationship competence, is model competence, is market competence, is political competence.
Complexity management capability is enhanced
From concept clarity, complex behaviors are easier to relate. The ability to scale up increases, as does the ability to differentiate. The view becomes broader, deeper, more precise, long-term development tendencies can be mapped more easily, systemic thinking is promoted, more sub- and function systems can flow into problem construction and thus solution construction.
The basic attitude that comprehensive and complex thinking is too exhausting does not work even on a biochemical level, because the more the comprehensive thinking works, the more it is rewarded by endorphin release and thus becomes easier. Just as a good runner with a good running style can run himself into runners high that makes running easy for him, the thinker can think himself into a thinkers high that makes thinking easy for the thinker. Exhausting is the narrow-minded thinking. Effortful is the poor running style.
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Critical faculties increase
Concept clarity and higher complexity management ability ensure better criticality because:
Concept clarity creates cognitive and communicative transparency, complexity management ability of higher levels creates the condition for further view and thus more comprehensive criticism.
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Criticality capability is the greatest freedom that individuals, organizations and societies have. It is the prerequisite for new markets.
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The ability to criticize guarantees that what does not work can be sorted out.
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Here we do not mean criticism whose interest is simply to grumble and bring about standstill. The criticality that we need to develop is the criticality that has the interest to contribute to progression and to lead into flow:
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Critical ability as an increase in creative flow!
New markets/market advantages
Conceptually clear, complexity competent and critically capable consultants and organizations are already forming in themselves new markets in new industries (such as the resilience industry).
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Formwelt research comes with a new set of models, methods, and measures that guarantee market advantages, that help save resources, that take conflict analysis into whole new spaces.
Elimination methodology saves resources
Concept clarity, complexity management capability, and criticality lead to reference density allowing to eliminate in advance what will not work from a factual and scientific perspective. This saves individual, organizational, political and societal resources that come with trial and error and with the mistaken belief that positive evidence in the much-vaunted, but rarely competently grasped “practice” shows that method, model or measure works. To conclude from the individual case to the general means in case of doubt: correlation is not causation.
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If I expect to be served over-simplifying models, I ignore the realization that we cannot create models whose validity is a priori assured. Therefore, the only method we can choose to get better models is to generate what we feel are good and at least sufficiently complex models, experiment and subject them to the falsification test to sharpen them and make them better models.
Create new models, methods, and measures
Models such as the complexity management model and considerations such as those on autonomy/autarky/autopoiesis, including reference density and complexity of social critique, are fundamentally possible for anyone working with formwelt/weltform research.
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This means that coaches and consultants no longer have to rely only on the work of others; they can also review it at a whole new level and modify it for their own purposes instead of continually watering it down to further thin out markets that have long since lost their crisis functionality and will no longer yield profits in the medium to long term.
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They can develop functionally dense concepts of their own and make them comprehensible to their clientele.
Political consultants can analyze voter behavior, management consultants their clientele needs systemically and reference them deeply accordingly and optimize their orientation and (training) education function and make it more comprehensible.
form analysis instead of self-fulfilling prophecy
From Weltform with its polyvalent epistemological logic, communication and conflict dynamics can be mapped and artificially emulated with mathematical precision. This makes one’s own model and expectation structure more transparent, errors in the formation of expectations can be eliminated more quickly, and the functionality of the model can then be checked in application and corrected in case of doubt.
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With the emulations, one’s own intuition for development in complex systems can be trained. It is possible to work with systemic terms that work globally.
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At the moment, consultants, politicians, managers depend on their personal experience – a problematic point as far as complex systemic issues are concerned, because the rule always applies: “What the thinker thinks, the prover will prove”.
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We have to learn to stand outside ourselves.
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As long as crises have not yet arrived, there is a lot of room to waste money and resources here – everyone is feeling good, the markets still seem to be functioning, but the storms are looming on the horizon and no one knows what to do about it.
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Bad consultants, who in addition hold their opinions and their under-complex models for market, environmental and human needs, contribute their share to the fact that smoke candles blind the view on facts and keep whole industries alive, which from a climate perspective should have been dissolved long ago.
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formwelt/weltform research can help clean up this mess and build new, contemporary, competent, highly economic resilience and sustainability industries that rely on scientific methodology rather than postmodern quicksand relativism.
Be better than the rest through formwelt/weltform research
Right now, many average consultants are trying to exist as undisturbed as possible by the relatively small discards that industry and politics allow them. To keep this alive, conditioning dynamics emerge that try to prohibit thinking in terms of “better/worse.”
Future and progression, however, need the better advisors who can see, sense and assess the coming economy and politics, and who can open up new and optimized markets for themselves and the world through their special skills.
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The future belongs to the different thinkers!
At the moment we offer monthly seminars and workshops according to market needs. We are also available for consulting and partnerships, but we emphatically point out that we do not follow the current trend of increasing opportunism in thinking, speaking and acting, but fundamentally look and proceed from a scientific and climate perspective.
We are convinced that politics and economics must adapt to the challenges of the coming metacrises. We are also convinced that there is enormous potential in this – provided we are prepared to work.
We do not subscribe to the general trend that everything has to be made simple and bite-sized and glossed over so that people will embrace the crises and take up new models. Undercomplex and imprecise models with a faulty relationship structure, so that the cash register rings and the clientele feels good, help neither the own market nor the clientele in the long run.
Humans are in continuous innovation and we are born to challenge, adapt and learn. New paths are not taken by making things easy for ourselves, challenges are not mastered from the couch. If you want to develop new things, open up new markets, create new perspectives, you have to work and learn. And people can and will do this when they recognize what it will do for them in the long term.
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The formwelt/weltform research comes with a claim.
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That is what we value, that is what we stand for.
This is our contribution to climate protection.
Contact Us!
Contact us for collaboration, seminars, workshops, counseling and support us in building Formwelt Online.
We are not here to become your competition.
We are here to help you achieve conceptual excellence.
