• We spent all our time constructing organizations according to machine logic...
• We focused exclusively on how best to analyze, assemble, and carefully control the world - nothing else mattered...
• Our most important task was to engineer the world into existence.
• The world itself was dead, incapable of creating anything for itself

This machine world ignored us as living systems... Machines have no innate desires, motivations, or intelligence. Everything must be built into them, imposed from the outside. In our organizations, questions about our effort, commitment, motivation, and quality were answered mechanistically. It was thought that the only way to motivate us was from the outside. Leaders were charged with making us work. They needed to find the right benefit or salary or threat. Without these external coercions, we wouldn't work. We, like the world, were assumed to be dead, incapable of creating anything from ourselves.

The impact of machine thinking... As the machine image took over so much of our thinking, human nature receded from view. Human concerns evaporated in the wake of relentless mechanistic forces. We couldn't talk about our passions, our families, our spirits, or our true selves because these had nothing to do with the efficiency concerns of machines. Because we could not find ourselves in this world, it became more and more fearsome. We often seek to control what we fear. Having created an alien world, we could only hope to grow more skillful in dominating it. We sought to harness and control everything: nature, one another, the future. Command and control became our only hope to fend off this hostile world. The machinery of organizations grinded on. Work became more deadly and more deadening. Our fear increased. The heart and spirit of being human disappeared from organizations. It is this deadening world view that is coming to an end.

Our personal exploration of living systems
For the past few years, we personally have been exploring the world through these new eyes of living systems. We learned a great deal from the work of scientists who study complex systems, the cosmos, the origins of life. While many of their findings seem startlingly new, mostly their work echoes in a different voice what philosophers and spiritual leaders have been saying for many long centuries.