Throughout history, the primary threats to our survival have come as sudden dramatic events: floods, earthquakes, attacks by rivals. Today, the primary threats to our survival are slow, gradual processes such as environmental destruction, the global arms race, and decay of our nation's educational system and its family and community structure.

We are poorly prepared for the new world because we have a nervous system focused on external dramatic events. A loud noise or a sharp change in our visual field brings us immediately to alert. Our adrenaline system heightens our awareness and strength. In extreme cases, our nervous system produces a state of shock that filters signals of physical pain, allowing continued reasoning and decision making. Ironically, all of these capabilities become potentially counterproductive in a world of slow, gradually emerging systemic crises. All our instincts are to wait until the gradual changes develop into crises-when it is often too late to take effective action.

These threats were also external, meaning their causes were outside our control. Today's primary threats are all endogenous, the by-products of our own actions. There is no enemy out there to blame. As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Nor will blaming ourselves individually help. The causes lie in collective behaviors and unintended side-effects of actions that make individual sense.

I'm not trying to place blame or induce guilt, just suggest that we need to think differently because this conflict between the nature of our most important problems and our instinctive ways of thinking and acting is no less catastrophic in organizations. Most of the primary threats to organizational survival and vitality develop slowly, and they are not caused externally.

For instance, the problems of General Motors and IBM did not arise overnight. Arrogance, insulation, and rigidity developed over decades of success. At IBM even as the symptoms of decline became more apparent, the sustained profitability of the core mainframe products allowed managers and investors to ignore growing signals of trouble. Only when an overwhelming crisis (record losses) occurred was there sufficient alarm to take bold action.

Our programming predisposes us to seeing external threats and to reactiveness. Add a culture of fragmentation and competition, and together they hold us captive. But the capacity can be loosened if we understand that our cultural history is but one historical path, a path that could have drifted toward a different present. The first step in exposing this illusory "naturalness" of our present way of thinking is to reflect on its genealogy.

Many pre-agricultural societies were not dominated by fragmentation and competition, contradicting the common view that ancient societies have always been like us, but "less civilized." But as David Bohm, a preeminent quantum physicist, put it: "Starting with the agricultural revolution, and continuing through the industrial revolution, increasing fragmentation in the social order has produced a progressive fragmentation in our thought."

Thus were sown the seeds of the fragmentation evident today. Their fruit has grown steadily. "The belief that man was separate from nature," writes Krishnamurti, "evolved into the idea that nature was a resource for man's benefit. Nature became a "resource," a "standing in reserve." We became the masters of the world with a license to exploit it. We stopped living amid objects and began living with disposable things that were just waiting to be used. "Because we do not love the earth and the things of the earth but merely utilize them," said Krishnamurti, "we have lost touch with life." A Shift in Thinking My work includes putting separation and fragmentation into their historical context, exposing the limits of analysis, and developing an alternative paradigm-one that can help to recover the memory of the whole. Just as Galileo proposed that the earth was not the center of the universe, I propose that parts, ego, and reality are not the center of a more meaningful way of life. Each reflects the fragmented world view we have come to accept. Each needs to be reexamined.

Decomposition is a time-honored way of dealing with complex problems, but it has big limitations in a world of tight couplings and nonlinear feedbacks. The defining characteristic of a system is that it cannot be understood as a function of its isolated components, for three reasons: 1) the behavior of the system doesn't depend on what each part is doing but on how each part is interacting with the rest; 2) to understand a system we need to understand how it fits into the larger system of which it is a part; and 3) what we call the parts need not be taken as primary. In fact, how we define the parts is fundamentally a matter of perspective and purpose, not intrinsic in the nature of the "real thing" we are looking at.

Rather than thinking of a world of "parts" that form "wholes," we ought to recognize that we live in a world of wholes within wholes. Rather than try to "put the pieces together" to make the whole, we ought to recognize that the world is already whole.

At the same time, the systems view recognizes that distinctions enable the observer to draw operational worlds. The whole may be more fundamental, but it is unmanageable. For example, the division of labor enabled societies to achieve levels of material well-being that would have otherwise been impossible. Had Henry Ford not divided operations, he never would have built as many cars as fast and as economically as he did.

But, once the workers become "workers" and the supervisors became "supervisors," rigidity sets in. To reestablish fluidity, the capacity for learning and change, we must once again confront the whole.

By the same token, we are startled to discover that at the core of the person, at the center of selfhood, there is nothing, pure energy. When we reach into the most fundamental basis of our being, we find a pregnant void, a web of relationships. When somebody asks us to talk about ourselves, we talk about family, work, academic background, sports affiliations, etc. In all this talk, where is our self? Nowhere, because the self is not a thing, but, as Jarome Brunner says, "a point of view that unifies the flow of experience into a coherent narrative"-a narrative striving to connect with other narratives and become richer.

We normally think that the individual has a primordial origin and that selfhood is given to each one independent of the cultural or group practices in which that person grows up. But, as Clifford Geertz says, "There is no such thing as human nature independent of culture."

When we forget about the social milieu in which we exist as people, we attain a spurious security and stability. We identify our egos with our selves. We take the contingent features of our current character and reify them into a substantive personality. Thus, we assign a primordial value to our ego (part) and see the community (whole) as secondary. We see the community as nothing but a network of contractual commitments in symbolic and economic exchanges. We think that encounters with others are transactions that can add or subtract to the array of possessions of the ego.

But the constitution of the self happens only in a community. The community supports certain ways of being and constrains the expressions of individuality to certain patterns of behavior-whatever we regard as acting "crazy" or inappropriate expresses our community of origin and upbringing much more than our intrinsic predispositions.

As with all deep cultural assumptions, the assumed primacy of the ego-self hides its contingent status, until we discover a different culture. For example, in many indigenous cultures of southern Africa, the common greeting is "I see you." What it means to be a person in such a culture is to be in relationship. When we confront such a culture, where speaking a person's name acknowledges that person's existence, it seems "crazy" to us. After all, for us, the "self" is myself, isolated from other selves.

But a systems view of life suggests that the self is never "given" and is always in the process of transformation. Whenever we do not take the other as an object for use, whenever we see the other as a legitimate fellow human being with which we can learn and change, we engage in a passionate interaction that can open new possibilities for our being.

The puzzle of the "ultimate ground" for knowing has long confronted philosophers. There is a story of the humble novice who asks the great sage what it is that keeps the world from falling through space. The sage responds that the earth stays aloft because it rests on a great turtle. But, the student asks, "What holds the turtle up?" "Why," responds the teacher, "the turtle rests upon another great turtle." "But," cries out the student, "that turtle too must be supported." "Yes indeed," responds the master, "it is turtles all the way down."

The alternative to naove "realism" is not solipsism, a view that there is "nothing out there," and therefore nothing to be learned, nothing to be valued. The better alternative is to recognize the generative role of the traditions of observation and meaning shared by a community. We invent structures and distinctions to organize the otherwise unmanageable flow of life. That organization allows us to operate effectively, but it can become a tranquilizing barrier to exploration and creativity.

The more efficient a model of the world is, the more it recedes into the background and becomes transparent. The more successful the model's strategies, the more the map of reality becomes "reality" itself. The danger of success is that the thinking behind it can become entrenched and disregard the context of its effectiveness. When a model loses its "situation" and generalizes its validity to universal categories, it sooner or later stalls our capacity to deal freshly with the world and with each other.

The map is not the territory, but we can only guide ourselves with maps. As cartographers, however, we are far from neutral. Our perceptual apparatus, with its biological, personal, and cultural filters, is actively involved in the construction of these maps. So, where is the territory underlying the maps? As philosopher Hubert Dreyfus says, "It is interpretation all the way down." The issue is deeper than recognizing that the map is not the territory. We have to face the possibility that we have no access beyond our culture to such a thing as a territory. We only have provisional maps permanently open to revision and recreation.

This may sound nihilistic. If there is no ultimate ground for values, why choose one system over another? Why is democracy better than totalitarianism? Why is anything better than anything else? Why even bother to care? The solution to the nihilistic dilemma comes from a self-reflective principle: those contexts that display their precarious nature, those contexts that invite revision and recreation are inherently better than those which hide their precarious nature and fight revisionist attempts. The best constructs for explaining and organizing the world will imitate life itself. They will be in a continual state of becoming.

When we fail to recognize this principle, we lose the capacity to understand others. We become rigid. We lose the ability to learn and change. We lose the child within us who lives in awe and who understands what Einstein meant when he said that the most beautiful experience in the world is "the experience of the mysterious."