Independent investigation of the truth; collaboration for social justice

About Steve Bosserman

To know about me begins with knowing where I’m from. I was born and raised in Kansas—the geographic center of the United States—and part of the “Great Plains” which extends from Canada to Texas. This area is characterized by wide-open vistas, near-constant winds, and frequent and sudden changes in weather conditions both in type and temperature. Despite nearly 150 years of economic “rewards” in agriculture, gas and oil production, aviation, and industry, this is a land better left “unsettled.” Attempting to tame the untamable is never easy. Thousands die or give-up in the process and sustainability is never assured. It requires a unique combination of strong spirit, dogged determination, and infinite flexibility to make a go of it under such circumstances. My family was among the first to arrive some five generations ago. They are still there. We are nothing if not persistent.

Growing up in Kansas shaped my fundamental views about life. My mother indoctrinated me at an early age to "do the right thing," as she termed it. It was her simple philosophy about everything. While there are certainly many perspectives on what is the "right thing," exactly, and it could be argued that such a state doesn't exist, she saw the dynamics of power as applied in social settings as the primary gauge. Acute awareness of who has the edge, how the context affects the advantage of some over others in the moment, and how the larger system yields patterns of sustained disadvantage which benefit some and marginalize many more were the markers she instilled in me. Having insight into these dynamics constitutes a moral compass that, when married with conscience, rarely fails to deliver in knowing what is the "right thing." Her dictum was that at the heart of every injustice is the abuse of power. Of course, recognizing what is the "right thing" and knowing what to do about it, now that's another story. I still struggle with that one, but don’t we all?

The distribution of a few people across vast spaces results in considerable distances between individuals and communities. Living across such expanses leads to an odd type of interdependence wherein isolation and rugged individualism is balanced by pulling on the rope in the same direction and volunteer involvement in churches, schools, fraternal associations, and various community-service organizations on the other. Each taking care for oneself was certainly the primary objective, but there was a clear expectation that we all pitch-in and do our part for the commonweal as well. To this day I take my affiliations seriously. While far more of my time is spent taking care of myself and my family, I still muster the wherewithal to contribute to those activities that make a positive difference for the greater good. It is the right thing to do.

Long days filled with hard work were essential elements of life in the Great Plains. With the first generation or two, it was a matter of survival; in later generations it determined success or failure. Adages like, “a little hard work never hurt anyone” and “idle hands are the Devil’s playground” were always at the tip of my mother’s tongue when I was slow in getting started with chores in the morning or I didn’t put my shoulder into the task at hand to get it done and done well. It was expected that beginning at an early age everyone pulled their weight and did their share. By the time I became a teenager I was a door-to-door salesperson during the winter and did lawn care during the summers. Once twenty, I already eclipsed retail sales, automobile mechanics, construction, and manufacturing on my way to a fifteen-year stint at the largest general aviation manufacturer in the world, Cessna Aircraft. “Hard work speaks for itself” was the approach I took to go from assembly line worker to shop supervisor to industrial engineering manager to program manager to internal consultant in organization and process design. My future was mapped by a pattern of paying attention, planning ahead, and doing the next right thing.

Kansas is at the heart of the Populist movement started in the late 1800’s. Many points from Populist platforms during that period continue to be mainstays in the political views of people from the Great Plains. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American President, captured the essence of Populism in the closing line of his historic Gettysburg Address, “…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” This ideal of individual citizens having the right and the responsibility to be actively involved in their government is a driving force behind the emergence of participatory democracy, as an increasingly viable alternative to its antithesis, representative democracy, which dominates our present government form.

Beginning in the late 1970’s and extending through the mid-1980’s the first major wave of “workforce adjustment” hit blue-collar America as rigid, inflexible Industrial Age structures shifted toward the more integrated and distributed ones of the Knowledge Era. Downsizing, consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, and closures characterized this period. Cessna Aircraft was not exempt from these changes. Broken “social contracts” with the workforce, labor-management tensions, and asset reductions characterized the final third of my corporate career and with it came incredible insights into the dynamics of change within organizations under duress. By the end of 1986, I, too, became a reduction-in-force. Accompanying the Christmas-season “pink-slip” from Cessna was my new-year resolution to never be placed in such a position again. To do otherwise would not be the right thing! In 1987, I formed my first company, Bosserman & Associates, Inc. and my career of self-employment was launched.

Self-employment and being a “knowledge broker” go hand-in-hand as do being a knowledge broker and self-education. Why? Efficiency in the Industrial Age is directly tied to how well the social structure of an organization mirrors the production structure of the business. The better people fit into boxes on organization charts and perform to the machine-like stipulations outlined in job descriptions the higher the efficiency. One of the characteristics of the integrated and distributed Knowledge Era structures is greater responsibility placed on people to be in charge of their own destinies with respect to preparation for and choices in career and work. Knowing one’s purpose, principles, and intentions is an essential element for success in this context because such knowledge breeds self-confidence. Being comfortable in knowing who one is, yet willing to take the steps that leads to who one is becoming, requires courage, conviction, and commitment. In lieu of the Industrial Age wherein external structures told people their purposes and places, the Information Age is based on internal structures within which this knowledge can only be derived from frequent introspection, processing, and application—self-education. Building relationships to explore possibilities and accomplish complex tasks requires brokering connections with others who are similarly self-confident and self-knowing; hence the term “knowledge brokers.”

Typical for the Great Plains, states like Kansas put a premium on education. In addition to the public education system, many of those same churches and volunteer organizations that provided a broader social fabric of individuals and families living on the prairie, sponsored private schools, colleges, and universities. Towns located in some of the most remote areas of Kansas had little more than a college to keep the local community intact. One of these is Friends University in Wichita—a liberal arts college founded in 1898 by the Quakers. With the sustainability of many small communities throughout the Great Plains, colleges and universities like Friends located in these towns were challenged to adapt to radically different conditions from those that created them over one-hundred years earlier or close. Many did not survive. Friends University did. One of the ways it accomplished this was to initiate a degree-completion program for working professionals who were half-way through their undergraduate degree and wanted to complete it in one year. Key components of this program included receiving credit for life experiences and independent studies within areas of interest and value for students and their sponsors / employers. This type of curricula complements a self-learner’s passion for “independent investigation of the truth.” Self-education is a recurring theme throughout my life as it is for anyone in the role of a knowledge broker. This program at Friends fit perfectly. I received a Bachelor of Sciences degree in 1987.

At various times throughout one’s life, certain people enter and share the stage whose presence has a dramatic and profound impact on who one is and what one does. These personages can come from all walks of life and can appear as relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers, colleagues, employers, and even casual acquaintances encountered in the virtual realm. All share a common trait; they are able to orchestrate “significant emotional events” at certain “teachable moments” that, whether for good or ill, forever alter sense of self. During the last three years I was with Cessna, two of those personages, Elizabeth McGrath and Patrick Dolan, became my coach and mentor, respectively, as I navigated a change in professional focus from engineering and manufacturing to strategic framing and organization design. Beginning with a leadership workshop for senior management at Cessna in 1984 and ending at the conclusion of a sub-contract between Bosserman & Associates, Inc. and W.P. Dolan & Associates in 1989, my self-knowledge about my life’s work and self-confidence in fulfilling that purpose were unflappable and irresistible. By the time I became a general contractor in 1989, my previous experiences in the arena of labor-management consulting provided sufficient theories-in-practice to represent my effectiveness when engaging clients on my own merit.

Transitions such as those to self-employment and becoming a general contractor are not easy, but they are necessary for professional growth and capacity building. And to have a mentor who freely shares knowledge and experience to help shape possibilities or a coach who takes a more goal-oriented approach to personal and professional development makes these transitions more palatable and approachable. More often than not, compensation for one who mentors or coaches is acknowledgement for having done so. The burden on those who are mentored and coached is that they do the same for another when a significant emotional event can be delivered at a precise teachable moment. It is the right thing to do.

In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the first Morrill Act into law establishing the land-grant college and university system in the United States. The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC) offer the following description of these institutions:
“The original mission of these institutions, as set forth in the first Morrill Act, was to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies so that members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.”

As obvious by the wording, their creation was intended to serve multiple purposes. Not the least of which was providing a diverse immigrant population of the United States with a well-rounded education so they could become fully-functioning members of a meritocratic society, capitalistic economy, and democratic political process. Today, these institutions have moved from serving a broad segment of society to focusing on a narrow slice of the elite in a total reversal from their original mandate. This raises the question that if the land-grant system, which was founded to prepare members of hoi polloi to be exemplary citizens, is no longer accessible, then where should they go to get this education?

By coincidence my client base between 1989 and the present involves organizations that have an association with agriculture: an agricultural equipment manufacturer, professional societies for agriculture-related sciences and technologies, foundations funding projects and programs related to food and society, federal and state agencies affiliated with agriculture, and colleges and universities within the land-grant system of higher education in the United States. Agriculture is the foundation upon which civilization is built and sustained. With civilization comes education and with education comes active participation in self-governance and community affairs. Civilization, education, and politics are local phenomena. When a local community loses its ability to provide members with a sufficient food supply from sources local to the community, its sustainability is at risk. Education, which happens at the locality where delivery occurs, not at the source, requires learners to have basic physiological needs, such as food, met. As Thomas "Tip" O'Neill—longtime Speaker of the House in the U.S. Congress—once declared, "All politics is local." Accordingly, education is the foundation for participatory democracy. In the absence of education is representative democracy. There is a tension between these two forms of democracy. When are people truly ready—as in their basic needs are met, they are educated, and they are politically responsible—to drop representation and become self-directed participants?

Beginning in 2001 and extending to the present, my work within corporate America is concentrated more heavily on strategic framing and organization design challenges associated with the second wave of downsizing in the shift from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era. This one, as well as the first, is directly related to advances in technology. In the first wave, people were displaced from production because of improvements in how production is done. The second wave is related to the cost of labor for the work people still do in the production environment. If people cannot be removed from the equation by technology then work flows to the places where the cost of a skilled workforce is the lowest. This is globalization. People are displaced from production in one locality in favor of others who pick-up that same production elsewhere. Production in an increasingly fluid network around the world is pushing organizations into more integrated designs characterized by quick-coupled connections for ease in building widely-dispersed knowledge networks, redundant capabilities to assure rapid adaptation, and committed associations for focused team attention and results.

Where is all of this heading? My current field of research and application concerns the third and final stage in the transition from the Industrial to the Knowledge Era: when production requires no people anywhere and everyone is displaced from making things. When technologies integrate so efficiently and effectively that their collective capacity and capability equal or exceed human performance, human equivalence is reached. Converging on this point presses us to make major changes in our relationships with those technologies, our environment, and one another. Although these changes are unpredictable, our commentary on trends, conditions, and events establishes shared frameworks through which purposeful actions and collective influence are possible.

The diagram (Figure 1a) below identifies three undeniable “forces” that comprise that convergence: environment for life—meeting the minimum requirements for life, or more precisely, human life; energy—what is required to convert elements and compounds into structures and systems that engender and support human life, socialization, and civilization; technology—that which improves the efficiency and effectiveness of those conversion processes that use energy within the environment.

It can be easily argued that human equivalence is a theoretical supposition and is unachievable. However, the point is not when the “machine” approximates human intelligence and capability, but what changes occur in our world the closer the machine gets to that stage irrespective of if or when it is fully achieved. Technologies of nearly infinite variety are being developed and introduced at an increasingly rapid rate.
As the graphic (Figure 1b) below proposes, these technologies are becoming faster, smaller, more integrated, and more human-like as time passes. Given results of the first and second stages in the transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Era, as the power and prowess of the machine increases, people are displaced from those paid activities related to production. Entering the third and final stage when people are no longer involved in production elicits the question, what will we do when all we have is ourselves and our relationships?

But with all this technological knowledge unleashed that is literally transforming our living world and even us as humans begs a more relevant question, how do we as a global human family appeal to the dictates of “collective wisdom” that guides us in the application of that knowledge? It is this question that frames my work over the next foreseeable future. At the heart of my approach is giving voices to the voiceless and hearing their “ground truth;” taking action in response; establishing decision-making forums and processes whereby people have direct influence over their destinies in their local communities and broader input to the global agenda. This is the foundation upon which social justice can be established. Such is the work of a “knowledge broker”—it is the right thing to do!

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