Growth

An unchallenged axiom

As I writer, If I lived off the money I earn I’d starve - quickly. To avoid this, I run a small consultancy business (i.e. it’s just me) where I put on a suit and play the part of a management consultant. It keeps the wolves (that’s another name for banks) from my door – just. One of things I did in my life that seemed a good idea at the time was to get a PhD in management – business strategy. It is something I’m rather good at though, if given the choice, I’d rather be a writer.

During my tortured battles with academia, I was most interested in the ‘P’ of the PhD – philosophy. Looking under the hood at business and management, helped by intelligent and well-read colleagues, I gained an appreciation for how the business world worked rather than how to extract as much money as humanly possible in as shorter time as possible.

I spent a lot of time thinking about who the business world works for and who it exploits. And once you know something, you can’t unknow it. If your best friend drunkenly confesses that they murdered someone and buried the body in their backyard, you’re stuck with that knowledge and the ethical dilemma it presents. I was stuck as a businessperson knowing that the model I was working within was a narcissistic, selfish, short-term game of hungry hippos.

I wrote recently that common knowledge doesn’t need to be true. The business world operates on a series of false assumptions and omissions that are generally accepted to be true. As a management consultant I get paid for playing along – so I play along. We skate over the surface of the iceberg, not thinking about the dark mass of reality, of Truth, lurking beneath the surface.

This past weekend I was facilitating a strategy session and I took the assembled group for a short visit to the dark side of the iceberg – I asked about growth. Cognitive dissonance is a term for the state of discomfort felt when two or more modes of thought contradict each other. We know that drinking too much alcohol is harmful to our health, but we (some of us) do it anyway and feel guilty. When I said that organisational growth was a choice, I could see everyone in the room experienced that discomfort.

Growth has become an automatic assumption, something organisations and countries must do to survive. Every politician’s (bar those on the real left) rhetoric is focused on local, regional and national growth. Luxon, New Zealand’s prime minister in waiting, is constantly banging on about growth – to get our economy back on track.  Yet, as most people know, continual growth is not possible – we live on a finite planet.

The next time growth is raised as a topic, ask the question – why? Why do we need growth? You’ll see the cognitive dissonance hit, then you’ll likely hear a range of trite sayings that have been peddled over the years to justify everything and nothing.

"Growth is the engine of progress."

"A growing economy benefits everyone in society."

"The more we produce, the more we all prosper."

"As the economy grows, so does the standard of living."

If anyone gives you a reason beyond the simplistic – growth is good – let me know!

The uncomfortable truth is we’ve created a system (capitalism) that relies on growth. If the system doesn’t continue to grow, it doesn’t shrink, it can’t shrink – it collapses in a local or general way.