End of the anthropocene?

Lessons from Covid for leaders and organisations

For centuries human culture and civilisation has been bedded in dualism.  Mind/body.  Science/religion.  Subject/object.  Covid has put a stark and blunt end to this.

The foundation of the anthropocene era, where mankind is the subject and earth the object, where we have set ourselves up as the master and earth the unwilling slave, is now facing a tectonic shift of life threatening proportions.

Earth is becoming active, a grumbling Vesuvius, spewing out a warning.  No longer content to be the passive object, earth has, virtually overnight, become the subject and we the object.

How we react to this challenge will determine whether homo sapiens, the last in the four million year line of hominins, survives at all.

Michel Serres, the wonderful French philosopher (died at 88 after 30 years lecturing at Stanford University in 2019) accurately described where we are today a decade ago in his Times of Crisis predicting that the earth will become active and start to control us.  He termed the word Biogea and predicted that our future evolution will depend on our ability to incorporate Biogea into our science and society as a third and critical partner in everything we do.

The question is this.  Do we have the collective intelligence as a specie to evolve rapidly enough to create a win-win relationship with Biogea?

And what will the impact be on all our organisational theories and practices?  We will need a revolutionary paradigm that revisits all our economic, financial, religious and social systems, building in Biogea at the centre of civilisation as the major stakeholder.

I predict that post Covid 19 will usher in this transformation as a wonderful opportunity for every game changer in society.

Here is a personal challenge.  How could you, your team, and your organisation build Biogea into your strategies and operations with immediate effect?  What could you do differently from tomorrow?