Persons of Tomorrow

A fundamental aspect of IFF’s work is our focus on the human. To those claiming to map the ‘whole system’ the great systems theorist Sir Geoffrey Vickers had a warning: ‘human systems are different’.

One thing to pay attention to therefore is that in an age of conceptual emergency we are all in danger of being confused and/or overwhelmed. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan summed up the danger in his book of the early 1990s In Over Our Heads: the mental demands of modern life. Kegan identified a capacity gap between the world we live in and our capacity to make sense of it and flourish in it.

From her own experience working on the impact of rapid change, anxiety and overwhelm at a societal and cultural level, IFF member Maureen O’Hara has identified a blend of three possible responses to such anxiety – which can be observed in individuals, families, organisations, nations, cultures.

One very human response is to give up the struggle to make sense of what is going on and to lapse into short term defensive strategies or longer term despair. Another is to strive to regain the comfort of control and coherence by reasserting old truths with more conviction and urgency, stressing fundamentals, ignoring inconvenient information, interpreting complexity in simple terms.

These responses can offer temporary adaptation and will quell anxiety for a while. But they can also dissolve into maladaptive neurotic and even psychotic routines. However understandable and human these responses are, they are pseudo-solutions, ultimately doomed to failure.

But not all responses to challenging times are dysfunctional. It is possible to face up to challenge and grow with and through it. Changed circumstances can be seized as opportunities for creative engagement and rather than generating resistance, generate a step change in learning and growth.

This growth response is what IFF seeks to stimulate and encourage in our work. When we work in support of people struggling with seemingly intractable challenges our aim is to increase their capacity, to reveal their ‘21st century competencies’ that lie within but which have been devalued or suppressed in order to succeed in our modernist age.

In a famous essay in the 1970s the psychologist Carl Rogers outlined his observations, based on encounters with thousands of people in places all over the world, that led him to conclude that a new world was emerging. He suggested that the upswell of social protest and experimentation taking place all around him represented a dawning 'world of tomorrow' that would equally call forth 'persons of tomorrow.' These new people would have the qualities, skills, competencies and capacities necessary to thrive in the new emerging culture.

IFF likewise sees that today’s powerful times are calling forth ‘persons of tomorrow’ – who display the capacities and qualities to thrive where others are struggling. An explicit theme in our work is to identify the characteristics of such people: what competencies do they possess that allow them to grow through the turbulence that others find so disorienting, how did they come by them, and how and where can those competencies best be developed and deployed in the future?

This theme is pursued in all of our work, but most evidently in work on psychological capacity, education and learning. Dancing at the Edge - by Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester explores the theme in detail and is available in the IFF shop.