If you don’t wish to ruminate on that place known as
Auschwitz, walk on by.  I have been
a pedestrian student of that “epoch” and have recently stood on the hallowed
ground.  Henceforth it doesn’t
escape the mind.

 

It sticks. Permanently. And the rest of life gets
compared to it.

 

In recent years, the subject of dysfunction has been
top of mind. Travel back to the 2008 financial meltdown, a poster child for organizational
dysfunction. It wrecked everything else. Cut deep, to the bone. Double dip
recession now is likely. That’s what a widespread financial meltdown in the USA
sows. For the cliff notes version watch HBO’s “Too Big to Fail.”

 

Here we go again…as a handsome guy who became known
as the Great Communicator once said.

 

In the study organizational psychology, I sought to
understand the interactions between working people and teams. Academia focuses
upon that high performance garbage, quotes tomes like “Good to Great” and
references blue chip corporations like P&G. Then the rest of the world imagines
that their own workplace can be all that.

 

Not so fast. Not so easy. Not so likely.

 

Then we look at a scheme that some leadership types
(Hitler, Himmler, Goering and their posse of evil) devised called “The Final
Solution.” These guys (and a few mean girls) sought world domination, but only
after permanently removing folks they deemed undesirables, or maybe unwilling
to be part of their plan.

 

Those people they determined to be undesirable:
intellectuals, artists, the entire Jewish population, Slavs, gypsies,
homosexuals.  Some of the folks
that make society interesting. 
Still amazing that Einstein wasn’t on a transport. And how many like
him, were mind numbing.

 

Hitler’s master plan was not dysfunctional. Say
what? That’s the strange part. In fact he was pretty darn successful. His “A”
team gutted our society: by numbers, by people, by thoughts, ideas and
way-of-life. By God, the man (or monster) changed the game.

 

This thing called dysfunction is a strange
bedfellow. If a group of individuals coalesces around a cause, they sometimes
find a path towards success. The Third Reich was functional. Their transports
ran on time, banished millions deemed unfavorable, employed people who believed
in a shared “vision” and came damn close to world domination.  Obviously, function does not always
equal good.

 

Walking across the muddy terrain of Auschwitz-Birkenau
is NOT the most shocking part of bearing witness to the Nazi plan. To me, it
was the complicit society of millions who saw evil but took no action to stop
it   that made The Final Solution possible. It took a very large
village to pull this deal off. Hitler’s clan was an evil, yet functional brood.
People come together for all sorts of reasons.  Many are born of ill intention.

 

Sadly, many positive, world changing, like-minded
and well-intentioned humans join one another to improve communities, but fail
due to dysfunction, political infighting, self-aggrandizing motivation and
struggles for power.  Just because
what you desire might improve society doesn’t mean that your organizational
prowess and leadership will make it so. Life isn’t like that. All too often, we
humans get in our own way.

 

Too many people become unabashedly certain of
themselves and their sure-thing ideas. Yet, as we get older, we become
painfully aware of all that we don’t know. In fact, we become less sure of
anything.  Somehow we thought that
(at some moment), it would all align and the world would make sense. Not the
case. Not for me anyway.

 

Our workplaces become filled with minds that think
that they have all of the answers. Any scholar, entrepreneur, inventor,
scientist, intellectual or man/woman who actually knows their stuff, will
profess that they are never even close to certain. Remember that Velcro was an
accident.

 

Frustration was explained by Will Rogers, “It’s not
what he doesn’t know that bother’s me, it’s what he knows for sure that just
ain’t so.” And this sort of invalidated certainly is what populates workplaces
across America. Those guys and girls at Lehman Brothers were cock-sure. Hello!

 

We sit back and hope that if we behave nobly, if we
believe enough, if we come together for all that’s good and right, if our
intentions are honorable and if we behave like good boys and girls, then
success follows. Yet survivor Viktor Frankl warned, “ Since Auschwitz we know
what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.”

 

To realize functionality, success, shared vision and
prosperity, we need to share something. That sharing needs to be bigger than we
each are as individuals, yet small enough to understand.

 

The Final Solution as a testament to function certainly
is a sad statement on society.  Afterwards,
we learned stories of joined function of high order, for good. 

 

Warsaw, Poland is a haunted and uplifting place all
at once. City of Uprisings. City in which its citizens united to rebuild with
their own hard earned cash and sweat equity. Enter the Warsaw Uprising
experiential museum and the sound of a loud beating heart accompanies the
journey through history. Alive and well.

 

Would we Americans undertake this sort of reinvention?
Or would we look to our government for a bail out?

 

Today can we answer the question posed by Bob Weir
(Leader, songwriter extraordinaire, muse, man for all moments), “Have you seen
the light?’ Not by a long shot.

 

We can each examine every crack, grain of sand,
swell and smell of a struggling country called Poland, a wrecked economy, the
dysfunctional nature of the workplace, the haunted ground near Oswiecim,
Poland, where too many trains stopped, and still not get it. Understanding does
not say it’s so.

 

In tie-dye and hoping I do, but knowing that likely
never have, never will,

Jennifer