How to Create Neutral Views and Perspectives During Transformations. Learning from Rebecca Solnit’s Book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”

In this article, the first essay in an excellent collection of essays by the renowned writer and essayist Rebecca Solnit (Open Door in: Solnit, R.; A Field Guide to Getting Lost, New York, Viking Penguin, 2005) is used to give another perspective on transformations in a business or organizational context and to describe the preconditions for transformations, the readiness to transform with means coming from outside business administration and organization theory. The article strongly draws on metaphors, similarities, and analogies from philosophy (Memo, Socrates), literature (Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Wolfe), science (J. Robert Oppenheimer), etc. which can be applied very well. The key thesis is that all (radical) transformations have to explore a new world that was previously (mostly or totally) unknown and that for the openness needed to explore this new unknown world it is crucial to get lost, which means getting pulled out of traditional thinking and perception in order to prevent one from missing important insights or misinterpreting realities. In other words: neutral, uninfluenced views and perspectives are needed. New knowledge can only be created if some traditional knowledge that is no longer needed is “canceled.” This might already be important to understand the necessity of a transformation for an organization and to define its general outline. But this is especially important if the transformation in which one finds oneself represents a real paradigm, a belief change. Even though Rebecca Solnit’s perspective is a personal one, it is nevertheless easily transferable to whole organizations. The article also—implicitly—underlines the importance that the book contains a larger number of articles from fields outside business administration and organization theory. The VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world can only be understood if all perspectives are used.