Accelerating the rise of the holistic human:
While organisations have been dedicating much needed commitment towards progressing tangible efforts geared at the “E” and “G” components of the ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) compass, it would be myopic to not dedicate equal commitment to the “S” component because ESG components are systemic and “S” is where much of the focus on the human being lies.
The World Economic Forum in a paper published in 2022, drew attention to the percentage increase in importance placed on the “S” component of ESG by institutional investors in the United States, indicating that it rose by 15 points to 69% from 2019 to 2020 bringing it above environmental concerns (61%) and governance (68%) for the first time. After the Covid-19 pandemic and coupled with key economic trends of the Great Resignation and increasing levels of burnout, the importance of the “S” component continues to rise. In business, it represents a commitment to addressing critical social issues of justice and equity such as human rights, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB), employee wellbeing, strong community involvement — with a view to forging sustainable, equitable and trusting relations with key stakeholders for the wellbeing of people and the planet.
To create sustainable effect at an organisational and social level, change needs to begin at the individual level – and hence the focus on the human being becomes pivotal. That said, for far too long has the focus on the human in the organisation been reductionist, focusing mostly on a single dimension — the “working self” and demanding a “clean compartmentalisation” of the human at work from the various other dimensions that make up the human.
The following three vectors of transformation signal a movement away from the single unit towards embracing the systemic kaleidoscope of dimensions that make up a more holistic human.
The emergence of the authentic human. Amid the landscape of technological transformation, post-pandemic and the quest to humanise the workplace emerges the need for individuals to establish “real”, “true” and trusting relationships with others through connecting and bonding with them. This means that instead of bringing in only their “working” self and shutting off other dimensions of self, they feel safe enough to bring their “full selves” — the self that does not shy away from honestly sharing the trials and tribulations facing them and admitting that they may not have all the answers to the problems an organisation may face. It is both vulnerability and courage that enables the authentic human to be unlocked in the quest to seek sustainable solutions.
The emergence of the diverse, equitable and inclusive human. While the importance of DEIB has been around for more than a decade, few organisations have fully grasped the powerful value-add and benefits that it holds and hence few have acted with urgency in driving and embedding the right mindsets and practices of a culture of diversity and inclusion — a huge opportunity lost that could bolster organisations with the competitive edge needed to emerge sustainable in the new world of work.
Herein lies the opportunity to move away from the single unit, which values the same thinking, same talent, same markets, same customers, to one that embraces the kaleidoscope of different thinking and perspectives of the various dimensions of diversity — including race, gender, people with disability, LGBTQ plus, ethnic and cultural diversity, generational diversity, different markets and customers. Driving DEIB is more than just acting with a moral compass. It is a smart approach to embedding sustainability in business through diverse solutions leading to innovation, agility and high performance.
The emergence of the holistic healthy human. For far too long has the health and wellbeing of an employee been addressed with a reductionist approach mostly focusing on physical health, safety and wellbeing — the extent to which an individual can competently perform physical tasks and activities without significant discomfort. While the vital importance of an individual’s physical health, safety and wellbeing cannot be dismissed, gone are the days where employees “hand in” their emotional, social and spiritual selves at the “front desk” only to be reclaimed at the end of the day. How can a reality of this kind be sustainable?
The need to rebalance the human aspects with machines, the effect of the pandemic and the rise of the Great Resignation and high levels of burnout amid hybrid working has changed all this. This change has been for the better, refocusing a paradigm shift that draws deep respect for the holistic human — mind, body and spirit. The cocktail of these trends has drawn greater attention to emotional and mental wellbeing with a recent study by the World Economic Forum ranking emotional and financial wellbeing higher in importance than physical wellbeing.
An individual’s social health and wellbeing in building healthy, nurturing, genuine and supportive relationships is increasing in importance as the movement away from silo working towards connection, collaboration and co-creation gains momentum. While previously considered a taboo topic in the workplace, spiritual wellbeing has also emerged as a vital dimension of the holistic healthy human especially when individuals were forced to face up to death and their own mortality during the pandemic. The relentless search for meaning, purpose and the epiphany many experienced after the pandemic and amid the Great Resignation led people to connect with their spirit, faith and religious beliefs, raising the profile on spiritual health and wellbeing.
The positive effect of the ‘holistic human’
The rise of the “holistic human” at the individual level has far reaching effects through extension into the social space. The rise of the authentic human enables a culture of physical and psychological safety at the team, organisational and social level — individuals are more likely to admit mistakes, speak up and build sincere, trusting relationships with various stakeholders.
At the core of driving a culture of DEIB is treating each individual with dignity, respect and fairness while consistently protecting their basic human, social and economic rights. As such, the rise of the diverse, inclusive and equitable human extends this focus to the organisational and social level through the promotion of fair and ethical labour practices and metrics including pay and benefits equity as well as ensuring ethical practices within an organisation’s operations and supply chain networks and combating forced labour.
The rise of the holistic healthy human with a focus on holistic wellbeing extends to the organisational and social level enabling individuals to establish stronger and more meaningful relationships with communities and local stakeholders that they serve, thus contributing positively to society at large. Moreover the call for a paradigm shift about holistic wellbeing and the wellbeing of the planet is beckoning a deeper reflection on the disconnect between the current industrial model of employment that demands endless productivity resulting in high levels of burnout and the restoration and regeneration needed to heal a sick planet.
Towards restoration and regeneration
Humanity is at a precipice. While all of nature operates through a perfectly created ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts, this ecosystem is consistently degrading. Change begins at the individual human level and the human being is a vital part of this natural ecosystem. Limiting the human being by focusing only on the single unit amounts to halting the progress towards a socially and environmentally sustainable world.
Embracing the holistic human at the individual, organisational and social level, demands bold, courageous and compassionate leadership powered by a higher purpose and social conscience. The gifts and benefits to a healthy and sustainable society and planet far outweigh the comfort of a reductionist approach.
Varsha Morar is a human capital strategist, thought leader and registered organisational psychologist.
The post Accelerating the rise of the holistic human appeared first on The Mail & Guardian.
A mirror to a modern conflict:
They are the three most famous and inviting, evocative and reverberative opening words in literature in English: Call me Ishmael.
They stand at the head of “Loomings”, the first chapter of a book so vast and deep it is a writerly miracle that “Call me Ishmael” connotes and invokes the whole. Ishmael means “God hears” and as readers join Ishmael on his deathly voyage, with good and evil, the satanic and the innocent for shipmates, they will hope profoundly that someone is listening.
“It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships’ cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.” Thus wrote Herman Melville of his novel Moby-Dick, published in New York on 14 November 1851. Less than a month before it had reached readers in London as The Whale, published on 18 October.
Of the many curiosities of the book, almost the first is that its hyphenated title does not extend to the whale in question, which remains resolutely Moby Dick throughout.
As a fellow mammal and the novel’s antagonist (more about that later), perhaps the whale deserves to be referred to as “who” rather than “which”. At any rate, it is more sentient, wiser and humane than the devilish man in pursuit, Captain Ahab.
Years before, Moby Dick inflicted an injury on Ahab that led to the loss of a leg. (Curiously — or not — Melville does not say which leg.) Now he stands on deck balanced on an ivory leg “fashioned from the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw”.
A sperm whale because Moby Dick is a sperm whale, ghostly and ghastly white, and based on the real-life Mocha Dick that sank many whaling boats (not ships) in the early 1840s.
Ahab is devoted to one thing only — vengeance on Moby Dick. This, however, he hides from the officers and crew of the Pequod, the whaling ship he commands.
As a portrait of life on board a whaler, the novel is nonpareil. Behind its characters and descriptions are the nearly four years Melville spent at sea, setting out on the whaler Acushnet’s maiden voyage on 3 January 1841 from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, bound for Cape Horn and the Pacific.
But notably, this does not make the book solely a human’s view of whaling. Although Melville prefaces the whole with an etymology of the word “whale”, followed by 16 pages dubbed “Extracts” that cite, among others, the books of Genesis, Job and Jonah, Montaigne, Paradise Lost, Hamlet, and diverse old whaling songs, he devotes three lengthier chapters to whales and to Moby Dick. So, we have “Cetology”, “Moby Dick” and “The Whiteness of the Whale”. If Moby Dick is to be the antagonist, the enemy, best to know him.
But, to flip this on its head, if the whale is seen as the protagonist, defying the monomaniacal, vengeful Ahab, even better the reader should know him and his kith and kin.
It seems perverse to suggest that Melville is on the side of a particular whale and of whales in general. Certainly, the exact opposite is at play in chapters such as “Stubb Kills a Whale”, “The Whale as a Dish”, “Ambergris”, “The Try-Works” (the gory separation of a dead whale’s parts — “assets” in our modern terminology — and boiling some over hellish fires) and “The Dying Whale”.
Nonetheless, Melville is aware always of the grandeur of whales, their ferocious nobility, and in the specific instance of Moby Dick and his real-life inspiration Mocha Dick, their superiority over humans.
Primarily, Melville’s thesis is that the business of whaling, with its ruthless and relentless commercial extraction of nature, contaminates all involved with it.
To illustrate those convictions, he fills Moby-Dick with the experience and lore of the sea and makes it an encyclopedia of learning and a compendium of Biblical and literary allusions, the scope of which are thrilling and breathtaking.
Melville’s prose reaches heights comparable to the King James Version of The Bible or to Shakespeare. His canvas is the globe itself, with the Pequod standing for voyages of exploration and discovery into the deepest and darkest motives of the human mind and soul.
As the greatest Melville scholar Harold Beaver declared: “The quest for Moby Dick, then, is to be read as a pastoral turned demoniac, an extension of the Narcissus myth in which the whole ocean becomes the mirror image of man.”
But the moment in which we live, with a merciless war being waged between Israel and Hamas, demands that we reach for other meanings in Moby-Dick. For, as Beaver writes: “… this universal and global book must range through universal and global references in space and time, through all religious creeds and philosophical ideas (ancient and modern).”
Twenty years ago, as one of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture Series of 2003, I gave a talk titled Passageways: Revisiting Self, The Society of The Spectacle and Moby-Dick in the Wake of September 11.
As noted then: “Given its all-encompassing nature, it is no surprise that Moby-Dick has much to say about 11 September 2001, and the war on Iraq.
“In a moment of eerie synchronicity, the strikes on the World Trade Center occurred just as Melville academics, scholars and devotees were preparing to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick on 18 October 2001.”
Leaving aside discussion of Guy Debord’s The Society of The Spectacle, it is significant to recall the view of Edward Said at the time.
As my talk Passageways recorded: “Ahab’s yearning for revenge on the creature that had injured him so grievously was ‘suicidal finality’, said Said, who cautioned of the perils of mystifying Osama bin Laden, and of the dangers of America embarking on a punitive expedition like that of the Pequod.
“The subsequent imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq show those warnings went unheeded.”
It takes little imagination to substitute President Benjamin Netanyahu, Hamas and Israel in the above. Netanyahu the narcissist has been grievously injured by his failure to protect his own citizens from the terrible slaughter perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October.
That humankind does not learn from history is made woefully apparent again by reference to successive sections of Passageways such as: “A passage to vengeance, transitory and troubling: we speak both of ‘I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened’ Ahab and of political and military power, united in vengeful intent.
“At the end of ‘Sunset’, Chapter 37, Ahab rails: ‘Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run … Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!’”
As the Melville scholar Richard Chase judged: “To be Ahab is to be unable to resist the hypnotic attraction of the self with its impulse to envelop and control the universe.
“To be Ishmael is to be able at the last minute to resist the plunge from the masthead into the sea one has been with rapt fascination gazing at, to assert at the critical moment the difference between the self and the non-self.”
In the respective fates of Ahab, Moby Dick and Ishmael we might glimpse portents of the future. Ahab harpoons the whale with the evilly tempered weapon he had specially made. Moby Dick flies forward, pulling the rope attached to the harpoon. The rope catches in the groove.
“Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone …”
Before this, Moby Dick has delivered the deathblow to the Pequod and the sinking ship pulls into its vortex all the small whaling boats with their crews.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
There is an epilogue. Of all the whalers, but one survives.
“It was the devious-cruising Rachel, [another whaling ship] that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”
Call him Ishmael.
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Kabila family legacy looms large over DRC polls:
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to hold elections on 20 December.
The country’s electoral commission has announced President Felix Tshisekedi will be seeking re-election alongside 23 other candidates. They include Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege and the runner-up in the 2018 presidential election, Martin Fayulu.
The courts will confirm the final list of candidates.
One key political figure has yet to make his intentions known: Joseph Kabila. He was president for 18 years until Tshisekedi took over in 2019. The DRC’s Constitution allows two five-year terms, but he remained in power by delaying elections. He holds substantial political, military and business sway. Jonathan R Beloff is a political scholar who researches the politics and security of the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. We asked him some questions.
What is the Kabila family’s place in the DRC’s politics?
Joseph Kabila was the country’s fourth president. He took office after the assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila, who was killed by his bodyguard in 2001. Joseph later won presidential elections in 2006 and 2011.
The surprise 2018 election of Felix Tshisekedi, who took power in January 2019, as president interrupted more than two decades of the Kabila family’s rule. At the time, Joseph was constitutionally barred from running for president — and he had already overshot his second term by more than three years.
The Kabila family became a political powerhouse after gaining control in 1996. With the assistance of other countries, such as neighbours Uganda, Angola and Rwanda, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, under the leadership of Laurent Kabila, overthrew the long-standing Zairian dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. This was during the First Congo War (1996-1997).
Laurent’s tenure was riddled with ineffectiveness and corruption. In less than two years, he had dismissed his minister of defence, the Rwandan James Kabarebe, and begun arming anti-Rwandan forces. These forces contained actors who participated in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Laurent claimed his government only backed these forces after Rwanda attempted to overthrow his regime.
The bloody Second Congo War (1998-2003) led to at least two million deaths, many of them from disease and extreme poverty rather than warfare itself. While Kabarebe’s invasion attempt on the capital Kinshasa in 1998 failed, the vast DRC was divided into spheres of influence for different nations and their aligned rebel groups. This status quo only began to break after Laurent’s assassination, which led to the rise of his son, Joseph.
Joseph learned military strategy, tactics and politics under Kabarebe. The two worked together after the Second Congo War to flush out many anti-Rwandan forces. This included the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda. They also campaigned together during the 2011 presidential elections, which Joseph won.
Joseph initially cast himself as a reformer who would end the Second Congo War and pursue policies to spur political and economic development. But instability in eastern Congo persisted under his rule, with accusations of corruption that undermined the nation’s development.
How much sway does Joseph Kabila hold today?
Joseph Kabila remains a strong presence within Congo’s political, economic and military institutions. He has strong networks developed over 18 years in power. He could use this influence to sway the vote towards any of the candidates.
His influence stems from favourable business and political alliances he created when he was president. Like Mobutu, Kabila used his vast financial resources to secure favourable relationships with Congolese and foreign business leaders. A document leak in 2021 showed that Kabila received more than $ 138 million from corruption and bribes.
There were claims that the former president originally convinced Tshisekedi to accept a power-sharing agreement. Under it, Tshisekedi would be president, while Kabila would control political decisions behind the scenes. The near appointment of Ronsard Malonda as the president of the electoral body illustrated Kabila’s political influence. Malonda held senior positions during the country’s 2006, 2011 and 2018 elections. He has been accused of rigging results in favour of Kabila.
Such accusations have benefited Tshisekedi’s election campaign. He is depicting himself as a candidate not tied to corruption in the DRC.
If Kabila does decide to campaign, political dynamics within much of Congo’s civil society, military and economy will be divided. Government ministers and officials will be forced to choose to support either the incumbent or Kabila’s preferred candidate.
What was Tshisekedi expected to change after he routed Joseph Kabila?
There was initial hope that Tshisekedi’s government would foster peace in eastern Congo, establish greater national unity and help solve the nation’s economic woes after decades of corruption and conflict. But these problems have persisted.
Initially, Amnesty International praised Tshisekedi for pardoning political prisoners and allowing greater public space for criticisms of the Congolese government. He also began investigations on past mineral deals during the Kabila governments. As the African Union chair from 2021 to 2022, he pushed for greater attention to the Covid-19 pandemic and promoted the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Despite initial attempts to foster more significant relations with Rwanda, relations soured in 2022. This was after the Congolese government accused Rwanda of supporting the resurrected M23 rebels.
Rwanda denied the allegations. It has also accused Tshisekedi’s government of being hostile to the Congolese Tutsi population — the Banyamulenge — who are historically related to Rwandans.
The US department of state has expressed concern about Tshisekedi’s anti-Banyamulenge rhetoric, as well as democratic transparency in the upcoming election.
Tshisekedi’s campaign strategy seems to focus on promoting security in eastern DRC by not only defeating the M23, but also attacking Rwanda for interfering in Congolese affairs. The securitisation of the Banyamulenge and Rwanda — the political manipulation to stir public fear — has helped deflect internal criticisms of the Tshisekedi regime.
Whether the elections take place is another area of concern. There are concerns that Tshisekedi will delay or cancel the election by citing security concerns. If this happens, it might be perceived by domestic and international partners as political interference by the ruling regime.
Jonathan Beloff is Postdoctoral Research Associate, King’s College London. This article was first published by The Conversation.
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