TRANSFORMATIVE THEORY IS DESTROYING THE LEFT

We have a clearly defined enemy with significant vulnerabilities. That enemy is Transformative Theory” also called “Organizational Design” and was the brainchild of Kurt Lewin at MIT’s former Research Center for Group Dynamics in the 1930s after his exposure to Antonio Gramsci.

Lewin was a prolific applied-psychologist specializing in bending the individual to the will of the collective through social dynamics. His theories translate Marxist concepts into behaviorist dogma.

Transformation Theory posits that many weakly prepared minds can outperform one well prepared and self-disciplined mind making traditional leaders unnecessary. All that is needed to innovate is a diverse group and motivation through participation. However, thermodynamic laws describing the flow of energy say otherwise. Energy ultimately flows in one direction.

Lewin was a psychologist from the Berlin School, also called the Gestalt School, which posits that the whole of a concept is different from the sum of its parts, requiring deconstruction to manage and optimize. Poor translations of the Gestalt concept state the whole is greater than the sum of its pieces, not the more accurate the whole is other than the sum of parts.

This mistranslation, whether intentional or through ignorance, causes considerable organizational damage throughout the English speaking world. It is a foundational plank of American Democratic Socialism and justifies their efforts to eliminate traditional American culture. The translation error is an often repeated trope that appears in many business consultant’s PowerPoint decks.

Lewin is also the father of sensitivity training and culture facilitation; now weaponized into socialist indoctrination in schools, universities, and the workplace via diversity initiatives. Clearly, to the socialist, Lewin was a man for all seasons.

He also developed Style Theory, classifying leaders as authoritarian, democratic, or Lasseiz-Faire. He argued for democratic leadership as the most likely to cause long-term success and boost innovation. Many well-meaning but inexperienced leaders jumped on Style Based Leadership without realizing that Lewin’s work evolved from a small sample of children.

Organizational structures which Lewin called democratically organized were socialistic. Manipulation of phrases is a characteristic of Lewin, Saul Alinsky, and other Gramscians. It is a core concept behind their methods and is understood by the left as narrative control.

Lewin further proposed several other leadership paradigms. Interestingly, all roads lead to socialism with his theories. Style Theory peaked during the Carter Administration and began to fall from favor during the Reagan years due to ideological competition from the total quality movement.

Large consulting houses have profit and loss statements that need tending, and so they began the quest for new business consulting products to sell in light of the decline of Style.

Lewin died from a heart attack at age 56 and was not directly responsible for the eventual wide-scale adoption of his theories. His cargo-cult like followers carried that torch. Several pointy-headed psychologists were behind the insertion of Gramscianism into the culture by first teaching Transformative concepts at MIT, then Stanford, Brown, Yale, Harvard, and their peers.

Outside of the Ivy-covered psych departments, social transformation concepts became business re-engineering in many MBA programs after books such as  In Search of Excellence  by Tom Peters gained attention. More honest people call the ideas coerced social planning.

After Lewin’s death near the start of the Cold War, the origin of Transformation Theory from Italian Marxist-socialist indoctrination doctrine was not discussed. The ideas were published and republished by academics via a circular-citation frenzy until they became the unquestioned worldview of many organizational psychology departments.

From academia, the infection spread to the Democratic Party and then to the Department of Education. Today’s shenanigans by athletes and junior Members of Congress are its logical result. Gramsci’s works here.

Transformative Theory is a polished-apple version of the international flavor of Italian Socialism. Gramsci’s literature behind the movement has an obsession with Mussolini’s fascists as their great enemy, hence anyone resisting central social planning is a fascist. Mussolini threw Gramsci into prison for his Marxist leanings and from that triggering event forward, the Transformers call all opponents of artificially engineered cultural systems “fascists.” They don’t care to understand the meaning of the word.

With the transformer’s, or postmodernists as they call themselves, the idea is to make society more productive through participation — not achievement. Andrew Maslow called this self-actualization. Under the theory, success at a lower skill level grants the right to shout one’s beliefs in business meetings or before the camera as a reward for climbing the pyramid. Ironically, success gives the right to participate, not to achieve further.

The theory turns organizations into prima donna factories that mirror the Ivy League faculty lounge.

Growth is supposed to come from “diverse” team efforts with each member contributing pieces of ideas to synthesize a solution to a problem. Unfortunately, these approaches work from closed experience sets and virtually never conceptualize new designs.

Late in the Reagan era, some Ivy League critical theory types tasked with replacing Lewin’s Style Theory discovered Transformative Theory and shoved it through American business via McKinsey & Company. McKinsey is in the business of selling broad concepts to organizations for a hefty fee and must refresh their offerings to maintain sales.

They still sell business transformation as do their competitors Disney Consulting. (yes, that Disney) Also, other consulting houses. Matt Rogers, president of McKinsey, was a significant player with the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009. These guys were deeply into the Obama Administration.

As a consulting product, replacing Style Theory with Transformative Theory made much sense. American business had grown cautious of Style Theory and the repackaged product made millions as few Americans were familiar with Gramsci and the Italian Socialist theoretical roots of Transformative Theory.

The new organizational paradigm sounded nifty. Market pressure from NAFTA led American CEOs to gobble Transformative Theory down like an addict and his Percocet. A colossal wave of factory closures followed as the theory is a productivity, cost, and innovation dud. It is a theory of indoctrination — not innovation.

Organizational design folks are not the same as Columbia University’s Frankfurt School Marxists. Organizational designers copied the philosophy of thinking globally and acting locally from Gramsci. He acquired it from Trotsky. They focus their efforts on one campus, Olympic team, or business boardroom at a time.

Many of those fat, angry and foul-mouthed feminists that look like Shrek are a product of transformational organizational design in the schools. Value-based on participation alone means that it pays to loud and large to be in charge.

The Democrat Party has gone all-in with this “open society” Transformative approach, however, to their peril. Transformative systems do not generate adaptive and modern leaders because they discourage rationalism, which is necessary for the conceptualization of new paradigms.

At best, they rely on empiricism through polling and focus groups. However, they even get sampling wrong as Trump demonstrated to them in the 2016 election because of their almost desperate rejection of the Pareto rule in statistics and its pro-capitalist consequences.

Call it peer review or social media or the suburban mom’s burden, or cult of the rainbow flag. Leadership degrades under transformative, postmodernist systems because of their importance placed on what they call organizational culture, but the rest of the world call groupthink.

We see the weakening of the left’s leadership right now as the new Congressional generation replaces the old.

Conservatives are winning the long game through innovation. The recent behavior by Rapinoe on the women’s Olympic soccer team is evidence that the left believes in behavior modification, Gramscianism, transformative theory, and collectivist social coercion. They are not generating competent leaders, and after twenty-five years of Transformative indoctrination, they have no pipeline left to restart production.

The history of all civilization is pretty clear. The people perish when the leader is incompetent.

The Postmodernist left will eventually fail. Until then, they should be treated as wounded and cornered animals devoid of hope.

The Great Acceleration after President Trump replaced Obama demonstrates bigly that the left rides the coattails of conservative leadership because they dismantled their concept of leaders. The transformative postmodernist left can’t control their future. Incompetent leaders are their curse.

Mike Ryan is an engineering consultant to the primary metals, minerals, fibers, and chemicals industries.