Reflections: Intellectual Shamans, Sensemaking, and Memes in Large System Change

Abstract

This Reflections piece focuses on the central yet often overlooked role of memes in the change process. Memes are cultural artefacts that pass from one person or group to others, in change, particularly the type of large system change that is needed to bring about a sustainable enterprise economy in the future. Memes are the foundations of belief systems and perspectives within any given system that establish the relationships and behaviours within the system. If left unaddressed in change initiatives, the stubborn persistence of old memes can potentially stall or even prevent significant change. Focusing on memes as a foundation for thinking about organizational and system change may provide a new platform for change agents, who can begin by understanding current memeplex (complexes of memes) within systems and working with system participants to change them in the desired direction. Some academics, considered as intellectual shamans, take on the shamanic mantle of healers, connectors, and, particularly relevant with respect to memes, sensemakers of the modern academy. Senesemakers generate new ideas, images, and fundamentally memes that, when successful, can provide a basis for change.

Keywords:

• memes
• memeplex
• large system change
• sensemaker
• change agents

When first invited to develop this reflection, I was a bit daunted to be in the company of some of my own heroes. Additionally, throughout my career I have considered myself first and foremost a business in society scholar rather than a scholar of change. Of course, at the heart of the business in society field is a fundamental question of changing society, businesses, and other institutions, so that they function better for everyone and for the planet, as least as I view the field. It is a rather large change agenda, which has recently taken the form of conversations (and writing) about large system change (LSC) (Waddock, Dentoni, Meszoely, & Waddell, 2014; Waddell, Waddock, Dentoni, MacLachlan, & Meszoely, in press).

On further reflection … the series is, after all, called ‘Reflections', it became clear that I have been studying change in one form or another throughout my academic career. My doctoral studies at Boston University in the early 1980s were filled with organizational change and development literature, and a focus on how public–private (social, now multi-sector) partnerships could transform schools and other aspects of societies. For years, I worked with the idea of corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship with an eye towards transforming companies into not just profitable but also responsible enterprises, followed by a study of people I called ‘difference makers', institutional and social entrepreneurs. At Boston College, where I have worked since 1986, a group of management and sociology faculty with business partners collaboratively developed a programme we called Leadership for Change – and then ran that programme for 17 years, putting change at the centre of that aspect of our teaching.

All of this work has been supplemented more recently by a study of renowned management academics I call intellectual shamans (in a book by that name), all of whom are change makers in their own rights. Furthermore, work LSC with a group of other scholars under the auspices of the Global Organizational Learning and Development Network for Sustainability builds on some of my earlier thinking about change and broadens the scope considerably. These experiences combine with a variety of other scholarly tacks over time, including forays into management education, the corporate responsibility infrastructure, building responsible enterprise, defining a responsible enterprise economy, thinking about wisdom, and considering stewardship of the future. Somehow, these things are all related to necessary changes in our enterprises and institutions that could make the world a better place. In what follows, I hope to draw some of these threads together in discussing what I believe is the central role that memes play in fostering or inhibiting change, and the ways in which intellectual (and other) shamans shape and reshape memes through the sensemaking process.

Here is the intuition behind these hopefully provocative reflections. I believe that major system change, not just organization change, but change of the whole economic, political, and social order, is needed if human civilization is to thrive in the future, or possibly even survive into the foreseeable future. A group of colleagues and I have called this broad and deep change LSC (Waddell, McLachlan, Meszoely, & Waddock, in press). One of the core but generally under-researched aspects of effecting LSC is the foundational role that the cultural artefacts that Dawkins (2006, original 1976) called memes play in shaping beliefs, ideologies, practices, behaviours, and societies. Memes are replicable ideas that move from mind to mind with varying degrees of fidelity (e.g. ideas, poems, songs, thoughts of various kinds, symbols, artefacts, brands, and whole ideologies can be memes or, when complex, ‘memeplexes’) (Blackmore, 1999; Dawkins, 2006).

If we hope to create LSC and are thinking about it holistically, then I strongly believe that focus needs to be paid to the memes that shape perceptions of reality, beliefs, values, and norms, and ultimately behaviours. In this foundational change context, there is a need for some people to assume the role of shaman – and in particular the intellectual shaman who provides new and compelling sensemaking (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005) that allows those perceptions, beliefs, and ultimately behaviours to change. Intellectual (and other types of) shamans, I believe, serve in this capacity through the sensemaking role of the shaman in generating and (re-)shaping memes.

Successful change agents do this sensemaking quite explicitly, as Frost and Egri (1994, also Egri & Frost, 1991) noted in discussing organizational development specialists as shamans. In my book, Intellectual shamans: Management academics making a difference (2015), I argue that as academics who wish to foster a better (healed) world in one way or another, we can and need to take on the three central roles of the shaman: healer, connector, and sensemaker (Egri & Frost, 1991; Frost & Egri, 1994; Waddock, 2015). I would go further to argue, albeit not here in detail, that anyone in virtually any field can undertake these three roles if they have a healing orientation, since in all cultures the shaman is the healer – medicine man or woman. Here, however, I want to argue in the context of LSC, the role of the sensemaker becomes a primary one, since it is sensemaking that constructs, changes, or reshapes memes that is core to whether a system changes in the desired direction. I will explain all of these things in more detail in the following.

Large System Change

In very brief overview, LSC involves multiple organizations, systems, and groups, often from two or more sectors, that take actions to deliberately effect fundamental shifts in the ‘rules of the game’ or a dominant worldview and associated practices, policies, and institutions (see Waddell et al., in press). That is, LSC is oriented towards orienting the policies, regulations, rules, norms, and standards of practice that constitute ‘how things work', the dominant framings, and standard operating practices within the boundaries of interest or with respect to relevant issues or topics of interest. Here, we need not spend a lot of time exploring the many problems facing the planet. Suffice to say that given climate change, resource constraints, economic instability, and population growth, among many other widespread problems, LSC is clearly needed if humanity is to thrive or perhaps even survive in the future – not to mention all the other living beings on the planet, including the living system that is the planet itself (e.g. Lovelock, 1999; Lovelock, 2009).

One key to understanding LSC is to explore the word ‘large’ to understand that the scale and scope of LSC as we are viewing it. Large system change is big, bigger than a single entity, and therefore at scale (see Waddell et al., in press, for elaboration). LSC crosses multiple boundaries, organizational, institutional, sector, industrial, organizational, state, or national boundaries. Better understanding of LSC is important because the scale of change actually needed to cope with issues of climate change and sustainability, not to mention poverty, equity, food security, or numerous other problems, is far more vast and complex humanity has had to tackle in the past (Ehrenfeld & Hoffman, 2013; Trainer, 2010, 2014). The systems that need to change, of course, include organizations, but perhaps more important involve changes in core memes, and relationships within multi-organizational complexes that are community, national, regional, or global in scope and that generate economic, political, and civil society activity. In addition, the governmental structures and policies that create what amount to the rules of the game, as well consumption and production patterns, are just a few things that will have to shift radically towards more sustainable enterprises, all the while providing for a decent quality of life for the Earth's human populace and survival for other living beings.

We know from the extensive literatures on individual and organizational change, just how hard it is to effect change at those levels. LSC, obviously, is that much harder, in part because the complexity of system change is more pronounced when multiple interacting sub-entities or systems fraught with wicked problems (Churchman, 1967; Rittel & Webber, 1973) are involved. Wicked problems, which have no identifiable beginning or end, are highly dynamic and complexly interrelated, with complex and indeterminate specific causes and numerous interactions. Resolving wicked problems is difficult because different stakeholders bring different problem definitions and different potential solutions and means to bear on any given set of dynamics. Some (e.g. Trainer, 2010, 2014) believe that what is effectively grassroots action on numerous fronts will be the source of much change.

It seems, however, that LSC of the scope and scale needed to assure a sustainable, or better, thriving, future requires a multi-level, multi-pronged approach, including both the grassroots action of many individuals, families, locales, and groups, and institutional and policy changes at many different levels of action – top down, lateral, and bottom up. What needs to happen in LSC (and very likely in any significant change in a complex system), in my view, is that the underlying memes that shape behaviour need to point in new directions so that system participants who accept these new memes will be willing and able to move – in their own wide variety of ways – towards new behaviours, attitudes, actions, and the like, that reflect the desired direction. Although shifting structures and policies, intervention efforts of various sorts, and leadership can help, the foundational nature of memes suggests that any new vision of a desired future represents a new set of memes that system participants need to buy into, accept, and act upon before LSC is likely.

Complicating matters still further, human and natural ecosystems are inherently complex adaptive systems (CASs) (e.g. Kauffman, 1995; Lissack & Letiche, 2002; Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), with all the features of complexity that CAS implies (for elaboration, see Waddock et al., 2014). CAS feature few or no definitive boundaries, need to be approached holistically, have nonlinear dynamics in which all the parts are interconnected and interdependent, and are characterized by the emergence of properties and co-evolution among various subsystems or elements. They can shift rather suddenly from one state to another when they are at what is called the ‘edge of chaos’ in complexity theory. State change possibilities include what Diamond (2005) calls collapse, which in human systems affected by issues of climate change or sustainability crises could potentially be devastating. In physical CAS, there is also a phenomenon of the strange attractor, which helps define the patterns that characterize the underlying chaotic features of the CAS (this background on CAS is derived from, e.g. Capra, 2005; Capra & Luisi, 2014; Gleick, 1987; Kauffman, 1995; Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989; Prigogene & Stengers, 1984; Stacey, 1991).

In LSC, this ‘strange attractor’ can in some respects be considered the set of memes (or memeplexes, see the later text) that constitute peoples' understanding of a given (set of) system(s). LSC then involves simultaneously dealing with both wicked problems and complex systems (Waddock et al., 2014), and recognizing that change can and does happen just about anywhere in the system, and that its outcomes are neither predictable nor controllable. The key to LSC, however, is figuring out somehow how to, in a sense, ‘direct’ the change in a desired direction, since change itself can come from just about anywhere in the system with all sorts of unpredictable consequences.

System complexity and wicked problems combine to mean that changing large systems involves multiple stakeholders with different perspectives, issues that appear (are) intractable with no apparent or readily agreed path to solution, and that there are no easily identifiable resolutions or end points. Such systems are dynamic, that is, always in flux, and have numerous interacting and interdependent elements and participants, with elements sometimes changing slowly and sometimes quickly, but always interacting and co-evolving. These characteristics mean that such systems are always in a process of continuous change and evolution, whether or not an intentional change initiative is under way. Because such systems are inherently dynamic, change is always going on – the question then becomes how to bring it about in the desired direction and at a desired pace.

As Klein (2014) has pointed out in her book This changes everything, when we think about change at the whole system level, we need an effective theory of change to bring about system change successfully. Many of us have such theories, which involve, for example, resistance (Werkman, 2010); overcoming resistance by ‘letting [change] happen' (Chia, 2014); classical planned approaches to change (e.g. Bennis, 1965; Bennis, Benne, & Chin, 1961); self-regulation (Kuntz & Gomes, 2012); structural change and interventions (e.g. Hackman & Oldham, 1980; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1969); various forms of dialogue and engagement change strategies (see Oswick, 2013); and other approaches too numerous to mention (see, e.g. Beer & Walton, 1987; Oswick, 2013; Weick & Quinn, 1999). But few of these or any of numerous other approaches deal with the interactions and complexities of the whole system effectively enough to create LSC in desired directions.

My theory of change for human systems starts with understanding … and changing … memes so that the system itself can begin to change as people adopt new behaviours, beliefs, and practices in accord with new memes. But all of this needs to be said with the recognition that because of the unpredictable nature of change in complex systems, because change can take place just about anywhere, and because of the dynamics of interaction, while patterns of change can be perceived, specific, pre-determined outcomes are unlikely to be achieved. It would appear that the best we can hope for is change in a desired direction over time with new and more positive patterns of behaviour and practice emerging.

Meme Change … Changes … Everything

Yes, the subhead is a bit overstated. If, however, I am correct that memes are at the foundation of understanding, shaping, and changing our various systems, then they play a central role in fostering or inhibiting change, as well as in shaping the systems that we have. Much of change theory has paid little attention to them. Consider the following: Weick and Quinn (1999) note that Lewin's notion of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing (Lewin, 1948; for a recent defence, see Burnes, 2004) underpins many theories of change. Weick and Quinn, however, modify Lewin's concept by reordering it to freezing, unbalancing, and unfreezing (1999). Whichever framing you use, something needs to change in the unfreezing (or freezing) process, depending on where you start, particularly when we are attempting to conceive of large systems comprised of multiple organizations changing in a desired direction. That something, I believe, is the memes that shape understanding of and relation to a system for its participants.

Given the dynamism of complex systems, it would seem that little is ever actually ‘frozen', since change is a constant. At the same time, to the extent that memes are deeply embedded within a system, beginning to shift them might allow some latitude for other types of interventions to take effect and begin to move the system towards a desired state. There are a plethora of well-rehearsed change approaches that can be used at various points within the system when change is desired, that is, changing individuals, changing teams (and their structure), changing leaders or leadership, changing organizational structures and dynamics, among others (for a review, see Cameron & Green, 2012). Focus can range from emphasizing tangible (job design, structure, and technology) to intangible (dialogic or discursive, participative, and constructivist) approaches, from backward-looking to future-orientations, from top-down to bottoms-up approaches, from inward-looking to outside-in focuses, among others (for an overview, see Oswick, 2013).

If we accept the inherently dynamic nature of systems that can appear ‘frozen’ or at least stubbornly resisting change, then we need to ask: What is it that shapes understanding of who we are as an organization, a community, a group, a people, a religion, a social movement, a society, or any other collective or as an individual? Arguably, it is the foundational ideas, values, norms, and stories that beliefs and ultimately behaviours in any given cultural context, which appear to be unique to humans (Blackmore, 2000). These foundational ideas or cultural artefacts (note that they can be symbols, artistic, or physical representations as well) are what Dawkins (2006, original, 1976) called ‘memes'.

Memes, a shortened version of the word ‘mimeme', are cultural artefacts, for example, ideas, symbols, and practices, that are replicated from one person (or group) to another (hence mimesis, or imitation) through new and emergent behaviours (Dawkins, 2006, original 1976; Blackmore, 2000). The term ‘meme’ was introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The selfish gene to create a cultural representation that performed for social systems much the same evolutionary function that the gene (or genome) does for biological systems. Memes evolve and change as they are transmitted from one person or group to another (e.g. Blackmore, 2000), though a core of shared understanding typically remains. Blackmore (2000, p. 65) defines memes as ‘stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation'. She is careful to point out that memes are constructed of information, not simply ideas. As informational units, memes can be complex like genes (Blackmore calls these complexes ‘memeplexes’), containing multiple units of information interacting and reinforcing each other, and, as Gleick (2011, p. 3) notes, ‘are complex units, distinct and memorable – units with staying power'.

Memes shape the bases on which we interact with each other, how we view the world around us, and ultimately our ability or willingness to change behaviours. That is, memes are at the heart of what needs to be ‘unfrozen’ (or ‘refrozen’ to use Weick and Quinn's [1999] reframing), that is changed, even in the dynamic conditions of complex systems. Author Gleick (2011, p. 2), quoting neurophysiologist Roger Sperry, notes that ‘Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas.’ These core ideas that shape us and our cultures, whether organizational, family, or societal, are memes. That memes need to change does not mean, of course, that other more traditional change strategies should not be used – but they should be used in conjunction with understanding, and reshaping, memes that support the status quo towards new memes that foster change in the desired direction.

Memes at core are the narratives, ideas, visions, values, norms, and other cultural symbols that shape human culture, individual or shared understandings, and other ways of relating to systems and each other at different levels of analysis. The relative prevalence of different memes or memeplexes differentiates one culture or system from another. Because they are composed of ideas and information, memes are considerably more subject to change than are genes as they pass from one person or group to another (Boyd & Richerson, 2000; O'Mahoney, 2007; Pech, 2003; Voelpel, Leibold, & Strep, 2005), yet they are foundational to how we understand and act in the world (Blackmore, 2000). We do not need, here, to get into the debate about whether memes set humans apart from other species. We need simply to recognize the powerful influence that memes have on shaping how people view their world, how they act as a consequence of those views – and consequently how ready they are to change when change is called for.

Why are Memes Powerful?

Lakoff's (2014) analysis of the importance of framing in shaping ideas and cultural norms – and particularly the relative success that conservatives in the USA have had during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century – helps frame the relevance of memes to LSC. Memes, as Lakoff (2014) has powerfully argued, speaking about them as frames, shape mindsets, points of view, and behaviours, including what is, and is not, acceptable in a given situation. Memes shape schemas, social constructions, ideologies, cultures, and, indeed, religions, as well as artistic expressions of all sorts, among other things. Because of inexact replication from one person (or group) to another (Blackmore, 2000), different interpretations of the same meme are certainly possible even within a single relatively homogeneous group; however, a shared memeplex (think of an ideology, a religion, a culture, the scientific method, and finance as a belief system) is something that results from a common memeplex and is generally shared within a group. Atran (2001), in fact, suggests that memes do not transfer by replication but rather by inference in which interpretation is inherently involved. In any case, memes replicate in some form throughout systems to form a core of common understanding of what a given entity is all about.

We can think of memes as the core elements of culture, that is, the foundations that shape beliefs, behaviours, and perspectives within the context of a given culture. As Blackmore points out, everything from what is taught in schools, what is read, watched, or heard, ‘everything from fashions and habits, to political ideologies and scientific theories’ can be considered to be a meme (1999, 9; also 2000). Memes are thus at the heart of how we understand our world – and as a result shape how we think and act in that world, as well as what we believe to be true (or false) about the world. The basis of the word meme has to do with imitation, with the suggestion that much learning about culture, and probably much of an individual or group's identity, occurs through the transference and replication of memes. Obviously, other means of learning, such as trial and error, reward and punishment, or reinforcement, are also possible (Blackmore, 1999), but here we focus on the role of memes.

Systemic change inherently involves change in multiple organizations of various types inherently involved in complexly related ways (By, Burnes & Oswick, 2012; Waddock et al., 2014). If we hope to move the perspective of change beyond the single organization, which has dominated much thinking about change processes (Oswick, 2013) towards the systemic change that is needed, there seems to be an imperative to consider the core elements represented by memes. Change in any complex system, that is, would seem to demand understanding and shifting of the memeplex or core set of memes that constitute the cultural artefacts that distinguish that system from others – and that may be at the heart of why it is so difficult to change organizations and institutions. At the more macro scale, we would want to deal with memes that constitute our core beliefs about that system. For example, a currently widespread meme is the economic idea that continuous growth is always necessary to both company and national success (to use a pretty radical example that is fundamental to LSC). The growth meme is an important one to economies and businesses alike – and makes change in any direction that seems to inhibit its potential difficult at best.

Figuring out exactly what is or is not a meme is somewhat controversial (see Blackmore, 2000). There is controversy as well about how closely something must be replicated to be considered mimetic transmission, since cultural transmissions do not tend to be exact (e.g. Atran, 2001; Pech, 2003). But if we consider that memes shape our understanding of a given cultural phenomenon, then even the definition of culture as the beliefs, arts, values, norms, and symbols of a group (or society or organization) suggests that some common level of shared experience of memes must be at the foundation of any shared cultural experience. This notion seems self-evident, despite some indication that even the simplest set of understandings can be widely divergent (Atran, 2001). Atran (2001, p. 375) defines cultures as ‘causally distributive assemblages of mental representations and resultant behaviors', in which memorable ideas are transmitted by what he calls ‘habits of mind'. For example, my former doctoral student Erica Steckler completed a dissertation in which one set of her findings demonstrated vividly how divergently a range of stakeholders interpreted the idea of sustainability (2014). Nonetheless, to the extent that we have things such as cultures, ideologies, and other systems of shared beliefs, we have to assume a common basis of memes – which can be stubbornly resistant to changing when they represent deeply held beliefs.

Lissack claims that meme should be considered ‘indexicals', or ‘words used to stand for a set of other words’ (2003, p. 50), making them contextually embedded constructs that help people understand a given situation or cultural condition reasonably efficiently. The meme or cultural artefact is situated and therefore ‘evokes an intended meaning’ (Lissack, 2003, p. 51). Such meanings influence the ways in which we perceive and deal with the world around us, and, arguably like many belief systems are difficult to change. Much as Lakoff (2014) discusses frames that shape peoples' political understandings (and which, as he demonstrates for the conservative agenda have taken decades to embed in peoples' minds), so Lissack places memes into the context of frames that shape cultural understandings, in terms of both core meanings and the boundaries that implied by a given set of memes or framings.

Lissack (2003) further argues that there is a difference between successful and unsuccessful memes. Successful memes' meanings transcend situations vs. the unsuccessful meme that cannot be understood in contexts different from its original. The spread and cultural dominance of many religions and political ideologies, considered as memeplexes, indicates both the staying and transmission power that some complexes of memes can have. Memes, however, are not limited to words – symbols, artistic expressions, and other types of artefacts are also replicable and create a shared understanding and count as memes. Just consider the power, recognizability, and replicability of the Coca Cola label or Nike swoosh symbol.

Another perspective on the power of memes, offered by Williams (2004, p. 771) in talking about management fads and fashions, focuses on how memes spread. Memes, Williams claims, are a form of contagion, like a virus, that need access to ‘brain space', and can ‘infect’ people when there is no ‘immunity’ to that particular cultural artefact. The idea of immunity is interesting because it suggests that people are more or less receptive to a given meme, depending on what their past association with that meme has been and, very likely, how strong the other memes they hold are. That is, if a strong memeplex is embedded in an individual or group's mindset, it will be that much more difficult to change. That association could possibly be due to past experiences, education, (lack of) knowledge about the meme, media influences, or interpersonal influences, among other factors. Successful memes tend to conform to what are called ‘meta-memes', memeplexes, or memes that construct the overall belief system in which, for example, a new meme, is embedded (Williams, 2004, pp. 775–776). This argument suggests that the more embedded a set of memes is within a given context, the more entrenched the people will be with respect to their attitudes, beliefs, and practices around those memes – and consequently, the harder that particular system will be to change.

Memes that spread easily seem to be memes that fall within a currently acceptable set of norms, standards, beliefs, or practice for a given context. If they are not within these parameters, they can be rejected out of hand – and therefore fail as memes – unless the innovative meme somehow appeals to people. Voelpel et al. (2005) suggest that conceptually there are several stages to the diffusion of a particular meme – creating, shaping, and tracking– which take place in a cyclical fashion because of the constant change and evolution of the meme by its very nature. Considering memes to be at the core of the change process would indicate that change agents, who, in LSC exist necessarily within the system (Waddell et al., in press), may need to work consciously at creating and shaping (and eventually tracking) new memes if they hope to move a system, since otherwise system participants can easily remain stuck in their own understandings. Notably, this shaping of new memes (or framing) is what Lakoff (2014) claims that conservatives have successfully done in the USA since the 1960s, while progressives have been unable to control the meme ‘conversation’ nearly as well.

Memes, Sensemakers, and Intellectual Shamans

Numerous change approaches articulate difficulty in overcoming ‘resistance’ or other impediments to change and developing forward momentum that sustains change. At the heart of what we call resistance to change seems to be (stubborn?) adherence to a set of memes that comprise the particular change system's culture, values, and core beliefs that have spread across the population of that entity (or set of entities). Such core memes in an institution (read this term broadly to reflect whatever level of analysis seems appropriate, including complex systems) deeply reflect ‘who we are’ and ‘how we do things', among other factors that stabilize complex systems. Memes reflecting ‘how we do things here’ or ‘who we are’ represent core memes (memeplexes) for an entity or set of entities, shaping our connection to the particular system or set of systems, as well as the mythology that surrounds and makes sense of the institution, thereby providing a basis for thinking about change (e.g. Movva, 2004).

An example may help. At the very large (business and economy) system level, consider for a moment how the meme of the need for continual economic growth (actually introduced after the Second World War, so not the ‘forever’ thing that many assume) has ‘infected', in a sense, businesses, whole economies, the media, and most of us. The particular set of memes surrounding the need for growth in business or an economy is a form of cultural mythology today that is deeply entrenched in the modern psyche. In fact, I am willing to bet that any reader who has not considered the need for not growing in light of climate change, population growth, resource constraints, and sustainability issues facing the planet is very uncomfortable, even angry, at this point. Such memeplexes shape us in ways we typically do not even think about because they represent core and largely unquestioned assumptions about the way the world is. When someone comes along and suggests something different, it can be quite uncomfortable because of the clash with the core memes that establish our identity or relationship to whatever the system of interest is. If the new meme(s) is(are) appealing in some way, however, it can displace the old one(s) and related behaviours, practices, norms, and ideas can begin to shift as well.

Given the strength of memes to shape beliefs and behaviours, if change agents overlook the core memes within any given system, then arguably their change efforts are prone to stalling, resistance, or other obstacles that make change difficult at best, if not impossible. The core ideas that people carry about who they are, what their particular system is, and how it operates will not readily change (be unfrozen or frozen, to use Lewin's and Weick and Quinn's language) unless attention is actually paid to reformulating foundational memes in acceptable ways or creating new ones that successfully replace the old ones. Arguably, then, we cannot fruitfully bring about the LSC that is needed for humanity (businesses, governments, civil society, and other institutions) to cope successfully with climate change, sustainability crises, inequity, energy, food production and supply, and financial system crises (among others), without understanding the central role that memes play in inhibiting and fostering change. I would suggest that similar dynamics are at play in systems (including individuals) at all levels of analysis.

So how do academics work with memes? Among us are a group of scholars I call intellectual shamans (Waddock, 2015). Because they tend to do pathbreaking work, it is the intellectual shamans (along with shamans in other realms) whose ideas and work have the potential to help reshape core memes in ways that allow change to occur. Shamans are, of course, the healers (medicine men and women) of traditional communities, and they tend to do holistic research that crosses multiple disciplinary boundaries, bringing ideas from different arenas together to create new insights – effectively, new memes. But they have two other central roles – that of connector and that of sensemaker (Egri & Frost, 1991; Frost & Egri, 1994; Waddock, 2015). It is particularly the latter role of sensemaker (Egri & Frost, 1991; Frost & Egri, 1994; Waddock, 2015) that is at work, for better or for worse, in articulating the (existing or new) memes that influence our organizations and institutions to either stay business as usual or change. A brief explanation follows and concludes this reflection.

Intellectual shamans are academics who take necessary risks to take on the healing mantle of the shaman, for all shamans are basically healers, that is, underlying their work is the notion of creating a better world, discipline, theory, or set of practices. Many traditional cultures believe that when a person becomes sick, it is because there is something wrong with the cultural mythology surrounding the community. For example, I believe that the meme of continual growth brings problems to our own modern culture that cannot be addressed particularly well until that meme shifts. In doing his or her work, the shaman travels (often in a trance state for traditional shamans, albeit not necessarily for intellectual shamans) to other realms to gather and bring back information that can potentially heal the cultural dis-ordered or dis-eased myth(s) (hyphens deliberate, indicating lack of order or ease) – and thereby heal the patient (Dow, 1986). Basically, these cultural mythologies are the set of memes that create the relevant cultural worldview and that make the system difficult to change because participants in the system believe that these memes represent how the system is and should be. For example, the growth meme is so prevalent that most people believe it impossible to have successful and effective economies without continuous growth. Another foundational perspective of the modern era – and, not incidentally, the management academy, which contrasts with the mythologies of many traditional cultures, is that we can fully understand the world through science, which often involves atomization and fragmentation of ideas into their smallest part and sometimes overlooks more holistic conceptions that are particularly necessary for change to be effective (see, e.g. Norgaard & Baer, 2005).

(Intellectual) Shamans are also connectors, typically viewing issues and problems holistically and bringing information from multiple disciplines to bear on ideas, theories, research, and teaching. To gain more holistic perspectives, the intellectual shaman typically crosses numerous boundaries, for example, disciplinary, research-practice, research methodologies, teaching-research (much as traditional shamans cross spiritual boundaries). As connectors, (intellectual) shamans ‘see’ across boundaries. They do what Frost & Egri, 1994) call walking between realms or worlds and serving as bridges among different worlds. This bridging function provides intellectual shamans with information and points of views that narrow specialization cannot provide, hence provides a basis for creating new ways of understanding the world – that is creating new and possibly powerful memes that can potentially displace old ‘dis-eased’ memes.

Importantly, it is in the sensemaking or what Weick calls ‘change poet’ role (2011), which Frost and Egri (1994) articulate as one of (spiritual) leadership, where intellectual shamans (as do other types of shamans) particularly serve as change agents to help others within their relevant communities to make sense of the world around them. As Weick notes, change poets create ‘evocative [new word or other] images in the sense that their words include more of the flux of direct experience and few of the surface categories that reduce options. Change poets reconstitute larger fragments of experience’ (Weick, 2011, p. 8). They undertake this creative task, says Weick, by ‘talk[ing] airy nothing into existence’ and ‘wrap[ping] perceptions in conceptions’ (Weick, 2011, p. 9). That is, intellectual shamans (who do not necessarily explicitly perceive themselves as change agents/poets) are acting at the level of memes. In generating new insights and ideas, or reframing old ones, they are effectively creating new memes or memeplexes that can potentially appeal to various constituencies. In creating these new memes, they focus on what the shaman sees as dis-order, for example, in theories, practices, or behaviours of various kinds, and attempt to reconstitute a new order through the generation and deployment of what they hope will be successful new memes (ideas, theories, practices, etc.). Intellectual shamans thereby provide a new foundation of memes on which, when successful, change that encompasses new ideas, insights, beliefs, practices, that is new ways of viewing the world, and ultimately new behaviours can emerge (also Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005).

I will state once more that to effect LSC, change agents need to pay explicit attention to determining, framing, re-framing, and changing the core memes of a target change system in ways that move the system towards a desired direction. Change then happens as more people adopt new memes, and hence new ways of interacting with and understanding the world, and change their behaviours accordingly from wherever they sit within the complex system. But because the system is complex and composed of wicked problems, specific outcomes cannot be predicted. Rather, patterns of change, hopefully as desired, can potentially be expected.

Intellectual shamans as change agents quite deliberately evoke new, powerful memes that can help people reframe and rethink how they view and interact with the world around them, and affect their willingness and ability to make significant changes. Boje (2012) argued similarly that change agents need to change the relevant story (or memeplex), and Freeman (1994) has argued that we need change the narrative of business and eventually provide the basis for a new cultural mythology. Though neither Freeman nor Boje discussed change in terms of memes, it is, in fact, memes that their ideas refer to.

As examples, consider what intellectual shamans Jane Dutton, Robert Quinn, and Kim Cameron have done to change the conversation around how organizations act and are perceived through their identification of and work on positive organizational scholarship. Consider how R. Edward Freeman shifted the language around businesses by popularizing the now ubiquitous term stakeholder and attempting to shift the conversation about who matters in businesses away from the single stakeholder group of shareholders towards a broader set of stakeholders. Similarly, the work of Stuart Hart and Andrew Hoffman, among others, has shifted the focus in at least some enterprises towards issues of sustainability both in the ecological sense and the business sense. These examples are but a few of the ways in which shifting foundational memes changes relevant conversations, dialogues, and concepts – and ultimately behaviours.

Memes are the foundation on which LSC needs, in my view, to begin. Academics who are willing to take necessary intellectual risks to make sense of the world in new ways that appeal to others in productive ways and move the world towards greater sustainability and equity can potentially assume the mantle of the intellectual shaman and help the world heal. We need to do so for our grandchildren … and their grandchildren's children.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.