Peter Smith says, "It seems to me that the mental model about the
connection between country and state economic success and personal
security is changing. Once, politicians were able to point to such success
as an indicator of growth and individual security, and people seemed to
support this. (Bill Clinton is currently struggling to find a new way of
doing this, as he would like to point to the type of numbers Rol
references, as a benchmark on his term.)
However, the new mental model no longer accepts a straight connection
between macro economic indicators and individual's feelings about
security. Even with high employment and increased salaries, people are
feeling insecure. Also, the fact that they should be able to obtain
another job, if laid off, is not reassuring them."
In summary, he says economic success is no longer an indicator of personal
security. In other words, even with strong economic, individuals' anxiety
levels are still very high. This is also in spite of strong evidence that
people are not out of work for long if they lose their jobs.
I think this exactly right. The issue is less economic and nore
community. how do we survive the hard transitions with poor community
support systems? Even if we know and accept that tomorrow's jobs will be
different than today's, how do we prepare ourselves with a high level of
confidence that we are doing the right thing?
We had this discussion several weeks ago about the difficulties faced by
military families, and we noted that those families stick together in
order to help each other through hard times. Unfortunately, today's
communities no longer have those support mechanisms built in to help the
non-military families through a transition. It is the community
fragmentation, not the economic fragmentation that is more devastating to
peoples' self-esteem, and to their ability to adjust smoothly and well to
change.
--Rol Fessenden LL Bean 76234.3636@compuserve.com
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>