Disillusionment, From the Forbidden Fruit of the Promised Land

This current volume by a successful consultant to leading organizations and institutions combines two of his recent papers. The first one looks at the phenomenon of illusion and disillusion in organizations. He believes illusions construct us, as opposed to us believing we create them. This is Gutmann's hypothesis which he examines in the book with help of examples from a personal and institutional point of view. He claims we can learn to recognize our own illusions and learn from them and this is the process he calls "disillusionment". The Dialogue of Lacks paper is a follow-up from the first paper and further elaborates on the process that is disillusionment and discusses the effects of the "lack of dialogue". "The trudging that each of us is engaged in -- over a shorter or longer distance -- whilst grappling with our own illusions is a fundamental journey, intimate and unique, passing through our own construction and touching on the very essence of our life. It is not only about knowing whether we are being manipulated, nor just how far these illusions can obscure our judgement, our rational and reasonable mind. Our freedom is at stake. It is about understanding where the boundary lies between survival (and its frantic analogue all too frequent these days that we refer to as "hyperlife") and a life of desire and creation. Our intention here is to formulate a starting hypothesis and to begin to unfold it in order to discover its consequences. It is based on our experience as advisers in leadership which invites us to work regularly with this kind of questions with leaders of organisations. Illusion is indeed as much an individual issue as it is a collective and institutional one." -- From the Introduction