On a metaphysical level, this old, wise saying has always imposed itself. These days, however, it is becoming more and more noticeable in our worldly experience and is approaching the reality of global experience. The shoe we wear was delivered by a man in his late thirties of Turkish descent, whose delivery vehicle was assembled by people and machines in factories and supplier companies in many countries. The diesel that powers the vehicle was produced in the Middle East before making its way to Central Europe through pipelines and diplomatic entanglements. The leather for the shoe comes from a manufacturing plant in Romania, which, in turn, did not source the animal from local pastures. Without the pasture fertilizer and antibiotics from an animal pharmaceutical company, the cattle might not have survived in its environment. And, incidentally, without the rain that made the grass grow, it wouldn’t have survived at all. Where the shoe itself was made is ultimately revealed only under its tongue. Globalization has exponentially multiplied worldwide interconnectedness in recent years, and mutual dependencies and degrees of interpenetration have massively increased. Our actions are woven into the chains of action of millions or even billions of other people. But if everything is connected to everything else, where does our action begin, and where does it end?

Anyone who acts consciously bears responsibility. However, in a hyper-connected global world, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to determine where our responsibility begins and ends. Are we responsible for the crisis in democracy if we don't engage in ongoing debates on social media? Or are we responsible precisely because we do, thereby unintentionally fueling problematic discussion dynamics? Are we responsible for climate change when we opt for car-sharing out of convenience instead of using public transportation? For the working conditions in Bangladesh if we don’t actively inquire about the origin of our clothes? For the exploitation of natural resources because we use a smartphone? Are we responsible for inhumane animal farming if we eat meat?

Simply closing our eyes to these questions is no longer an option, especially in the age of global real-time communication and information. The interconnectedness strikes a second, relentless blow: we are compelled to confront the direct and indirect consequences of our actions and our responsibilities—whether consciously or unconsciously.

If we, as humans, tend toward a broad understanding of responsibility, we inevitably fall into the 'rabbit-before-the-snake' syndrome or responsibility burnout. This leads to the unsettling feeling that 'you can only do things wrong.' On the other hand, if we choose to limit our personal sense of responsibility, it results in withdrawal and detachment from the world. But this eventually reveals that global and transnational problems, like climate change, will catch up with even the most self-sufficient individuals. To avoid feeling completely overwhelmed by this world of dependencies and interactions, while also not burying our heads in the sand, we need access to a resource that goes beyond mere reactive capacity. So how can we position ourselves in response to the demands of the world?

The English language helps us understand the subtle distinction between "react" and "respond": while the distance between stimulus and reaction is comparatively short and often occurs unconsciously, the distance between stimulus and response is somewhat longer and involves other levels of perception. One could also say that the space between stimulus and (conscious) response is expanded.

In recent years, several authors from the perspectives of management theory, organizational theory, and self-management have explored the concept of response-ability. As early as 2001, Rick Dove wrote a book titled Response-Ability about the language, structure, and culture of the agile organization.

This ability of response-ability does not arise from mere reactions to external stimuli, as there are already far too many of those. It is also not satisfied with a purely logical examination—dividing the multidimensional complexity of our surroundings into two-dimensional cause-and-effect chains will always overlook certain senses and meanings that the code of "logical/illogical" cannot adequately describe.

Response-Ability expands the logical cause-and-effect level to include aspects of empathy, relational positioning, and intuition. It is a subtle ability—more a result of personal maturation processes and personal development than a measurable skill. It often requires a moment of pause, even if only for fractions of a second. Therefore, response-ability is also a neighboring competence of emergence. Only by not immediately following instinctive or purely cognitive decision reflexes do we open a space where second, third, or nth-order solutions can emerge.

In recent organizational development, there is often an emphasis on the necessity of responsiveness for organizations as well. This usually means that organizations should be structurally, procedurally, and culturally equipped to view changes in the external environment as the normal state of affairs and to continually reshape themselves flexibly in response to these changes. The calls for agile, lean, and anti-fragile are frequent variations of this theme, each with slightly different meanings.

Thus, paradigms regarding organizations are also changing. For a long time, organizations were viewed as output machines, whose behavior could be predicted and must be controlled. This perspective is largely rooted in the dynamics of advancing industrialization.

However, as the interconnectedness of global societies progresses, and as we increasingly find ourselves caught in the paradox of ever-accelerating change on one side and the growing awareness of the finitude of our resources on the other, developments become less linear and predictable. Consequently, the aforementioned paradigm of "prediction and control" becomes less effective.

As a result, the "organism" paradigm is gaining significance, describing organizations with the characteristics of living systems: open and self-organized, they adapt to internal and external changes through feedback mechanisms, processing new information quickly and reliably to create meaning and context. Mike Arauz, the founder of responsive.org, puts it aptly: previously, organizations optimized themselves to create the greatest possible certainties; organizations that want to succeed today are purposefully optimizing for uncertainties and learning from them.

In this sense, responsiveness is something different from mere frantic calls for flexibility. It is not just about being more flexible, faster, and more competitive in responding to market changes. Rather, it is about understanding on a deeper level of the life process and orienting oneself toward perpetual change and uncertainty in this context. Stability exists only as relative stability against the backdrop of the general instability of life.

Response-Ability could be described as an essential software competency for living the principles of such understood responsiveness. Response-Ability relates not only to the level of adaptive structures and processes but also opens up collective spaces where people agree on how they, as a group—be it an organization, company, institution, association, or any other entity—want to respond to life. In other words, it involves determining what responsibility they wish to take toward life.

This is far from easy, as this type of exchange is still not very common in many organizations and is far from becoming a social habit. How do you open spaces where people can collectively agree on what the next meaningful step is? Spaces that invite a subtler perception to find answers? Spaces where not only cognitive thinking occurs, but also empathy is fostered?

When asked how people can respond to complexity, the organizational psychologist Peter Kruse, who passed away in 2015, distinguished four essential strategies: trial and error, ignoring complexity, trivializing it, and collective intuition. However, collective intuition requires spaces where the connection to the evolutionary impulse of life is practiced. What these spaces look like could be one of the most important developmental questions for organizations and even entire societies in the future.

In light of increasing complexity and simultaneous trends toward simplification, it is our responsibility to open our state of mind to further levels of perception—both individually and collectively.

It's paradoxical: we can no longer grasp all dependencies, and precisely for that reason, we must at least attempt to do so. However, this cannot be done solely on a logical level; it requires incorporating the greater whole into our small reality. Only from such an open mind can we succeed in listening more attentively to life, understanding the various questions of existence more profoundly, recognizing the relativity of reality, and developing responses beyond our own ego. This would represent a new type of responsibility that enables innovative solutions.