hopefully i can now understand my swedish book and start writing on my essay (about meads theory )

tnx for posting !

I want to advocate building these opportunities for informal conversation into the road show in a way that the senior people become aware of the responses of the troops, without judging those responses.

You are also making another good point that all of us can only have one-to-one or one-to-few interactions. One-to-many communications are inevitable one way and the senior person does not get to understand how people have responded. And that is the subject of another post…

I was drawn, rather belatedly, to this post by following the link to Zena’s comment.

I think that one of the reasons that the responses of staff are framed by managers as “resistance” is that, typically, those responses are not made directly to the original ‘gesturer’ (the managers themselves). It is rare for people openly to query managers’ statements at road shows and the like – at least in ways that reveal the full extent of their queries or concerns. Sometimes this is because they don’t want to appear foolish, sometimes because it’s not in their nature to speak out, and sometimes because they fear that it might be “career limiting” to appear to show dissent. Sometimes it’s because …

Whatever the reason, it seems to me that the joint enquiry you are advocating rarely gets the chance to emerge in the context of the usual suite of formal ‘communication’ approaches that managers typically adopt. As soon as the formal presentation is over, though, these same people who had remained silent in the meeting become very animated in their gesturing and responding to each other over coffee, in the car park or in the privacy of their own offices. And, as you suggest here and in other posts, it is through these ‘local’ conversations that meaning is co-created and actions emerge.

As a result of this, any contrary action (or inaction) that follows makes no sense to managers from their partial, ‘disenfranchised’ perspective. Labelling it as “resistance” then flows from the established management discourse, as managers respond via their own, local, peer-group conversations to this perceived ‘gesture’ from staff.

Managers need to recognise that their one-to-many ‘communications’ can never communicate with people in a meaning-ful way. As Stacey would say, these can only serve as gestures to which others may or may not respond. The informal, one-to-one and one-to-few conversations (of gestures and responses) that are triggered by these formal inputs will go on with or without managers’ active involvement. The only meaningful choice they have, therefore, is whether or not to engage with this ongoing sense-making process in a deliberate way. If they choose to do so, then the possibilities for joint enquiry that you outline will open up for them. And they might come to see so-called “resistance” in a different light.

-Z. Matthews