Stephen Billing’s Blog

In which I seek to shed some light on the early history of organisational culture so that we can see where our ideas about the problematic concept of culture have come from.

Changing your organisation is often thought of as meaning changing organisational culture. The term "organizational cultures" first was used by Pettigrew in 1979 in an article titled "On Studying Organizational Cultures" in the scholarly journal Administrative Science Quarterly.

To me it is quite significant that he used the plural, denoting that there are many cultures within an organisation. It is a more recent thing to talk about an organisation as having one culture only (a "corporate culture"). I think it is more accurate to think of there being multiple cultures within an organisation, as there are many groups that people in your organisation belong to, and people are included and excluded from these groups as they are in all social groupings. (more…)

I posted earlier about thinking being a silent conversation one has with oneself, and this is an inherently social way of viewing the process of thinking. It is inherently social because it is viewing thinking as a process of silent interaction.

There is another, less obvious way in which this view of thinking is radically social. It is in the make up of the participants in the silent conversation that consitutes thinking.

Who is talking to whom in this silent conversation I am having with myself? Who is doing the talking, and who are they talking to? Please bear with me and see if I can answer this question, drawing on George Herbert Mead and Ralph Stacey.

The answer is that different aspects of the self are talking to each other. "I" am talking to "me." The aspect doing the talking is "I" as the subject, doer or initiator of action.

The aspect being spoken to is "me" as the object, the recipient of the action.

The "I" as the subject doing the talking is the individual in the present moment responding to the "me."

Mead pointed out that as humans we have the capacity to take on the attitude of the other person. In other words, you can perform an imaginative feat in which you experience what it would be like to be in the other person’s place. Mead said that it is because we can imagine ourselves in the other person’s shoes that we have human consciousness.

You imagine yourself in the other person’s shoes based on your experience of many social interactions over time – the results you received from these interactions and what they meant to you. These imaginings are therefore socially based because of the social experience you have had. For example, I moved around a lot when I was growing up and so would often have to leave my friends behind and make new ones. If you were brought up by different parents or in a different culture you would have different experiences and so your view of what the other person would be making of you would be different.

Humans also have a tendency to generalise.

The "me" taking part in the silent conversation of thinking is a generalisation that represents your generalised view of what society thinks of you. Society in this case is that group of people whom you identify with.

In a process that utilises both our human tendency to generalise and also our capacity to take on the attitude of the other, we imagine what others think of us. Our imagining of what others think of us is the "me" that is participating in our silent conversation.

This conversation between "I" and "me" is never resolved. It is a conversation in which "I" am constantly responding, in the present moment, to "me." In other words I am constantly responding to the generalised view that I think others have of me.

There, simple eh?

Thinking is a process of silent conversation with oneself and is therefore a social activity.

It makes you more effective when thinking about organisational change to be able to articulate what you think it means to be a person and to think. Why? Because how you think about what people are doing in organisations when they are thinking affects what you do to help influence the course of change. This is so in many subtle ways, whether or not you are aware of your assumptions about human consciousness. If you are aware of your assumptions about what it is to be human, you can be more deliberate in your effectiveness in organisational change.

Most people think of the mind as being something that lives inside a person’s head, something separate from the brain, that controls the actions of the body.

George Herbert Mead talked instead about a conversation of gesture and response in which meaning arises from the gesture and response taken together.

He proposed that thinking was the process of engaging in silent conversation with oneself. This makes sense in terms of our experience in which we do talk to ourselves. As a tennis player I tell myself to do things like hit up through the ball. And I hear other players admonishing themselves to "Concentrate" or "hit it" or "move." The silent conversation is then spoken aloud and in some cases becomes an exasperated shout!

So, this highlights one way in which the process of thinking, because it consists of silent interaction, is a social process.

Instad of thinking about thinking as a property of the individual, think of the mind and its process of thinking as silent conversation. This silent conversation is what constitutes human consciousness, and one of the great benefites of this view is that it means that cognitive processes do not need to remain a mystery as properties of individuals that we can never reveal or become aware of.

Instead, if you realise that thinking is a process of silent conversation, you can become aware of it and engage with others in their process of silent conversation. This will make you more effective as a facilitator of change in your organisation.

My previous post about whether you can learn by reading prompted comments from Andre Ling and Chris Rodgers. My thanks to you both.

Earlier I said that learning is an activity of interdependent people. I wrote in my previous post that reading is a social activity and therefore people can learn by reading.

I suggested that one of the ways in which reading is a social activity is that the reader is interacting with the author. Andre Ling in his comment pointed out that in fact the interaction is between the reader and the text, not between the reader and the author. I stand corrected and agree with this, my previous post was not correct in this respect.

I should have said that one way in which reading is a social activity is that there is an interaction between the reader and the text (not the author).

Chris Rodgers pointed out that the written text can be viewed as a gesture from the author, and that the responses of the reader will determine what meaning is made as a result of this interaction.  To me, this builds on the notion that there is an interaction between the reader and the text. The text is written by the author, who cannot know how the reader will respond to what is written. As Chris points out, this is similar to the CEO doing a roadshow, giving a speech.

The CEO cannot know how the themes of the speech will be taken up in the organisation. Will the CEO’s sentiments be mocked, or will they constitute a point of view that the employees relate to differently, stimulating them to respond differently and helping to change the patterns of interaction taking place in the organisation and hence changing the organisation itself?

 My short answer is yes, and this is because reading and thinking are social activities and therefore you can learn by reading.

In an earlier post I said that learning was a social activity of interdependent people. Chris Rodgers in a comment then asks a very natural question that follows on from that – can people learn by reading? By reading a blog perhaps, a book or a document? To me, this is a very logical question to ask because I have asked myself the same question.

lf learning is an activity of interdependent people, where does that leave reading? – which after all is a solitary pursuit. Can one learn from a solitary activity like reading, if learning is a social activity?

I want to start by drawing attention to how the logic of the question contains two hidden assumptions in the above reasoning. The first assumption is that reading is not a social activity and the second is that thinking also is not a social activity. Because these are seen as being non-social activities, it is relevant to question whether learning can occur from the experience of non-social activity of reading. 

It assumes that your mind lives inside your head, is somehow separate from your body and is not a social phenomenon, but rather, the mind is a property of the individual.

George Herbert Mead suggested that the mind was not like this at all. He described the activity of thinking as being a silent conversation with oneself. I am a tennis player and I, along with others, can often be heard to be giving ourselves instructions (e.g. "bend your knees," or "swing through the ball," or "focus"). This to me is a visible example of the silent conversation that is always going on. We are always in a process of silent conversation with ourselves, and it is this silent conversation that constitutes the process of thinking, and the mind itself.

Taking this point, it is not hard to see reading as a silent conversation, not with oneself, but between the author and yourself.

Having been critical in earlier posts of the concept of the learning organisation, I now want to explore instead what learning actually is. In previous posts I said that learning could not be understood as a property of individuals alone, because we cannot ignore the impact of social influences – learning is a social process.

And I also said that groups and organisations cannot learn – they do not have consciousness, minds nor bodies.

It is my contention, like Ralph Stacey’s, that learning is instead an activity of interdependent people. Ralph points out the inherently social nature of humans, the social nature of organising, and the social nature of learning.

As I have said earlier, an organisation is the thematically patterned activities of interdependent people, which constitute their closely interconnected individual and collective identities.

When I talk about thematically patterned activities of interdependent people, I am referring to the continually reiterated patterns of repetition that seem to have stability amongst the myriad interactions in power relationships. These repetitious patterns have meaning for us as people involved in the organisation. This might be what is often referred to as culture although I won’t go into culture here – it’s the subject of another discussion.

Human interaction is non-linear iterative process (i.e. myriads of interactions over time mean that you cannot map one to one causes with effects in human or organisational settings).

Because it is non-linear, "there is always the potential for small differences to be amplified into transformative shifts in identity," as Ralph says. In the same article he says "learning is the emerging transformation of inseparable individual and collective identities,’ and he goes on to say, "learning occurs as shifts in meaning and it is simultaneously individual and social."

In this way of thinking, learning is understood in terms of self organising communicative interaction and power relating, in which there is the potential for the transformation of identities.

What does this all mean? Well, think about computer based training. The theory was that people would sit down with a computer and learn stuff. Hence a plethora of "computer based training" in the nineties that was supposed to eliminate classroom-style training because people could do it at their desk, or in their down time and this would reduce down time and increase productivity. Sadly these promises have not been met.

Apart from limitations in the instructional design of such computer based training, I think the whole idea of computer based learning falls down because it ignores the fact that learning is a social activity of interdependent people. Without the social element of interaction, people do not learn well.

Teachers have known this for centuries, from the questions (i.e. interaction) of Socrates to the way good teachers in current times continue to involve their students in their learning, whether the teachers are teaching primary or secondary school, university, corporate trainers or good managers acting as coaches.

I have said in previous posts that organisations can’t learn and that it doesn’t make sense to talk of learning organisations. It t is unsatisfactory to think only of individuals learning without considering the impact of the social nature of organisations and groups.

In my last post I claimed, following Ralph Stacey’s article Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People, (subscription required, unfortunately) that organisations cannot learn because they are nothing more than the patterns of interaction between human beings. They do not have a body, they do not have consciousness and so they cannot be said to learn. In other words it does not make much sense to talk about a learning organisation.

I also stated, together with Ralph, that to say that it is individuals who learn in organisations is also not satisfactory because it ignores the impact of social processes and the influence of others on us.

Ralph points out that one way around this issue is to say that it is both individuals and groups who learn. But saying that groups learn has the same problem as saying that organisations learn. A group, like an organisation, is the patterning of interaction amongst humans, and, as Ralph says, "patterns can neither think nor learn."   

Further, Ralph Stacey also makes the point that this amounts to saying that the group exists in a different place or on a different level from the people themselves. It is a separation of the group from the people, and, in the process, creates the notion of the group as a "thing" that exists outside the people and acts back on them at the same time as the group is made up of the people. It is like saying the group is a living organism, but, other than as a metaphor, a group does not have a living body – it does not have an existence of its own outside the interaction of the members of the group and a sense of belonging felt by the members of the group as a "we-identity."  This latter term is taken from the work of Norbert Elias.

To summarise, in my last post I said that it is unsatisfactory to say that individuals learn in groups or organisations, and that it is also unsatisfactory to say that organisations (or groups) can learn.

Now I am saying that it is also not satisfactory to say that both individuals and groups learn.

I want to propose an alternative based on Ralph Stacey’s work that does not create fanciful notions of organisations having bodies and being able to think and learn, while acknowledging the social nature of human experience in organisations and groups.

This alternative is the idea that learning is an activity of interdependent people. More to come.

To ask whether organisations can learn is to ponder on the very nature of organisations themselves.

The previous post identified the difference between organisational learning – people learning in an organisational context, and learning organisations – where the organisation itself is seen as being able to learn.

Let’s take the latter argument that organisations can learn. If organisations can learn, then this is saying that an organisation is a living organism that has a mind that can think and learn from its experience. If an organisation is to be thought of as a living organism, then you would have to be able to point to its body and its consciousness.  

While one might argue that the top managers of the organisation do the thinking (in the form of strategy) for the organisation it is surely not accurate to say that an organisation is living in the sense that it has consciousness and can think for itself.

After all, an organisation has no physical body (an organisation is only a convenient legal construction) and no mind of its own. The decisions of the organisation are made through interaction between people, such as debate amongst the senior managers.

So, to me, saying that an organisation can learn, i.e. "Let’s create a learning organisation," amounts not only to saying that an organisation is a thing in itself, but to anthropomorphise the organisation – to give it the characteristics of a human being.

But an organisation is neither an inanimate thing, nor is it a physical living being with consciousness, choice and will.

The alternative of thinking that only individuals can learn within organisations is not very appealing either. It implies that individuals make independent autonomous decisions in isolation of others and ignores the impact of social influence and processes.

Hmmm, there must be an alternative.

I am grateful to Ralph Stacey for the stimulus of these ideas in his article "Learning as an Activity of Interdependent People" (subscription required) 

Much of my work recently has been helping people to learn to do things that will be helpful in their jobs. For example, I have been teaching managers such topics (I hesitate to use the word skills!) such as delegation, planning, and problem solving. I am also helping a group of staff to learn effective procedures and how better to handle customers. Additionally I am part of the off-campus faculty team for NZ’s Open Polytechnic, so am currently involved in organisational learning (or learning organisations) from a number of perspectives.

This has led me to think about learning in organisations and a distinction made by Easterby-Smith and Araujo between organisational learning and learning organisations. I am grateful to professor Ralph Stacey for making me aware of this.

The organisational learning school of thought concentrates on individual and collective learning within organisations. It concentrates on understanding the nature and processes of learning, according to Easterby-Smith and Araujo. The learning organisation school on the other hand is thinking about the organisation as a whole and how it can learn so that in the future it is better placed to anticipate and respond to its changing environment than it was previously.

So, this raises the question then, is it possible for organisations to learn? Or is it only possible for individuals to learn within organisations? 

What do you think?