The previous post described the perspective of the world of the CEO of an NGO – what it is like to be funded by an entity that does not actually use the services you provide.

But, it’s not all beer and skittles for a contract/relationship manager in a funding organisation such as a District Health Board. Imagine you are the new contract/relationship manager in the procurement area of the DHB. You start your job and you are responsible for a range of NGOs providing services, some with as few as 2 full time equivalent staff and others with over 100 full time equivalents.

You review each contract and find that some don’t specify how many service users will be catered for. The descriptions of the services specified in the contracts don’t match what the providers tell you they provide. The NGOs explain the reasons for this, but how do you tell if they are valid or not?

Informally, you hear both positive and negative things about the service provider.

One NGO is not meeting the reporting requirements. The information provided is incomplete and they tell you they don’t have the information you need. You can’t tell how many clients have received services, and you can’t tell if they are happy with the service they received. And you are responsible for delivering, through these contracts, a certain quantity of services to certain quality standards.

Basically, you have to walk a tight rope between developing enough trust with the provider so that they’ll tell you what’s going on for them, and at the same time holding the provider accountable for the quality, quantity and results of the services they deliver.

This is not an easy job!

Continuing Gergen’s argument, the modernist view was that an ideal human would possess machine-like reliability and rationality – and would be genuine, principled and stable.

David Riesman’s book Lonely Crowd distinguished other-directed from inner-directed types of character. An inner-directed focus was a source of direction implanted by parents and family, that was aimed implacably at the achievement of goals.This sense of direction would keep the inner-directed person on a course towards those goals while negotiating the buffetings of the external environment. By contrast, an other-directed type would be without an internal guide, and would instead be guided by the immediate social surroundings. This type would tend to be superficial, a conformist with a high need for approval.

The inner-directed personality captured the central ideas of modernist humans. If people have machinelike essences, situated not too far from the surface (by contrast with the romantic self which was hidden deep and only hinted at in the real world) then these should be able to be measured. And if the essence of a person could be measured then this should lead to the ability to make predictions about people’s behaviour in the future.

Personality instruments are based on the assumption that people are basically consistent and stable through time, and that their essences will manifest like a fingerprint or DNA.

Gergen points out that the logic by which such tests demonstrate the internal traits of a person is both interesting and misleading.

A respondent puts marks with a pen on a piece of paper in certain patterns. While the person is doing the profile, no one knows what has caused the person to use that particular set of patterns. The interior essences have not been observed by anyone and nor is there any evidence for any other cause for the pattern of markings made by the responses. There is just as much evidence that the pattern of markings was caused by "spontaneous creativity" or "divine intervention." However, the tests are not said to measure spontaneous creativity, they are said to measure mental dispositions.

The measures are then used to make predictions such as university results, job fit and occupational success.

Gergen does not have an issue with the predictive correlations themselves, although interestingly many tests (e.g. Myers Briggs) are not supposed to be used for recruitment (i.e. to predict recruitmentn success), although they often are used for this purpose. But he points to what he calls a rhetorical sleight of hand that goes undetected by most people.

Successful predictions are called evidence that a test measures what it purports to measure. "Something" caused the person to mark the answers in a certain way, and if the score is correlated with future results, then the test must be measuring the "something" which must be what the test maker says it is. Gergen says this is like arguing that the internal voice of Satan causes people to have loose morals and that a correlation between a score on a morality test and the incidence of extramarital affairs shows that Satan is at work in the world.

In the modernist world, Satan is replaced by a machine-like essence as the fundamental source of human activity. In fact, the successful prediction of a personality test does not say anything about waht the essence of the person is. And a correlation between two factors does not mean that one caused the other.

All in all, another reason to be wary of personality questionnaires.

The romantic stage began to wane toward the end of the 19th century. As expansionist markets and mass production started to emerge, the sciences, with their imperatives to objective evidence and rational utility gained favour. These concepts went against the romantic ideals of feeling, soul, will, and the driving forces of the deep interior which were so much a part of the romantic view.

Science: objective versus Romantic: deep inner core (subjective). The battle lines were drawn.

Science gave precedence to reason and observation. Darwin’s The Origin of the Species was a synthesis of the latest thinking into an argument outlining the development of the various species from a scientific point of view.

In the early 1900s philosophers like Bertrand Russell started to consider how scientific procedure used in chemistry and physics could be applied to human affairs hoping to provide a science of human affairs as precise of that of Newton’s physics.

It wasn’t long before Frederick Taylor was scientifically measuring how long it took workers to assemble a car, and the profession of management consulting was born ("I can help you do that task faster"). Likewise, the acceptance of psychology as a science to study the mind increased its popularity throughout the 20th century.

Scientific management then, is a logical and natural expression of modernist thinking, through the application of scientific procedure to the world of human work. 

The grand narrative of modernism is that through the power of logical thinking, there would be a continuous, upward movement of growth, improvement and achievement toward certain goals. After all science had enabled breakthroughs towards goals such as travel through the air and in space, cures to disease, and transmission of words and pictures through space.

During the modernist period it was thought that because reason and observation could reign superior, a single form of economic system – capitalism or communism – or form of government such as democracy would be the best approach for dealing with the problems of humankind.

The modernist grand narrative was accompanied by a suspicion of the past, and questioning of tradition, leading to a desire to wipe out whatever had gone before. 

Accompanying the modernist period was the rise of the machine which could accelerate the upward movement of progress. The machine metaphor pervaded human life – even study and learning could be seen like as the result of knowledge factories – scholars and their research could be seen as productive or profitable in the same way machines are. 

By comparison with the romantic notion of hidden depths that lie beyond our ability to know them, the modernist view of the self revealed cognitive processes similar to the workings of the ulitmate machine, the computer.The essence of the human mind was its rationality.

You can see the ultimate expression of modernism in the concept of a human as a rational economic unit moving through life seeking to maximise economic outcomes by evaluating benefits and weighing them up against costs.

So there is a shift from the romantic view of the self as deep well of passions and emotions through to the modernist view of the logical, rational self, knowable through rational process. We can see the imprint of both these ways of thinking about humans nowadays – seeking to get to know the essence of the human through the application of rational tests such as personality instruments.

This post is based on chapter 2 of Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self.

• Romantic
• Modern
• Post-Modern

This post considers the Romantic stage and the residue it has left on our current thinking about leadership.

Gergen is not using the term "romantic" in the way we think of romantic love. Rather he is referring to a view of the world that prevailed at its height in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s, which is known as the Romantic period. During that period, the view was that what was important about people was their personal depth – passion, soul, creativity and moral fibre.

An early exemplar of the romantic period was Goethe’s "The Sufferings of Young Werther." This is the story of a young man, Werther, who is hopelessly in love with a young woman who is married to an older man. His love goes unrequited and Werther has months of agonising over the conflict between passion and morality.

This conflict summarises in a nutshell the elements of the concerns of the Romantic period – the conflict deep inside the person, between the passions of the spirit, and what it is right to do.

This depth of the psyche was not just words though, it was a call to action. In the story, Werther takes his own life. In the 21st century this would be seen as a futile act, but in the book at the time of publication this was seen instead as heroic. Because the way they saw it during the Romantic period, his heart was the source of all his strength, bliss and misery. Without being able to have the object of his love, taking his own life was an act of self-actualisation, long before Maslow ever thought of the term and put self-actualisation at the top of his hierarchy of needs.

Apparently Goethe’s work was so popular and influential that a wave of suicides followed its publication.
The Romantic period, then, is the source of our ideas today about humans having a deep interior. Artists and philosophers in those days were exploring the make up of this psychological depth. For example, William Blake elevated the imagination over mere experience because imagination enabled people to escape from mundane life and in Blake’s drug-induced poetry, imagination became a spiritual sensation, as it did also in Keats.

The philosopher Schopenhauer thought that the human will was at the centre of the deep interior that controlled the actions of individual human beings. Edgar Allan Poe was writing stories positing that a dark core of inner evil inhabited our deep interior. Edvard Munch’s faces were contorted with anguish from an eternal wellspring deep inside (e.g. "The Scream"). He and other artists were creating paintings which were expressions of inner emotion, rather than as illustrations of the real world.

The Romantic view was also the source of the idea of the soul which in Romantic times was not seen as a fictional aspect of the self, but as an aspect of nature given by God.

This Romantic view lives on today in our ideas of people being true to that deep inner core, and the concept of being authentic – acting in harmony with that inner essence. We especially expect this of leaders – leaders with character are seen as being true to themselves and passionate about their organisation or team. Qualities of this inner self, such as integrity and trust, courage, ethics and values, compassion, and fairness are now articulated as competencies, generic attributes that can be developed intentionally.
We also attempt to get to know that deep inner core of leaders through the use of personality questionnaires to identify the kind of inner essence that our leaders have, and to develop these in the service of their organisation.

I do hope though, that our leaders are not now expected to die for their passion for their organisation like young Werther! This may be due to the influence of the modern thinking stage which came after Romanticism, and is discussed in the next post.

I am currently reading The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen. In it, he discusses the impacts of burgeoning technology on our identity – i.e. how we experience who we are. He says that through technology we are now bombarded by many disparate voices of humanity – both harmonious and alien.

He demonstrates how the scientisation of human behaviour has led to an explosion of terms to describe mental health deficits in the 20th century. Terms such as low self esteem, repressed, authoritarian, obsessive-compulsive, bulimic, sadomasochistic and post-traumatic stress disorder have only come into being relatively recently, and they all refer to problems, shortcomings or incapacities – mental deficits.

He is pointing out that we now have countless ways of locating faults within ourselves and others that were unavailable even to our grandparents. He says that as psychiatrists and psychologists have worked out ways to explain undesirable behaviour, they have generated a technical vocabulary of deficit.

This language has become increasingly disseminated to the broader public as they become aware of these issues. People have increasingly come to see self and others in these deficit terms. He uses this process as an illustration of how the language of the self is malleable – that is to say, it changes gradually over time, and thus how we see ourselves changes over time.

Implications for Leaders

I am struck by how the same process is operating in terms of leadership. One of the side effects of the proliferation of tools such as competencies, 360 degree feedback, climate surveys, engagement surveys, personality questionnaires, emotional intelligence is the corresponding increase in the number of deficit terms we now have for leaders. For example I have on many occasions recently heard people described as "low in emotional intelligence." Our performance management systems provide lists of competencies and behavioural indicators in categories of differing levels of deficit, and even overuse.

Just as in the mental health example given by Gergen, the proliferation of deficit terms for leaders has been the result of the "scientising" of leadership. This scientising process involves attempts to break leadership down into its constituent parts and make these attributes more amenable to control. For example, the development of particular personal attributes such as listening skills, in the service of the organisation.

So, the language of leadership is malleable, it has changed gradually over time. Even the concept of leadership is relatively new – having emerged in the twentieth century.  It is still not conclusively determined what leadership actually consists of (or indeed whether there is even such a thing as leadership).

But one thing we can be sure of is that the leadership tools have nevertheless introduced plenty of language terms to point out deficits in the personal characteristics of those who lead in organisations. 

Guest contributor Theodore Taptiklis, author of Unmanaging, who has worked recently in New Zealand, UK, and Denmark argues in his very readable style, that we need to reconnect work and its evaluation back together.   

It seems that there is now an impulse to think again about how public sector quality is evaluated and reported, arising from a deep-seated concern about current approaches. This concern appears even though the practices presently favoured in most Western economies (around performance measurement, outcome evaluation, and key performance indicators) have themselves developed from an era of almost continuous public sector reform. And it is possible to understand the  character of these reforms largely as a product of recent history, undertaken alongside – and heavily influenced by – that most pervasive of late twentieth-century endeavours: the management project.

But it might also be helpful to consider the origins of the present concern from an even longer historical perspective. From earliest times, as soon as labour became specialised, and tasks were undertaken by one person who was paid by another, the question has arisen: What is good work? Manual labour or craft work seems to produce visible results, or things whose functional quality can be observed directly. But even here there are problems. How can we judge the thatcher’s work until there’s a rainstorm? Or until the wind blows from the east, which happens only once or twice in a year? Some aspects of ‘good work’ are not visible to the untrained eye, but are deeply embedded in the tiny details of working practice.

And as the types of specialised work to be undertaken proliferated with the growth of human society, so it became important to record and remember the details of each activity. Beginning in the Middle Ages, guilds and societies formed to guard and regulate the transmission of such specialised knowledge. A detailed understanding of a specific working practice was held to be a privilege, available only to a member of the institution who committed to the rules and the (sometimes exploitative) disciplines of apprenticeship. In this jealously guarded and carefully delineated world, the connection between work and its evaluation was a very intimate one. Work was not seen to be complete until the guild-master judged it so. Sub-standard work might damage the reputation of the entire professional community. Sub-standard work might even be an offence punishable by God.

However, in the seventeenth century, Descartes and the Enlightenment began the massive shift in Western society that swept away notions of secret and privileged knowledge, undermined the institutions that depended on such secrecy, and opened the floodgates of the public realm. Newspapers appeared, making the details of distant events and undertakings widely available to anyone. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Diderot and the Encyclopedists, in a massive publishing effort, did their best to explain and illustrate in minute detail the working knowledge of all known professions and crafts. Now it seemed that work and its detailed understanding and evaluation could at last be separated. With the appropriate volume of the Encyclopedia under his arm, the young squire could argue with the master builder about the placement of windows in the façade of his new manor, or decide to vary the roof pitch according to the fashion of the day.

With the rise of industrialisation, new, larger-scale forms of enterprise appeared. Now people were gathered together not by profession or craft, but by industrial activity. The quality of work could no longer be regulated by the guild, or be influenced and moderated by the beliefs and attitudes of those in the local community. The rhythm of work was set by the machine rather than by the embodied skill of the worker. People at work became separated from their local communities, in many cases migrating to become part of a new urban landscape. Urbanisation centralised populations, and gave rise to new urban professions, forms of infrastructure, and institutions. The combination of industralisation and institutionalisation was transformative for the nature of work and its operation. So was the ground readied for the great twentieth-century invention: the management project.

In the second half of the twentieth century, with first the growth and then the globalisation of the management project, the separation of work from its evaluation was now completed, symbolised in its central figure: the Manager. For this heroic enterprise, the manager had at his command all the classic tools of the Enlightenment: abstraction, simplification, and measurement. With these tools, the management project became prolific in its outputs. It generated extensive theories and representations of organization (with increasing frequency and ever-shorter cycle-times towards the end of the century). It crafted many kinds of reductionist, simplified goals for organisations, and experimented with multiple forms of practices of orientation towards these goals. It made detailed observations and conducted increasingly sophisticated analyses of inputs, processes, and outputs, conceiving complex new performance measures along the way.

At the same time, the management project sought to be instrumental not only in evaluating work, but also in composing and arranging it as well as in shaping and guiding attitudes to its conduct and its performance through mechanisms of planning and assessment. And although not necessarily the original intention, the ubiquity of management doctrines fostered a climate of mistrust: an attitude of skepticism, and even cynicism, about the claims of practitioners. “What can’t be measured, can’t be managed,” was the mantra.

Perhaps the apotheosis of this project was the invention in the final decades of the century of a single composite measure of the value of work: shareholder value. This iconic construction at last distilled human purpose at work to a universally recognizable form: “I produce shareholder value, therefore I am”. Here the work and its evaluation became so distant that both began to be seen as abstractions. [And in very recent times, the possibilities available from fast-paced financial manipulation seemed almost to have made the actual work of the enterprise irrelevant.]

However, though the management project – with the rise of business schools and legions of MBA-trained consultants – has become the dominant force in the world of work in the West, it turns out not to have been the only game in town. Opposition to its instrumentalised view of human endeavour has been led from the most unlikely of directions – by the philosophers. A powerful strand of philosophical enquiry has developed to challenge Cartesian triumphalism head-on, that includes thinkers and writers such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, James, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Elias -  and in our time – Taylor, Dreyfus, Benner, Shotter, and Stacey.

The Cartesian position started from the assumption that mind and body are separate entities – a position that encouraged us to believe that our intellectual selves were individual entities that can and should dominate our physical selves, and thus, that we can and should organise the world as rational, sceptical individuals through argument, ideas, experiments, theories and propositions. 

The counter-view – that of the foregoing philosophers – holds that mind and body are one, and that we lose our way in thickets of contestable abstractions unless we pay attention to our embodied experiences. Such experiences connect us to others and therefore allow us to make sense of the world together rather than leaving us separate and isolated, as if each of us was always supposed to begin our enquiries alone – starting, like Descartes, from a clean sheet of paper.

So this alternative strand of thinking pays close attention to our relational existence and experience: how we influence and move each other in intricate, minute, often unconscious ways in our everyday encounters. These phenomena of influence, of movement and response, of gesture and acknowledgement, of hesitation and affirmation, go largely unnoticed and unrecorded – especially so if we consider the world only through Cartesian eyes.

So steeped are we in instrumental thinking in our organisational lives, that it is hard for us to imagine anything different. As an example, take the phenomenon of the workplace meeting. We generally hold that a meeting is arranged with a particular group of people for a specific purpose. So we conduct the meeting on the assumption that nothing except what has already been agreed is considered seriously before the meeting, that all that matters takes place at the meeting, and that the meeting concludes with a result that will generate a different form of behaviour (perhaps some kind of action) that can continue unconsidered until the next meeting.

Reality is much more complex than this. Things with significance for the avowed purpose of the meeting are happening at every moment before, during, and after the meeting, many of them unknown and unknowable to those present. No amount of instrumental management can prevent them from occurring, or can pretend them out of existence. This recognition can change the way we view and conduct meetings. Rather than using them as though they were closed worlds of command and control that are supposed to have predictable and measurable outcomes, we can use them as opportunities to connect our experiences together as whole persons in ways that allow us to generate fresh, collaborative, practical insights and commitments to each other that always acknowledge and take account of the ceaseless onrush of wider organizational activity.

With this philosophical counter-view in mind, we arrive at a different understanding of work and its evaluation from the heroic conceptualisations of the management project. First, we stop thinking about work as a series of disembodied tasks, static and fixed and without relational and developmental character. Instead, we recognise that work becomes centred in the body as a practice: that is, as an undertaking that develops with experience. Just as the guilds of old understood a craft or profession as a trajectory from apprenticeship to mastery, so we can see all forms of work as movements or experiences of becoming skilled within a community of participants whose experiences can inform one another.

Connected to this recognition, we also understand that embodied experience becomes a kind of second nature, and is therefore not necessarily directly or easily visible to the practitioner themself. The skilled professional generally moves into the arena where their capabilities are most at home without apparent effort, and without self-consciousness. Only by reflecting with fellow-practitioners about the detailed nature of the activities in which they are habitually immersed, can they come to recognise themselves and their actions in ways that give them useful traction on their own skilled performance.

Third, we understand that work, like all human activity, is responsive to its particular local circumstances. It comes into being and exists in response to a specific situation, and cannot be readily separated from that situation. And it is not only the general characteristics of the situation that matter: it is the singularities of an individual event that draw forth specific, often unpredictable aspects of skilled practice. So to be useful, the evaluation of work needs to respect and understand these singularities.

From this standpoint, we can see that the management project, if too earnest in seeking to separate work from evaluation, is bound to fail. If it reduces its understanding of work to simple, repetitive patterns that can be codified and expressed as formulae – such as the ‘capabilities’ of human resources evaluation practice – it can shrivel the human spirit, and risks leaving many real, orginal human capabilities unwanted and unused. If by giving primacy to measuring work, it reduces work only to things that can be easily measured, it produces only an impoverished, mechanical world – the world that Dickens foresaw in Mr. Gradgrind.

What we need instead is a way of operating that binds work and its evaluation together. Instead of inventing representations of, or surrogates for, the work as the basis for judging quality, we must use the work itself – and our understanding of its significance – as the yardstick of quality. For this we need an entirely new approach.  But first, we need to consider the particular concerns and challenges that have arisen as a result of the growing influence of the management project on the conduct of the public sector.

The public sector has long been troublesome to the adherents of the management project. It has resisted the simplifications of competition, the market and the profit motive, and by doing so, has escaped the unambiguous discipline of the “bottom line”.  Historically, public sector advocates have asserted that its services may have some intrinsic purpose and value to the community and to society as a whole, rather than simply being responses to the needs of individual, freely-choosing citizens-as-consumers. And it has tended to attract people who have a calling to serve society, or their profession, rather than being dutiful climbers on Maslow’s predictable ladder of needs. So it has been an irritation to the totalising instincts of the most ardent of the management reformers.

However, over the last several decades, the management project has been taken up within schools of government, and has now graduated new generations of bureaucrats armed with its theories of organization as well as its reforming zeal. With the help of such reformers – keen to replace ungoverned slackness and inefficiency with more transparent, accountable management and measurement processes – successive waves of privatisation have been undertaken in many countries. In this new era, public servants in disciplines ranging from research to railways been re-educated, for example as deal-makers and contestable bidders.

The results of this enthusiasm for reform seem, however, to have been mixed. In some cases, privatised and corporatised institutions have been down-sized, right-sized, and upsized-down again according to changing models of public sector reform. In the pursuit of greater efficiencies and more stringent controls, such rapid changes have also had the effect of severing spontaneously-formed, invisible links of skilled practice and hard-won collaboration. And unfortunately, the consequences of the careless destruction of these delicate webs of professional capability become apparent only under conditions of crisis.

More recently, with the introduction of devices like the ‘funder-provider’ split, even public servants who had previously worked together have found themselves choosing between employment in service commissioning organizations, or bidding as newly-formed independents to provide those services. In separating commissioning from service provision, we might conclude that the goal of distancing the work of the public sector from its evaluation has finally been realised. Now unreliable human judgements of service quality can be replaced by scientific performance measures. A new doctrine has arisen: the concept of ‘outcomes’. Outcomes will show what is different as a result of providing a service. All the details and the messy complexity of service provision can now be ignored in favour of unarguable, unshakeable evidence of change. Outcomes, with the citizen as unconscious arbiter, can become the “shareholder value” of the public sector.

Here we approach the nub of the present difficulty.  The management project has been seeking to recast citizens as users, customers, or consumers of public services. At the same time, its tendencies are to reduce civic autonomy and freedom to choices between market-disciplined service provider alternatives (for example, as in infrastructure provision in the UK). In doing so, it ends up by devaluing the currency of both citizenship and public service. 

This account of events suggests that what has occurred has been an ideological struggle: a battle for the supremacy of ideas first forged in the Enlightenment of four hundred years ago. Moreover, it seems that the tenets of Pure Reason – and the understanding of human nature and purpose that has arisen from them – are so deeply buried in the fabric of Western civilization that in many ways we have forgotten that they are only assumptions, and have for a long time taken them for granted as uncontestable truths. So we will not easily escape them.

But for a realistic understanding of public service quality, we need to join the post-Cartesians in the struggle to re-connect mind and body, and in doing so, consider how to find a way to re-connect service provision and its evaluation.

As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends."

During the conversations that take place during these meetings, participants make choices about what to bring into the public domain and what to leave unspoken. Thus, organisational participants are always negotiating a balance between what to reveal and what to conceal in their organisational conversations. Such matters as the status of your love life, your living conditions or issues in your family are obvious matters for judicious revealing and concealing.

But so are matters such as what you really think of the CEO’s presentation on customer service,  whether you think this change initiative will blow over and be superceded by something else, or whether you are thinking of looking for a new job.

What you think of your colleague’s idea for your current project is no less the subject for judicious revealing and concealing. After all, your relationships are subject to power relationships that both enable you and constrain you at the same time. So frustrating!

All conversations are subject to power relations that enable and constrain at the same time. Hence, your people are always determining what it is safe to reveal and what to conceal – perhaps not consciously. You are subject to the same dynamics. By which I mean that you as a senior manager are also negotiating what to reveal and what to conceal in each of your myriad interactions during the course of a day.

I contend that choices not to bring issues into the public domain tend to foster consistency and support the status quo (i.e. "no change"), while choices to bring issues up for discussion, which can be risky, perhaps even career-destroying, create the opportunity for new patterns of interaction to arise.

In other words, as a leader, your choices about what is acceptable for discussion – what you proactively raise as a legitimate subject for discussion, has a direct impact on the potential for change to occur in your organisation.

Your mundane day to day conversations with others have a big impact on the change potential of your organisation. If you’re thinking about the change you want in your organisation (and who isn’t?), ask yourself, "What topics am I legitimating," and "What topics are undiscussable?" Your intuition may tell you the answer.

Check out your intuition with someone you trust.Or else get someone from outside to help.

A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by Margaret Moth, who explained her philosophy that, while you have little control over how and when a ball is served to you, you do have control over how you return it.

Margaret Moth is a New Zealand-borm CNN camerawoman who has covered war zones. She was hit by a sniper’s bullet in the face and had extensive surgery.

When I heard Moth’s philosophy expressed this way, I warmed to it immediately. It’s impact was strong – after all, it’s based on tennis, my favourite sport. The ball is served and then you choose how you want to return it. What a great position to be in as a tennis player, having the choice of where and how to return serve.

This is a way of saying that you choose your responses to the situations you are faced with. It gives you a lot of power to place yourself in charge of your life. And I was reminded of organisational change situations and how you cannot control how people will respond, sometimes unexpectedly, to the activities of your change project.

When I heard Margaret Moth’s statement, I was immediately transported to a tennis interclub doubles match I played the other day, and one of the serves I returned from a very good player (currently top 40 in NZ). He served it wide to my forehand, I was slow to read it and I just managed to get my racquet onto it, hitting it late. It hurtled down the line, past the outstretched racquet of his partner and landed just inside the line for a clean winner. That wasn’t where I was aiming it at all, but I liked the result. Perhaps the fact that it was a return from such a good player made it memorable for me too.

Then I remembered another serve in my subsequent singles match in which the serve came pretty much straight to me, quite fast and I dumped the return into the net. Seeing it was match point, I lost the match.

In both of these situations, the ball was served to me, I reacted as best I could, but with quite different results in each case. I had a choice, and my choice was to hit the ball back, preferably for a winner or at least a difficult shot for the other player.

My execution however was not entirely under my control. In the first situation, objectively speaking, the serve was very good and could easily have been an ace – it was a lucky return that went in – it could equally have gone out – but I was not in much control at all. In the second, it was a much more straightforward serve that I just didn’t return well. In both situations though, I had to react to the speed, direction and spin on the ball. Also there was the pressure of the match situation – the psychology of the game and how I responded in that situation. Another factor was the choice made by the server in the context of the match, to go wide or to serve straight at me, how hard to serve, what spin to put on, what he thought I might be expecting, what he thought my weaknesses were.

But the choices made by the other player and by me are not made independently of each other. They are part of a pattern that has built up over the course of the match, and from other matches we’d played before in different circumstances. 

So it is in change situations. You introduce change, and although you don’t control people’s reactions, they seem to fit familiar-seeming patterns. These patterns are specific to your circumstances, but are recognisable as the result of interdependent interactions, nevertheless. Some authors have categorised these patterns, for example as stages in a grief cycle. But even though the patterns are familiar (ball goes in, ball goes out), you cannot predict in any particular circumstance, what the result will be.

Will you hit a winner, or will you dump it in the net? It’s not entirely up to you. 

Many managers have fallen for the attractive prospect of "best practice." And many consultants claim to be able to bring best practice to your organisation. What is usually meant by this term is that they bring models or processes they’ve used or developed in the past, which they can implement with new clients.

There is certainly value in the experience consultants have had in other organisations – it can bring a new perspective to what is going on in your organisation.

The idea of best practice goes further than this – it implies that the same outcomes are possible in your organisation using the standardised best practice or models adopted in other successful companies.

In an interesting post "On Models and Scaling Up," Chris Mowles makes the point that the effectiveness of any model is due in part to the quality of the model and in part to the people working together with it, and so you can’t really separate out the contextual from the generalisable. This is the problem with ‘n-step’ approaches to change – the claim is that by following an 8 step or a U turn model, you will successfully implement change.

It is significant that the people working together with the model are just as much a part of the effectiveness as the model itself. In fact I think the people involved are much more important, and most managers are aware of this too, which is why they know that picking the right team is so important.

And yet best practice and its forebear benchmarking both divert attention from the people and the context, focusing entirely on the disembodied prescription or model, as though it can be implemented anywhere and get the same successful result.

Note that the process of naming something as "this" simultaneously names everything else as "that." So if I call something a circle, then I am also calling everything outside that circle "not circle." So by naming "circle" I have actually created two categories, ("circle" and "not circle") even though I am only focusing attention on one category – the one I have named. The other category becomes almost invisible in this process. So if in talking about "best practice" we are making the "people working together with the practice" almost invisible.

The emphasis is, in fact, on the least important factor – the model or the best practice itself. Concentrating on "best practice" risks leading to a selective interpretation of social facts – an interpretation seen only in terms of the "best practice." According to Axel Honneth, this can significantly reduce your attentiveness to meaningful circumstances in a given situation.

Instead of looking at best practice, focus your attention on the particularities of your situation, trying to understand all the factors at work, not just those prescribed in your model or best practice. Reflect on how your own participation is affecting, and is affected by, the way these factors are playing out in your organisation. That way you can help to make sure your attention is on what really matters so much more than a best practice or model – how you and others are interacting with each other and influencing each other in the process of getting the work done.

Photography by Ruby Cumming

I have noticed when I have been asked to help organisations where people are in deep seated conflict, that the situations are often characterised by each party accusing the other of bullying them. When I mention to a new or potential new client these accusations of bullying in other conflict situations, I am struck by how they say "that happens here as well."

Chris Mowles writes an interesting post in Violence in Organisations on his blog Reflexive Practice that shed light on this for me.

He says that organisational politics consists of the daily exercise of power, involving people negotiating, discussing, being polite or impolite to each other, revealing, concealing, pulling rank, delegating and so on. Drawing on Hannah Arendt, he describes this political process as the proper exercise of power in the public space; as something that leads to the greatest of human civilising achievements.

Then he goes on to make the most interesting observation, as far as these bullying accusations go. When this daily political process breaks down, when we get to the point where there is no longer a potential for negotiating how we might go on together, then we can experience this as violence.

The key aspects of bullying seem to be that it is repetition of behaviours over time, intending to control others, with a focused target, and ends up pitting people in the workplace against each other. It seems to me that these key factors are also involved when there is long standing conflict between groups of people that has never been resolved. I would expect in any long term conflict situation that there would be repeated behaviours, intentions to control others, focus on particular individuals and general taking of sides.

In the workplace you often did not and cannot choose those you are working with. Some workmates are people you develop a rapport with, and others are not. You have to work out or negotiate ways of going on together with people in both groups – this is the political process mentioned above.

When conflict reaches a no-return point and there seems to be no way of negotiating a way forward together, this can be experienced as violence. And when you reach this point of no possibility of negotiating how to go on working with the other person time after time, then this repeated experience of violence is very similar to the experience of being bullied.

So, from the perspective of those involved in the long standing conflict, they feel they are being bullied, and hence these claims arise, sometimes from both parties, of workplace bullying.

So, accusations of workplace bullying are, at the very least, a sign that a working relationship(s) has broken down to such a degree that one or both parties cannot see any possibility of carrying on together.

Admonishments to attempt to rise above the politics of daily life, or to "manage" it, are missing the target. We are all in situations where we are working with others, some of whom we have chosen to work with and others we did not choose. Some of these we find a rapport with, and others not. Daily politics are what allow conflict to be negotiated and for people in both groups to carry on together.

As Chris says, “Daily politics allows organisational life to flourish.” Without daily politics there is no avenue for conflict to be negotiated and this can be experienced as violence, as bullying.

If you are in a situation where there is long-standing conflict and accompanying accusations of bullying, then you have to attempt to address the situation with the aim of finding a way for the parties to go on together, i.e. through political processes of negotiation and so on. Ignoring or attempting to rise above the political aspects will get you nowhere.  

Photography by Ruby Cumming