Stephen Billing’s Blog

Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self points out how the modernist view of humans gave rise to the (questionable) personality questionnaire.

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. (more…)

The romantic notion of the self as a deep well of hidden passion and emotion has given way through the application of scientific thinking to an idea of humans as rational beings applying reason to make sense of their world. The n-step approaches to change are based on this view of humans.

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. (more…)

In Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self, he notes that the Western concept of the "self" has developed in three stages and I have been thinking that we can see these three stages in our current views of leadership. These stages he labels as:

• 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. (more…)

In which I consider that even though it is much debated what leadership actually consists of or whether it actually exists at all, the language of leadership has certainly given rise to to many ways to describe deficits of personal characteristics in those who manage and lead organisations. 

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. (more…)

Have I found a sports analogy I agree with?

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. (more…)

What is reification and why on earth should I care?

You may or may not have come across this term before, and if not, then welcome to the arcane aspects of complexity science and organisation theory.

However, as a leader it is important to understand the tendency we have to treat organisations and other abstract concepts like culture or organisations as though they were actual physical things that respond to natural laws. Why? Because it affects how you approach making changes to your culture or wider organisation.

Organisations and other social objects respond to processes of human interaction, but they do not respond to universal laws the way that physical objects such as balls (speed, direction) or pot plants (colour, mass). Even though pot plants are living, and organisations are dynamic and so seem to have some qualities of living things, organisations are not living systems like pot plants. (By the way, do you like the pot plants shown in our front entrance? I am quite proud of them.) (more…)

My last two posts were about the group dynamics and systems thinking approaches to change. Why was this? Because they both lead to thinking of change as a sequential process. Kotter in his book Leading Change has the most widely known example with his eight stage process for creating major change:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Creating the guiding coalition.
3. Developing a vision and strategy.
4. Communicatin the change vision.
5. Empowering broad-based action.
6. Generating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change.
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture. (more…)

Alvesson and Sveningsson have a useful potted summary of open systems thinking which I will briefly explain in this post. It is useful because this thinking is so strongly embedded in most thinking about organisational change. And this thinking is, in my opinion, largely responsible for the reported widespread failure of organisational change projects.

Organisations as Systems

The open systems way of thinking emphasises the organisation-wide view rather than just what is going on in work groups. Organisations are seen as a set of systems and sub-systems that are interconnected. In a well-functioning organisation there is fit and harmony between these sub-systems. (more…)

Alvesson and Sveningsson’s useful potted summary of group dynamics thinking illuminates the roots of assumptions we now take for granted in working with change.

Group Dynamics in Organisations

The Group Dynamics school in the 1950s targeted change at the group level as leading thinkers realised that most people in organisations work in smaller work groups. They assumed that individual behaviour was governed by group norms, roles and values.

Kurt Lewin was a leading proponent and his three step model of unfreezing, change and refreezing is a well known classic approach. Unfreezing is about destabilising the status quo or group norms and values through means such as inspiring talk, education or projects to convince people of the necessity of the change. The second stage is making the change to move towards the desired state. The third stage is to stabilise the new state and prevent it from regressing back to the old state. The idea is to reduce the barriers to change rather than increasing the forces in favour of change, through knowledge, learning and commitment. (more…)

The concept of the organisation as a social object is helpful for change leaders.

An object is, in general terms, a physical thing. There are many aspects of organisational life that are treated as though they were also things, even though they are not really physical objects. For example, an organisation itself is not a physical object, because although physical things are involved, such as buildings, computers and other equipment, the organisation itself is not limited just to these things. There are also the myriad interactions among people, with certain distributions of resources, financial constraints, relationships, power imbalances, and an interweaving of the different intentions of all the people involved. (more…)