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. 

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. 

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.)

Reification means the process of taking an abstract concept, something that does not really exist as a physical object, and treating it as though it were an object or a physical thing. In the same way that personification means to treat an object as though it were a person (e.g. "I remembered Sunday’s mistake," as though Sunday were a person who could make a mistake. Or thinking of a storm as grumpy – as though it could have the kind of emotion a person has). I think of "reification" as meaning "thingification."

Naming an abstract concept is an important step in enabling humans to discuss and make sense of it. To a degree, it could be said that if we can’t name something, then it doesn’t exist for human beings.

There is a phenomenon (not often considered) 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. I learnt of this concept from Farhad Dalal, who has drawn on Matte-Blanco in discussing the process of categorisation that occurs in the development of racism.

That is one aspect of naming something that is not often considered.

Naming the concept does not necessarily lead to reification though. So to use the word "culture" as an example, we could, having named the concept of "culture" then go on to treat culture as though it actually exists as a thing that can be managed, manipulated or changed by rational action, and that perhaps has properties such as direction and speed, in a similar way to how you could manipulate a ball and say that it has direction or speed. Of course, culture is not a physical thing that you can touch and discern its shape and direction.

Nevertheless, culture surveys (often nowadays called climate surveys or engagement surveys) do attempt to discern the shape and direction of a corporate culture.

At most culture is an abstract concept created by humans to help to explain certain social phenomena – i.e. the way certain patterns amongst a group, country or organisation seem to be continually perpetuated.

So to me, reification is something that we commonly do in everyday life and in many situations. This is useful to do as it helps us to understand certain things. It can also lead us to think of trying to manage and control such abstract concepts as culture, as though they were actual physical things, and this, to my mind is unlikely to be helpful and that is the danger of reification.

Reify = ‘thingify" – to treat an abstract concept as though it were a physical thing and had the physical properties of a thing. It is powerful to be aware of these tendencies that we have when talking about such abstract concepts as corporate culture. After all, how we approach them can have major effects on the lives of hundreds and even thousands of people who report to you as an organisational leader.

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.

There are many other approaches to change along similar lines. Patrick Dawson in his book Understanding Organizational Change summarises these as having five aspects in common (according to Alvesson and Sveningsson).

1. Identifying a need for change.
2. Selecting an intervention technique.
3. Gaining top management support.
4. Overcoming resistance to change.
5. Evaluating the change process.

It is relatively easy to see these five aspects of many change projects of the last 15 years or so, reflecting how this way of thinking has become so dominant.

Alvesson and Sveningsson call these approaches "n-step" change models, characterised by a number of sequential steps, depending on which author or consultant you are talking to.The sports analogy is that this is like a relay race, where at each step, the baton is passed on to someone else to carry out. For example, top management identify the need for change. They hire (i.e. pass the baton to) a consultant to come up with the method / intervention that will be used. The consultant trains (i.e. passes the baton to) middle and senior managers to run workshops. The senior managers then expect (i.e. pass the baton to) their people to change their behaviour and actions according to the desired new culture.

Of course I am describing a typical cascade approach, and in Alvesson and Sveningsson’s book they describe a case in which it becomes exceedingly obvious that the organisation concerned is acting as though their organisational change really is like a relay race. The managers don’t actually use those words, but when you observe the way they expect each step of the change intervention to be carried out by different people, it becomes evident that they are acting as though it were a relay in which you can pass the baton on to the next person for them to do their bit, and your bit is finished.

I have seen several initiatives like this and I’m sure you have too.

The relay race metaphor relies on what Latour calls a diffusion model, which is based on the idea that ideas originate in the supposedly autonomous mind of the scientist and then spread, more or less by themselves, by virtue of their truth value. In other words, a change plan or desired new vision will spread and move acording to its initial force and its intrinsic truth value. It might meet with friction (e.g. bad communication) or resistance such as opposition which will slow down the initial force. This, as you can see, is a view based on Newtonian physics, that social forces are like physical forces, with resistance in the world of humans being like friction in the world of physics. The top manager makes the decision and the other managers react like billiard balls, pushed in irreversible directions. Subordinates are, by implication, passive receivers of the new initiative, passing it on to others as a mechanical execution of predefined tasks. People are transmitting a force and meaning according to its original definition.

Latour’s alternative to the diffusion model is the translation model. In Latour’s translation model people are active interpreters of the ideas, and in the process of interpretation or translation, they modify, distory and transform the meaning of the ideas they are supposed to carry, as anyone who has played "Chinese whispers" can attest. In the translation model, the movement of the ideas is dependent on how the ideas are transformed as people make sense of them.

People are doing something active with the change plans, rather than passively transmitting them.

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that what happens in a planned change programme is that it gets constantly renewed energy by people who do something with it as they make sense of it and interact with others, a bit like the interaction between rugby players with a rugby ball, the initial force of the first in the chain cannot be said to be any more important than that of the subsequent others.

If this is the case then, as a manager of change you need to be paying attention to the daily translations of meaning that are going on in your organisation on a moment by moment basis – your key messages are not being passed on from one person to another, they are being translated and revitalised. So you need to track what meaning they are taking on as this translation process takes place.

Your organisational change is not a relay race where you can pass the baton on to others and watch them bring it on home to the finish line. 

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.

The organisation is seen as an open system, in interaction with the wider environment in which it exists, which is itself a larger system. Change in the macro environment system causes change in the organisational system and sub-systems.

The soft elements of people, culture and values need to be aligned to the harder elements of technology, strategy and structure. In fact, the term "alignment" is a giveaway that the person speaking is coming from a systems perspective. Common aspects that are said to need to be aligned include people, process and systems.

Respected organisation development pioneer Noel Tichy, for example, identified in his TPC model three mutually dependent systems: technological, political and cultural. McKinsey’s popular "7S" model is another example where they formulate organisations as the interdepedency of seven systems each of which begins with the letter "S."

A change in any one of these will also involve a change in the others because they are interdependent. Systems thinking emphasises understanding the linkages between the different sub-systems.

In systems thinking, an organisation is seen as a system.

In a further evolution of systems thinking, organisations came to be seen as living systems, in other words, as organisms. In this metaphor, organisations are seen as being like biological life forms, having the ability to think (head), ability to feel emotion (heart) and the ability to take action (hands). In this way of thinking, actions taken should be determined by rational thought (of the top managers or "head"), carried out by the workers ("hands"), with passion. If any of these are missing, then projects are initiated to capture the hearts and minds of staff.

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.

Organisations are taken to be in equilibrium of forces for change and forces for stabilisation. A common technique is to analyse the forces for and against change, mapping them to show this equilibrium graphically.

This approach gives rise to the classic cascade where the desired change is determined by top managers and is then rolled out through the hierarchical levels of the organisation. The following values underpin this approach, according to Alvesson and Sveningsson:

1. Empowering employee to act.
2. Creating openness in communications.
3. Facilitating ownership of the change process and its outcomes.
4. Promoting a culture of collaboration.
5. Promoting continuous learning.

These will all sound very familiar to any of you who have dealt with consultants or HR people in change projects. No doubt these will also reflect some of your own principles, which shows how ingrained these values have become in managerial and organisational change work.

This group dynamics way of thinking started off originally focused on work-group level evolutionary change and has developed more into organisation-wide approaches and towards cultural, strategic and revolutionary change, which has made it more similar to the Open Systems school, covered in the next post.

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.

So, even though strictly speaking an organisation isn’t a physical object, we tend to refer to it and treat it as though it were a thing. This is very convenient and necessary at times, for example in order to constitute a legal entity that can contract with others, and as a way of referring to the bundle of "stuff" that makes up the organisation.

But it is important when implementing change to remember that an organisation is not actually a physical thing and therefore cannot be changed in the same way that you might, for example, mould a piece of plasticine into a different shape through force from the outside, or use wood and nails to build a table.

George Herbert Mead used the term "social object" to refer to social formations such as organisations, to distinguish them from physical objects. He defined his term "social object" in a way that I think is very helpful for change leaders and practitioners.

A social object is a generalised tendency of people to act in a similar manner in similar situations. So, a restaurant is a social object in that it is not just the building alone, nor is it just the tables and chairs, the food, the chef or the waiting staff. While all these things are related to the restaurant, the social object of the restaurant is the tendency of people to come in, expect to be seated, order food, eat, pay and so on. As well as the tendency of the staff to do service and cooking actions, and all this constitutes the social object of the restaurant.

The social object is thus a generalisation (i.e. a general tendency to act) that comes into being only when it is made particular in the ordinary local interaction between people. By this I mean that it is only when specific people are cooking and eating on a particular occasion that any specific restaurant comes into being.

How is this useful for change leaders?

If you think of your organisation as a social object, it means that your organisation is a tendency for people to act in certain ways in your organisation.

If you want to change your organisation, then look for clues as to how to go about it by thinking of how people tend to act in your organisation. How do customers tend to be treated? How do people tend to respond to each other? How is your work organised?

This is a good thing to do because it necessarily focuses you on what is actually going on in your organisation at the moment. In other words, it will tell you what your current practice is. Too often managers allow themselves to be distracted from observing what is going on around them in front of their noses because they are focusing on big pictures, on the future vision, or on abstractions such as corporate values.

As a leader of change, you will be most effective if you concentrate on what is going on around you and make it your practice to participate in conversations with the people you influence.