Stephen Billing’s Blog

Saras Sarasvathy from the University of Washington uses the analogy of creating a menu for a dinner party, where you decide in advance what dishes to have and then go shopping for the ingredients (in an article published in the Academy of Management Review (available by subscription). She contrasts this with cooking a meal by looking in the cupboards to decide what to cook that evening. At our place, we use both methods, depending on the circumstances.

Sarasvathy points out that you can have dinner by either method. You can plan a menu in advance, then go shopping to make sure you have all the ingredients. This method she calls causation, because it’s a process of determining in advance what the meal will be, and then causing it to happen by shopping or acquiring the ingredients which cause the predetermined dish to materialise.

You can also have a meal based on what is in the cupboards, fridge and freezer – looking for the ingredients you have on hand and then deciding what to make with those ingredients. For example, we have a copy of Digby Law’s Vegetable Cookbook which is arranged in order of vegetable used. Inserted in this book are many recipes using particular vegetables so that if we are looking for what to do with cauliflower, for example, we have Digby’s ideas already published in the book plus a number of clippings for cauliflower recipes that have been stuffed in the relevant section like book marks. It’s primitive, but it works for us when we are trying to put together a dinner from what’s in the fridge. We also use Cuisine magazine’s amazing Meal Maker function for this – you can enter your ingredients and the software searches Cuisine’s recipes using those ingredients to give you some ideas for what to make with, say broccoli. Brilliant.

Planning a menu in advance, or causation, is similar to what happens in organisations when senior managers (i.e. chefs) determine in advance what results are wanted and then cause it to happen, through their actions. Let’s assume for the purposes of the post that managers can decide what result they want and then bring it about. This idea is problematic but is not the subject of this post, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Making a meal from available ingredients is what Sarasvathy calls effectuation, and she likens it to the entrepreneur’s task of working out what to do with the limited resources available. In other words, the entrepreneur does not have the resources available to go shopping to buy expensive ingredients like caviar and crayfish, but instead must work out how best to utilise the available resources such as contacts, technology and finances to create something that potential customers will be interested in. 

More information on Sarasvathy’s ideas on effectuation can be found at www.effectuation.org.

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 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.

It’s obvious isn’t it? The organisation’s mind is the managers, its heart is the values and its body is the staff.

The mind is commonly thought of as being located inside our heads. Separate from the body itself, the mind is seen as being inside the brain, doing the thinking, directing the actions of the body.

There is a real external world and this is represented, more or less accurately in the mind. This real world can be specified prior to cognitive activity, and hence the external world is discovered. In the tradition of thinking descended from Descartes ("I think therefore I am") the mind is observing the world from outside and directing the body to act accordingly – thinking comes before action.

This view is prevalent in our organisations as well. Usually in a taken for granted way that is not explicitly acknowledged. Here is what I mean by that.

In organisational life, planning is seen as coming before action. In other words thinking in the form of planning happens, and then planning directs action.

Further, the senior managers are seen as the thinkers setting out the strategy that the staff are to follow. Managers are seen as the brains, the thinkers, while staff are seen as the brawn, the doers. Staff, as the body of the organisation, carry out the instructions of the managers, who are the brains or the thinkers.

It is taken for granted that the organisation is like a person with a brain to do the thinking (that’s the managers), a heart to do the feeling (that’s the corporate values, mission and passion that people bring to work) and there is a body to take action, in the form of the staff.

While this may seem to be a very accurate view of the way organisations work, nevertheless it is only one explanation. In fact it is purely an analogy. If it seems natural to think of organisations this way, that only goes to show how ingrained this analogy is, not that it actually represents the ‘truth’ about organisations. 

How do you get away from the deficit way of thinking?

In my last post I suggested that the quest for the ideal future diverts people’s attention from what is going on around them in the present moment. Always paying attention to the deficit between where they are now and the ideal where they would like to be, they miss the possibilities of the present.

Again drawing on Patricia Benner’s The Primacy of Caring, here are three questions she suggests that can open up possibility:

• "What can be done now, in the meantime (before the ideal can be realised)?"
   
• "Is there another way to achive the same end?"
   
• "Is the end in sight the most worthy?"

In looking for the possibility inherent in the current situation there is still the notion of desire or some good to be achieved.

Benner suggests that decreasing your reliance on a preconceived end or means of getting there can offer a new point of departure for new possibilities that were not previously available. To me, this applies as much to individuals in their personal lives as much as it does to people in organisations.

The gap analysis perspective can divert your attention from noticing what is going on around you at this very moment.

It is common for many people to see the world as an ideal contrasted with a reality. People are measured against an ideal standard and are diagnosed in relation to that standard. The gap analysis is the classic example – where do you want to be compared to where you are now. There is a deficit and the solution is to work out a plan to close the gap.

Patricia Benner in The Primacy of Caring points out that this orientation towards some future ideal state has some cost. The price people pay for having this mindset is that they become blinded to the possibilities in their current situation. Because their focus is on the future and the gap, it is not on what is going on around them at the present moment.

This reminds me of the acres of diamonds story – I think I heard it from Brian Tracy and it may well be apocryphal. It concerns a farmer who sold up his farm and went off to another country to hunt for diamonds. Years later, he died, penniless and alone. In the meantime, on his farm that he had sold years earlier, guess what they found? Some very very large diamonds.

I think that the focus on an ideal future and the deficit compared to the current state stops people in organisations from seeing the possibilities in what is going on around them. It stops them from seeing the acres of diamonds that are present right now.

In your organisation where are the areas in which you are talking about what should be in the future at the expense of noticing what is going on around you at this very moment?

How we experience the present moment is very different from how we normally think about time – as a point on a line separating the past from the future. Although most leaders are not consciously thinking of this, it has important implications for how to deal with people experiencing organisational change.

I have written here about how we think of change as being a movement from one equilibrium state to another. We have come to think this way because our thinking privileges static states over moving process (more on this here).

This has a lot to do with how we think of time. Not so much how we manage time, but the difference between how we think of time, and how we experience time.

This is a useful distinction to understand because it helps to explain why people respond to change the way they do, and it helps leaders of change to make productive responses to their people when they’re going through change.

The most common way of thinking of the present moment is as a point on a continuum moving from past through to the future. The present separates the past from the future. The present is a point in time, distinct from the past and distinct from the future, although ever moving towards the future.

As Ralph Stacey points out, in this view of time the ‘here-and-now’ is distinguished from the ‘there-and-then’. Seeing time as a point on a line is useful in business because it allows you to make project plans that help you to get your projects done effectively. So far, so good.

But consider for a moment how you actually experience the present moment. As you are dealing with important budget decisions or people issues, you do not experience your present thoughts and options as an arbitrary point that somehow occurred all on its own, divorced from the past. In fact, the present arises as the results of the events of the past. Past budget discussions influence your present experience of your budget challenges and decisions you make. Likewise, your past interactions with your staff affect what you decide to do next in relation to a particular performance problem or issue with one of your team.

The present moment has arrived as a result of myriad events of the past. You could say that the present is the inevitable result of the events of the past. If the events in the past were different, the present moment would also be somehow different – for both parties. For example, your past experience of your boss and your thoughts about the future will influence how you respond to the news that there will be a review of your business unit. Ditto for your team.

The experience of the present moment is informed by past experience and also by your expectations about the future.

I think this helps to explain why it is so powerful in change settings, to give priority to allowing people to voice their experience of the past and their expectations of the future. People experiencing change in their work settings are responding to that change based on their past experiences and their future expectations. In many cases they may not even have articulated these in their own minds.

It is certainly unlikely that you know enough about their past experiences and future expectations to be able to interpret their responses accurately without paying them some attention.

And you will not find out what they think if you are hell-bent on delivering key messages via power point slides in mass auditoriums.

Patricia Benner’s work challenges leaders of change to consider and generate new responses to employees’ reactions to change. This is more effective than the commonly utilised grief cycle approach.

This is the fifth in a series of posts about how to view your employees’ responses to change as other than ‘resistance.’ It is based on Patricia Benner’s work described in her book The Primacy of Caring which in turn is based on Heidegger’s phenomenological approach. Phenomenology means that people can grasp a situation directly in terms of its meaning for the self. 

People grasp change situations in terms of what those situations mean for them.

Previous posts have covered Benner’s four aspects of our humanness through which we deal with change situations and the associated growth and loss:

• Embodied intelligence
• Background meaning
• Concern
• Situation

Benner’s contribution assists in redefining what is commonly known in managerial terms as resistance, or opposition to the change desired by management, an opposition that it is the leader’s job to overcome.

To me, Benner’s work challenges leaders of change to consider and generate new responses to the specific situation where the smooth operation of the participant’s background meaning, habitual bodily understanding and the individual’s concerns are breaking down.

This view is consistent with complex responsive process thinking which encourages paying attention to the micro-interaction of what is going on in the here and now.

John Shotter points out the importance of being open, of being willing to be struck by the novel moments in ordinary conversation. I think Benner’s suggestions help leaders to concentrate more on understanding the life situation of participants and to identify what is potentially new in a conversation.

This is a far cry from seeing employees as going through the stages of a grief cycle, and allows a far more personalised approach to situations of ‘resistance’ that might arise.

 People constitute their world and are constituted by it at the same time. Changed situations lead to breakdown of smooth functioning for your employees. Better to see this as an opportunity for reflection rather than an opportunity to ‘persuade’ them.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Patricia Benner’s work described in her book The Primacy of Caring on how people deal with growth and loss as they are lived or experienced.

Benner proposes that there are four aspects of our humanness that enable us to grasp situations directly in terms of their meaning for the self:

• Embodied intelligence
• Background meaning
• Concern
• Situation

Earlier posts discussed embodied intelligence, background meaning and concern.

Benner calls the fourth attribute ’situation’, which denotes that people inhabit their world, rather than living in an environment. What I mean is that people are constituted by, at the same time as they form, their world. Not only do we create our own world, but it simultaneously creates us. Benner says that this point is often missed because we are so ingrained in an individualist view of the world where we are seen as autonomous individuals, who create the world we live in through our words and actions. Interdependence with other people takes a back seat – more on this here.

Over time, external situations change, and in response the individual also changes. For example, marriage, divorce, widowhood, unemployment, promotion and retirement are all examples Benner gives of how real world situations or contexts change and can impact upon life experience.

No amount of rehearsal or reflection can prepare one for these events because people cannot, in advance, reflectively encounter every taken-for-granted aspect of their being.

However, these changed contexts represent breakdowns in smooth functioning, which can prompt reflection. We can become aware of previously unnoticed background meanings, habitual body understanding and concerns.

This breakdown in smooth functioning is experienced as stressful, as any person involved in organisational change can testify. In situations of change, people’s concerns change and the habitual bodily understandings may not seem to work any more. Taken-for-granted aspects of one’s being may no longer work smoothly. And yet often, leaders respond with ‘persuasive’ messages, rather than attempts to understand what it means for employees whose habitual smooth functioning is breaking down.

Considering this, along with history in the form of background meaning can offer you as the leader of change, the potential for new responses to your employees’ ‘resistance.’ Something more relevant to your employees than a persuasive message.

These new responses you make to your employees have far more potential to trigger the actual organisational change you desire, more than all the programmed key messages and persuasive messages your PR team could dream up.