Stephen Billing’s Blog

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…)

Corporate values redux.

I was talking to a new reader of the blog the other day who said that she didn’t agree with some of what I’ve written  about values. She saw people’s individual values as being important.

I realised that my opinions about shared values may have been interpreted to mean that I don’t think personal values are important. Quite the contrary.

I think that personal values are very important and are experienced as a kind of voluntary compulsion of what it feels right to do. They provide an uplifting experience that feels good and right to us. This is a very important aspect of being human.

On the other hand, I do not think it is important to work out what values an organisation should have and to write them on a wall chart, and then to try and get people to "align" themselves to those values.

1. The values that are written down are generalised abstractions. GH Mead called them "cult values" to remind us of their generalised nature, and that when they are applied directly regardless of the circumstances, this amounts to a cult.

2. Values are always in conflict and are negotiated in particular situations. For example, should the CSR answer the telephone within 3 rings or attend to the customer standing in front of them? This conflict is never resolved once and for all, because the next time the phone is ringing and there is a customer in front of them, the CSR has to negotiate the conflict all over again.

3. If everyone has the same values, then you have a homogenous organisation in which the agents are very similar. By analogy from complexity theory, when similar agents interact, the patterns of interaction that emerge have significantly less novelty, innovation and change than when the agents are dissimilar.

4. Organisations are not people and cannot have values. Organisations are habitual patterns of relating, always with the potential for novelty to arise from any particular interaction.

5. People cannot design their values in advance, but they can discover or become aware of their values through reflecting on problematic or difficult situations, and working out what has been important to them in negotiating that particular situation. So it makes no sense to try and design the organisation’s values and commit them to wall posters and other artefacts.

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.

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. 

OK, here’s the guts on corporate values. I draw on George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self and Society and Ralph Stacey’s Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics (p397) in explaining why I am so critical of corporate "shared values." These three flaws are showstoppers.

The first fatal flaw of shared values is anthropomorphism, the second is that values are cult values and third is that values are always in conflict.

This post addresses the problem of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism means attributing the characteristics of a person to an object or animal.

We treat the organisation as if it were a person when we say it has values. Organisations are not people, they do not have consciousness and they do not have values.

Mead pointed out that humans have a tendency to individualise a collective and treat it as if it had its own overriding motives or values.

So we tend to talk about our organisations as though they are objects or things. Further, we tend to think of them as though they were human things. Then we attribute to our organisations human characteristics such as a sense of purpose and values.

Shared values projects attempt to identify these overriding motives or values of the organisation. As I have alluded to above, there is no such thing as a set of overriding values of the organisation – they do not actually exist. The humans involved in the organisation might each have their own overriding values or motives, but the organisation itself does not.

Values are attractive because they give a feeling of an enlarged personality in which individuals participate and from which they derive their value as persons. No doubt there is also the appeal to managers that they might be able to use these overriding values in service of their own managerial objectives and goals.

However, organisations are not individual humans, they are collectives made up of patterns of human interaction that constitute individual and collective identities. While organisations have a legal identity they are not actually sentient beings and they cannot hold values in the way an individual human being can.

So, it is a logical non-sense to say that organisations can have shared values. If that is not enough reason to be critical of the idea of shared values, there is another one coming up in the next post – the cult aspects of shared values.

At the Control or Care of the Self conference in Hamburg in July, Jason Hughes (right) caught my attention with his paper critiquing emotional intelligence. The others in the photo are Stefanie Ernst (our host in Hamburg) and Sam Binkley (Boston).

You have no doubt come across Daniel Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence. Hughes pointed out that the promise of emotional intelligence is to open the door to talk about emotion at work. On the other hand it makes the emotions into something that can be labeled and measured.

The concept of emotional intelligence promises the management of emotions at work. It repackages human emotions as a corporate concern. The ability to measure people’s emotions appeals to the perceived requirement for managers to inspire the hearts and minds of their people to perform exceptionally well for their employer. This leads to a kind of quest to colonise employee emotions in the service of their goals for the organisation.

The concept of emotional intelligence configures emotions as abilities that are properties of the person that can be developed intentionally by the individual. There is no notion of the social development of the self in emotional intelligence as there is in the work of G H Mead, Norbert Elias and Ralph Stacey.

Although I notice that Goleman now talks about social intelligence, his view of social intelligence seems to be a bolt on to emotional intelligence  and the two terms are used interchangeably.

Emotional intelligence allows you to experience emotions, as long as the expression of them is ‘appropriate.’ For example, you can become angry, as long as it is in the right degree and expressed appropriately. Not only is there an expressive element to EI (express your anger) but it is also subtly suppressive (express it only in appropriate ways), and the suppressive component is hidden – or at least not obvious.

Emotional intelligence has a further worrying fish hook that Hughes identified. In the past, if you made a mistake at work, you would be seen as a bad worker. Now, if you make a mistake in the expression of your emotions you will be seen as a bad person. This amounts to little more than a personal judgment that is lent an aura of scientific rigour by the measurement scales of emotional intelligence.

For a person with emotional intelligence, read a person who expresses desirable emotions. For a person lacking emotional intelligence, read a person who expresses undesirable emotions. Who decides what is desirable or undesirable?

I don’t doubt that if Daniel Goleman were to read this, he would take exception to what I have said here. You might be a supporter of emotional intelligence. Whatever your stance might be, I would be interested to hear what you think.

We make the mistake of "identifying with an isolated ego inside a bag of skin" (Eric Eisenberg). 

This attention-grabbing image echoes the idea of George Herbert Mead from 1934 in Mind, Self and Society that the mind is not some sort of essence or spirit that lives inside our heads or inside the brain. Our human minds, according to Mead, consist of the silent conversation we have with ourselves. This is a very social way of considering our sense of who we are and what it means to be a "self". In the same way that we have conversations with others, we have conversations with ourselves. 

A person’s mind then, is the singular of this conversational process. Our sense of who we are is thus formed through a social process of interaction with others. Covey in Seven Habits says that interdependence comes after independence but I do not agree with his idea of interdependence. I think we are interdependent human beings because we rely on others from the day we are born. And we rely on others in our organisational life. 

What we think it is to be human (independent or interdependent, mind as socially created processes of conversation with oneself, or as an ego inside a bag of skin) is very important for what we think we are doing when we try to change organisations. 

What do you think?

In my last post I described the sender receiver model of communication and said that thinking this way about communication was a reason why we have communication breakdowns, and why, when they occur, they are so hard to repair. I said that when you see communication as a sender and a receiver in this way, a misunderstanding can only be resolved by identifying which party made a mistake, or which parties made which mistakes. Admission of mistakes like this is hard for people to do, which means it is hard to resolve breakdowns in communication.

What is the alternative?

Ralph Stacey introduced me to the thinking of George Herbert Mead, who, early in the twentieth century pointed out what I have found to be a very useful alternative to seeing communication as a message transmitted between sender and receiver. Mead talks about meaning in interaction as being co-created through a process of gesture and response. Gesture means words, actions, facial expressions and so on, and the response to the gesture creates the meaning of that gesture, at the same time as it is being generated by the gesture.

How is this different from sender / receiver? Well, one difference is that the message has no intrinsic meaning of itself.

If I yell at you, you could take it as a warning that a car is coming and thank me, or as an insult and yell back at me. There is no intrinsic meaning held in the yell itself, and neither of us knows the meaning of it until you respond. Of course, I have intention in yelling, but the meaning we make of it together is not known until the response is given. And of course the response itself is also a gesture calling forth its own response. So, communication can be seen as a continuing process of making meaning through these gestures and responses.

Rather than transmitting meaning from one person to another we are jointly communicating meaning. The response gives the gesture meaning – there is no inherent meaning in the gesture alone.

In this way of thinking, you have to consider both the gesture and the response together as the unit of communication. Thinking this way, your attention is drawn to the meaning made of the gesture/response together, not how the sender’s intention differed from the message decoded by the receiver.

Here’s another example.

The statement “the cost is $10,000” is a very familiar occurrence in a range of settings, from financial (e.g. budgeting or financial reporting), to sales (negotiating a price).  A response of “That’s too much” gives a very different meaning to the interaction compared to a response of “Should we accrue that amount?” 

When I was first introduced to Mead’s notion of the conversation of gesture / response, I thought it was an academic concept of not much value. In fact I thought it was quite a difficult concept to grasp of extremely questionable value. I have now changed my tune completely.

So why is this such a useful way of viewing communication?

It is useful because it completely transforms the nature of what you think communication is. Instead of looking at the sender or receiver as being at fault, our attention is drawn to the meaning that we are making together in this situation. Communication becomes a process of joint inquiry in which we are both, together, making meaning of our situation, drawing on your unique background and understanding, and my unique background and understanding.

For leaders, taking this perspective completely eliminates the need to see employees as expressing resistance to change when they question a change initiative. Why? Because when employees ask questions, they are responding to gestures made by the leader, perhaps at a roadshow presentation, perhaps in a company newsletter or any other setting. This does not mean that the leaders have given the message poorly, or that the employees are resistant. The questions from the employees are the responses to the gestures made by the leaders, which lead to further gestures and responses in a never-ending process out of which meaning is constantly emerging.

When you take this perspective, communication is seen as a joint inquiry, in which both parties are accountable to each other for the meaning they are taking from the interaction. Meaning is constantly evolving through the conversation of gestures and responses. Each response is itself a gesture that calls forth a response. In this process the views of both parties can change.

And that is the exciting thing – it helps you avoid getting stuck blaming each other when communication doesn’t seem to be going the way you would like it to.

This view of communication has been very significant for me and others who have explored it. I would be very interested in your response to this gesture. That will enable us to make meaning together.

So please feel free to post questions or comments. 

Illustration by Martin Coates

Shannon and Weaver’s influential formulation in 1949 of the conduit or sender receiver model of communication constitutes the dominant model of communication. The sender encodes a message which is sent to the receiver who decodes the message. If the sender has encoded accurately, and the receiver has decoded accurately, then clear communication is said to have taken place.

Other factors that can be considered include the channel of communication – face to face, telephone, email etc, and also environmental factors which are considered as noise, and can detract from the clarity of transmission of the message. In this way of thinking about communication, the meaning of it is understood to be held in the message, and is to be decoded by the receiver.

It is known as the conduit metaphor because of the focus on the successful transmission of a message, almost like it was going down a pipe.

This way of looking at communication pervades our thinking on the topic in most areas of organisational life, from information technology and its evolution into knowledge management which concentrates on how these messages can be stored, accessed and decoded at a later date, to cybernetic and computer based models of how humans store, access and extract meaning from these messages.

The goal of communication is understood to be the transfer of meaning from the sender to the receiver with minimum spillage  in the process, to use Eisenberg’s term from his 2007 book Strategic Ambiguities.

The problems of communication are understood to be accurate coding and decoding by the sender and receiver respectively, limitations in the channel of communication, and problems with noise from the environment contaminating the communication. In practical terms, this means that when something goes wrong with face to face communication then we have no alternative but to consider either the sender as having erred in the encoding or else the receiver to have misunderstood the message. Either way one party is at fault.

I believe that this is one of the reasons that breakdowns in communication are so difficult to resolve. For there to be resolution, then one party or the other has to admit that they did something wrong, and this is hard to do.

The sender receiver model of communication is pervasive throughout the western business world. It seems to make logical sense. It fits with our view of ourselves as autonomous individuals making rational choices to bring about our intentions – if we can communicate our intentions clearly as senders, then we will be better leaders and get what we want in the world.

I have come to the belief that one of the reasons communication breakdowns occur is because of our faulty way of seeing communication as the transmission of meaning. And the sender receiver model is also a large part of the reason that we find it hard to repair communication breakdowns. In other words, our very way of thinking about communication in terms of sender and receiver is responsible for miscommunication and the difficulty in resolving miscommunication.

But what is the alternative? For years there seemed to me to be no satisfactory alternative, until Ralph Stacey introduced me to the work of George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher writing in the early twentieth century.

More about this in the next post.