When you think about it, it is fairly obvious that there can be no "I" without we, you (singular), he, she, you (plural) and they. "I" can only be thought of as "I and relationships with others." "I" cannot be thought of as a stand alone individual in isolation from others. You could think of "I" as meaning "interdependent I."

You can distinguish between interdependent I and others, but you cannot separate them – interdependent I only exists in relationship to other people.

The language of speaking about "I" tends to mean that you forget about the interdependent nature of "I" and it seems that maybe there is an "I" that is separate. For example, we come to take for granted that the "I" is resident inside the individual person, quite secluded from other people.

Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two relationships – AB = A’s perspective of the relationship and BA = B’s perspective of the relationship. In the world of mathematics AB=BA, but not in the human world.

Here’s another way of saying it. Everyone that I think of in the third person as "she", e.g. my friend Robyn, thinks of herself in the first person as "I", and she in turn thinks of me in the third person as "he" or sometimes as "you." So Robyn’s perspective of our relationship is different just in the quality alone that her "I" is different from my "I." It’s all a matter of perspective.

I have found it useful to bear this in mind in any corporate or business situation, especially when you are involved in change.

There are always at least two perspectives in every relationship, the perspectives of each party to the relationship, and both of them are valid.

So, as a leader of change, it is helpful if you remember that. Remembering that there are two perspectives will lead you to first seek out the different perspectives, and secondly to find a way to hold both perspectives at the same time, even if they are contradictory.

The most common response to being faced with contradictory perspectives is to become anxious. And then to try and resolve the two points of view so that the "right" perspective, or the "facts" can be found. The problem with this is that one perspective then is labelled "right" and one labelled "wrong." Usually the "right" perspective is the one that is closest to that of the most powerful people.

It is very helpful to have the capacity to hold contradictory points of view without becoming anxious. Apart from keeping a relatively calm atmosphere for others, it also helps you to facilitate the parties to see the other’s point of view and this allows the possibility for each point of view to be transformed, into something new. And this is at the very heart of leading change in organisations – the ability to assist others to transform their point of view.

This post is based on the ideas of Norbert Elias, in What is Sociology, 1978.

Photography by Ruby Cumming

In 2009, how can you create organisational change without a huge financial investment?

The key is for managers to understand the concept of interdependence in which we move away from the notion of the self as autonomous individual. Instead we have an organisation, and indeed a society, of interdependent people whose individiual selves are consitituted through their interaction with each other. In this way of thinking, individual change cannot then be separated from change in the groups to which the individual belongs. Likewise, organisational change cannot be separated from change in the individuals themselves

This means that managers in organisations must understand that they cannot change their organisations while remaining the same as an individual. Through the process of going through organisational change, managers as individuals will change, as will those that work for them.

The interactions between managers and their staff will change, and this will constitute change in those individuals, as well as change in the organisation.

So the first step for the manager seeking to create change in their organisation is to reflect on the interactions in which the manager is participating, and consider how those interactions themselves might change. The key to the change you are seeking lies undoubtedly in what is not discussable in your teams – you can bet it will be being discussed informally. For example, whether or not staff bring up their good ideas at meetings, or ask questions to make sure they understand what is going on in your organisation.

A good question to ask yourself  as the manager is "What are we talking about in our teams, and what are we not talking about?"  If it would be helpful, ask a trusted member of the team, or your own manager. Use the insight you gain from this to start talking with your whole team about what was formerly undiscussable. While this might not be easy, you will see amazing results. And it won’t cost you a single dollar of capital expenditure.

The competency approach is so commonplace in organisational life that it hardly seems worthy of comment. It has become like the air that you breathe, always present so that you take it for granted and hardly notice it.

Here are four assumptions behind the competency approach that are rarely mentioned. For these, I have drawn on Carroll, Levy and Richmond’s article Leadership as Practice: Challenging  the Competency Paradigm.

• Human behaviour can be described in a manner that is free of context and other people – as an individual agent choosing what behaviours to exhibit, in isolation of the specific context.
• Human actions can be reduced to fragments and then rebuilt into a complete ‘whole’.
• What has worked in the past will inevitably continue to be relevant for the future (competencies are based on past behaviour).
• Competencies, which by their nature can only articulate what is tangible, ‘objective’ and measurable can be used to describe leadership, a phenomenon which is intangible, subjective and not measurable. 

As I consider each of these assumptions I come to the conclusion that they are not accurate assumptions.

Human behaviour can surely only be described in particular situations with other people, not in disembodied descriptions of context-free behaviour.

The reduction of human action to fragments is potentially useful for thinking about some micro aspects of behaviour, but the ‘whole’ can only make sense in the context of the relationships between the people concerned, the past background of those involved, and their intentions. The kind of ‘whole’ that can be built from these fragments does not seem to me to be very useful.

It seems that the future may be quite different from the past.  As I write this it seems that the world is about to head into a recession. Many of the people managing organisations currently or in the past, upon whom the various competency models are based, will have learnt their skills in a very different world from that we anticipate in a recessionary environment.

And as for the final assumption above, I do not think that applying reductionist methods to the world of human beings does much except give us an unrealistic view of human behaviour.

We need to find better ways of understanding human beings, ways that acknowledge the interdependence of humans, ways that acknowledge that we cannot step outside of human relating to break it down into its component parts, ways that acknowledge the unknowability of some aspects of being human.

Norbert Elias was a German sociologist who fled Germany in the 1930s and made his home in England. His work starts from consideration of us as interdependent human beings. This is different from our commonsense view of ourselves as humans surrounded by social groupings.

The diagram to the left is taken from Elias’s 1978 book What is Sociology, and shows how we see human beings as autonomous individuals surrounded by social structures, bumping up against others in social interaction. And it seems to make common sense that our experience is that we are at the centre of our world, with other groupings like family, organisation and country surrounding us. It has the individual at the centre of it, surrounded by other, progressively larger and more encompassing groupings. But although this view is extremely commonplace to the degree that it is taken for granted, this is actually only one potential way of looking at the world.

And when you think about it, it is actually quite an egocentric view of the world with the individual at the centre. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes this way of seeing the world as ‘individualism’, and is the basis of much of the personal development / self help / authenticity movements of the 80s, 90s and today.

Elias argued that societies, and organisations, are made up of interdependent beings, including you and me. Because we are interdependent, we rely on each other and are in relationship with each other. Therefore, in order to understand organisations we should seek to understand the nature of the relationships we have with each other.

We make up webs of interdependence, what Elias called figurations, of many kinds. The figurations are characterized by power balances, and this applies to all figurations, such as families, schools, organisations, towns or countries.

The significance of understanding humans in relationship to each other, rather than as each of us being the centre of an autonomous world, is the foundation on which I follow Ralph Stacey in arguing that organisations are emergent patterns of continuously iterated interaction which arise from myriad relationships amongst those in the organisation.

This way of thinking has important implications for how you view leadership because it changes what you actually think an organisation is. Changing your view of what an organisation is means that you also change how you think you should lead it.

If organisations are patterns of interaction, then as a leader you cannot control those patterns – you can only control what you say and do, but you cannot control how people respond to what you say and do.

Follow and participate in this blog to explore further the radical implications and the extraordinary potential for leadership success that is offered by taking this view of organisations comprising interdependent individuals.