The Wimbledon grand slam tennis event is a very good example for helping us to think about how we would account for the complex stable instability of social life.[1] It is an event where the dynamic regularities of British social life are reproduced and potentially transformed year after year and where we have an opportunity to reflect upon the interconnectedness of individual and group behaviour. We recognise and might look forward to the event year on year, and partly because there are always differences and novelty. We are reassured by the annual improvisation on traditional themes. The recognisable patterns of tradition and the familiar arise because of a multitude of fluctuating, responsive social relationships dependent on the co-operation between very long chains of interdependent people. Meanwhile the event is predicated on competition and the disciplined channelling of intense emotional and physical drives.

The playing and watching of tennis depends upon what Norbert Elias would understand as highly civilised, or regulated behaviour. Just to reiterate, Elias is not attaching a particular value judgement to the idea of being civilised or otherwise, but is simply noticing that social regulation and self-regulation coincide to produce the high degree of co-ordination that is required for very large numbers of highly interdependent people to co-operate together. The very fact of holding such a complex event depends upon vast networks of mutually supporting transport, catering and other interconnected systems to get everyone on the right place at the right time, and to herd large numbers of people through the gates of the championship, which takes place at a specific time and place every year.

 The event is what the pragmatist philosopher GH Mead would call a social object, a generalised tendency of large numbers of people to act in a particular way, who are then capable of inducting other, newer people in what is expected, although the precise nature of the social object will differ every time. The event comprises newcomers and old timers who find ways of mutually adjusting their behaviour to each other with the potential for transformation and change.

 The game of tennis too is a highly regulated affair for both the players and the audience which demands of both of them great control of affect and of the body. The players respond to each other as habituated, disciplined tennis bodies improvising on the possibilities inherent in the game as it unfolds. The game itself gives testament to Bourdieu’s idea of our being completely absorbed in what we are doing, of being invested in the game (of social life). There is no suggestion that Andy Murray is making rational calculations about how to respond to Djokovic’s 130mph serve – his body is already reacting even as the ball is struck. Broadly both players have a strategy, i.e. to win the game, but each is adapting and responding to the other, point by point, as they test each other’s nerves and reactions. Their ‘strategy’ evolves in relation to each other, as they anticipate each other’s anticipations, and their responses are reasonable in the context of what they have to do, rather than rational. The game has clear rules which enable and constrain the players in developing their creative responses to each other, but they are not slavishly following any rules themselves in response to the responses of their opponent.

 At the same time, and for most of the game, everyone must exercise enormous self-discipline and have discipline imposed on them. The people watching would not often be predisposed in most situations to shouting, clapping and automatically rising in their seats after climactic points, as they themselves get caught up in the game, they find themselves doing all of these things. However, before players begin a point the court has to be virtually silent. Members of the crowd exercise disciplinary power over each other by hushing up those people in the audience who cannot contain themselves and who continue to shout out. The players themselves must regulate their own emotions so as not to become dispirited, and in the men’s game recovering from two sets down is considered a great achievement of character. It shows mettle. The game is overseen by an umpire sitting aloft who judges the game point by point and calls upon line judges standing to attention in uniform who adjudicate whether a ball is a fault or not. Most of the time players demonstrate highly civilised behaviour, acknowledging an assist of the net with a wave of the hand, shaking hands with their opponent whether they have won or lost, shaking hands with the umpire, waving to the crowd and perhaps bowing to royalty.

 In Bourdieu’s terms the whole event is a playing out symbolic capital. It is an elite game, developed by elites and played before elites. The game of social and economic capital is unfolding before our eyes as the great and the good socialise in the royal box. The outgoing governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, bumps into the England manager Roy Hodgson on the stairs. The BBC camera pans across a row of entertainers and sports and personalities to demonstrate the social capital of the event: this, the subtext would read, is how important this event is. In this way social relations are both produced and reproduced.

 Wimbledon itself is a club which differentiates: it has members, mostly on the basis of the ability to pay, and has members’ enclosures where men are obliged to wear jackets and ties and women are required to dress smartly. The ordinary tennis fan, perhaps without a ticket for one of the show courts, group together on a hill overlooking one of the large hills. In the main, the ordinary tennis fan is not of lower class themselves but is what Bourdieu would refer to as a dominated dominant: they  are usually members of the middle classes who may have fewer power chances than the elite but could by no means be considered to be powerless. There are very clear processes of social distinction and inclusion and exclusion at the championship as well as between the event and other sporting events, like football, which is more likely to be followed in the main by less elite groups.  The distinctions and differentiations between one sporting event and another replicate British society more broadly.

From Elias’ perspective an event such as Wimbledon is only possible as a relatively recent development in human socialisation, in the civilising process. It is a highly complex manifestation of social life because it brings together self-control and social control, and the tight co-ordination of very long chains of interdependent people. To understand how such a social feat is only possible if we reconcile the artificial split between the individual and the social, self and society. In Bourdieu’s terms it also demonstrates how regularities of social life are on show, which are based on dominance and inequalities, and by being on show become replicated. Drawing the analogy between the game of tennis and the game of life demonstrates how there is no such thing as a rational, calculating individuals deciding in advance how to participate in advance of participating. We, like the tennis players, are invested in the game, actively pursuing our interests, improvising in more or less expert ways on the rules, the regularities of social life. We are part of some groups and excluded from others. The warp and weft of processes of belonging and not belonging, competition and co-ordination, are what keep social life evolving.

In the last post I discussed the ways in which people regulate themselves and each other in everyday life. I made the argument that without this self- and group discipline there would be no order in social life. As we have pointed out many times on this blog, après Bourdieu, Elias and Foucault,  and by drawing on analogies from the complexity sciences, power relations both enable and constrain what it is possible to do. There is, however, a general tendency in more popular management literature to suggest that somehow we can do away with or ‘transform’ power relations by being nice to each other, or by being appreciative, or by being open and transparent, or authentic. These perspectives convey the implicit idea that power is somehow unpleasant or illicit. But this is to cover over or even to miss the productive nature of power. Power produces a regimen of resistance and compliance, the exact patterning of which will always be unpredictable, but is likely to give rise to both routine as well as a degree of novelty. But to ask the question about how disciplinary power operates in social life is not simply to enquire into how ‘they’ are doing something to ‘us’ but also to probe into how we are doing things to ourselves. How we try to influence each other to organise our joint undertakings can say a lot about the kinds of pressures we are under and how we aspire to being professional.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was participating with a group of people discussing the extent to which we could justify the expense of staff from different geographical regions meeting together to share their experience of their work. In general my colleagues thought it wasn’t a good idea just to let them do this without regulating it in some way. There had to be some measurable indicators of usefulness, such as changes in behaviour or changes in thinking which we could claim were directly related to people meeting together. We might even be able to specify this in advance of meeting so that everyone could assess the effectiveness of the meeting in making the required changes. That way they could have ‘smart’ meeting and so could justify the expense whenever someone in a higher authority, or with their hands on the purse strings, obliged us to do so. We could get there first by demonstrating how reliable we were in specifying the outcome of every pound we were spending.

It is interesting, then, to notice how we co-opted each other into this process of beginning to set targets for ourselves, to shape and regiment our meetings without yet being obliged to do so, and to discipline ourselves in anticipation of being disciplined. All of this was undertaken with a degree of self-congratulation that we were ahead of the game and ‘transparent’ in our intentions to do and be good. There was a reassuring concreteness about the decisions we felt we were making: concrete, clear, measurable and wrong. It is part of a general contemporary trend in favour of instrumental reason, where everything can be countable and measurable, and thus commensurable in highly abstract ways. Our disciplinary measures were not just ways of recording what we were doing, but actively shaping it in advance. The potential danger, then, is of organising a meeting which only produces measurable outcomes.

What is it that gets lost if we think of human conduct entirely from this perspective?

According to Olav Eikeland[1], Aristotle considered the highest form of knowledge to be insight, or what he terms theoria, which is deeper understanding about who we are and what we think we are doing together. This can only be achieved by groups of people meeting together to enter into dialogue and to practice discussing what they think is important to the common undertaking, and why they think it is so. In contradistinction to theoresis, knowledge about something, there is no way of accessing insight from the outside – it is produced ‘internally’ as a result of the discussion itself. It is an improvisational activity aimed at developing more helpful understanding from within the experience of having the discussion. One of the conditions which aids the production of insight is that there be no immediate action requirement. There is no rush to claim that the discussion will have tangible results. Deliberation together is the end in itself – groups of people do not meet together to prove something, or necessarily to produce anything pre-planned, except to understand each other better. This may or may not lead to concrete outcomes, depending on what is meant by ‘concrete’.

Rather than working with the specific, theoria may be informed by questions which are vaguely formed, and which only become sharper in the asking. Part of the dialogic process is to remind ourselves as a group what we already know, and to help each other to articulate what is important to us; to work together towards more common understandings, but only by exploring similarities and differences. The process is likely to create both cognitive and emotional transformations in participants as they experience both affirmation and negation. Dialogic conversation is critical in nature, and turns on exploring ambiguities, nuances and inconsistencies in what is being said. This requires the participants to be drawing skilfully on experience, but in doing so they will also be creating experience since dialogue and experience are mutually constitutive.

Dialogic meetings are aimed at producing a different kind of knowledge, which may or may not have any immediate and measurable outcomes, and it may or may not be immediately obvious why or how they are useful. It produces meetings with no ends in view except to increase understandings of ourselves, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. It explicitly encourages reflection and reflexivity as well as meaning-making.

These aims are very different from those predicated on rushing around ‘delivering’ things. One interesting question is why it is so hard to talk about the importance of asking each other what we think we are doing and why there is such a prohibition on thinking.

On Wednesday 16^th October Mary Ward and Jo Collins, the founders of the Chickenshed Theatre, were interviewed by BBC Radio 4 presenter Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. They were invited onto the programme to celebrate the forthcoming 40^th anniversary of a theatre which was set up to involve young people in theatre, irrespective of their abilities. Both founders had a shared belief that they could produce excellent theatre with young people if they could encourage everyone to accept what young people bring, rather than what they don’t bring. They argued, for example, that young people are often much less judgemental about other young people with disabilities than adults are: they simply accept the disability as a given and proceed from there, without fuss. They argued that discrimination is a learned, social behaviour. That commitment, and the continuous improvisational ability to involve other people in the undertaking, has created an institution which has lasted 40 years although it has never received Arts Council funding.

‘What was your vision for Chickenshed?’ Jenni Murray asked. ‘We didn’t have a vision as such, we didn’t sit down and say “this is our vision”’, Mary Ward answered arguing that they had both felt impelled to include as many young people as possible, ‘but we just did it, and as we did it we became more and more committed to this idea that everyone can contribute to the production, the final end.’

I was struck by the formulation that she used (and amused that if you now visit the Chickenshed site you will find a Vision and Mission, although expressed in very simple terms) because I think it comes very close to what pragmatist philosophy is trying to get at, that it is in the doing that we discover ourselves and what we mean. It’s not that we have values, but that our values have us, and they make us who we are in realising them. This is not a linear process, but a recursive one. This was no account of sequential progress towards a pre-reflected goal, but a determined feeling forwards.

In John Dewey’s terms Ward and Collins’ account is a very good description of values understood as voluntary compulsion. They both became so convinced that things could be other than they were that they felt obliged to act. They couldn’t help themselves, and they found themselves in the activity of starting something. When they set out they had no idea where this would lead, that it would still be running 40 years later, or how one thing would lead to another, but they were compelled to start something and to knit together a coalition of other people similarly compelled. She describes how in the practice there develops a greater commitment to the practice. In both of their stories (listen to the full interview here), there is no mention of feeling passionate, having a vision, wanting to transform, empowering or any other of the appurtenances of the contemporary change discourse. Rather it is a detailed narrative account of how going to have tea with Lady Rayne led to being driven to visit her deserted chicken shed in her BMW, the first home of Chickenshed theatre.

Second, there is no distinction between thought and action, rather thinking becomes a form of action. I think Ward’s language conveys this instinctively well when she immediately reacts against Murray’s suggestion and represents the idea of having a vision as sitting down, being sedentary. This was clearly far from her experience at the time. It seems to me that she reacts instinctively against the notion that everything needs to be thought out in advance rather than advancing the thinking in the doing. In this sense it is only possible to have a vision, the one which now appears on the company website, retrospectively. Her reaction does not support the axiomatic notion that we have to have a clear plan, a destination, all worked out before we can do anything (‘if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you ever get there’?).

Thirdly I think Ward speaks eloquently to the inseparability of means and ends and the importance of improvisation: commitment informs action which in turn informs commitment. This seems like a fractal activity: the ends are present in the means at every step. And she gives a strong impression in her account of what it is like to proceed experimentally, and perhaps also experientially. An encounter with the practical world with the intention to get something started leads to further endeavours in the world informed by experience. Because this sort of enterprise was rare, there was no recipe about how to go on, but they had to proceed making it up as they went along. It sounds like a tale of both founders throwing themselves whole-heartedly into the next thing that presented itself as a consequence of the last.

Of course this is not an injunction against planning: no doubt the theatre would not have succeeded in their later application to the local borough council for premises if they had not had a plan. But it is an interesting provocation to think about how innovatory practice happens and to what extent this can be planned. Like many similar stories it turns conventional contemporary management prescriptions on their head. We cannot know how one thing will lead to another, ‘vision’ makes more sense backwards than forwards and we can only realise what we are committing to in the act of committing. We act in the present informed by the past and in anticipation of the future.

I came across two recent stories from organisational life which reminded me of how attempts to rationalise it can often bring about irrational consequences, and how schemes to systematise and order can disrupt even as they try to make things cohere.

One educational institution I know has decided to streamline and control its purchasing with the noble intention of cutting costs. This means that any member of staff wanting to buy something has to fill in a form justifying the purchase and explaining why they are using the particular provider they have chosen. The form designed by purchasing colleagues clearly has in mind those members of staff ordering stationery or perhaps chairs, since there are questions to be answered about which catalogue and which page the item is on, which colour you are ordering, and where you want the item delivered. Be that as it may, all members of staff have to fill in the same form.

In anticipation of next year’s centenary commemoration of the start of WWI staff in the History department encouraged students to undertake a creative project and make a short film about the war. They found a historian locally who had turned his garden into a mock-up of a WWI trench. In return for the use of his facility and in order to maintain it, the man asked for a fee of £500. In order to get the man paid, staff in the History department had to convince purchasing colleagues by filling in the form explaining why they had not used the institution’s ‘preferred suppliers’ of WWI trenches and why they had not sought competitive bids.

In another organisation a recent restructuring was used as a way of both centralising and decentralising control. In terms of centralisation, all financial responsibility was pulled upwards to the rank of directors of departments, so members of staff who previously had had financial responsibility for, say, signing off their teams’ expenses no longer could. And as for decentralisation, colleagues at the newly configured ‘centre’ of the organisation were told that they couldn’t speak to colleagues in the region, because now the organisation was devolved requests for help should come from the periphery to the centre, rather than the other way round. Otherwise it would seem as though the centre was dictating terms to the regions, rather than strategy emerging responsively and ‘bottom up’.

In this second example the managers I was working with had responded in a variety of ways to the new conditions. For some, the inability to spend money had completely stymied them. Others developed work-arounds with the co-operation of their new directors so that under certain agreed conditions (usually the conditions which pertained before the reorganisation) they could use his e-mail address as though they were the director signing off expenses claims and permitted amounts of money. In terms of the injunction for colleagues at the centre not to communicate with the regions, some had felt bound by it, and others had simply ignored it, phoning up old and new colleagues as a way of establishing or re-establishing relationships in order to further the work. What was being negotiated here was the ability to break the rules collectively and selectively when the rules were getting in the way of the work. This involves a good deal of practical judgement about when it is both ethical and sensible to be subversive for the general good of the shared undertaking.

Both the examples above are relatively trivial, and perhaps humorous instances of every day organisational life. Of course, managers do sometimes need to systematise, and every organisation needs to pay attention to where the money goes to ensure there is as little waste as possible. What interests me, however, is the way that the rational and irrational are two sides of the same coin, and how well intentioned plans for organisational improvement can often bring about the opposite of what they intend. Sometimes the grander the scheme the more irrational the consequences can be, particularly when there are quite despotic attempts to engineer ‘culture change’, which I wrote about here. These sometimes involve prescriptions not just for the way employees behave, but also for what values they should have. This is an example of what Habermas referred to as the tendency in contemporary western society for rational schemes of improvement to attempt colonise the life-world[1]. However, as in my examples above, they are likely to call out a variety of responses in staff, from obedience, to outward conformity, through to more or less public subversion, which may or may not be for the good of the collective undertaking.

In a deliberation on Reason in the Age of Science[2] the hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer reflected on what is unique about modernity in terms of scientific thinking and the pervasiveness of technology, which, he argues, leads to attempts to technologise social relations. For Gadamer, this massive expansion of technology, and instrumental ways of thinking, which produce it and derive from it, have resulted in both the maturity and the crisis of contemporary civilisation. Abstract, scientific thinking has brought about a very comfortable life for us in terms of our increased control of nature. But the ubiquity of technology has also caused a reversal of the way it is used. Previously technology was always subordinated to the command of the user – now ‘what has been artificially produced sets the new terms’[3]. We are stimulated and provoked into desires that we didn’t know we had. Secondly, according to Gadamer, we also lose flexibility in our exchanges with the world, particularly when the same techniques which are used to manipulate nature are applied to engineer social relations. ‘Whoever makes use of technology – and who does not? – entrusts himself (sic) to its functioning.[4]’. We are constantly adapting and responding, rather than creating, and we are much more exposed to manipulation, both through the media and through technologised forms of relating.

Gadamer is not arguing that our society has become completely determined by social technologists, but he does think that an expectation has become pervasive that we can master society by means of intentional planning. The expert, (in organisational terms, the leader or manager) who is an indispensable figure in the technical mastery of processes has replaced the old-time craftsman, and is also supposed to substitute for practical and political experience. This, according to Gadamer, is an expectation that s/he will never fulfil.

I think both of the instances I give above are good examples of the ways in which well-intentioned schemes to systematise and rationalise also bring about the irrational in terms of work process. They do so because they decrease the flexibility of employees to act and to exercise practical judgement, unless they do so subversively and in contravention of what was originally intended.

If you can prevent yourself following the footnotes to the end of the post, try and guess who offered this critique of scientific method when applied to the social:

“Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.”[1]

Perhaps this is a quotation from a post-Marxist sociologist, or a post-modern relativist worthy of being mocked by natural scientists such as Alan Sokal?

How about this quotation from the same person on the limitations of modeling social phenomena using statistical methods:

“Statistics of limited use because it proceeds on the basis of reducing complexity: it deliberately ignores the structure into which the individual elements are organized. We can talk in generalities, if, all things being equal, certain patterns will occur. We should have developed beyond the understanding that we are in search of simple regularities which will help us with predicting events. The idea that to be scientific we have to produce laws has proved very harmful.”[2]

Maybe these are the thoughts of a famous social anthropologist or a critical management scholar?

Or lastly, the observations of our eminent mystery guest on social complexity:

“Since a spontaneous order results from the individual elements adapting themselves to circumstances which directly affect only some of them, and which in their totality need not be known by anyone, it may extend to circumstances so complex that no mind can comprehend them all. Consequently, the concept becomes particularly important when we turn from mechanical to such ‘more highly organized’ or essentially complex phenomena as we encounter in the realms of life, mind and society. Here we have to deal with ‘grown’ structures with a degree of complexity which they have assumed, and could assume only because they were produced by spontaneous ordering forces.”[3]

Perhaps this is a contemporary of Norbert Elias, another process sociologist? Or perhaps another pragmatist arguing that ‘mind and culture developed concurrently rather than successively’[4]?

Our mystery scholar is in fact the Nobel prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek, whose ideas have been taken up widely both economically and politically during the last three decades, particularly in the US and UK, but not just there. Broadly speaking they have been adopted in defence of policies which have promoted the marketization and privatisation of economies and the ‘rolling back of the state’; it has been used to support the promotion economic activity, competitiveness and consumer choice as preeminent in government policy. The broad set of ideas, usually referred to as neoliberalism, originally fleshed out by Hayek, his contemporary Milton Friedman at University of Chicago, and a variety of other eminent figures like Karl Popper were enthusiastically taken up by both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and have remained the global economic orthodoxy ever since. They have also been imposed on the developing world in the form of structural adjustment, and have been recommended to relatively new democracies such as the Russian Federation.

So it might be worth spending a brief moment thinking about how we get from complexity theory to ideology. As someone who also draws on the complexity sciences to offer a critique of the way in which the natural sciences are introduced simplistically into organisational theory I am concerned about the company I am keeping. I am interested in the connection between being influenced by insights from the complexity sciences on the one hand, and its use in the justification of a particular social and economic order on the other. Thinking about complexity and ideology also makes me reflect upon how I am taking up these ideas. Is it at all possible to adduce ideas from the complexity sciences and not take up an ideological position?

One reaction which often arises routinely when I present insights from the complexity sciences to groups of managers is that if we take the idea of emergence seriously, then there must be no point in planning or managerial activity. Understood in caricature, the complexity argument is a form of quietism, a giving up on managerial interventions because nothing will transpire as one intends. We might as well all pack up and go home.

And to a certain extent, this is exactly the way that Hayek does understand the idea of spontaneous order and our dealings with it. For Hayek the intentions and activities of a myriad of individuals creates an order which nobody can predict, and which nobody can influence, except in very broad and abstract ways. The complexity of this plurality of activity is such that no single mind, or group of minds can comprehend it, even the wisest amongst us, and particularly not governments. This leads Hayek to idealise his idea of spontaneous order and argue that it is the best of all possible worlds, and encourages human autonomy and freedom. The greatest repository of human wisdom lies in system of rules which have evolved culturally. The role of governments, then, is at best to get out of the way, or at the most, to encourage more competitive activity. This has led to what contemporary political economist Philip Cerny has described as the ‘competition state’[5], where the activities of government have changed from protecting economic sovereignty to opening up their economies, particularly state functions, to corporate involvement.

Hayek argues in a similar vein to James C Scott when he points out that some of the greatest crimes against humanity have been caused by people acting in the name of doing good: there are often immoral consequences of morally inspired efforts to bring about social justice, he maintains. The best that can be achieved is equality of opportunity; the concept social or economic justice is an unhelpful distraction empty of content:

“It is now necessary clearly to distinguish between two wholly different problems which the demand for ‘social justice’ raises in the market order.

The first is whether within an economic order based on the market the concept of ‘social justice’ has any meaning or content whatever.

The second is whether it is possible to preserve a market order while imposing upon it (in the name of ‘social justice’ or any other pretext) some pattern of remuneration based on the assessment of the performance or the needs of different individuals or groups by and authority possessing the power to enforce it.

The answer to each of these questions is clearly no”.[6]

Hayek accepts that proper market functioning may produce inequalities which might look like unjust outcomes, but maintains that the concepts ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ simply do not apply, but are imposed constructions on outcomes which are naturally occurring. What we can focus on, he argues, since the outcome of our interactions is unpredictable, is that we engage with each other in a fair and just way. Equally, he has problems with the word ‘social’ since he finds it infused with a morality which he thinks it does not support: it is simply a description of a collective phenomenon. His attitude was reflected in Mrs Thatcher’s now famous observation that ‘there is no such thing as society: there are only individuals and their families’. What she was arguing here, I think, is that ‘society’ cannot act, but is simply the collective of the individual.

In the next post I will spend some time evaluating Hayek’s arguments by setting them alongside what may look superficially like similar arguments from Elias and Scott as a way of reflecting on ideology, ethics and politics. For the time being I think we can conclude that there is nothing inherently ‘progressive’ about a critique of existing taken-for-granted assumptions about the linear state of the social world. Insights from the complexity sciences can be just to support a whole range interpretations of, and remedies for, the functioning of the social. 

So was it right that he was sacked or not?

Those of you who are not cricket fans, or not UK residents (or both) may not have heard that Kevin Pietersen, England’s best but most unpredictable and unreliable batsman, has been told that he no longer figures in the plans of those managing the England cricket team. This follows a disastrous tour of Australia where the team lost all of their matches in the annual grudge series with the Australian team known as the Ashes. (The competition is called the Ashes following England’s shock defeat to Australia in 1882, when the Sporting Times printed a mock obituary stating that English cricket had died and its ashes had been sent to Australia. Every year since then the England team has struggled to wrest them back).

What is interesting about the sacking is the soul-searching it has provoked in the press well beyond the sports pages. This is not just because sport, to bowdlerize Clausewitz, is war by other means (or if you like, and after Elias,  the civilising of our aggressive instincts in highly interdependent societies), but because it appeals to our sense of identity, our ‘heroic we’. Pietersen’s sacking has provoked very strong emotion in a wide variety of people, not all of them avid cricket fans. Clearly, it’s not just about the game.

And the commentary in the press has not always followed the course that one might have predicted. So, for example, the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Oborne, the in-house conservative in what is an overtly conservative paper described the episode as a ‘morality tale for our times’. Oborne uses the story to mount a critique of neo-liberal economics and the kind of hyper-individualism that it breeds:

“Neo-liberals have little time for social institutions, are contemptuous of national borders, and dogmatically advocate the free movements of capital and people. They regard community, place and nation as worthless superstitions. Above all, they place the individual first.”

This is the kind of writing that one might expect to find in a newspaper tending to the left.

He argues that the England selectors made the right decision to dump Pietersen for his egotism and disloyalty (and here we stray onto much more familiar conservative territory). Nonetheless, Oborne draws attention to the ways in which what we as British people value has come to change over time. Previously: “It was assumed that men and women of exceptional gifts would devote lives of service to their community rather than further their own interests. It was recognised that extraordinary talents came by the grace of God and were not a mark of individual virtue.” The article promotes collective values, community, loyalty and team spirit.

Just as confounding was an article in the left-leaning Guardian newspaper by Martin Kettle. Here one might have expected to find exactly the hymn to collective values that are present in Oborne’s article. Instead, Kettle argues that despite Pietersen’s unreliability, the England team and selectors should have been able to work in a way which accommodated his genius. He goes on to say that Pietersen has been scapegoated, made to atone for all that was wrong with the miserable England performance in Australia. In his article he points to a variety of paradoxes of group life, like this one in politics:

“Like cricket, politics is a team game played by individuals who are preoccupied with their own success, to the extent of actively trying to do down those on their own side.”

Drawing on an article by a colleague in the Times he argues, again paradoxically, that the team and its managers moved to oust Pietersen because they needed him so much. In contemporary political life, he says, enormous emphasis is placed on conforming and being ‘on message’. We must make more room for, and learn to live with, errant geniuses, like Churchill, for example, if our teams, whatever shape they take, are to thrive. Kettle cleaves much more to the idea of individual genius, partly on the basis of being a classical music fan and making a parallel with the opera diva.

In general it seems to me that there are similar things going on in organizational life. Many work teams are struggling with the ongoing paradoxes of trying to achieve things together, although the problems of particular talented individuals may present themselves in much less extreme form.

There is a parallel between what Kettle argues about political life to what happens in today’s organisations, where a good deal of energy is spent by managers trying to convince employees to conform, either by ‘sharing the vision’, being positive and constructive, or hitting prereflected targets. It is important to pull together, but I understand these approaches to go beyond the appeal to the collective spirit and to be an attempt to cover over difference and contestation, and to get all employees to ‘align’ and point in the same direction, i.e. the direction of senior management’s choosing. It becomes much more about the managerialist principles of predicting and controlling. All organizations need to cohere, but equally, they also need to experiment, evolve and change. From a complexity perspective this is only possible through the exploration of difference which will usually involve conflict.

Another paradox of group life, then, is that teams may only cohere if they can be more open about and discuss the conflicts that they are enduring. There may be no resolution to differences, despite much current management literature assuming that conflict can be analyzed and responded to with managerial tools and techniques.[1] If conflict occurs, managerialism promises, then it can be tuned by managers using the Goldilocks principle: not too much, not too little, but just right.

In the Pietersen saga there is very little made public about the reasoning behind the decision: current coverage suggests that even Pietersen doesn’t know why he has been sacked, although one might guess that he has a pretty good idea. It does seem clear, though, that there has been very little discussion of the conflicts within the team, which is not the same as saying that the conflicts haven’t been expressed.

The psychoanalysts Smith and Berg[2] point out that group life is riven with paradoxical pressures which provoke anxiety amongst group members and can dissolve into stuckness, or polarized conflict. So, on the one hand we want to be a member of a group, but we want to retain our individuality. Equally, all groups have to focus on completing a task together and at the same time they have to look after the needs of group members. The ability to become involved in the working life of the group at the same time implies the ability to take a more detached view.

Smith and Berg suggest that groups may follow a number of strategies to avoid dealing with the emotional pain of working with their contradictions.  They may try to find a ‘middle ground’ of compromise hoping that the contradictions will disappear. They may try to settle on one pole of the paradox, as they seem to have done here with the Pietersen paradox (can’t live with him, can’t live without him), by expelling the supposed cause of the difficulty. In doing so they may have weakened themselves fundamentally. Or they may do what they have done up till now, which is to yo-yo between accommodation and rejection, first deciding they needed to drop him, then reversing the decision and trying to include him (before this final rupture).

In all these instances groups are trying to change the inherent nature of group life, Smith and Berg argue, where thriving groups have to be able to endure the opposing tensions that being a member of a group evokes.

Of course, there are also differences between a sports team and a work team: cricket is highly competitive, and teams may change from match to match, with new, talented newcomers coming through all the time. What is interesting here, though, is that the same human dilemmas present themselves again and again and throw up real difficulties for the managerial orthodoxy of predictability and control. (For a parallel example in football the film The Damned United is a very good example of the confounding of one of Britain’s most famous football managers, Brian Clough, by a group who refused to be led). Leadership and management are also ensemble improvisational activities which provoke strong and complex feelings in people, feelings which there is no alternative but to work through if organisations are to innovate and evolve.

Can leaders change organisational culture? – alternatives from a complexity perspective

What do we mean when we talk about the need to ‘change organisational culture’? This is a way of speaking which is now taken for granted, whether in relation to banking, the UK’s National Health Service or sometimes whole societies. What is organisational culture anyway, and to what extent can even the most powerful leaders and managers (or politicians) change it in ways that they decide? And if we were to conclude that it’s not possible to change culture, at least not in predictable ways, then why has this way of speaking and thinking become so widespread? What else might be going on, and what purpose does the culture-change narrative serve?

This year’s Complexity and Management Conference will follow on from last year’s discussion of leadership and will encourage the exploration of a term which is widely used but poorly understood. Participants will be encouraged to share their own experiences of organisational change, particularly when it is framed in terms of changes in culture. We will explore together the implications of the discourse of culture change for leaders and managers.

The key note speaker this year is Prof Ralph Stacey, co-founder of the Doctor of Management programme at UH and a groundbreaking scholar with his work on the complexity sciences and their relevance to leading and managing organisations.

The conference will be informal and highly participative, as in previous years. The conference fee will include all accommodation and food. The conference will be held at Roffey Park Institute in the UK: http://www.roffeypark.com as usual.

The booking page on the university website can be found here.

There is a discount for early-bird bookings before May 1st 2014. A more detailed agenda will follow, but the conference begins with a drinks reception @7pm on Friday 6th June and ends after lunch Sunday 8th June..

Participants wishing to set up a particular themed discussion in a working group during the conference should contact Chris Mowles: c.mowles@herts.ac.uk

I was working with a group of managers and we had been discussing how a lot of managerial work is about dealing with uncertainty. Things don’t work

out quite how you planned, surprises come out of left field, and your boss, or the organisation with which you are working closely, has just decided that something else is now a priority. What you came in to do in the morning has somehow gone off course by the afternoon, but you’re still responsible for your first priority. This was the link I had been making previously to the complexity sciences: I had been arguing that small changes can amplify into big differences, and social life arises in the interplay of differing intentions. But how do you know how to respond and what to pay attention to?

I suggested that we might work together with uncertainty with the group as an experiment the next morning, if they were up for it. We would meet with no agenda as such and the only task would be for the 26 of us to sit together in a room for an hour and a half and talk about how we cope with uncertainty, making links with organisational life, and noticing at the same time how we were dealing with the task together as we were dealing with it. I was explicit about the fact that this was a group method developed by the Institute of Group Analysis as a way of paying attention to process from within the process itself. I told them that would participate with them, but that I wouldn’t be in charge. I warned them that they might find it a bit uncomfortable and anxiety provoking, but they were a group of social work managers and no doubt they would have been in situations like this before.

They said they would like to try it.

When we started the next morning we sat together and I briefly reminded them what we had agreed to do. Hardly had I finished speaking before one person had come up with the idea of a round of introductions (26 people, 3 minutes each, that’s almost all the time used up already), and another suggested we make a list of themes and then prioritise and vote on them (this is in a country where there is a lot of devolved democracy and a lot of referenda). Within a minute someone had leapt up to grab a marker pen and started writing down suggestions about what we might talk about.

Suddenly there was a crisis of confidence. The themes that people suggested were quite broad and actually not very related to the theme of dealing with uncertainty that we said we would talk about. The person who wanted a round of introductions lobbied again for his idea, and meanwhile my colleague, with whom I was co-leading the workshop, got caught up in a discussion with another group member because he felt guilty about the fact that a list of participants hadn’t been circulated in advance, for one reason and another, which had contributed to the idea of the round of introductions in the first place. My co-leader was rebuked by another group member for taking up the space of the group. This wasn’t what we had agreed to do.

But what had we agreed to do and what were the outcomes that we were expected to produce? People vied for influence. We were in something of an impasse, with two or three different ideas about how we might proceed, and a certain jockeying for position amongst two or three vocal people.

People then began to look to me, one of the authority figures, to help them out. Wasn’t it a bit of a waste to have me there and not have the benefit of my expertise – perhaps I could just give then another lecture? Perhaps they could abandon this activity altogether and go into small groups and talk about what I had told them yesterday.

I reminded them that we had agreed to stick with this for an hour and a half, I encouraged them not go into small groups and pointed out that we had agreed a task: to talk about, and experience, dealing with uncertainty.

The group descended into silence.

This seemed to me a more measured response to the task we had agreed to undertake, more thoughtful. We sat more or less comfortably in silence for three or four more minutes and then someone began with an observation about how interesting it had been to experience the first twenty minutes where everyone had got caught up in the rush of the moment. Instead of entering gradually into an exploration of what the task might mean and how they might undertake it, they had fallen very quickly into routines that they were already familiar with: flip chart pen-grabbing, list-making, and introducing each other mechanistically. Even the voting was something which was taken for granted as a way of resolving differences in this particular country. I guess that they would have experienced each of these activities in almost every other workshop they had attended.

For the next hour or so group members began to engage much more skilfully with the task, talking about uncertain situations within their organisations, commenting on what they had found easy and difficult. At the same time others were able to make links to what we were doing together in the here and now. There were still some moments of crisis. Is this what they were supposed to be doing? Were they likely to achieve their outcomes? What were their outcomes anyway?

The discussion was very animated and involved almost everyone in the group. During the previous day maybe only six or seven people had spoken. Today, all but three do. People could not help themselves become involved in the discussion. This is something we remark upon – when things matter to us it is hard not to get caught up in the game of organisational life.

One participant remarked upon the fact that the hour and a half has gone very quickly, although they viewed the prospect of that length of session together with others with some trepidation. Another observes that although he championed the idea of formal introductions he was glad that we didn’t proceed with it, since he felt that he got to know other people much better through free association.

A number of things occurred to me after the session which we talked through together later on. Firstly, our existing ways of dealing with what we face in organisations don’t necessarily serve us well in new situations. We are quite likely to fall back on tried and tested routines, but these may or may not be useful when the challenge is different. Secondly, the idea that we form intentions first and then act on them was belied in this particular experiment. Mostly people could not help themselves pitching in, provoked as they were by what was going on around them. They discovered themselves in the act of participation, and sometimes their intervention was a surprise, even to themselves. We found out something that we already knew, that the game of organisational life is very involving, and, as Kierkegaard observed we live forwards and understand backwards. Thirdly, in sustained acts of improvisation and negotiation people can find their way forward if they can live with the anxiety of being together in a group and not knowing the ‘best way’ of proceeding. There is no ‘best way’ only the way that works for this particular group at the time. Fourthly, participants observed that when they were back in their organisations they often pitched into solving problems as though it were obvious what they should do. They spent very little time sitting with the discomfort of not knowing.

This last observation led them to ponder what they might do differently as managers to create more time and space for talking without any particular end in view.

Here is the abstract of my latest article on complexity and evaluation, which you can find here:

This article offers a critical review of the way in which some scholars have taken up the complexity sciences in evaluation scholarship. I argue that there is a tendency either to over claim or under-claim their importance because scholars are not always careful about which of the manifestations of the complexity sciences they are appealing to, nor do they demonstrate how they understand them in social terms. The effect is to render ‘complexity’ just another volitional tool in the evaluator’s toolbox subsumed under the dominant understanding of evaluation, as a logical, rational activity based on systems thinking and design. As an alternative I argue for a radical interpretation of the complexity sciences, which understands human interaction as always complex and emergent. The interweaving of intentions in human activity will always bring about outcomes that no one has intended including in the activity of evaluation itself.

Only one week to go before the close of the early bird rate for this year’s Complexity and Management Conference on organisational culture.

Book here.

Key note speaker: Prof Ralph Stacey

Good conversation, good food, great venue.

It has become axiomatic that organizations need to change their cultures in order to reform or modernise, or to adapt to a changing world, or to bring about some kind of improvement in performance. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in this kind of thinking is the idea that certain organizational cultures are more conducive to success than others, and that adopting a particular culture is likely to lead to organizational improvement. It has become a way of talking as though organizations can ‘have’ a culture which can be identified and changed from one state to another. Culture becomes reified, or ‘thing-like’, and is capable of being shaped and manipulated. Usually there is a close link in the discourse to values which are thought to relate causally and directly to behaviour. Restating the values required of staff, usually ones chosen by the Chief Executive or the senior team, is supposed to lead to improvements in the workplace.

As a counter to this idea of culture existing in one organisation as an object of intervention by senior staff, and as something manipulable over the short term, I would like in this post to think about culture evolving over the longer term in society at large with the sociologist Norbert Elias. In doing so we come to notice some of the paradoxical qualities of culture, how it both includes and excludes, and how it involves values as voluntary compulsions, which can take on the qualities of the sacred.

As we have explored elsewhere, Norbert Elias takes a highly social view of human beings. We are who we are because we are members of specific groups and live at a particular moment in history where social relations have evolved in particular ways. To a degree we take on national characteristics as well as personal ones according to our position in the social networks of the country, time and place in which we live. We participate in the habitus, the habituated life process of our society, which is both firm and elastic at the same time: we form it just as it is forming us. Elias studied the habitus of particular societies, especially Britain, France and Germany, as a form of enquiry into how specific national characteristics evolved as a consequence of longer term historical processes, how cultures emerged. For Elias these broader social processes were contributory factors in helping to explain how certain historical conditions, for example the rise of fascism in German, became possible. The evolution of highly interdependent societies also forms us psychologically: we develop a sense of self, with both an ‘I’ layer and a ‘we’ layer. However, in contemporary life, he argues, there have been significant changes in the I/we balance with the we-layer of our personalities has been pushed markedly to the background. We have become convinced that we are autonomous, separated individuals cut off from other, similar individuals. Our sense of we-ness is most likely to come to the foreground at times of national crisis or celebration.

In contemporary Britain the elections for the European parliament currently involve a great deal of debate about what it means to be British and how best to enhance a sense of Britishness, whether within or outside the European union. And similar arguments are currently taking place over the border in Scotland about what it means to be Scottish. Debates involve discussions of law and policy, but much more importantly they involve much trickier and inchoate deliberations about collective identity, which are much less easier to pin down.

In a book tracing the historical development of Nazi Germany, Norbert Elias (1997), himself a German Jew, reflects upon how nationalism came to take such a strong hold on the German bourgeoisie throughout the 19^th C leading up to WWI and WWII. What interests Elias, and is key to our argument here, is how concepts evolve and change over many decades, becoming part of the competition and co-operation between different groups in society, and then, as some come to dominate, they come to be taken for granted as natural and given national or class characteristics. They become a way of thinking which is unquestioned because it is part of the group and/or national identity: certain notions become part of a society’s ‘we-identity’, the self-beliefs and values of a whole group of people. A good example of this is the way in the which the National Health Service has come to be seen as the embodiment of Britishness to the extent that it became part of the UK Olympic ceremony. This is not to suggest that these ideas, even when they become embodied in institutions, are uncontested, (as we can see from the current privatisation of the NHS) or experienced everywhere the same, but what is intriguing for Elias is to see the:

…persistence with which certain patterns of thinking, acting and feeling recur, with characteristic adaptations to new developments, in one and the same society over many generations. It is almost certain that the meaning of certain key-words and particular undertones embedded in them, which are handed from one generation to another unexamined and unchanged, plays a part in the flexible continuity of what one otherwise conceptualises as ‘national character’. (1997: 127)

I want to draw attention to two aspects of Elias’ argument. One is that ‘patterns of thinking, feeling and acting’ arise in the co-operative/competitive relationship between groups in particular societies although some may come to dominate. And secondly, he regards national character, or culture, as both flexible and continuous. In other words, it arises as the consequence of struggle between groups which calls out both regularities and differences. It plays out in the politics of every day life both local and global and so is constantly fluctuating and changing. 

To continue, Elias comments on what he considers the barely understood processes of mutual identification which take place in highly developed mass societies. When people live together in large, highly differentiated populations, overseen by the same framework of governmental and administrative organizations, the links between them are much more complex than in simpler societies. Instead, he argues, they are woven together with symbolic emotional ties:

So, the emotional bonds of individuals within the collectivity which they form with each other crystallize and organize themselves around common symbols which do not require any factual explanations, which can and must be regarded as absolute values which are not to be questioned and which form focal points of a common belief system. To call them into question – to cast doubt on the common belief on ones own sovereign collectivity as a high, if not the highest possible value – means deviancy, a breach of trust; it can lead one to become an ostracized outsider, if nothing worse. (1997: 146)

This is Elias’ particular formulation of what Griffin (2002) has written about elsewhere drawing on Mead’s idea of ‘cult values’: collectively held ideals the conformity with which decides whether one will be included or excluded from a group. Here idealised symbols of social solidarity, such as nationalist language and symbolism, act as norms of inclusion and exclusion. It seems to me that it is precisely this that the more orthodox writers on organizational culture want to stake a claim to: they would like managers to set and be in control of what Bourdieu (1986) refers to as symbolic capital as a form of disciplinary control in organizations.

If one really could command it, it would be a big prize, because the symbols around which we identify provoke very strong feelings in us:

These symbols and the collectivity for which they stand attract to themselves strong positive emotions of the type usually called love. The collectivity is experienced and the symbols are represented as something apart from, something holier and higher than, the individuals concerned…whatever else it may be, it is also a form of self-love. (Ibid: 151)

If appeals to collective identity, in nations and in organisations, call out love as a form of self-love, then they are equally likely to provoke hate towards those who appear to be violating the symbol of love. This is a phenomenon we are currently experiencing in Britain in the run up to the elections, where strong feelings are being provoked towards non-British citizens in the belief that they are the prime cause of Britain’s problems.  In popular management literature such as Collins and Porras’ Built to Last there is an explicit intention to provoke such a collective identification, to develop a ‘cult-like culture’ in their own words. It is not hard to detect some of the totalitarian undertones of this kind of thinking, both in encouraging cult-like identification and in the divisiveness to which it leads. At the end of 1984 by George Orwell, and after a long period of incarceration and torture the hero Winston Smith realises that he ‘loves Big Brother’.

However, for Elias there are two principal difficulties related to the control of shared symbolic affiliation. Firstly, if the numbers of people caught up in the phenomenon are large, it can take on a self-amplifying momentum all of its own, which goes beyond the ability of any individual, or group of individuals to influence it. Self-amplifcation can produce both extreme and unpredictable social effects. As an example, there have been a number of high profile cases of ‘rogue traders’ in investment banks who over- interpreted their employer’s buccaneering attitude to trading by gambling illicitly with the bank’s money. Equally, stigmatising Romanians in political debates may be an expression of well-founded concerns about the influx of European workers into Britain, but it may also trigger much nastier xenophobia. This leads into Elias’ second point, that when symbols get taken up as group norms, disciplining individual members of the group as well as acting as a form of self-discipline through guilt, they can have contradictory effects: they can bind people to each other as well as uniting them against others, depending on the degree to which the norms are shared. In this sense they have both integrating and disintegrating effects, uniting some and dividing others. Nor is it always the case that shared symbolic values experienced as norms are all of a piece: they may well be contradictory and pull people in opposing ways.

Elias recognises, as does the orthodox management literature, the importance of mediating symbols in social life, symbols which can also be represented in particular people (for example, the Queen of the UK, the NHS, or perhaps the CEO of a company). They contribute to our sense of individual and collective identity. However, for Elias they can have paradoxical effects: they both include and exclude, unite and divide. These symbols and the collective ideals and values they call out, and which provoke strong feelings in people, cannot be controlled by anyone, since they can take on a dynamic of their own ‘through a self-escalating dynamic of mutual reinforcement (Ibid: 150)’. In this way I think Elias’s descriptions of the processual and evolutionary nature of culture undermines the orthodox management idea that it exists in some kind of equilibrium state, or that it is always integrating, or that it can be controlled in any way (although it may be mobilised in political arguments as we can see in the UK at the moment). It seems to me that he argues that it is constantly evolving and that the evolution is driven by the constant flux of integration/division co-operation and competition between groups. Cultures change as much by conflict as by convergence.

Already, then we can see some of the difficulties arising for organizational scholars who claim that culture, whatever they understand by it, can be harnessed and manipulated for the good of the company. First in Elias’s terms it is a kind of voluntary and collective identification involving affect: since it is freely given, identification is a hard phenomenon to oblige someone to give. And second it both integrates and divides at the same time. Even if leaders and managers were able to manipulate culture it would still play out in contradictory and unpredictable ways.

References

Bourdieu, P (1977) Outline of A Theory Of Practice: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, J. and Porras, J. (2005) Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, New York: Random House.

Elias, N. (1997) The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Griffin, D. (2002) The Emergence of Leadership: Linking Self-Organization and Ethics, London: Routledge.

I found myself sitting among a large group of experienced managers who were being updated on the strategy process by the deputy CEO of their particular organisation. He proceeded to explain how he had gone about developing the next corporate strategy in terms which I have critiqued extensively on this site. In critiquing systemic managerialism previously I have always been anxious not to caricature, not to set up an easy straw man opponent in order to knock it down. I have been concerned that if no-one these days really proceeds to explain strategy as vision-mission-values, sets up working groups to develop organisational values to underpin the vision, and then suggests that members of staff who don’t follow the values may have to go and work elsewhere, then there is nothing really to critique.

But what I found on this occasion was a text book example, perhaps a text book still in its first edition, of what I engage with elsewhere as idealised design. Originating in cybernetic systems theory and developed in the thinking of Russell Ackoff, idealised design assumes that fomenting excitement in staff who work in an organisation towards an idealised end point, increases motivation, commitment and performance. There is very little evidence for this claim, and given how long these methods have been used in organisations with change-weary staff, it would be just as easy to make the opposite claim that such abstract idealisations are just as likely to call out cynicism, negativity and disbelief particularly in the UK. Judging from the conversation which took place later at coffee, I think the group in which I was sitting may have been strung out along the spectrum from enthusiasm at one end, to bafflement and frustration at the other.

A number of things struck me about the experience of participating in this presentation. The first was the way the logic of the method distracted the speaker from the reactions of his audience. As he proceeded to explain in rather Jesuitical fashion how he and his team had worried about the order of the words in the vision statement, whether it should be ‘internationally renowned for being the leading X’, or rather ‘renowned internationally for being the leading X’ he failed to notice how many people in the audience, either literally or metaphorically, were sitting with their heads in their hands. In the first instance the vision looked very much like the vision from the previous strategy, as far as anyone present could remember it. And secondly, a number of people in the audience had worked for other organisations who also aspired to being ‘the leading X’, ‘recognised as the leading X’, or internationally renowned for being the leading X’. A formula is no more or less convincing just because it is repeated endlessly. What were the chances of success if everyone else was pursuing a similar strategy?

The second was that where the speaker expressed doubts about word order, he entertained none about the assumptions upon which his thinking rested. Rather than noticing and responding to the disquiet of a number of his audience, expressed through body language, and latterly through questions, instead the speaker continued to warm to the abstract logic of his boxes and to insist that he knew what he was doing. At one point, and perhaps in order to convince us, he produced slides with empty boxes arranged in hierarchies which were yet to be filled in in the next round of work. Strategy as wordless, hierarchically nested boxes held aloft by the logic of the thinking.

The time set aside for questions proved a rather testy affair. Questioners working within the paradigm wanted to clarify it and dig it deeper. Since it was so generalised and abstract, most of the words on the slides could be taken up in a variety of different ways. Those approaching it from a critical position, for example asking whether an organisation can really ‘have’ values, evoked defensive responses from the speaker, who reasserted that of course, the strategy wasn’t perfect, but he knew how to ‘do’ strategy.

All in all I found it rather a dispiriting meeting. Where a senior manager had proceeded with the intention of uplifting his audience with an aspirational future he had instead confused many and demoralised some. This is partly to do with  the method he had chosen which dealt in abstract terms very far removed from the daily experience of most of his audience. But it was also due to his inability to notice and respond to what was going on around him and in relation to what he was saying and doing. The greatest failure was an absence of mutual recognition: the senior manager failed to recognise the reaction and concerns of his audience, while many in the audience failed to recognise in the strategy and how it was being presented, their every day concerns.

As an outsider you might have cause to worry about this organisation where senior managers have a greater commitment to their slides and the systemic method underpinning them than the quality of participation between people. If you thought that the future health of an organisation was not to be found in the logic of nested boxes, but in the spontaneous responsiveness of senior managers to what is going on you might conclude that there is still much strategy work to be done here.

Having written about the experience of attending a hollow strategy event in the last post, I was interested hear criticism levelled at Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella for the address on strategy he gave staff recently. It is entitled ‘Bold ambition and our core’ and seems to be a terrific example of managerialist thinking (or perhaps lack of thinking).

After setting out an understanding of what the core of the company is, which seems to revolve around technology and the ‘customer experience’ Nadella then continues in the following way about the company culture:

Our ambitions are bold and so must be our desire to change and evolve our culture.

I truly believe that we spend far too much time at work for it not to drive personal meaning and satisfaction. Together we have the opportunity to create technology that impacts the planet.

Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture to deliver on this core strategy. Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned. Our priorities will be adjusted. New skills will be built. New ideas will be heard. New hires will be made. Processes will be simplified. And if you want to thrive at Microsoft and make a world impact, you and your team must add numerous more changes to this list that you will be enthusiastic about driving.

What I suppose Nadella’s critics noticed is that he has written so much, 3,000 words, while saying nothing at all. Additionally one notices the contrast between the rousing title of the speech and the rather mundane list of future activities in the third paragraph, all of which are expressed in the passive tense.  The third paragraph seems to say that every single activity that people are currently doing, i.e. hiring and firing, adjusting their responsibilities, making changes and some improvements to the way that they do the work, will continue pretty much as it does at the moment, and this constitutes a bold strategy (although the language seems to have stripped all human beings out of the processes).

‘New ideas will be heard’.

Notice too the rather threatening sting in the tail of the last sentence: ‘if you want to thrive at Microsoft…you will be enthusiastic about driving (change)’. I think Edgar Schein referred to this as coercive persuasion and this is not a very subtle example of it.

Of course this also says something about the personality of the CEO and what they think good rousing communication might be, but for me, and for Nadella’s critics, it also speaks a lot about the vacuity of managerialism. This is pure MBA-speak: grandiose talk of change and ambition which comes down to a simple list of every day activities rounded out with slightly threatening warnings about not conforming to the vision, however you might understand it. I am reminded of Alvesson and Sveningssons’ observations about leadership talk: it is usually highly inflated on the one hand, but is unsubstantiated by leaders in their study being able to point to anything extraordinary that they are actually doing.[1]

For me there appears to be more promising thinking in Nadella’s address a bit later on when he strays into philosophy by quoting Nietzsche on courage, although this too provoked much hilarity from his critics:

A few months ago on a call with investors I quoted Nietzsche and said that we must have “courage in the face of reality.” Even more important, we must have courage in the face of opportunity.

Nadella appeals to the importance of courage as part of his strategy for developing Microsoft but it is not immediately clear what he means. He goes on to say though that if individuals in his company do not change themselves ‘one individual at a time’ as he puts it (although there is no great insight into how they might do this or what it might mean to change) then they will lack the courage to make the transformation he considers necessary for the company’s evolution. With managerialism it usually needs to be transformation, rather than just change.

I think Nadella may be on to something, but not in the reduced and individualised way he deploys the term.

Nietzsche writes quite a lot about courage and reality, but here is one of the things I think he means by it based on my reading of the Twilight of the Idols:

Courage in the face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucy-dides and Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality-consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control-consequently he retains control over things.

Nietzsche compares Plato unfavourably with Thucydides because he thought the former took refuge in idealisation, while the latter was capable of writing history which dealt with politics and power in all of its messy, and sometimes ugly reality. Whether Nietzsche was right in his assessment of Thucydides and Plato is another matter entirely, but the contrast he is making is between abstraction from and immersion in the everyday politics of social life. Courage for Nietzsche is the ability to confront life as it is lived. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he says this:

He who seeth the abyss, but with eagle’s eyes-he who with eagle’s talons graspeth the abyss: he hath courage.

What I think he means by this is that courage arises from the ability to confront a difficult reality and the depth of any predicament in which we find ourselves.

This is rather a long way from the rather anodyne list of tasks that Nadella thinks confronts Microsoft, i.e. hiring and firing, doing new things, dropping some old activities, starting some new ones. He does at one stage mention the importance of challenging orthodoxy, but it would be difficult to take strength from this given that the speech as a whole is long testament to the reduced imagination of managerial thinking. In and of itself it challenges no orthodoxies whatsoever.

By contrast I was struck by the way that the new Archbishop of Canterbury has been dealing directly with some of the entrenched and potentially divisive problems that have beset the Church of England over the past decades (not that I have any stake in that particular game). Having steered the reversal of the decision taken two years ago to prevent the elevation of women priests as bishops, Welby now wants to address gay marriage, although he was keen not to rush to the second without working through the first. He was going to move the church forward, he said, by paying attention to the quality of conversation, encouraging people to recognise each other better as they struggle to address difficult themes. Some of the controversies in the C of E could split it from top to bottom, but Welby is keen not to duck them.

Of course Welby himself is an ex-executive of BP, so has management and leadership experience. Whether it is his management experience and/or what he derives from his faith that makes him act the way he does, he seems to me to be giving a much better example of courage in the Nietzschian sense Nadella refers to. Life, he argues, is difficult, and there is no avoiding talking about it.

[1] Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2003) Managers doing leadership: The extra-ordinarization of the mundane,  Human Relations, Volume 56(12): 1435–1459.

Conference theme: Exploring our experience of everyday politics in organisations

How do we negotiate degrees of freedom with each other in what we can increasingly experience as regimes of disciplinary power in organisational life? How do grand schemes for whole-organisation transformation play out in every day relationships between people?

This conference will invite participants to discuss and reflect upon the every day politics of getting things done together, noticing the negotiations, compromises and improvisations which are necessary to take the next step.

Between now and then we will be posting further reflections on the topic on this the Complexity and Management blog.

The key note speakers this year are  Svend Brinkmann,  who is Professor in general psychology and qualitative methods as well as Co-director of the Center for Qualitative Studies, and Professor Patricia Shaw, co-founder of the Doctor of Management programme at UH and currently working at Schumacher College. Here is Svend’s profile page at Aalborg university http://personprofil.aau.dk/117579?lang=en and here is Patricia Shaw’s at Schumacher College: http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/teachers/patricia-shaw .

The conference will be informal and highly participative, as in previous years. The conference fee includes accommodation and food and will be held at Roffey Park Institute in the UK: http://www.roffeypark.com

The booking page on the university website will be set up in the New Year.

A more detailed agenda will follow, but the conference begins with a drinks reception @7pm on Friday 5th June and ends after lunch Sunday 7th June 2015.

Participants wishing to set up a particular themed discussion in a working group during the conference should contact Chris Mowles: c.mowles@herts.ac.uk

I was reminded of the importance of anxiety and the idea of emotional contagion the other day when I sat with a group of not-for-profit trustees who were being given a presentation by an auditor from a big corporate firm of accountants. The auditor had been asked to present on his experience of auditing other not-for-profits to identify what other organisations were concerned about and how they were dealing with it. The trustees saw it as a way of ‘benchmarking’ the field so that they could be reassured that they were focusing on the right things as they undertook their roles and developed a new strategy.

What transpired in the meeting made me think about how certain ideas about leadership and management are spread partly because they have emotional valency, and thus are more likely to be taken up without being challenged. For the presentation was not just an overview of the sector but also carried a strong ideological message wrapped in an anxiety narrative. This was that adopting a particular approach to organisations and management based on an especially dominant orthodoxy is a way of belonging to an in-group in especially turbulent times. To emulate others would mean ameliorating anxiety about not keeping up, not being professional and not being alongside the people who really know. 

Just to back up a bit, the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal has studied the way that emotion can be transferred from one mammal to the rest of a group, playing a very important role in the group life of mammals (like us humans). In his extended reflection on empathy[1] he explores how troupes of baboons, or mobs of meerkats can pick up and amplify the strong feelings of one of their number. So a spooked meerkat on sentry duty, or a distressed baboon can quickly call out a strong resonating emotion in others in the group. Such an ability has an important role for the survival of the group. The difficulty for mammals without a theory of mind, ie those without the psychological capacity to take the perspective of others as elephants and bonobos can, is that they are unable to know what to do about the contagious emotion except get distressed as well (and perhaps flee for safety). De Waal gives a number of examples where mammals do have the ability to recognise and empathise with the distress of others in their group and go on to do something about it. In other words, bonobos can take a perspective on the situation others are in, and relate it to their own. This gives them the option not just of picking up and amplifying the emotion but of doing something practical about it.

So, to return to the presentation, the auditor presented sensitively and intelligently but nonetheless soon resorted to the usual tropes and taken-for-granted assumptions about change and the way organisations should be managed. For example, he told the group of trustees that ‘remaining with the status quo is not an option’, that the organisation would need to transition from management to leadership, and that they should concentrate on being as strategic as possible ‘going forward’. The idea that change was an urgent and unavoidable necessity was publically accepted by the group without demur, irrespective of what they might have been thinking privately. That there was a difference between leadership and management, that we would recognise it when we saw it and could consciously change from one to the other was equally unchallenged publically and taken as given.

Producing a variety of four by four grids and frameworks, the auditor encouraged the trustees to ensure that they drove their organisation from ‘threshold performance to leading edge’. They needed to make sure that every aspect of what they were doing was ‘best in class’ and he promised to show them what to concentrate on to make it so: aptitude, core competences, values and skills base. The first thing to focus on would be a ‘skills audit’ of the board itself. And although these were trustees who responsible for a not-for-profit organisation, the terms ‘business’, ‘business strategy’ and ‘business model’ were liberally sprinkled throughout the presentation. It was a given that everyone in the room was responsible for a business, that there was a ‘class’ that they could be best in, and that they could measure and improve performance towards identified business ends.

Next came the most alarming slide of all which related to the management of risk, which was elided by the auditor with the idea of uncertainty. The auditor showed a tabular risk management grid with criteria on the left hand side and risk factors along the bottom so that the grid could be completed. This particular example seemed to have an enormous number hatched in distressing shades or red which even made me, an independent outsider, begin to panic. A number of the squares related to financial management, which in many organisations has become a dominating preoccupation. To be fair to the auditor, he also encouraged the trustees not to be risk-averse, given that opportunities and innovations also arise out of risk. However, he didn’t point out that the biggest risks to organisations often come from uncertainty: what we don’t know that we don’t know.

There were a number of threads to this anxiety narrative which threatens by emotional contagion: there is an imperative for change, leadership is the answer, trustees must measure, control, drive up standards, worry about money, stay focused until they are best in class. Above all they must be strategic, whatever that means.

It is easy to see how a group of trustees would come away from such a meeting feeling relieved that they had been given a sharp lesson in the way the world works, and had been given some insights into how others were tackling similar problems to their own. They might have emerged paradoxically both anxious and gratified at the same time. The whole presentation was as much an emotional as an intellectual experience and gave me some insights into how dominant ideas come to dominate. It made me also realise the importance of perspective-taking as a potential escape route from simply copying everyone else through emotional contagion. That’s the way others might see it, but how does the world look from where we are standing?

[1] De Waal, F. (2009) The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, London: Souvenir Press.

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s chief scientist Jayne Lawrence gave an interview on the BBC on Wednesday 5^th November arguing that doctors needed ‘binding targets’ to reduce the over-prescription of antibiotics. Despite the fact that everyone knows we are becoming resistant to antibiotics, including and especially doctors, still the amount of antibiotics prescribed has risen rather than fallen both in the UK and across the world. It was unclear from the interview with the BBC journalist exactly how these binding targets would work – and Dr Lawrence was taxed on this very point by the interviewer. What happens when the annual target for prescribing antibiotics has been reached and yet there are more patients who need them? However, one of key her arguments was that targets help GPs keep the issue ‘in mind’.

This is a good example of what has become an accepted response to a general, population-wide problems. It has become taken for granted that the first recourse must be to set a target and preferably to make it binding. So we have the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for social development in developing countries, global emissions targets which are binding depending on whether a particular country has signed up to the Kyoto protocols or not, and a variety of targets for the NHS, Education and schools in the UK with more on the way (the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has just announced forthcoming waiting time targets for mental health patients). These are then backed up by apparatuses for scrutiny and control so that the targets can be enforced and made ‘binding’.

On this blog I have posted a variety of articles here, here and here where I have suggested that setting targets has become axiomatic in organizational contexts as a way of declaring seriousness of intent and sometimes moral purpose; as a way of exercising disciplinary control by ‘naming and shaming’, including and excluding when targets are taken up as cult values; and as an authoritarian theory of motivation (that staff in organizations will not do things unless they are forced to do them and then inspected to make sure that they really have).

One way or another targets are usually met by staff in organizations, but this often tells us nothing about the gaming strategies, subterfuge and aspects of the work process which have been neglected in order to do so. It is not hard to think of examples where staff in organizations have hit the target but missed the point, or confused what is countable with what is valuable. What we notice about targets is that they do not just measure the work, they shape it at the same time.

What I was struck by in this interview was Dr Lawrence’s idea about what it means to hold something ‘in mind’ and the link one could make to ideas of motivation and identity. It seems to me that the idea of a target carries with it an extrinsic assumption of motivation – in other words we need some kind of external reference point to do the right thing. Some rule or target ‘outside’ needs to impact on individual minds ‘inside’. A similar approach has been adopted in the NHS concerning the values of nurses, midwives and care staff. The six ‘C’s, care, competence, compassion, communication, courage and commitment will be widely promoted within the NHS and will be used as the basis of hiring, firing and promotion. Promotion within the NHS is dependent on at least an outward show of adhering to the six ‘C’s, which is elicited in individual appraisals.

In contrast to the news item, the previous week I had met two NHS colleagues who were talking about a project they had been engaged in to reduce the number of patient falls in their hospital, which seemed to me to be working with an intrinsic theory of motivation and a very different and social understanding of what it means to hold something in mind.

Patients falling over in hospital, particularly if they are frail and elderly, is an endemic problem in a variety of care environments and all hospitals monitor and publish their fall rates. At the very least falls seriously disrupt patients’ care and at worst can lead to serious illness and even death, so it is right and proper that managing and preventing falls should be a high priority amongst nursing and care staff.

But how might overstretched and under-recognized nursing staff keep the patient’s potential for falling over ‘in mind’, particularly if there is a prevailing and unhelpful taken-for-granted assumption that elderly people falling over is inevitable and unavoidable?

The two NHS colleagues I met undertook to work with nurses in a particularly shabby and neglected ward where the patients had dementia and the fall rate was unacceptably high. But they refused to set targets or take an overtly disciplinarian approach. Instead, one of the colleagues I met, an experienced nurse herself, worked on a daily basis alongside nurses on the ward encouraging them to make sense of what they were doing as they were doing it, and particularly so around incidents where patients had fallen. The other colleague worked on securing her the organisational legitimacy to continue to work in this way. The premise, then, was that nurses on the ward were engaged in a social activity together which would become more visible through the cycle of action and reflection on action, a method which I have written about elsewhere on this site, and which is aimed at greater reflection and reflexivity on the part of practitioners. The nurses were invited to take greater notice of what they are doing in relation to others, particularly the patients, and to bring this more prominently to mind as a social activity. This also involved the practitioner confronting nurses on some of their assumptions that falls were inevitable and reigniting their ability to place themselves in the shoes of others. On one occasion the practitioner colleague challenged a nurse who had said that falls were inevitable (and by implication acceptable) by asking her how she would feel if the person falling were her mother. The practitioner was working alongside nurses as a support, as critical friend, as a model, as an enquirer and as a facilitator of reflection and reflexivity.

One way of understanding her interventions with the nurses was that they were aimed at making nurses more conscious of processes of mutual recognition, of making the nurses more mindful of themselves in relation to others. This also helped bring about a different sense of ‘we’ identity, as a group of practitioners who were mindful of falls. It provoked conversations about who ‘we’ are, what ‘we’ think we are doing, and what ‘we’ care about. From the testimonies of the nurses involved in the project it seemed to make the idea of falls and their prevention easier to hold in mind because they were integral to practice and talking about practice and what the group valued as nurses.

The two NHS colleagues set out a very interesting alternative to the instinctive recourse to targets and extrinsic approaches to motivation, where it is assumed that care staff need some kind of external reference in order to behave well. However, this way of working is both labour intensive and takes time, even though the approach has brought about a dramatic reduction in the number of falls.

Just published:

Managing in Uncertainty: Complexity and the Paradoxes of Everyday Organizational Life, Routldege.

Browsing the bookshop at Schiphol airport I picked up the Harvard Business School handbook on leadership which is supposed to contain the ten must-read articles of the last couple of decades. In the book you can find the usual taken for granted tropes and separations: that there is a difference between leadership and management, that managers are of course needed as well, it’s just that they don’t have what George Bush senior referred to as the ‘the vision thang’, that today’s speeded up world demands more leadership not less, and that if not all leaders need to be or can be transformational, they do at least need to be authentic.

Authentic.

One explanation for the move to authenticity is, as the particular chapter revealed, that there have been thousands of scholarly studies produced about leadership without our being any the wiser about how we might become good leaders ourselves. There is no recipe: ‘what a relief!’ (states the chapter). The answer, then, is to be our authentic leaderly selves. This involves being self aware and conscious of our story, being clear about our passions, responding constructively to feedback and learning how to empower others. All of this is brought about by the power of self-scrutiny. We pull ourselves up by our boot straps by scrutinising ourselves intensively and realising our own shortcomings.There can be no surprise about the individualised nature of this kind of thinking and its self-referential nature. Other people are bit-part players in the process, although one of the ‘world renowned leaders’ the authors interviewed was prepared to listen constructively to feedback from his second wife. His second wife, note.

There is a good deal of good contemporary critical literature calling into question this solipsistic rendering of authenticity. One such author is Michael Crawford whose most recent book The World Beyond Your Head: how to flourish in an age of distraction (British title) encourages us to move beyond what he sees as the radical subjectivism. In other words, if we think of ourselves as autonomous individuals separated from everyone else and from the world then we can only be our own referent. It leaves us cut loose from the world in which we operate and the people who matter to us, as though we can be our own best guide. He argues instead that our inner experience does not come to us pre-given but is only made intelligible to us within a prior shared world of meaning.

Unfortunately we live in a society which champions a radical form of individualism based on a distorted notion of ‘choice’ which sets about dismantling opportunities for these same shared worlds of meaning. In my opinion there are good examples in the UK in the assault on the BBC, the potential privatisation of the NHS, the closing of libraries, any number of instances where goods held in common are deemed to work against sovereign autonomy. In modern society a premium is placed on atomism, where we are all supposed to work out for ourselves what to do and who to be. This can lead to fragmentation of the public world, but also fragmentation of the self: this year’s speaker at the Complexity and Management Conference Svend Brinkmann has as his current research project the proliferation of depression in Denmark, which he sees as directly linked to the prevalence of atomism and instrumentalism that pervades contemporary society. We are encouraged to fall back on ourselves and our own abilities to make our way in a complex world.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor encourages a reappraisal of the idea of authenticity[1]. The initial moral motivation in favour of authenticity was based on the idea that of free expression to overcome the arbitrary authority of medieval societal structures of both religion and state. The imperative to express ourselves was also a demonstration of independence and a bid for fulfilment starting with Augustine, who, according to Taylor, argued that the road to God passed through a reflexive awareness of ourselves. There is a moral imperative for each of us, argues Taylor, to express our own humanity in our own way.

However, he goes on to point out that the human mind is dialogical not monological, and that I discover who I am in dialogue with significant others. Identity is not internally generated, but is similarly negotiated with others. In parallel with Crawford’s argument set out in the paragraphs above, Taylor maintains that the quest for authenticity demands a shared horizon of significance; in other words, it takes place against a background of things of value that we hold in common with others. It is on this basis that shared action becomes possible rather than each of us being thrown back on ourselves and our own resources in order to overcome the pressures and demands of contemporary society. Authenticity in these terms is also the quest to realise myself in the company of others so that they too might realise themselves, my fate being intertwined with theirs.

Thinking again about leadership then, perhaps leaders should spend less time in isolation contemplating their own inner authenticity and should get out more. They might find themselves engaged full-on in the hurly-burly of every day organisational life having to listen, negotiate, and persuade, and they might in turn be persuaded. They might more fully realise themselves in the company of others so that they too may realise themselves.

[1] Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.