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Leadership development in a fragile state

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My colleague Nick Sarra and I were asked to work with some practicing managers and leaders in what is usually described as a ‘fragile state’ in Africa. The country has been plunged into conflict for decades, and this has had a profound effect on social relations and the ability to get things done. Conflict still breaks out sporadically, making parts of the country off-limits,  potentially reactivating the tensions which still exist between groups living elsewhere in the country, especially in the capital. The government struggles to provide basic services, so the country is dominated by international aid agencies, development organisations and the representatives of international governments who each have their own sets of policies, procedures and priorities. This becomes visible the moment one steps off the plane: the airport car park is full of 4x4s, each sporting its own logo, and often there to meet, or disgorge development workers with their wrap-around shades and desert fatigues. Without the agencies this country would not be able to survive, but at the same time it feels a bit like an occupation.

What does it mean to work with leaders and managers in these circumstances, where the whole country, let alone the organisations they work in, is caught up in conflict causing even more uncertainty and unpredictability?

Nick and I drew on the thinking which informs the Doctor of Management programme at the University of Hertfordshire to put together a loosely formulated curriculum for the two and half days we spent together. The  doctoral programme at UH combines the natural and social sciences, along with thinking derived from the group analytic tradition, to develop unique insights and methods for inquiring into the everyday activity of practising managers and leaders. The programme sits in the critical management tradition: that is to say that it calls into question some of the taken-for-granted assumptions about management and leadership practices and theory in order to explore alternative understandings.

We guessed that our participants would have had enough of people coming to their country telling them about the latest models and fads of management, and as far as possible we should create as much opportunity as time allowed to talk about what was important to them.

We spent most of the time talking together, but these conversations were informed by the following ideas for a ‘curriculum’, such as it was. The group spent some time adjusting to the fact that there would be very few lectures, very few notes to take and an assumption that they were free to talk about what was on their minds. We spent:

  • A morning of getting to know each other as an opportunity for thinking about listening, reflection and reflexivity and the importance of relationships. This was nothing new to the participants, but were topics which they felt they did not usually have permission and/or time to explore on development events on management they had experienced previously. The themes of reflection and reflexivity were developed further throughout the weekend since the convenors guessed that these would as useful as any other skills needed by leaders and managers experiencing situations of extreme uncertainty. The capacity for reflexivity may afford a greater ability to act more skillfully in demanding situations.
  • A short sociological lecture on power and its role in emergent social processes with opportunities for participants to explore their own power relationships at work/community, and its constraining/enabling potential. In addition, there was another lecture on our interdependence and the relationship between groups, including insider/outsider intra- and inter-group dynamics based on the process sociology of Norbert Elias.
  • A longer lecture on group dynamics and the emotions that being in relation with others provokes in the workplace which is largely undiscussable in most professional settings. Participants were encouraged to consider the role of envy, rivalry, loss and anxiety, amongst other emotions and feelings, and how these contribute to the uncertainty of every day organisational life.
  • Two group meetings which ran without agenda and without anyone leading the group formally. These meetings enabled the participants to bring to the fore their own concerns and to discuss them in their own way. It also enabled further reflection on the group of participants as a temporary organisation in itself.
  • Two evaluative sessions where participants were encouraged to find other ways of thinking about the quality and value of what they had been involved in other than comparing against pre-determined targets (of which there were none for this particular course).

Participants shared views on the constraints and limitations of the current aid regime which shapes the organisations, and in which many of them work. The main characteristics of the aid relationship which they found most constraining were to do with the overly-demanding reporting requirements of donors; unrealistic expectations of linear cause-effect in turbulent conditions; hierarchical and often authoritarian working relationships in INGOs which were also permeated with racist assumptions about the capabilities of the local population; over-bureaucratic ways of working. Participants discussed power relationships between white and black, and between Africans from different African nations employed in this particular country. They also began to reflect on the relationships within the room where two white facilitators convened a development programme for an entirely African group. This also produced ambivalent feelings in the group, which could be a useful source of criticality.

In beginning to discuss inequalities in general, participants also started to explore sexual harassment in the workplace which was something every woman in the group had suffered. Each had a moving story to tell. Although the group seemed supportive of the idea that is was predominantly women who suffered from the culture of sexual harassment, nonetheless some of the men also had stories about how they too had felt compromised by more junior women offering sexual favours in return for organisational advancement. In other words, in order for a culture of sexual harassment to persist it is likely to be co-created by both men and women in different ways. The topic of gender inequalities and sexual harassment also provoked disagreement in the group, which the participants started to explore, including some of their assumptions about how men and women ‘should’ behave.

The question of ethics came up again and again throughout the two and half days, as each participant offered examples of the compromises involved in being a member of a group, particularly if that group is colluding in corrupt activity. The conversation ranged over more obvious moral cases of right and wrong to explore more subtle, intractable or ambiguous situations that participants had found themselves in at work. The group gave participants a forum to explore their concerns and anxieties, which they became more confident in using as the weekend progressed.

One strong theme which developed over the weekend was that social life is co-created – we contribute to patterns of relating and are shaped by these same relationships. This led participants to reflect upon the way they are affected by factionalism in their own country and how they may themselves contribute to it, even in small ways. For example, one participant mentioned the fact that she had very few dealings with her next-door neighbor, perhaps because they are from a different tribe, but has strong relationships with people from her own tribe, even though they live further away. This led her to reflect on why this might be and what she might do about it: could she be contributing in a small way to perpetuating factionalism in her every day ways of being?

The participants have been exposed to the uncertainty of everyday life in ways which it is difficult for the convenors to imagine. We could support them with some concepts to help them express what was important to them, but apart from that they needed little encouragement once we had all got over our initial anxieties.

I expect to develop these themes further when we work with the same group later in the year ahead.

 


Organising as conversational activity

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‘Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps which have gone before. You listen for a while until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument, then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or the gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late. You must depart. And you do depart with the discussion still vigorously in progress.’

Burke, K. (1941) The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, pp110-1.

The above quotation encapsulates for me what it’s like joining an organisation, as a consultant, or as a new employee, understood from a pragmatic perspective. On entering an organisation you pitch into an argument which is already going on and in which there are several threads of heated discussion. It’s a struggle to join in, to understand what is being said and what it might mean for what you do next because you don’t yet have enough history with this particular group. You take up a role and become part of the action, influencing and being influenced. Once in the organisation, not to participate is as significant as participating, because people have already noticed you. Do you have anything to say? There’s no ‘safe space’ that people sometimes crave in team away-days, and nor is there a view from outside what is going on where you can make sense independently, somehow uninfluenced. The moment you speak your ‘truth’ you have become part of the discussion; you have taken sides in organisational politics.

For the pragmatists groups of people talking together, arguing, making alliances, trying not to make alliances, clarifying what we mean by what we say, is how knowledge if produced. It is fallible knowledge, good enough for now until circumstances, and the turn the heated debate takes obliges us to think differently. In doing so, thinking differently, we understand ourselves and the argument we are part of, anew. We have to decide how to take the next step, but having taken the next step, everything looks slightly different from the new position.

There might be some advantage for those engaged in this situation of flux if they can use their reflective intelligence. Although there is no stepping out of the discussion it may be more or less possible to participate but at the same time to notice how your participation influences things, and how you are influenced. The ability to notice the repeated patterns of this particular episode of hurly burly may offer different options for you and the other discussants. But it may also not be an advantage for long. It is hard to maintain an understanding of plural points of view, particularly if they are changing as the discussion changes. Is it possible to maintain your own argument and be radically open to other arguments both at the same time?

These, then, are some key ideas from pragmatic philosophy which are helpful for thinking about organisational life. Organising is a conversational activity which has no beginning and no end and which takes place in a group of groups. It is often heated because our valuations matter to us: we cannot stand outside our commitments, although we only fully realise what they are through articulating them and encountering others’ difference. In struggling together as a conversational community we discover how to take the next step, which may then give us a new perspective to keep going with our inquiry. Practising intelligent reflection, noticing the patterns of our habitual engagement, may offer potential for thinking and behaving differently. But there is never just one thing going on and taking in plural points of view requires work.

From quantity to quality

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I had been invited to work with a group identified as ‘talented potential leaders’ in a large public sector organisation in a European country. Workers in the organisation were highly likely to be users of the organisation’s services, a bit like workers in the NHS in the UK because of the size and scope of the organisation. To an extent, then, there is no inside and no outside, no clear-cut distinction between the employees and the ‘customer experience’: employees had very direct access to what it meant to use the organisation’s services, which were widely available.

My role was to encourage the ‘talent’ group to think about how they are thinking, to identify some of the organisational patterns they found themselves caught up in, and to think about how the organisation did strategy. To what extent were accepted ways of undertaking strategy in the organisation helpful? How did they square with their own experience of making plans and trying to implement them?

Quantities

One of the events programmed for the day was for the ‘talent’ group to listen to two members of the leadership team, who came at lunch time, and who described their own take on what the organisation’s strategy should be. Unsurprisingly they said they had a ‘transformational’ agenda, part of which was to ‘capture the hearts and minds’ of both employees and customers. As the lunchtime session proceeded, both senior manager showed their PowerPoint presentations showing graphs of falling sales, competitor performance, and their own remedies (showing upward trending graphs and outturns).

I was intrigued to see how both senior managers might talk about their ‘transformational agenda’, particularly to do with staff, some of whom were sitting with them in the same room. One senior manager held forth, legs outstretched, answering questions dyadically, but not fomenting a conversation. The other senior manager did try to develop a back and forth with the group she worked with in an understated, but quite effective way. I would guess that the group which worked with her would have had a more developed sense of who they were being led by, than those who worked with the other manager.

Taken together tho’, the presentations followed by quite muted discussion could be understood as a missed opportunity. If your employees are your customers, and some of your customers are your employees, then what better chance to find out what matters to them. From the strategy perspective, most of what this talented group of managers were shown they could have worked out for themselves. Try and do less of what is not profitable, unless we have a legal obligation to do it; try and do more, and more cheaply what makes us money; and try and at least keep up with, if not innovate in newly emerging areas of service. But how to engage with each other differently and perhaps take the first step in what might turn out to be transformational for all of us, was not explored, could not be explored because of existing ways of organising. Potential blockages to organisational change lay not so much in the bar charts and figures, but in the relationships in the room.

Similarly and in a different context I was present for a presentation in an educational institution which is also pursuing a ‘transformational’ agenda. We had an hour together, staff and managers, in which 59 minutes was taken up with the senior manager telling us things he thought we needed to know. One of these things was that if we could achieve a one percent increase in our student satisfaction scores, then we might go up 20 places in the league table.

So one way of understanding transformation in both of these contexts is to increase the numbers. The employees, the sense we make of things and ourselves, the way we understand the world, are not transformed, unless we take particular meaning from the numbers going up. No one in the room wanted the institution to do badly, indeed almost all of them would have been committed to improving performance. What, then, does it take to do so, and what does it mean to us to be here, together, jointly involved in this enterprise? What do we think we are doing, and why are we doing that?

In speaking to the employees in both settings I came away with their sense of disappointment. Is that it? Is that what is supposed to motivate us?

Qualities

In another context I have been invited to speak at a conference considering transformational change, which focuses almost exclusively on the qualities of leaders. It encourages wisdom, grit, determination, resilience and courage. I am convinced that leading an organisation requires all of these things, but I am struck by the contrast in the two different narratives. One turns on the transformative potential of improving the institution’s scores and how good that might feel as an employee. The other, one might understand as a form of flattery for heroic leaders in their Sisyphean struggle to transform others – the wise leader, hand on the institutional helm, making the courageous decisions to make changes that employees may not realise are good for them.

Is either very satisfying?

I wonder if it is possible to break out of the tyranny of metrics and the warm, self-congratulatory language of the heroic leadership discourse. How do we begin to discuss the sometimes bloody process of change, which may involve loss and grieving as well as institutional gains, may sometimes prove unfair and confusing to some, and always involves power, politics and ideology? If leading change involves courage and determination, then it also involves humility and openness to be changed by others. Nothing is transformed if how we talk about who we are and what we think we are doing are not also transformed and brought into a different relationship – and that transformation may not always be to the good.

Changing conversations: changing hearts and souls

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What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.

Margaret Thatcher Sunday Times, 3 May 1981

I worked with a group of senior managers in a higher education establishment to help them think about their ways of working while they discussed strategy. A pattern emerged in discussion about current difficulties and in anticipation of future changes that drew on ideas of an education marketplace, and which drew forth economic language. Managers were concerned about ‘buy in’ to plans and strategies, they worried about brand, they were anxious about their students’ customer experience, they wondered how they would act if their institution were a supermarket, a supermarket like John Lewis for example. They were anxious about competitive threats from the Chinese, they wanted to make business cases for change, they were concerned about their products. Education needed to be as flexible as possible so that students could consume whatever, whenever they wanted. They were worried about student satisfaction. These notes of market vocabulary were the clearest melody, although there were also contrapuntal themes opposing them – some argued that being business-like isn’t the same as being a business.

I wondered what might be going on in the group, and what else was being communicated with all this market language. Perhaps it is one way of reducing uncertainty and anxiety by developing a discourse shared in common, and by identifying with the currently dominant and perhaps reductive way of thinking about strategy dilemmas. Young economists Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zac Ward-Perkins have pointed to how this phenomenon I experienced in this particular group of managers has been amplified more generally in society. They refer to it as an Econocracy, where all social problems and questions of policy become reduced to questions of economics, and economics of a particular and abstract neoclassical kind. So one explanation would be that the adoption of the language of the marketplace is a response to the marketization of higher education, and not just education, but also an identification with a dominant power figuration. It has become a common sense and taken for granted way of thinking about the world. Members of this particular group were signalling to each other that they understood, and perhaps even agreed with, the current orthodoxy.

In doing so group members communicated to each other that they think they belong to an elite group: they are an in-group which really understands the particular and contemporary difficulties they all face. Elsewhere Norbert Elias has referred to this as a ‘heroic we identity’. A minority of members of the group had recently been on management courses where they had been taught to think and talk this way. One might, then, understand this phenomenon as an example of MBA-thinking considered appropriate to a cadre of managers/leaders operating at this level of the hierarchy: there is cachet in being fluent in business speak. Perhaps there is an assumption that other senior management teams in a similar cohort of higher education establishments talk about their strategy dilemmas in similar ways. It’s what senior managers do.

In creating an in-group through the now common-sense ideology that all social problems can be reduced to questions of economics, it became quite difficult to explore different ways of thinking, and particularly arguments to the contrary. If the dominant way of talking is to draw on business terms, then it may sounds unbusiness-like, naïve even, to make a different kind of argument. Framing strategy dilemmas in terms of economics is beguiling and reduces complexity. But it also produces an enhanced sense of risk – there was a good deal of anxiety in the room about competitors, about ‘loss of market share’, about technology, about ‘the Chinese’.

Patricia Shaw made the case that changes in organisations are changes in conversations: people talk about what they are doing differently, which at the same time makes them think and act differently. In another piece of research I carried out in different HEI, a senior member of the management team described how some years ago he had participated in a workshop facilitated by an outside consultant to help his team think through processes of change:

Oh, it was all you know, sort of get the monkey off your back and all those kinds of management book clichés really, it was all of that stuff, Americanisms and yeah, it wasn’t the language we were used to using at all. It would be really interesting to have done a study on to what extent now amongst those people who sat in those rooms and found his terminology a bit alien and confusing and hilarious at times; are they actually now using some of those terms? I think they probably would be.

What starts out as alien and incongruous becomes ubiquitous and taken-for-granted. It is hard not to talk into a conversation using different vocabulary from everyone else.

Some of the other voices in the group I was working with tried to raise the following questions, potentially disrupting the university-as-business discourse: to what extent should students be satisfied? Isn’t there something inherently disturbing and unsettling about the educational experience, which doesn’t lead immediately to feelings of satisfaction? (This doesn’t dismiss the idea that the institution should provide the best possible education for students who pay a lot of money for it). And what about the university’s responsibility to the academic disciplines which make up a higher education establishment? Is there a trade-off between flexibility and academic rigour? How important are the relationships within which learning takes place, and which are particularly important for developing learners – do we have a tendency to over-glamourize technology as the answer to everything? To what extent does the university turn on the idea of transmission rather than transaction, more experienced learners struggling with less experienced learners in a community of inquiry, the notion that learning takes place between human bodies trying to stay in relation? Is education an end in and of itself, rather than being a passport to a job in an organisation?

Navigating a polarised world – perspectives on radical difference

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Lots of people are currently thinking about how we might talk to each other differently, particularly when politics seems to have become so polarised, and what it is that gets in the way of our fully recognising each other. In an interesting article on what he terms ‘denialism’ in The Guardian the other week, Keith Kahn-Harris treats sociologically contestation over what we think to be true. Denialism goes beyond every day denial, of which we are all guilty, but is both ‘combative and extraordinary’, he says. In some ways, Kahn-Harris argues, denialists are like the rest of us: they just want the world to be the way they would like it to be, and to make actual sometimes unspeakable desires. However, where formally denialists tried to emulate the careful work that goes into making an argument that climate change is happening, in other words they spent time and energy building a careful argument, now we encounter post-denialists who might say one thing one day, and another the next. If you like, they feel no need to entertain science-envy by mimicking scientists’ methods, and can speak, like President Trump, off the top of their heads. This has an insidious effect of contributing to an environment where everything is contestable and no-one believable.

One of the interesting things Kahn-Harris does is to kick away the liberal myth that if denialists would stop denying we would necessarily share a common moral view:

‘Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation; it is a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. An end to denialism is therefore a disturbing prospect, as it would involve these moral differences revealing themselves directly.’

He argues, nonetheless, that although empathy with denialists is not easy, it is necessary if we are to find a way through together. It is not enough just to think of our opponents as stupid or pathological, as this video, no matter how amusing, seems to suggest. The difficulty of locating all problems with one’s adversary is that it lets us off the hook.

It is this encounter with profound moral differences, and differences which may be irreconcilable, which put me in mind of Richard Bernstein, the pragmatic philosopher. Bernstein’s book The New Constellation contains a chapter entitled: Incommensurability and Otherness Revisited. In it, Bernstein explains why we may not understand each other, no matter how patiently we listen to each other, although this is no argument against continuing to try. The argument in the book is not aimed specifically at denialists, and certainly not at what Kahn-Harris calls post-denialists who may have no interest in building a systematic claim and becoming recognised, but simply in destabilising and unmooring things. It may be a bit of stretch to dignify post-denialists by calling their arguments a tradition, or a language, rather than an orientation which simply tries to undermine every one else’s tradition. Nonetheless, I summarise here nine points he makes on pp65-66 for what it might add to the discussion about our encounters with the radically other, and to find ways of bringing ourselves into the discussion rather than just blaming the other:

1 Recent controversies in philosophy have seriously challenged the accepted orthodoxy that there is a universal, neutral, ahistorical framework in which all languages, or ‘vocabularies’ (we might say points of view) can be adequately translated so that we can evaluate different validity claims.

Kahn-Harris makes a similar point that orthodox science can sometimes be dogmatic and blind to its own limitations. To make an argument simply on ‘the facts’ is never going to cut it. Will Davies says something in his recent book Nervous States, where he argues that statistics and facts arguing that on average we are better off will fail to resonate with the local, contextual and non-average experience of communities who have failed to do so. For those who feel excluded, more rational arguments by experts may feel colonising

2 This is not the same as saying that anything goes, and it’s your point of view against my point of view.

As a pragmatist, Bernstein does not accept what might loosely be considered a ‘post-modern’ view that all opinions are equally valid. For a pragmatist some points of view are more helpful than others. This still leaves questions open about how we establish usefulness, particularly when the pragmatic position, that we do so in a community of engaged inquirers, is unlikely to be accepted by a post-denialists. In current debates sometimes groups claim that this truth is truth for us, irrespective of what anyone else thinks.

3 We can evaluate different claims but using a variety of methods and with hermeneutic sensitivity and imagination.

In a previous post on this site I wrote about how the biologist Richard Dawkins had argued that the referendum in the UK on whether to leave the EU should only have been conducted on ‘the facts’ alone. I noted that this would have been a difficult undertaking given how much of the political contestation revolved around questions of identity and themes of inclusion and exclusion. There were few available facts about a proposal to withdraw from the EU which had never been attempted before by any other country. More evaluative methods were required by all of those involved in the debate than the simple finding of facts.

4 There are overlaps in different interpretations of the world.

I think Kahn-Harris makes this case well when he points to the idea that we all deny the obvious, and may all entertain desires which cause us shame, whether we consider ourselves denialists or not. The experience of desire is shared, though the object of desire is plural and may also be of a morally repugnant nature.

5 But we may have to face the practical possibility that we may fail to understand ‘alien’ traditions in terms of the tradition to which we belong. This possibility of failure places an ethical obligation on us to listen carefully, but in doing so we must not recategorize what we hear in terms of what we already understand without doing justice to what is genuinely different in what’s being said. We should neither colonize it (‘they agree with us, they just don’t know it’) nor dismiss it as exotic nonsense.

I think Richard Kearney makes a similar suggestion about the importance of standing one’s ground, but at the same time being radically open to the otherness of the other. It is too easy to fall into monstering those we disagree with, even though their point of view may be monstrous. Linking back to point three, Kearney terms his method diacritical hermeneutics. I would also add a caveat even if one concludes that other points of view are exotic nonsense this should not block further inquiry as to the role this particular nonsense plays for the person entertaining it.

7 Within a given language or tradition people are already making claims which transcend their context.

Even the idea that there is an elite conspiracy of experts, big government, big pharma, neoliberal politicians, who set out to cheat ‘the people’ is more than just a local claim and may be something to work with.

8 We must avoid essentialism about our own traditions and about other people’s.

9 Learning to live with pluralistic incommensurable traditions is one of the most pressing problems of our age. An informed, textured understanding of another’s tradition helps us to understand our own traditions better. An encounter with what is alien (even in ourselves) helps us with better self-understanding.

Perhaps the first part of point 8 and the injunction in 9 to understand the limitations of our own positions may be the most important aspect of what Bernstein points to. An essentialist understanding of the dilemmas which currently face us is that ‘they’, denialists or people we oppose, are responsible for stirring up hatred, xenophobia and calling into question obvious facts which make us unsafe. This lets us off too lightly. If all situations are co-created, irrespective of whether the responsibility is equal or not, then one of the first things to think about is our own role in how we come to be in the situation we find ourselves in.

 

 

What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life.

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Complexity and Management Conference – 17th– 19th May 2019, Roffey Park Institute.

One of the difficulties of thinking, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is that it tends to unravel things. Next year’s conference will address a theme which has come up again and again in previous conferences, the degree to which questioning, particularly of our own assumptions and value positions, can unsettle. It’s not always easy to question what’s going on, particularly in organisations which encourage us to align and be positive, but what are the ethical consequences of not doing so?

In a recent piece of research carried out for LFHE/Advance HE, we discovered that senior managers in Higher Education establishments may feel conflicted about some of the change projects they are responsible for. Keen to do a good job on the one hand, on the other they may also entertain doubts about the long-term effects of the changes they are implementing. One requirement of surviving in an environment which values change, then, may be the ability to entertain doubt and uncertainty, and to find ways of critically reflecting with others.

Equally, consultants trying to navigate the crowded field of concepts and management fads may find themselves working for clients who seem to be asking for support which the consultant doubts will be helpful – what does it mean to be a critically reflective and reflexive consultant, and what are the ethical implications?

We are delighted to have Professor André Spicer from the Cass Business School, City, University of London to give the keynote on Saturday morning, and help us think these things through.  Originally from New Zealand, André holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting appointments at universities around the world.

André is the author of many academic articles and nine books. The most recent are ‘Business Bullshit’, ’The Stupidity Paradox’ and ‘Desperately Seeking Self Improvement’ He has worked with a range of organisations including Barclays, TFL, Old Mutual, the City of London, the House of Commons, IBM and CAA. He frequently appears in the international media and writes regularly about work and organisations for The Guardian. He is currently working on a book about skepticism and doubt.

On Saturday afternoon we ask conference delegates to suggest workshops that they themselves would like to run consonant with the theme of the conference.

As usual the conference booking page will go live on the university website early in the New Year. The fee for the conference covers all board and lodging from the inaugural dinner on Friday night 17th May, through to lunch on Sunday when the conference finishes.

In addition we will offer the usual one day introduction to the basic concepts of complex responsive processes of relating on Friday 17th.

 

Talking about organisations and complexity

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Teach us to sit still.

An interview with Richard Atherton from the Being Human podcast.

2019 Complexity and Management Conference 17-19th May

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stamp_hannah_arendt-2The 2019 Complexity and Management Conference booking page is now open and can be accessed here.

The title of this year’s conference is: What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life.

On Saturday morning we are delighted to have Professor André Spicer from the Cass Business School, City, University of London to give the keynote on Saturday morning. André holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting appointments at universities around the world. André is the author of many academic articles and nine books. The most recent are ‘Business Bullshit’, ’The Stupidity Paradox’ and ‘Desperately Seeking Self Improvement’.

On Saturday afternoon we ask conference delegates to suggest workshops that they themselves would like to run consonant with the theme of the conference, so if you would like to suggest something, then do let me know.

As usual, the event will be highly participative and will offer lots of opportunities for discussion and exploration of the key themes with other delegates. The conference begins with an inaugural dinner on Friday evening 17th May, and ends after lunch on 19th May. The conference fee includes onsite board and lodging for the duration of the conference. Early bird rates apply before 1st April 2019.

As with previous years we are also offering a one day introductory workshop on some of the key ideas informing the perspective of complex responsive processes on Friday 17th May.

Hope to see you there.


Complexity and Management Conference 17th-19th May 2019 – booking now

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This year’s Complexity and Management Conference, on 17th-19th May:  What does it mean to be critical? – complexity, reflexivity and doubt in everyday organisational life offers the opportunity for delegates to reflect on what it means to be critical and why it is important to be so in today’s organisations. On the first morning of the conference we have invited Professor Andre Spicer to help us get the discussion going. If you want to sign up for the conference and save yourself some money before the early bird deadline expires, then click here.

Here are a few ideas on the traditions of thought to which we will be contributing.

We have a strong critical tradition in western thought, starting with the ancient Greeks. However, the contemporary philosopher Julian Baggini has shown us how a variety of cultures have their own traditions of systematically thinking about the human condition, on the basis that, as Socrates put it, the life unexamined is not worth living. How might we lead a good life, what do we mean by truth, how might we guard against the fragility of goodness, as Martha Nussbaum expressed it?[1] Examining our lives in the back and forth dialectic of discussion is necessary if we are to make meaning and become fully human, but it can have its negative consequences, as it did for Socrates. Problematising, probing, judging comes with its own risks: we are unlikely to be condemned to death for corrupting Athenian youth, as he was, but simply asking questions can call out a strong reaction. Why might that be?

As Kant identified, to critique (originating in judgement, from the Greek krisis) involves imagination and daring:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! “Have courage to use your own reason!”- that is the motto of enlightenment.[2]

Kant thought that ‘daring to know’ may require courage to take on sources of authority, so that even religion, perhaps the biggest locus of authority in his day, would need ‘to sustain the test of its free and public examination.’[3] He suggested that subjecting sources of legitimacy and authority to critical inquiry is not something to be undertaken lightly, although it is necessary if we are to liberate ourselves from ignorance. Both implicitly and explicitly, becoming critical means engaging with questions of legitimacy and power and calling into question the status quo.

But is it enough just to doubt and reason on our own and by ourselves? From a Hegelian perspective the answer is no, since Hegelians would claim that we are not just autonomous, rational individuals cognizing in the abstract, but we are socially and historically formed. More, and from a pragmatic perspective, it is not helpful to doubt everything all of the time, but we should engage first with those problems which preoccupy us.[4] To pursue inquiry from a Hegelian and pragmatic perspective means taking an interest in history. How has the phenomenon, the particular predicament we are interested in evolved over time, and what has led to what? We then try to place our  difficulties, within the larger history of social relations and their structural contradictions. This may mean drawing attention to power relationships and calling into question the legitimacy of certain ways of knowing and speaking, perhaps asking the question cui bono, who benefits? It certainly means pursuing these questions through dialectical inquiry, where an abstract notion of truth is replaced by the idea that insight arises in the back and forth or argument in a community of engaged inquirers.

And by taking part in discussion and argumentation we then find ourselves discovering that moral and political judgements in particular are plural. We might enhance our ability to see the world from perspectives other than our own. So in addition to Kant’s injunction to dare to know, we might find ourselves developing greater empathy, imagination and solidarity.

If this kind of inquiry interests you, where you engage with a committed group of peers to discuss current organisational difficulties and discover plural and complex points of view, then this year’s Complexity and Management conference 17th-19th May is the place to be. There may be no resolution to your predicaments but perhaps you will find some degree of solidarity with and from others in the complex responsive processes of relating. Dare to come!

Early bird concessions end 1st April. On Friday 17th May there is a one day introductory workshop to the ideas underpinning complex responsive processes of relating.

[1] Nussbaum, M (1986) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] An answer to the question what is Enlightenment? 1784

[3] Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.

[4] “We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy…Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” CS Peirce (1992), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings Vol 1, Bloomington: Indiana University Press: pp28-29.

A glossary of contemporary management terms – trajectory

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Trajectory (trans meaning across, jecto meaning to throw), the curve that a body such as a planet describes in space, a path or line of development similar to the same, is a word which is frequently used in management speak. It is what Lackoff and Johnson (1980) refer to as a ‘metaphor we live by’ in the sense that it makes intuitive, cognitive and bodily sense. It’s a spatial metaphor

trajectory

with an implicit understanding that we launch our project or plan, and it rises in a gentle curve of our plotting towards an end point we have preplanned. Like physicists or rocket scientists, we can steer the vessel, the organisation or the department, in a calculated way. The appeal is also to engineering science and cybernetic systems thinking.

A document I read recently outlining a strategy had the word ‘trajectory’ peppered through it a number of times and it made me wonder about what else was being communicated. The course of the trajectory was unsurprisingly ‘upwards’, towards a better, improved position for the organisation. The metaphor implies calculation and control, as well as an ability to predict in advance what ‘better’ and ‘improved’ is going to mean. It fits broadly within the ‘life as a journey’ metaphor, where we have a destination and/or a ‘direction of travel’. It also carries with it implicit inclusion/exclusion criteria. If we want to reach the same destination, the improved position, then of course we need to travel together on this trajectory and get on the same bus/train/rocket. Otherwise we might get left behind, or we might reveal ourselves to be the kind of staff members who don’t want to travel in the first place, in which case we might not belong on the team. Anyway, who would set themselves against improvement, refusing to travel to a better destination? It’s rare to find people who want to be left behind.

So the word trajectory does a lot of work. It conveys simply the idea that managers promoting the strategy are in control and can make predictions about how things will turn out: if the calculations have been done correctly, then we will definitely arrive on the moon. It is deterministic, plotting one course. The metaphor makes instinctive sense that we can’t make any changes unless ‘we know where we’re going’ and have a ‘destination’ in mind. And at the same time it arouses a degree of anxiety about being included or excluded, along with the everyday anxiety of all travellers about showing up on time, so we don’t miss the train/opportunity.

A glossary of contemporary management terms II – transformation(al)

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Transformation, a marked change in form or appearance, is one of the most widely used words in contemporary management vocabulary after leadership and delivery (future posts). Quite often it is used in conjunction with leadership: everybody knows since Burns and Bass that leaders are transformational and managers are transactional. It goes without saying. Linking transformation to leadership is another blast of air into the already over-inflated concept of leadership given that most leadership activity involves humdrum, every day tasks and conversations. It creates anxiety for leaders and unrealistic expectations from those they lead.butterfly

The idea of transformation is part of the charismatic tendency in management thinking and talking and fits well with other alluring, quasi-religious ideas such as vision and passion. It is no longer enough just to change something, or even to try and keep things the same, forgetting that there are many social traditions and practices which persist because they serve us well, there must be a commitment to transform them. The promise of transformation feeds into what one might think of as the anxiety narrative about change, which we can’t achieve completely enough or quickly enough, as other competitors catch us up and pass us by, particularly the Indians and the Chinese.

Implied in the rush to transform things are a number of assumptions about the role and capabilities of leaders and managers, time, and valuations of the good.

Firstly, if whatever happens, happens simply and only because of what everyone is doing together (as a brief distillation of complexity thinking) then leaders and managers won’t get to decide on their own whether things will be transformed or not, nor how they are transformed, nor will they be in control of the process. Of course they will be highly influential in any change programme, but they won’t always get what they want. They too are caught up in broader processes of change over which they have little control. They might even get the opposite of what they want, depending how the warp and weft of human interdependence plays out, who wins and who loses by the changes. You could draw either on the non-linear complexity sciences, or on the sociologist Norbert Elias to argue that because of a particular figuration of events and circumstances a big change programme can bring about very little change, or even resistance to change, whilst a small initiative could bring about a population-wide transformation.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as a counter-intuitive thinker, said he was much more interested in why things stayed the same, rather than why they changed. So despite decades of anti-discrimination legislation minority groups still face discrimination as do half the population (women). In fact, it would be possible to argue that just recently in the Northern hemisphere, things have got worse for minority groups and women. There is a constant churn in the dynamic of stability and change, and ‘progress’ whatever we might mean by that, is not linear and can also go ‘backwards’. The counter-narrative to Elias’ major work The Civilising Process, which is an evolutionary account of how interdependence leads generally to more civilised behaviour towards each other (although at the expense of internalising our guilt, shame and violent feelings) is The Germans, which sets out how the civilising process can go into reverse and lead to barbarism.

On timing and valuations of the good, when will we know when something has been transformed, and how will we know that it is good? Good for whom? From the late 90s to about 2007 and apart from a handful of commentators, it was generally accepted that parcelling up debt into collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) and other highly complex abstract debt vehicles was a transformation for the finance sector for the good, because it distributed risk. From 2007 exactly the same phenomenon was regarded as a catastrophe because no one knew who had ‘good’ debt and who ‘bad’. As another example, in a piece of research I carried out last year with colleagues at the university inquiring into ‘transformational change’ in the Higher Education sector, senior managers and leaders in UK universities were ambivalent about whether the process of marketisation was a benefit for the sector or not, and perhaps it was a mixture of both. For some respondents, marketisation was a much-needed fillip to a sclerotic sector which ignored the needs of students and business. For others, the changes meant a hollowing out of the higher education sector and undermining the very nature and purpose of a university. Only time will tell the degree to which either of their concerns are warranted.

It is not so obvious, then, that we can transform things the way we want them, that we will know when the transformation will have been achieved, and that even if we do transform, it will lead to an unalloyed good. There will always be winners and losers, and who gets to describe this process as transformation for the good is in a very powerful position. The current crisis over Brexit in the UK is a very good example of the dilemmas of transformation. One senior pro-Brexit politician said that he couldn’t think of a single downside to Brexit, which may be an indication of his limited imagination, or a limited understanding of the complexities of change. But in appealing to imagination and complexity we might also conclude that there must also be upsides, even if they are not immediately obvious from a pro-Remain position.

It is worth thinking about our current obsession with transforming things, and who decides whether transformation is ‘good for us’.

A glossary of contemporary management terms III – deliver

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Deliver, meaning to liberate (deliver us from evil), to give birth or to take something somewhere, has become ubiquitous in contemporary management speak. This is particularly the case in the UK after the Labour government set up what they termed the PMDU (Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit) in the 00s under the aegis of the now knighted Michael Barber. Barber’s book Deliverology – a Field Guide for Education Leaders is used in the public sector and civil services throughout the world. The idea behind deliverology is to set up a small department, reporting directly to the accountable leader, which turns broad social aims, improving the level of literacy in schools, for example,download into measurable performance indicators. Systematic programmes are then developed with aim of advancing current performance amongst practitioners, who might then need to report on a regular basis on what they are doing with more or less elaborate monitoring forms . Although such programmes are likely to be ‘evidence-based’, i.e. they will have engaged with practice in a particular field and will be informed by research, they are nonetheless more often than not top-down, technocratic and target-driven. No area of the British public sector is left untouched by this technocratic, target-driven approach to ‘reform’.

There is now plenty of evidence to show that if targets work because they do so because they are made to work. That is to say, managers and staff in public sector organisations pursue a variety of strategies, legitimate and illegitimate, to make sure the targets they are measured on, and perhaps rewarded for, are realised. This may arise from careful and appropriate engagement with the way, say, literacy is taught in the classroom through to gaming strategies and massaging the figures. In case schools divert resources away from other areas of teaching, i.e. they ‘deliver’ on the literacy targets, but at the expense of numeracy, then other targets are set in order to cover as many areas of activity as possible. This can result in no educational stone left unturned and uninspected.

Understood as a technical discipline, ‘delivery’ is another form of project management tied to targets and goals, causing as many problems as it solves, and sometimes overwhelming staff with performance measures. But it has become so widespread that it has become almost impossible to imagine organisational life without them.

So much for the instrumental aspect of delivery, but there are also ethical and value questions. More generally, it has come to be a badge of honour to be known as ‘someone who delivers’. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, one of the things which makes us uniquely human is the making and keeping of promises. It should matter that we take seriously the promise of improvement, or a more equal society, say. Wouldn’t we want the people to whom we give responsibility for improving literacy in schools to commit strongly to the task and to tell us how they think they are getting on?

Yes, but as the word has become more and more widespread, so it is applied to a huge variety of social processes involving competing goods, which then get reduced to an object, a thing to be delivered, like a parcel. We might think of this as reification, turning a process into a thing, or what Alfred North Whitehead referred to as ‘misplaced concreteness’. For example, managers might find themselves committing to ‘delivering change’, ‘delivering excellence’, or ‘delivering transformation’. The plural becomes reduced to one, and much that is important, all nuance and complexity, gets lost.

Norbert Elias referred to this as process reduction, where a phenomenon which involves people acting in concert over a period of time, with no necessarily distinct beginning, middle and end becomes unrealistically reduced through language . The British government has spent nearly three years promising to ‘deliver Brexit’: what Brexit means is still to be defined, we won’t know when it’s over as the end of one phase will simply trigger the beginning of the next, on and on into the future. Who will decide when Brexit is ‘delivered’? That Brexit is complex and involves many irreconcilable valuations of the good is currently being played out in the British Parliament as no one version of ‘delivering Brexit’ can command a majority.

The whole Brexit episode, and any number of other social change programmes whether organisational or not, involve complex ethical and practical questions to be borne in mind if we commit to ‘deliver on our promises’.

The first is that we should not forget the link between origins, means and ends: that is to say, we might so enthusiastically pursue our goals that they lose contact with original moral or practical impetus that got us mobilised in the first place. And along the way we might treat people so badly that achieving our aims becomes a pyrrhic victory. The ends/means paradox is mutually constitutive. Lastly, in many organisations the complex apparatus of measuring and quantifying can lead to burn-out and cynicism amongst staff as they no longer recognise themselves in their work. When work which involves practical judgement and everyday expertise becomes reduced to ‘best practice’ (future post) or proxy targets, it can no longer seem like meaningful work.

Committing to our promises to one another involves a continuous exploration of the relationship between means and ends, the constant uncovering of what ‘we’ consider to be the good, and frequently reminding ourselves why we began this process in the first place. There is no thing to be delivered.

A glossary of contemporary management terms IV – performance

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Performance, the act of performing a dramatic role, or piece of music, a display of over-exaggerated behaviour (‘you’ve made a bit of a performance of that’), or simply the act or process of accomplishing a task or function, is a preoccupation of contemporary management. These days we are all concerned to improve performance. But how would we know if we had so improved? The first recourse for many contemporary managers is to reach for performance indicators, sometimes known as Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. These are quantitative indicators, things we can count and match against prereflected targets for improvement or aspirations for the good. performance graphIn a school these might be exam results, in a university journal articles written, and in a company selling products, sales figures. Sometimes there is an expectation that these figures can only increase: being static or decreasing might be seen as a failure, as we ‘improve our performance’ endlessly into an idealised future. As one UK government minister is reported to have said without any sense of irony: we want to increase performance until all schools in the UK are above average. Although of course, every school aspires to being outstanding.

Performance measures can themselves create a performance – they become performative. This might involve the performance of being busy, the performance of appearing to take the indicators seriously, the performance of gaming the indicators in order to appear to be performing. It might also provoke exactly the behaviour in staff that they are designed to, a relentless focus on what has been decided is most important, although that says nothing about how constructively people might do that. Presented as an objective way of judging reality it is less obvious that these measures also help shape the reality they claim to judge, as we mould our public behaviour and focus of attention to make ourselves measurable. Taking performance indicators seriously becomes a public habit of speaking and acting. When managers concentrate on performance measures, both individual and group, they also express a particular way of understanding power relationships and are a statement of values without an overt values statement. They are both a disciplinary instrument and an expression of what matters around here, and can be experienced as a kind of relentless surveillance. I am not the first to point out that we are disciplined, and we come to discipline ourselves in anticipation. To call performance indicators into question is not to get with the programme, and not to be seen to be performing risks exclusion from the cult of performance.

There is a moral case for quantifying performance measures – why should we necessarily trust the word of professionals who have a stake in the game that they are good at what they do, when we can trust in numbers? We should of course be concerned that our children do well in school, that our surgeons are safe, that our academics are being productive, that we get value for money from our public services. There must be generalisable ways of making comparisons,  of getting into a discussion about quality.

But here are some of the difficulties of the narrowest sense of how we have come to understand performance, particularly when it is reduced to a handful of metrics.

There is a danger that performance indicators are likely to unravel the social conditions which are required to increase performance more generally, particularly if they are individually described. So, going back to the original definition of performance, an individual actor, no matter how brilliant, can only be brilliant with an ensemble of other players, the right props and set, a good script and a responsive audience. How much training, effort and support, how many institutions are required to produce a good surgeon, dependent in the operating theatre on a broad range of colleagues with improvisational skills to match their skill? Where performance indicators produce rivalry between colleagues, anxiety in staff at the prospect of failure, of being ‘found out’, envy between ‘high performing’ and ‘low performing’ colleagues, then the collective performance of the institution is likely to suffer. What interest do I have in helping you if increasing your numbers make my numbers look less good, or even go down?

In addition, there are less tangible elements of successful performance – I want my child to do well at school, but this may or may not involve passing exams. Just as important are that the child is encouraged to be curious, has a secure group of friends, is recognised in the school community and recognises others, is relatively stable in their relationships with others, both children and adults, becomes an active citizen. Doing well at school, or in the workplace, also involves being trusted to exercise one’s judgement about what is needed in this particular situation at this particular time with these particular others, irrespective of whether there is a performance measure for that.

Understanding the complex nature of performance has implications for managers and what they are doing. There is nothing worse than the dead exercise of sitting in a performance appraisal having to justify whether one has hit the indicators one was given perhaps up to a year ago. To make performance appraisal more vital, more encouraging of performance, managers need to work harder. It requires curiosity about what the person’s job they are appraising involves. What does it take to achieve a successful performance in that particular role, both tangibly and intangibly?

In drama school, when actors are learning their trade with improvisational exercises, they are encouraged to make their actor partners look good in the moment. In other words, if you and I are improvising a role play together I can obstruct you or I can help you perform, which in turn helps me take my turn. This negotiation is likely to be hit and miss, because there are never any guarantees that what I think is helpful will turn out to be so. Intentions are never sufficient. But when we proceed from an understanding that whatever performance emerges does so because of what we are all doing together, then it ceases to be just about me and my individual activities. Performance is always in an ensemble. How might that be reflected in performance appraisal?

And finally, sometimes it’s liberating to be just good enough for now, a good enough parent, a good enough teacher, a good enough boss, until we need to take the next step. Perhaps there is a need for a release from performance anxiety.

 

A glossary of contemporary management terms V – going forwards.

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Going forwards, either used to mean ‘what we’ll do next’, ‘in the future’, or sometimes just as a hollow place holder meaning absolutely nothing at all, is another orientational metaphor which makes embodied sense. It belongs to the family of journey metaphors which we referred to in previous posts: we choose our ‘direction of travel’, we know where we’re going, we are determined. Moving-Forward-1We’re on our way to a better future, an onwards and upwards ‘trajectory’. Nearly 15 years ago Tony Blair’s election campaign chose the tautologous slogan ‘forward, not back’ just to reinforce the point that to vote for Labour meant being in a car with no reverse gear. There is only the future: there are no regrets.

There is a particular cognitive approach to executive coaching, still in use in many organisations, which exemplifies this kind of singular future-oriented thinking. For example the GROW model is explained as follows:

  • Goal.
  • Current Reality.
  • Options (or Obstacles).
  • Will (or Way Forward).

Organisational problems are understood as the individual’s struggle to overcome particular difficulties with determination and rational analysis. And perhaps if you intend undertaking some difficult change process it is good to imply that you will push on and not falter at the first sign of mutiny, and that you know what you’re doing.

However, maybe there is more to uncover about complex experience than talking as if there is only one tense which is important, the future, and only the individual’s rationality and will to map it out.

John Dewey warned us against an unreflective tendency which he termed a ‘lust for action’. What he meant was that if our default is to understand experience as a problem to be hammered into shape, then we rush on from one experience to the next without stopping to reflect. Each event is only experienced on the surface and with a particular end in view. We develop a superficial response to life and a diminished repertoire for what may be required of us. More, we cultivate a preference for situations where the most can be done in the least possible time – we rush around ‘delivering’ things without thinking through what is really important in the situation and what the ethical implications might be.

Secondly, in our hurry towards an idealised future we treat the past as an embarrassment unworthy of a backward glance, forgetting that there are some social traditions which have served us well. Take universities, for example, which one might think of as the institutionalisation of curiosity. The oldest amongst them, like al-Azhar in Cairo, have endured in some form or other for more than a thousand years because they serve an important purpose. All universities have survived by adapting and may look nothing like they were when they were first founded. But adaptation involves a reinterpretation of the past in the present, in anticipation of the future. In order to work out what to do next, to go forward, we may need to understand the traditions which have formed us as a community: we need a nuanced sense of our history. This  became particularly evident in a piece of research I carried out with colleagues in six UK universities last year. Senior leaders in these universities showed themselves very thoughtful about the kinds of changes they were asked to carry out, but were often ambivalent about whether these were at all transformational, and if they were, then they questioned whether the transformation was necessarily for the good. I and colleagues reflected with them in the here and now about how they had become, and who they thought they were becoming as part of an academic community.

This interweaving of past, present and future, the rich present of a community, is perfectly captured in a speech by Barack Obama to announce his presidential candidacy:

“Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be        done. Today we are called once more – and it is time for our generation to answer that call.

For that is our unyielding faith – that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it.

That’s what Abraham Lincoln understood. He had his doubts. He had his defeats. He had his setbacks. But through his will and his words, he moved a nation and helped free a people. It is because of the millions who rallied to his cause that we are no longer divided, North and South, slave and free. It is because men and women of every race, from every walk of life, continued to march for freedom long after Lincoln was laid to rest, that today we have the chance to face the challenges of this millennium together, as one people – as Americans.

All of us know what those challenges are today – a war with no end, a dependence on oil that threatens our future, schools where too many children aren’t learning, and families struggling paycheck to paycheck despite working as hard as they can. We know the challenges. We’ve heard them. We’ve talked about them for years.”

This is a very good example of what it means to reinterpret your past ‘going forwards’. Given who we are, what has happened to us, what we believe to be important and true, how might we take the next step together to address our current problems? However, this is not to imply that all American were equally moved by Obama’s address. As we have witnessed in past couple of years, for some Americans Obama’s speech provoked them to feel threatened by this particular narrative and to vote in reaction to it. It may be simplistic to think that we are heading to singular future, but it is equally so to imagine that we can conjure wholly inclusive communities.

Although it has just become a glib throwaway remark, perhaps it is time to resist the idea of simply going forwards, at least not without a moment’s pause to reflect on what that remark might be covering over. Imagining a shared future is a complex undertaking.

 

 

 

A critical glossary of contemporary management terms VI – changing mindsets.

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The term mindset, a collection of beliefs and/or attitudes, has evolved to mean any fixed group of ideas that has come to govern behaviour of an individual or a group. The term conveys cognitivist assumptions that attitudes and beliefs are confined inside an individual’s head, more, that a mindset can be changed with a particular programme of interventions of a behavioural kind. We can change our own mindset, or as managers in an organisational context, we can change the mindsets of those for whom we are responsible from one coherent, though undesirable, attitude to another. mindsetIt is a taken for granted assumption that any change programme in a contemporary organisation requires a change in mindset in staff before it is realisable. Changing mindsets is often linked loosely to organisational culture change (future post).

The work of Carol Dweck, a Stanford University cognitive psychologist is broadly cited for her work on mindset. She suggested that there is a fixed mindset, where there is an assumption that abilities and traits are innate, and a growth mindset, which is the belief that whatever talents we are born with, these can be cultivated and improved. Employers, parents, teachers, are encouraged to imbue a growth mindset in order to foster greater achievement. With a growth mindset an individual accepts setbacks, learns to reflect, and understands that effort is needed in order to attain ‘mastery’. Methods employed to instil this include setting achievable micro-goals, praising effort over results, overcoming negative ‘self-talk’, and, tautologously, encouraging growth mindset thinking. Here mindset is presented as a binary, fixed vs growth, but more broadly the term is used whenever some kind of change is required which is thought to need a commensurate change in attitude.

As far as it goes, a programme of encouraging people to consider that they are capable of thinking differently is to be welcomed. There are a variety of schemes in the UK aimed at changing the status quo, improving BAME student achievement in universities for example, which assist both students and teachers to raise expectations about the flourishing of black and ethnic minority students in higher education institutions. So far so laudable. However, there are a number of difficulties with the term which benefit from exploring.

Prescriptions for changing mindset involve some social processes, such as surrounding yourself with positive or creative people, for example, or having someone set incremental goals for you. Changing mindset often involves being praised and may be broadly but vaguely linked to a change in organisational culture. However, largely in the organisational context the responsibility rests with the individual to identify and change their own mindset: you are expected to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps having first identified that you are wearing boots. The change is a binary one from X mindset to Y mindset. Additionally, we gain no insight into how the mindset might have arisen in the first place. It seems just to be there, a priori.

Just compare the term with Ludwig Fleck’s idea of a thought collective, for example, which is trying to describe the same phenomenon, a set of beliefs or attitudes about the world. A thought collective, as the phrase implies, arises and is sustained in a group: people come to have a set of beliefs or attitudes because they are born into, or join, a particular group where these ideas are current and have legitimacy. Maintaining membership of the group involves getting with the programme, and policing deviations from it: it reflects a set of power relations and processes of inclusion and exclusion. This strong group process occurs even in groups of scientists where one might expect scientific method to trump it. For Fleck, and for all sociologists who take a highly social view of human formation, we come to have a particular view of the world because of the groups we belong to. And because we belong to different groups it is quite likely that we espouse mutually contradictory beliefs, whether we are conscious of this or not. Our ‘mindset’ may consist of fragments.

A second difficulty is the assumption that people are able accurately to cognise themselves, realise that they have a particular mindset, and then systematically set about changing it, or can have it changed by others. The experience of running a reflective doctoral programme which is aimed at encouraging managers and consultants to become reflexive, to notice how they are thinking about the world so that this noticing may offer the possibility of thinking differently, makes me think that this is by no means an easy process. We are all ideological and think the world is as we think it is. In fact, we often have huge investment in keeping our understandings of the world stable: we are our habits and attitudes to the extent that a change in understanding is also a change in identity, towards which we might be resistant. Even students who come on the programme claiming that being challenged about the way they understand the world is exactly what they are looking for, may then stubbornly resist examining their own thinking. This resistance is not necessarily a bad thing: resistance to change is also a form of resilience and is something to work with.

Two social processes in particular may help with this shaking of a relatively fixed identity, although neither of them is a tool or technique to be applied, and neither of them guarantees a change in ‘mindset’. The first is the radical encounter with oneself in a group. The founder of the group analytic tradition, Foulkes, claims that the group is a place where one is faced with a hall of mirrors. Having one’s opinions, habits, actions reflected back as others experience them may be highly discomfiting but can also be revelatory. We may become partially visible to ourselves through others.

The second is that this reflecting back may provoke feelings of shame, the experience of vulnerability, exposure and anticipation of possible exclusion from the group. The most profound learning experiences can often occur when our membership of a group is at risk, or feels as though it might be. It does depend, though, on how the individual and the group are able to work with shame – some forms of group shaming can close down all potential for learning and are experienced as a form of violence.

I am not making an argument against the idea that learning may be incremental, can be broken down into small steps and can involve praise and encouragement. Nor am I recommending destabilising group processes as an alternative. What I am pointing to, though, is how difficult it can be to ‘change mindset’, whether one’s own or someone else’s. The first obstacle is realising that one has a mindset, what it is and how it is maintained. This mindset is likely to be an amalgam of sometimes contradictory beliefs which we cling to because they have served us well and make us who we are. A change in mindset amounts to a change in identity, which is difficult to achieve for ourselves and even more so for other people. The idea that we might change other people’s mindsets also brings with it ethical questions about who we are to try and change other people’s identities, whether we think it is ‘good for them’ or not. Next, our mindsets may be impervious to tools and techniques or injunctions to be better or more open. In fact, despite our own desires to change we can often remain adamantly the same. Sometimes, perhaps the best we can achieve is to become a connoisseur of our own imperfections.

 

 

 


A critical glossary of contemporary management terms VII – sending out a clear message

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When managers say that they need to ‘send out a clear message’, what exactly is being conveyed? That good management depends on good communication is something which every manager knows. But there are also moral undertones to the expression which imply taking a principled stand. So the phrase carries an aspiration for both clarity and moral purpose, perhaps communicating a message which might be difficult to hear.

There are any number of helpful training courses and web sites offering advice to support managers achieve clarity by decluttering their language, by avoiding jargon, by thinking about their audience, and by matching body language with the intended message.  Then there are a variety of tips and tricks for cutting out vaguecommuncation and ‘weakening’ words, even from some consultants’ techniques on how to ‘cut out the mush’ of misunderstanding so that management and leadership can be offered clearly. These can sometimes be accompanied by appeals for communicators to be authentic, honest and transparent. We are invited to be good selves, clearing away misunderstanding with the purity of our intentions and honesty about ourselves. The more authentic you are, the more your authority will be heeded.

The idea that we can all get along better by learning to communicate clearly, being more open and honest with each other and acting with authenticity, is of course very edifying. There is a duty on all of us to try and say what we mean, and mean what we say to the best of our abilities, and to let people know what they need to hear: perhaps taking the decisions that lesser managers would be loath to.

Depending on how you think about the expression, however, it merits further exploration.

First is that underpinning many of recommendations for how to send out a clear message is an assumption that what people intend to communicate is exactly what will be communicated, and that it will be understood by the receiver of the communication unambiguously and as intended. However, whatever our intentions about what we want to say and the way we want to say it,  it will be interpreted and filtered through the hearer’s experience and in the context in which they hear it. So, for example, if managers ‘sent out a clear message’ that one of the organisation’s values is collaborative working and respect for each other, then such a gesture would provoke a whole array of responses from those who hear it, partly depending on how respected they are currently feeling and how they have experienced the manager, or group of managers saying it. This will have little to do with the authenticity of the speaker(s) and how fitting their body language is to the message. What we say as managers will be further interpreted in the light of people’s experience of us and the organisation in which they find themselves working. No message, no matter how clear, comes into a world made new.

So, since the abundant recommendations about how to communicate clearly focus predominantly on the communicator, and not on the target audience, this renders much of the advice politically naïve and only partially helpful. It comes independent of context and locates the responsibility with the communicator alone.

The second aspect worth exploring is the important role that lack of clarity plays in organisations, because of the implication in the expression that if only we could communicate clearly all of our problems would be solved. If you accept the points made in the previous paragraphs, then human communication will always be imperfect. In the back and forth between communicator and the people to whom they are communicating there is always room for misinterpretation, misunderstanding and ambiguity. And it is from this very ambiguity and difference that emergence, movement, creativity, are possible. Creativity arises in organisations through every day ensemble improvisation to get the work done, the slips and adjustments that create the regular irregularity of organisational life. Creativity is as much happenstance as it is planned. The only problem is that it may not be movement or difference or creative response that we want or need: misunderstandings might be helpful or unhelpful, and only time will tell.

The third aspect worth thinking about are the moral implications of taking a stand inherent in the idea of ‘sending out a clear message’. On occasion managers do need to take a position in response to the emergence of some organisational pattern which needs them to take a view. That’s what they are paid for. However, this isn’t the end of the story. If the ‘clear message’ provokes a variety of responses from staff, as it is likely to, then managers are still in charge and still obliged to respond again. Having acted, they are then required to act again in response to the reaction. There is no end to the cycle of managerial responsibility.

Another way of thinking about the idea of ‘sending out a clear message’, then, is that it is a further iteration in an ongoing conversation. It is a response to something which has been identified by managers as needing attention. But the ‘clear message’ itself doesn’t put an end to things: it will be met in turn by a range of responses from staff which will need further engagement as everyone works out together what is needed to take the next step. The requirement to go on exploring our mutual responsibilities constantly evolves and the ‘clear message’ is just another episode in the story.

 

A critical glossary of contemporary management terms VIII – authentic

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Being authentic, meaning conforming to the original features; not false or imitation; or being true to your personality or character, has been a preoccupation of philosophers for hundreds of years. For humans and their flourishing, the question of authenticity means to inquire into what it means for anyone to live their life fully as an individual. To a degree, the idea has to be relational, turning on the paradox of the individual and the group. How might we flourish as individuals, but acknowledge authenticityour obligations to others, or even, for Aristotle, how we become fully ourselves by taking our relationship with the community into account. In our increasingly individualised world, however, following a radically subjective movement in thinking the preoccupation has been mostly about one side of the relationship, the individual.  As with many big ideas like happiness, or even leadership, it has proved far easier to define what authenticity isn’t than what it is. So, for example, being authentic does not mean conforming unthinkingly with what everyone else is doing, or doing something because you think you will be liked as a consequence, or coasting along in your life to get by.

In general, when the idea of authenticity is mobilised in contemporary management discourse it is meant to indicate an ‘inner’ authentic and true self, which one can discover through introspection, intuition and listening to one’s ‘inner voice’. It is a self which is already there, which just needs to be found and made manifest. In modern conceptions of authenticity, there is no escape from the tyranny of the subject.

For example, we are invited to bring our authentic self to work, or leaders may be encouraged to lead authentically. The point of doing so is often performative: to instrumentalise knowledge for greater organisational productivity. When we are encouraged to bring our authentic self to work it is because if we don’t, we won’t be fully engaged, the organisation may fail to thrive then productivity will suffer. This invitation to bring our imperfect, vulnerable selves into the organisation is so we can recover our full humanity. You might find this reassuringly humanising, or alternatively you might consider it another attempt by managerial discourse to colonize you and what might once have passed for your private life, so that everything you do to realise yourself is work-related. This is what Habermas meant by the colonization of the life world.

The authentic leadership discourse is variously interpreted, but is broadly predicated on four individual qualities: awareness of self through self-scrutiny; relational transparency; balanced processing and an internalized moral perspective. Each of the qualities has something to recommend it in the abstract, although no more so than any other edifying injunction to live one’s life well. It is usually understood individualistically. For example, awareness of self is certainly an important quality. Socrates told us that a life unexamined is not worth living. However, whether one can usefully do this from self-scrutiny, or feedback questionnaires is another question. In a previous post I wrote about how moments of self-revelation often arise in a group, and can be both unexpected and provoke feelings of shame and vulnerability. It involves a radical encounter of the self with other selves, and is often an uncomfortable process which destabilises identity.

The second quality, relational transparency, i.e. the injunction openly to share one’s thoughts and beliefs, is both helpful and unhelpful. When might one do this, and to what degree? Whatever one thinks leadership is, it aims at the productive exercise of power, which is always relational. So when to disclose, how and how much to be transparent, is at the heart of the exercise of a leader’s practical judgement, which has both ethical and political implications.

Balanced processing, the idea that a leader should take many points of view into consideration and treat them all fairly is in theory a wonderful thing. It requires moral imagination and an ability to decentre the self, what has been described as the ability to widen our circle of concern. However, and in my experience, organisations are increasingly intolerant places of alternative points of view. To express difference too often brings with it political repercussions. As an example, here in Oxford it was decided that cancer screening services would be contracted out to a private company. When local NHS managers and staff protested they were threatened with legal action by NHS England for defamation. Challenging management in public increasingly comes freighted with risk.

And finally, there is an internalized moral perspective, which is predominantly positive, to encourage trust and openness in others. The idea is that being clear about one’s own moral position leaves one less open to being swayed by the herd. Perhaps this last injunction comes closest to the original understanding of authenticity, concerning the need not to be conform to unthinking opinion: to know your own mind. A perceptive reader might question whether this last recommendation works against the last one. What would be the point of taking many points of view into consideration and treating them fairly if you were unwilling to change your mind in the light of what you had heard?

The problem with the idea of authenticity in the conventional management discourse is that circles around in a solipsistic loop of the autonomous, self-cognising individual. It doesn’t define itself in relation to anything except a sense of self which already there.  In contrast, a relational alternative would be to consider the idea of an indeterminate self, emerging in attempts to co-ordinate action with other indeterminate but interdependent selves. Authenticity here becomes the paradoxical ability to find oneself with and through others, choosing between multiple sets of responsibilities while negotiating joint action. It is the activity of dynamically sustaining membership of multiple groups as we navigate how to go on together, to become the fullest expression of ourselves.

A critical glossary of contemporary management terms IX – passionate.

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Passionate, meaning capable of being roused to intense feeling, ardent, easily aroused to anger, is a word which is taken for granted now in organisations to convey commitment to the job, or being able to go the extra mile. Despite the ubiquity of the term over many years, it seems that we have not yet reached peak passion. Previously the word also had connotations of suffering or enduring. Hence the passion of Christ refers to Jesus’ suffering on the cross. To be passionate about one’s job, then, denotes hard work, endurance, and a willingness to suffer in order complete work which pushes the employee to their limit. In a way, then, to claim to be passionate is also an indication of submission and obedience to a call of duty.

passionThe prevalence of the term is at odds with the experience of many workers in organisations where metrics and performance management are used as a disciplinary apparatus to keep people’s noses to the grindstone. Ticking boxes, conforming to increased standardisation and targets often squeezes out worker autonomy and a sense that it is possible to exercise professional judgement. And yet while this narrowing of professional enjoyment is happening, employees are expected at the same time to be able to assert that they feel passionate about their jobs. Perhaps the greater the presence of the former the more the latter is required as public display.

The inquiry into an employee’s commitments and passions seems to have become a particularly important interview question for companies, judging by the number of internet guides there are to answering the passion question. Often, when I work with groups of managers it is usually only a matter of minutes before someone in the group responds to a particular dilemma by wondering out loud what Steve Jobs (or perhaps Richard Branson) would say/do. On the question of passion Jobs was a convert: a video circulates on the internet where he argues how necessary passion was for him to develop Apple, but how hard it is to live with. So we might think of passion at work as the Jobs manoeuvre at recruitment interview. The idea clearly has performative value for interviewers wishing to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Of course, since the idea is so cliched and so rehearsed from both sides of the interview table, it is hard to know how seriously either party takes it. So another way of interpreting a question about passion is a kind of shadow boxing where what’s really being asked about is the level of conformity an employer might expect. Perhaps the interview question is really: how much trouble are you going to be?

Meanwhile, other claims to passion in an organisational context are as unlikely-sounding as they are bizarre. You can be passed on the motorway by commercial vehicles claiming that the company is ‘passionate about logistics’ or ‘passionate about sandwiches’. Nothing is too trivial or mundane to attract one’s deepest feelings. Where work may be repetitive and boring, so it is thought possible to invest it with greater meaning by infusing it with emotional significance.

We should all be mindful of the Irish poet WB Yeats’ observation about passion in his poem The Second Coming:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Anyone observing the UK during this disastrous three year period since the Brexit vote, culminating in the current leadership contest for the Conservative Party, might be able to see what Yeats was getting at, and what Jobs, to his credit, also realised: that your passion can be extremely exercising for everyone else around you. Passion on its own doesn’t get you out of the mess you’re in and might have landed you in the mess in the first place.

And yet there is something significant about caring about what one does. Work should matter given how much of our lives it takes up. The difficulty arises then, when it becomes a confessional requirement and/or performative marker of obedience. If it merely has the status of a thought-destroying cliché, then it no longer serves us well.

In Weber’s essay on Politics as a Profession he tries to explain two other facets  of passion when taken up in political action which are often missed when passion at work is taken up as an edifying but thin invitation: a sense of proportion and a feeling of responsibility. Weber argues that the sense of proportion and responsibility for a cause, and one’s part in it, rescues the term passion  from what he calls ‘sterile excitation’ , where people ‘intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations’. Passion is not just about you, but about the broader cause for which you are prepared to suffer, and those you implicate in your actions if you become a leader. And because of the dangers of blind passion, exposure of the self, and exposure of others, it needs a broader understanding of the social implications of what one is attempting:

‘that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ‘sterilely excited’ and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The ‘strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.’

Weber argues that no politician would have changed things had s/he not been prepared to attempt the impossible. However, attempting the impossible is undertaken with a passionate detachment and a sense of responsibility, to become a hero in ‘the sober sense of the word’. Weber is pointing to a paradox that one needs to be detached about one’s passionate commitments in order to engage more intensively. In the paradox of detached involvement it is also important not to lose sight of the suffering your passion might cause for everyone else, what kind of difficulties you implicate others in. So there are always ethical implications of having passions, particularly if they lead to passionate action.

Maybe there is something about passion which is worth hanging on to, not as some kind of bull-headed and individualistic pastiche of Steve Jobs, but as a social phenomenon which can have the full range of consequences, practical and ethical, for the group of which one is part. Being committed above and beyond what is required can be a very noble and inspiring thing for those around you. It can also be socially disastrous, and you might be experienced as over-committed to the wrong cause to the detriment of more generative relationships. Think on that in Brexit Britain.

 

A critical glossary or contemporary management terms X – embrace

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Embrace, to hold someone closely in one’s arms, especially as a sign of affection, to accept a belief, theory or change enthusiastically and willingly. This word has become very widely used in organisational life, particularly when applied to hardest of all concepts. So, for example, we are invited to ‘embrace complexity’, to ‘embrace change’ or to ‘embrace diversity’. It sounds cuddly and nice: problem-free. There is an implication in this invitation, then, that we might be a bit reluctant toembrace accept that organisational life is complex, or that having more diversity is beneficial, but if we do so then it will be good for us in an unalloyed way. Change is always good for us, particularly if it is transformational change. If we eat less, drink less alcohol, and exercise more as we promised ourselves in our New Year’s resolutions, then we’ll start to feel the benefits by March. There are no downsides and we’ll feel warm and good about ourselves; fitter, happier, and hopefully more productive at work. There, now that you have embraced complexity you’re beginning to feel better about your job already, aren’t you?

One might understand the invitation to ‘embrace’ as part of the general environment of charismatic cajoling and hectoring that is part of the managerial discourse in contemporary organisations. Where older authoritarian concepts of command and control are no longer supposed to wash in theory with the great majority of employees, we are now managed with a combination of quantified targets sugared with a concern for our welfare. The pastoral side of quantification is keen for us to be our ‘best selves’ at work, to believe in the values, to take care of our wellbeing, to be resilient, to be mindful, and to inquire into the positive. Sometimes being managed feels like meeting someone you are not quite sure about at a party who nonetheless insists on invading your space. In a similar vein, when the temperature goes up in the summer, my institution writes to me to remind me to keep myself hydrated, to open the windows and see if I can acquire a fan. It makes me feel grateful that my managers are looking out for me in such a detailed way.

What the breezy injunction just to accept complexity and diversity leaves out is just how hard it is to do in practice – if it were that easy, we probably wouldn’t be where we are. Embracing complexity, or diversity, or change means being open to be radically destabilised, and to feeling uncomfortable, even possibly shamed and humiliated by events and the inability to get on top of them.

That’s because ‘embracing complexity’, if taken seriously, is likely to provoke a radical undermining of managerial identity. For example, we might need to accept that managers are in charge, but they are not in control. They are likely to be as much changed as they are to change others, and there are limits to what they can achieve, no matter how charismatic, influential and good at ‘delivery’ they are. It’s not just that they are not in control, but they are nonetheless still responsible for whatever kicks off in their domain. There is no ground to stand on, just good enough ground for now. Changes in the wider environment are likely to be far more influential on what is going on in a particular institution, than what a particular group of manages decides needs doing. And this is no argument for doing nothing.

Embracing complexity implies a radical decentering of the self, which some might find alarming, but others liberating. It is maddening, contradictory, uncertain and disturbing territory and it throws you upon others to help you make sense of it. Embracing complexity on your own may only be partially helpful if you are to make sense of the game in which you find yourself caught up. It means paying attention to the obvious and the less obvious, inquiring below the surface of things, expecting the unexpected and enduring strong emotions, yours and other peoples’, in the process of doing so.

So too with diversity. There are very few nations worldwide which are not struggling with questions of diversity at the moment,  for both good and bad reasons. The radical encounter with otherness can be painful if we are to avoid either monstering the other, or admiring difference from a distance but remaining unchanged. Embracing diversity, if it is to be meaningful, may involve giving up some privilege because existing social relations depend upon the dynamic maintenance of power relations. Those who dominate can only do so if they are hypervigilant and thoughtful about how they dominate, and it is quite rare for people in a dominant position to give up their advantages voluntarily. How easy is it to embrace diversity if it means a loss for us?

The invitation to embrace things, then, particularly hard things, just doesn’t cut it. It’s a weasel word. It covers over just how much of a struggle the whole process involves for us and others, particularly if embracing something threatens to radically alter what currently matters to us, and our sense of self. To embrace things meaningfully really could be transformational if we have the patience, fortitude and judgement to see things through.

 

 

 

A critical glossary of contemporary management terms XI – organisational politics

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Move fast and break things – this is the poster that one of the Tech Giant CEOs is supposed to have in his office. The invitation to ignore social conventions, perhaps even to avoid consulting people and talking things through, is a signature of managers in a hurry. Thinking, talking can disrupt progress and slow everything down. In UK politics we have some very vivid examples of Arendtthis attitude, when the current government prorogued parliament to prevent any more deliberation, or when they use procedures intended to facilitate anti-terror legislation to rush through changes to Education policy. Enough talk getting in the way, we need to deliver things.

So politics, the way that people living in groups make decisions, is under particular strain at the moment, and so too in organisations.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has commented at length on the way that ineluctable and amplifying social acceleration puts political processes out of kilter with the fast pace of change and creates double binds. The more complex the issues we face, the more we need to deliberate; the more time we take to deliberate the more the complex issues we face escalate and evade our control even further. Acting fast and breaking things is not just the first recourse of technocrats and demagogues, but may also be a response to the pell-mell pace of change where we find ourselves, as Rosa points out, in a state of frenetic standstill. Many organisations are in exactly this position, particularly if they have committed to the ideology of transforming things. But the one constant is change, so despite the fact that everything changes, nothing changes.

Contemporary management discourse has always had a bit coy about politics and its role in making decisions in groups, particularly with the erosion of traditional forms of authority. The exercise of power in organisations, particularly when your leader is supposed to be authentic needs to be a bit more subtle than command and control. As the psychological contract between employer and employee has attenuated, so we need more sophisticated ways of bringing about coherence, and sometimes obedience, in organisations.

There are various forms of charismatic appeal to cover over politics, the invitation to believe in the vision, or to follow the transformational leader. These might take the form of mystical appeals to the ‘purpose’ of the organisation as they do with Laloux, which is thought to be above and beyond the interests of any individual or group of individuals. This is a familiar trope of pathetic fallacy where the organisation is understood as a ‘living, breathing whole’ to which its employees should submit. Another form of idealism would be any understanding construed in the social constructionist or appreciative schools of thought, which consider power and politics as ‘just another discourse’ and ones which can be airily waved away with a more positive perspective. It is quite unusual for particularly North American scholarship to deal explicitly with questions of power and politics in organisations. We may be invited to leave our politics at the door, or to refuse to gossip about each other, or always to be open and transparent.

Next there are various forms of categorisation of politics, sometimes into the usual two by two Cartesian co-ordinates familiar in business school teaching. Scholars in this tradition acknowledge that there is inevitably politics in organisations, and that can even be a good thing. But there are good politics and bad politics. Bad politics are those which prevent us from achieving our goals and making us more effective, while bad politics is dysfunctional. The role of the manager, then, is to stand outside what is going on, identify what is helpful and what isn’t and steer politics towards effective organisational ends. This might be by setting clear and measurable goals, and thematic organisational objectives. Or scholars may even take the Goldilocks position: not too much politics, not too little, but just right. A similar argument is often used with complexity, where there is an assumption that managers can control complexity in the organisation by steering ‘it’ towards organisational ends, and/or that the complexity does not implicate them, or that ‘just enough’ complexity is required, or even that complexity is always good and creative. Managers are assumed to be above the politics which they are trying to influence, and as with much of the realist managerial discourse. They are reflexively mute, unable to take their own position, and their own limitations and interests into account, because they are assumed to be the same as the organisation they steward.

Alternatively there are various methods arising in Organisational Development (OD), which claim to design politics away. They do so by proceduralising employee engagement, while making the moral claim that these ways of working produce greater democracy, harmony and effectiveness in organisations. The various manifestations of sociocracy or holocracy, claim to work against the traditional limitations of top down bureaucracies by creating explicit, rule-governed ways of working which distribute power, thus allowing workers, and the organisation as a whole, to be more entrepreneurial and ‘agile’. One way of thinking about these developments is that they simply replace explicit and formal power with implicit and shadow forms of power, where the most obvious social capital is gained through a commitment to the ideology itself. The ideal of trumping politics, the messy, uncertain human process of exploring how we might go on together, with rational and technical methods, is as old as humanity itself, and certainly was one of the principal informants of the rise of scientific management.

If we return to the original definition of politics above, the way people in groups make decisions, and think about it from a complexity perspective, then as members of groups there is no standing outside what we are all engaged with, all of the time. Managers cannot control how people respond to each other to get things done: there is no political ‘system’ to be manipulated, no procedures which will be complete enough, or obvious enough without a lot of political negotiation and interpretation. Nor is there any point in trying to ban gossip,  or inviting people to be totally open and transparent. This is not an argument for doing the opposite, of course, but how transparent to be and when will always be a matter of judgement. It matters that senior people in organisations appeal to colleagues to work for the good of the organisation, but exactly what that means in particular situations will always need to be negotiated through. The person who gets to decide what is good for the organisation is in a very powerful position.

So managers are also part of the political game, and have their own interests, more or less legitimate, and more or less explicit, and more or less ‘aligned’ with those of the organisation. We are caught up together because we are interdependent, and there can be no taking the next step together unless our interdependencies are at the heart of the matter. It is not at all obvious in advance what productive or positive politics looks like. We can certainly take a view about what unproductive politics looks like, since we will all have our stories about having been caught up in them. Our relationships can be influenced, people can be persuaded and cajoled, they can be threatened, or they can be invited to follow the dream of a better world. But the alternative to some kind of political, deliberative process is to move fast and break things, a shattering which can lead to tyranny and violence, or at the very least to people feeling unrecognised, or misrecognised. If politics is the art of the possible, a negotiation of the uncertain, then, as Hannah Arendt warns, the outcomes of tyranny and violence are even more uncertain. Perhaps politics is the least worst option.

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