Advocating for an organic, wholistic view of organizations
There are a number of sources exploring the concept that an
organization is a lot more than a machine, adjustable and amenable to various
tweeks, new ‘plugs’ additional oil and especially high-octane gasoline. Lines
like, “Maybe if we change ‘drivers’ we will get more and better results!” are
just an example of the kind of thinking, perception and especially conception
that linger in the minds of executives, supported by a culture whose archetypal
roots were ‘poured’ in the industrial revolution. This specific ‘metaphor’ lurks
in and through the minds of many male organizational leaders, dependent on and supportive
of a set of management principles that point to raising production, lowering
costs, enhancing performance as measured by observable, predictable and
reliable data.
As the cultural consciousness
about the risks to global warming and climate change rises, there is a predictable
and almost inevitable shift among some organizational leaders and theorists, to
a different metaphor. No longer a machine (auto), some of these thinkers/executives
are revising their notion, into something more organic…a kind of natural
system, interacting with its environment, not only on those traditional scales
of profit and loss, sales and revenue streams, but even more complex. Some of
this thinking details environmental (eco-system, political, economic, labour and
even values determinants and goals) as a much more complex, inclusive and even ‘living’
thing that requires detailed attention, nuanced and sensitive observations and
judgements and monitoring.
Half a century ago, Charles A.
Reich wrote a book entitled, The Greening of America, in which he outlines
three levels of consciousness:
1)
The values of rural farmers and small business
people that dominated the 19th century
2)
An organizational society that features
meritocracy and social improvement through large institutions like the New Deal,
the Second War and the 1950’s Silent Generation
3)
The worldview of the 1960’s counterculture,
including personal freedom, egalitarianism, and obviously recreational drugs.
Twenty-five years later (1995),
Reich penned an even more urgent warning inside the cover: “If there was any
doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent
today…I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now
threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our
energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with
human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means.
Predictably, given the ‘hippy’ characterization of the author, the book and the
author received many ‘one-star’ reviews. Words like naïve, idealistic, were
amply applied. George Will argued it was the worst book ever written.
However, as the world “turns” and
we face some still urgent dynamics over which we (collectively, especially in
liberal democracies!) potentially can have an influence, the ‘organic’ notion
is finding resonance in our diet, as well as in our glimpses of how we would
like our world to be perceived and engaged. Authenticity, that cliché criterion/lens
by and through which many assess people and situations, we can hope, may be a
glimmer of candle-light in our tunnel to the future.
With respect to organizations,
when they are considered “organisms” (rather than machines), they take on a
vibrancy, as well as perceptible needs in order to ‘function’ in the most optimum
manner. Working conditions from the most basic that include adequate training,
effective equipment, personal safety and security, environmental protections, to
such human resource benchmarks as ‘worker turn-over,’ employee reviews, even extrinsic
evaluations (Top 500 companies, for example) and evidence of social
responsibility are all included in many of the profiles of successful business
organizations. Some corporate organizations use these indicators in their
arguments against the right of workers to unionize. (Not incidentally, the labour
movement has suffered serious depletion in both Canada and the United States
over the last two or three decades.)
Obviously, many of these metrics,
taken individually and together, offer both the potential of increased costs,
as well as enhanced worker loyalty. Human Resource departments, at least in the
larger firms, keep track of both the company’s and the employee’s relationships
as they monitor sick-time, scheduling, holiday time, potentially merit
incentives, and also potentially dis-incentive programs, as well as the
long-standing pay-distribution, accounting and reconciliations as required.
All of these variables, when considered in the albeit
growing portfolio of organizational responsibilities and expectations, continue
to be monitored as well as to reflect those social and cultural waves that
occur outside the walls and the fences of specific organizations. For example,
over the recent months and years, there has been a growing public consciousness
of the disparity in employment and unemployment numbers between with and non-white
workers, as well as a significant gap in the wages earned by black and brown
workers, when compared with white workers. There is also a rising tide of
political activism around the disparity between the income earned by men and
that earned by women doing the same jobs with the same qualifications. These
metrics, too, are having a significant impact on the expectations of both the labour
supply, as well as on the management theories and practices especially in
larger organizations. Added to this “stew” of organizational ingredients/expectations/perceptions,
is also the issue of gender politics, given that women experience abuse from
male colleagues at a rate that continues to grow, in the public consciousness.
Race, gender, social and professional guidelines, these are
all a matter of growing importance in all organizational settings, whether they
are operating as for profit or as not-for-profit.
Serving as one of the driving energy forces in the
organization too is the growth in the development and deployment of technology,
giving rise to new working conditions, as well as completely new and deeply
embedded social media communications among people everywhere in real time. So
it is not an exaggeration to note that whatever is happening in the social and political
discourse is going to make its way into the deepest recesses of each and every
organization. And this dynamic is especially true, if not actually exaggerated,
at a time of a pandemic, like the one infecting every nation and organization
on the planet.
So far, we have been exploring objective data, even that
data that discloses racial and gender conflict inside and outside the organizational
boundaries.
Now, it seems a reasonable time and place to stretch our
consideration beyond the extrinsic, the objective, empirical and the ‘scientific’…given
the considerably high importance in our culture as well as in our organizations,
of numerical, algorithmic instruments of manipulating mountains and seas of
information.
And here we cross into the realm of what is common termed ‘anthropomorphism’….the
attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, an animal or an object.
This tendency to attribute traits, emotions and intentions to non-human entities
is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. The study of
religion and theology has included the notion of giving human traits to God,
whereby God has eyes, hands, feet, and molds humans out of dust, plants a
garden, takes his rest is an area familiar to many. The very notion of
ascribing traits of humans to an organization, runs the risk of ridicule, for
many reasons.
First, the separation of religion and state has been long
advocated especially in the United States. Secondly, the corporate and scientific,
including the medical and legal disciplines, rely heavily on the observation,
detection, collection and curation of empirical data, in order to conduct their
‘business’ generating a conventional tidal wave of ‘authenticity’ and validity,
and reliability and thereby trust, in the pre-eminence of the objective,
empirical way of knowing, and assessing and then deciding. Clients, patients,
workers, managers, and leaders all gravitate to the conventional vernacular as
well as the epistemology that undergirds this way of seeing and of knowing.
It is the artist, the poet, the shaman, the psychotherapist,
the dreamer, and the spiritual guide, while clearly aware of and capable of
grasping the empirical reality in every organization, is not only open to the
connotative, the poetic, the imaginary and the wholeness of the picture, based
not only on cognition but also on intuition, imagination and the images the
empirical reality generate. Just as there is much “more” to a human being than
the list of symptoms and numbers in a diagnosis and prescribed treatment, there
is certainly ‘more’ to an organization than those empirical digits that are
assigned to the many and varied symptoms of the operation of an organization.
Call it the intuition, the psyche, the spirit, the so9ul…that dimension
which, in some way perhaps, integrates the reflections, the data, the symptoms,
into what some call the gestalt. There is what we common term a conscious and
an unconscious in each of us…following the mapping of both Freud and Jung and
their successors. Let’s speculate, for a moment, that it is legitimate to
consider that there is a conscious and as unconscious aspect to each
organization, each family, team etc. And while the conversation today centres
around the word “identity” especially as it regards ‘identity politics’ (under
which classification each voter’s identity falls using such categories as race,
gender, ethnicity, age, income, education etc.), and we hear every day about
how an athletic team needs to find its ‘identity’ in order to be successful, here
we are picturing a slightly different, slightly more complicated and complicating
aspect of the human being, not to the exclusion of those identity markers, but
in addition to them.
Instantly,
many will have already shuddered at the thought of considering something that
smack of therapeutic language and its inferences and implications when
discussion an organization. The last thing most executives seek, want or even
will tolerate, (and this tragically includes too many educators and theologians)
is to consider the relevance, important and need for ‘help’. The Los Angeles Times
reports on royal biographer, Anna Pasternak’s response to the Oprah interview
with Harry And Meg last night: It was a very soft-serving, soapy interview in
Meghan’s favor…This is a woman who seems to make a habit of falling out with
people.” The LA Times reports also includes this quote from Piers Morgan on
Good Morning Britain, “I expect all this vile destructive self-=service
nonsense from Meghan Markle—but for Harry to let her take down his family and the
Monarchy like this is shameful.” Also, in the LA Times report, “A column in the
Sun tabloid, which alleges that palace staff have dubbed the interview “Moperah”
because of all the complaining, called the interview the ‘biggest theatrical
performance of Meghan’s life.” In the same report, Clare Foges in the London
Times said Harry and Meghan should have their titles removed. ‘The Oprah
interview seems like the Sussexes’ own queen sacrifice: a strategic decision to
burn bridges with the British in order to build them with the Americans,’ Foges
wrote.
Any
suggestion that the ‘firm’ (the British Monarchy) can and will tolerate a
request for help against the tabloid press, who themselves are regularly
entertained at Buckingham Palace, seems to have evoked, “That’s just the way it
is; we have all suffered the same treatment and survived,” if Harry is to be
believed. And it is precisely the chasm of both reality and perception that
separates the “management” view of their organization and the “intrinsic,
organic, intuitive, imaginative and (obviously the much more sensitive,
compassionate and caring, and wholistic concept which, from their perspective
would only lead to a “surrender” to the emotional frailties, akin to what they
consider the emotional frailties of the Sussexes.
And
yet, if Harry’s perspective has credence, especially his view that he “saw
history repeating itself”, following the appalling treatment of his mother at
the ‘hands’ of the tabloid press, then it seems some are more willing and ready
to take a walk in his ‘mocassins’ than others.
The
discarding of an organic perspective, including an organic epistemology, is a
risk that too many in positions of power and leadership are not only willing to
take. They may even be taking it unconsciously, unaware of the underlying,
apparently imperceptible, and therefore unimportant energies that are flowing,
potentially erupting and complicating the effective, efficient and ‘successful’
running of the organization.
This organic, intrinsic, wholistic, intuitive, imaginative, psychic and spiritual lens and the many nuanced colours, rhythms, patterns, and pulsations at the heart of the organization are not to be lumped into the category of facial technology that robs individuals of privacy. It is more aligned with a perception and a cognition of “identity” not as a demographic marker, but as a ‘fellow being’…in which those charged with its growth, health, and survival can feel an enhanced sense of comradeship. This organic framing, too, could apply not only to the organizations in our human community, but to the planet itself. We are long past time when we can legitimately continue to grab whatever resources the planet has for our corporate, political, ideological, narcissistic “profit”. And, the same is true of how we treat other humans: if we are nothing more than a productive resource, objectified, replaceable and easily and casually disposed, like trash, we will all have to live with such an attitude and a mind-set, long after the multiple human tragedies will have witnessed, and been complicit it permitting.
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