I’ve been thinking of writing a blog post about organizational development. However, there is one very important thing to be understood before one engages in such a dialogue: There are no Organizations! I repeat: There are no Organizations! Nope. None. I have been working in and for organizations for 13 years, so I know.
What do I mean by that? Well, I mean exactly what I write. The whole concept of organization is … well, a concept. It’s an abstraction. A metaphora. A symbol. A social object. Dream castle. Externalized speech. Fictive character in a sci-fi book. Second order abstraction. Someone to blame. A scapegoat. Common dream.
I used to be an engineering manager for a technology area with about 25 subordinates + subcontractors. In those times I spent a lot of time discussing with my employees and finding out what motivates them and what demotivates them. Usually they liked their work and team mates, but hated the organization. Sometimes even the whole company. So what I tried to do with them was to prove that there are no “organization” or “company” which makes their life miserable. It is just a projection of their own mind. There are only people, and like they said themselves, most of them are pretty good guys. The “organization” is something we create in our own minds for some specific purposes. It gives us something to relate to, something to compare ourselves with, something to blame for if things don’t go like we would like them to go. It is a “generalized other” which sees us.
For some people this was actually quite revealing. If we create the “organization” by ourselves, we are free to change it. It is quite empowering thing to understand. I remember one guy who was really cynical about the work and the company. After we discussed about this it was like a light bulb lighting over his head. His motivation to work went to different level and his cynisism vanished. But some people don’t get it, not really. With some of them it’s not even worth a try.
So, my goal in this blog post is to make you really understand that what I say is literally true. Not just as a concept but in a very real sense. It is possible to gain a deep and personal experience of this. Of course I can’t give you this experience by writing few lines of abstractions. Some of you might be like that guy I told you about, light bulbs lighting just by reading something like this. But even in that case you can deepen that understanding to be a living experience.
I suggest you to try out following practice. It is similar to Chinese Hua-Tou practice and has some resemblance to Japanese Zen Koans. Here it goes:
Whenever you have a meeting, in the beginning of a meeting ask yourself: Where is the Organization, right here and right now? In the middle of the discussions in that meeting ask yourself: Where is the Organization, right here and right now? At the end of the meeting, when you all are closing your notebooks and laptops, ask yourself: Where is the Organization, right here and right now?
Whenever you are having a conversation in the coffee rooms or corridors, ask yourself: Where is the Organization, right here and right now? Whenever you are having a one-on-one with your superior or subordinate, ask yourself: Where is the Organization, right here and right now?
Here is the important part of Hua-Tou practice: Whatever answer you might get from yourself (or others), throw it away and reject it. It is not the correct answer. Keep asking the question again and again, going deeper and deeper in it. If you are working with organizations, this will give you more material to work with than any books or trainings could ever give.
This is one of the core practices of any decent Wu Wei Coach.
I like your approach which is really helpful in making invisible things (“the organization”) discussable. Here’s my answer (free for anyone to throw away
:
An organization is a shared agreement about who makes which decisions.
In your meetingn/corridor example, as long as the people in a meeting room / around a water cooler agree – sometimes tacitly – about whose decisions (about strategy, budget, actions, etc.) they accept, they are part of that organization and therefore their decisions represent the organization. That doesn’t mean they agree with those decisions, they just agree to live with the fact that these decisions are being taken that way.
Why do you need the concept of organization to explain/make sense of what is happening in those discussion by the water cooler? I think that is a really important question…
There are at least two things to be aware of:
1) It is sometimes useful to think about what is happening with the concept of “organization”. It is like making a process chart out of something that happens naturally – you become able to compare that process with other process charts that represent dynamic action.
2) That very process of “seeing processes” is also a trap. You will lose your contact to that which the process chart is representing. You might become blind to that what is actually happening.
For me, “organization” is a dynamic process and a dynamic concept at the same time. It is something that is socially constructed again and again. You can’t walk to the same river twice.
Thanks for replying, Ari-Pekka – I still feel the concept of “river” is useful, even if you can’t walk to the same river twice. I agree that mapping something is like taking a snapshot of its current state; but unlike some Asian philosophies I don’t believe that this stops you soul from evolving. As long as you are aware, as you mentioned, that what you mapped is just a snapshot at some given time, you can let the dynamics evolve… and agreement about who gets to make what kind of decision is a very dynamic thing and *very* badly represented in an org chart. Finding out who talks to whom at the water cooler will probably tell you much more about how the organisation really works!
Using language changes thinking. In that sense it might be very beneficial to use concepts such as “organization”. On the other hand, the changes in thinking can easily be also harmful. One might focus on more and more to these abstractions and less and less towards what is really happening..
It’s kind of like falling into sleep without even knowing it…
Hi and thank you for sharing your thoughts. I myself have choosen to work most of my time with people, even though my job professions and official job title including the position in the organizational chart only entitles me to work with the organization and the systems. That makes a hugh difference for me, because the concept of the organization has indeed vanished and instead it is the people which matter.
I have a question though, why your last sentence: “If you are working with organizations, this will give you more material to work with than any books or trainings could ever give.” The two things remembered strongest in an article is the first statement and the last. So you kind of leave me puzzled now, are there organizations or are there not?
Good question!
My answer is that there are no organizations. Organization is a concept. It’s an abstraction. A metaphora. A symbol. A social object. Dream castle. Externalized speech. Fictive character in a sci-fi book. Second order abstraction. Someone to blame. A scapegoat. Common dream.
If you are working with “organizations”, this is what you are working with. You are well better positioned if you are aware of this.
But don’t take my word on it, see for yourself!
Thanks for this Blog. I agree with the statement that there is no such thing as an organisation. It reminds me of a comment in a paper by Bruce Reed from the Grubb Institute: ‘Organisations are just people behaving. The question is, how they behave’. The Grubb has created the Guild { } in the Business of Now. This sort of conceptualisation is in synergy with the spirit of enquiry that the Guild is seeking to engage with in working with people who come together for a purpose. It is also very much in tune with the work of the brilliant psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion whose approach to insight laid the foundation for the work of the Tavistock and the Grubb Institutes.
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Very interesting article, whose main argument I heartily agree with. It reminded me of reading Dee Hock explaining that our “pervasive habit of perceiving an institution as a tangible, physical reality, like a building or a machine” is one of the main reasons our institutions and organizations “seem increasingly as much beyond our control as the turning of the earth and the burning of the sun”.
Hock then asks the reader to leave the physical manifestations of the organization aside, its name, employees, offices and so forth, and describe the company with any of our senses: what color is it?, how does it smell or taste like?, … He goes on: “If you can’t perceive a company with any of your senses, does it have any reality at all?”
Furthermore, he says: “The truth is that any commercial company, or for that matter, any organization, is nothing but an idea. All institutions are no more than a mental construct to which people are drawn in pursuit of common purpose; a conceptual embodiment of a very old, very powerful idea called community. All organizations can be no more and no less than the moving force of the mind, heart, and spirit of people, without which all assets are just so much inert mineral, chemical, or vegetable matter, by the law of entropy steadily decaying to a stable state.”
Poetic. And, quite literally, as you say, the truth.
Ps. Read the quotes are from Hock’s book “Birth of the Chaordic Age” – if you haven’t read it, please do
Thank’s for the reference! I agree wholeheartedly with those quotes. It is funny that Hock seems to even use the same analogue that I used – namely that of the Koan practice. In the past when I was a zen student my teacher used to ask me those same questions concerning the Koan “Mu”. “what color is it?, how does it smell or taste like?”…
I cringed at your koan. The reason I cringed was because it clarified what “organization” is, and why it is so troubling, as an abstraction. The abstraction becomes concretized (i.e., a conglomerate that solidifies, nearly permanently) by the rule of law, and corporate law. While human attention decides the reality of the organization, and can be considered a fluid and flexible reality, the organization that abides and overtly controls all decisions is the rule of law. For example, by law, in the U.S., corporations must maximize profit, at any (non-financial or long-term) expense. While laws can be changed, they are tremendously difficult to change. A person’s mindset can also be tremendously difficult to change, and the dominant mindsets determine the law, yet laws are intended to restrict, not expand decisions and behaviors. They then have a strong controlling influence over time on the dominant mindsets that create more laws and rules.
Changing the corporate governance laws can be the greatest lever for change. A prime example of this is the new B Corporation laws that states are adopting:
http://www.bcorporation.net/about
So, what about the laws and rules defining the “organization?” While somewhat changeable, they funnel decisions and behaviors.
As I go deeper with these insights, I continue to hit this legal wall. The rules are the organization. The rules are made by the mindsets of the people in power. Change the rules that can be changed, yet most of the rules are unchangeable. And I cringe again, because I just banged my head into the wall, again………..
Thank’s for sharing your experience! I see that this koan is leading you to the same direction as it leads me too. I actually made a new blog post about the organizations, where I also reflected upon how this abstraction of “organization” is reinforced by lot of characteristics that make it feel more real..
http://fractalsauna.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/organization-now-you-see-it-now-you-dont/
Your new post distinguishes the trap we get into of conflating “I” with “We” and with “It” and “Its” – that classic Integral distinction. As we consider the organization, we must be careful about pursuing each distinction separately and in how they inter-relate. I was considering the “we” and quickly focused on the “it(s).”
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I wonder if anybody changed any of one’s initial opinions about organizations existence or not as a result of reading others’ thoughts. Based on scanning the above, I assume the opposite : whatever we people read, we tend to find ourselves and people who agree with us “righter” and the others “wronger”, in a very civilized professional manner of course, accompanied with quotes, eastern philosophy references and new fresh ideas. Still waiting to read a response saying ” I thought blah blah blah….and after reading your post I see that there is truth in the opposite perspective”.
And some corrolaries come to mind after reading this like : There are no real “books”. Just ink dots on paper that through physical channels evoke certain neural excitations and chemical discharges based on patterns embedded in the brain. the rest is mumbo jumbo that justifies people calling themselves intellectuals for remembering all the dots and their meanings.
or : there is no real “history” just people who say things and do stuff. all the rest are excuses for justifying why we don’t take charge of our world.
Your thoughts about it ?
Very good questions. Obviously there are no single answers to them. I have reflected upon how learning new viewpoints to causality might evolve. You can read it here: http://fractalsauna.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/scarp/
Basically I do think that engaging in dialogue (whether it is inner dialogue or public one) can change people’s ways of thinking and acting. But of course that doesn’t always happen – and the direction where this change might lead is also unpredictable, i.e. how articles like this are interpreted and responded to can vary a lot.
I also wrote a follow-up post for this one: http://fractalsauna.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/organization-now-you-see-it-now-you-dont/
In this post I try to explain in what ways I can see “organizations” and in what ways I can’t. It was also replied with a remark that “me”, “people” etc. are also abstractions. So even though I concentrated in “organizations” in this post, the same process of thought can also be applied to other abstractions. But I do think “organizations” have some more interesting characters than e.g. “books”. For example the indication to ethics is quite interesting. I plan to write about those later…
I think this is a half-truth. There is no thinking being called the organisation. No malicious agent sabotaging our efforts. However, any complex adaptive system is composed of agents. We do not cese to exist merely because our bodies are composed of billions of individual cells acting independently at the micro level. We are a large complex adaptive system, a somewhat stable pattern of feedback. I think organisations are much like that. They are systems, or templates, patterns of behaviors and values that are not independent of the people in them and that affect these people to a large degree, changing their behavior from what it otherwise might have been.
I both agree and disagree with you. I agree there are no “thinking beings” called organizations. But I also see that “organisms” can’t be used as an analogue to “organizations”. Organisms are really unified systems, wholes, sometimes even “thinking beings”. Organizations on the other hand are just abstractions of mind – i.e. they exist only in the minds of individuals. Sure, there are patterns of behavior etc but those patterns aren’t emerging from the “organization”. They are emerging from the interactions between people and world. If you label that interaction as “organization”, it is quite like labeling the passing wind as “Mike the hurricane”. There never was Mike, it was just a name you gave to some phenomenon you saw…
I wrote another article about how I think “organizations” can be seen and in what way they can’t be seen: http://fractalsauna.wordpress.com/2012/09/06/organization-now-you-see-it-now-you-dont/
This last comment of yours really helped me “get it” a bit more. the goals we share as a group and the processes we engage in are the organization, but they only exist within our own minds and between people as agreements. This is an insight, one more further along the scale of meditating and dialoguing on this koan: there are no organizations!
“Here is the important part of Hua-Tou practice: Whatever answer you might get from yourself (or others), throw it away and reject it. It is not the correct answer. Keep asking the question again and again, going deeper and deeper in it. If you are working with organizations, this will give you more material to work with than any books or trainings could ever give.”
This is a wonderful koan for thinking and dialogue, and my next dive into it will be how it affects practice and the engagement of myself and others in our organizations.
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