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Organisational Therapy

Psychology of Change in Organisations

April 8, 2011
Archive, Ex-Amplify.com, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting, Snippet
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Psychology of Change in Organisations

[From the Archive: Originally posted at Amplify.com Apr 08, 2011]

[Updated Jan 17, 2021 to point to different online version of the referenced article, the original at www.psychologytoday.com having become inaccessible.]

Here’s a snippet from an article explaining the key role of (collective) mindset in organisational change.

Organisational psychology and neuroscience are two key influences in the Marshall Model. This article fills in some of the background to how these things relate:

Leaders today must understand and apply the knowledge of behavioral psychology and the lessons from brain science [a.k.a. neuroscience] to manage organizational change successfully. In the past, efforts at organizational change which have focused on the structural aspects of organizations have systematically failed because they have neglected the reality that change doesn’t happen without individual people changing their thinking, beliefs and behavior.

In an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, Emily Lawson and Colin Price argue that change success in large organizations depends on persuading hundreds or thousands of groups and individuals to change the way they work, a transformation people will accept only if they can be persuaded to think differently about their jobs. In effect, CEOs must alter the mind-sets of their employees—no easy task.

Read more at TheChangeManager

– Bob

The Nine Principles of Organisational Psychotherapy

April 29, 2012
Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
13 Comments

The Nine Principles of Organisational Psychotherapy

The core premise of Organisational (Psycho)Therapy is that flourishing organisations are great places to work, and because of this, highly effective at pursing their chosen purpose.

Definitions

“Psychology is more of the ‘let’s figure out what is going on’ (scientist) and psychiatry is more ‘let’s treat whatever is going on’ (physician)”.

Organisational psychotherapy aims to increase an organisation’s well-being and, as a consequence, its effectiveness. Organisational psychotherapists employ a range of techniques based on:

  • experiential relationship building
  • dialogue
  • communication
  • behaviour change

Organisational psychotherapy posits that application of such techniques may improve the “mental health” of an organisation, including the improvement of relationships – both individual and collective – within the organisation (and often, between the organisation and external parties, such as its customers and suppliers, too).

Distinctions

Although there is no clear division, organisational psychotherapy differs from e.g. organisational psychology in that the former is generally focussed on “treatment”, whereas the latter is primarily focussed on study, research, and the addressing of presumed workplace needs such as e.g. creation of systems, policies, etc.

From my perspective, as a self-annointed “organisational therapist”, organisational psychology most commonly aligns to the Analytic mindset, whilst organisational (psycho)therapy has much more in common with the Synergistic mindset. YMMV.

Put another way, therapy involves inviting the organisation “onto the psychiatrist’s couch” and working through issues using e.g. conversation and a kind of coaching style.

And frankly, I hold organisational psychology, as a discipline, to be responsible for some of the most egregious dysfunctions –  including: job design (narrow specialisms), “training”, appraisal systems, task design, incentive schemes, and pretty much the whole HR nine yards – in today’s knowledge-work organisations. (See also: What are Non-Obvious Systemic Constraints?).

DIsclaimer

The principles listed below are my principles – as practising organisational therapist. N.B. Other folks may work to different principles.

Sick, Sick, Sick

Many organisations are sick. If they were people, many of these sick organisations would likely be sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

A common reason given for sectioning (involuntary commitment) is to prevent danger to the individual or society. Organisations with suicidal tendencies may act on these tendencies and harm or kill themselves. Organisations with psychoses are sometimes driven by their delusions or hallucinations to harm themselves or others. Organisations with certain types of collective disorders can present a danger to themselves, their employees, customers, suppliers and society at large.

But organisations are not people. And the psychology of organisations are much less well understood – and less easy to get at – than the psychology of individuals. Much as we might like to “section” organisations, this option is not (yet) available to us (society). Even “voluntary commitment” or therapy is something that very few organisations even perceive as being an option open to them.

And I think we have some way to go yet before organisations come to consider therapy as “acceptable”. In California, for example, most folks regard therapy as a perfectly normal response to the travails of life. There’s little or no social stigma associated with having a therapist (or, for that matter, a life coach). Such cannot be said of therapy for organisations. Organisations rarely recognise they have a collective “mental state”, let alone perceive the nature, characteristics of that mental state at any given point in time.

I posit that even organisations that are relatively healthy, mentally, can benefit from therapy (much like individuals do).

The Nine Principles

The following are the nine principles that I work to when acting in the role of therapist for any given (client) organisation:

1. Risk Awareness

Cognisance of all the things that could go wrong during the therapeutic intervention. Knowing these risks, the therapist may choose to take steps to manage them on behalf of the client – at least until such time as the client chooses to manage them for themselves.

2. Do No Harm

Ensure that individuals, in particular (but also groups, and the organisation as a whole) do not suffer any (avoidable) negative consequences from the therapeutic interventions. More than this, work to instil hope in the folks within the scope of the therapy (this in itself is a moral and practical hazard, as some organisations are so sick as to cynically attempt to exploit such new hope).

3. Organisations Have a Collective Psyche that Responds to Therapies

Organisational therapy proceeds on the basis that the collective psyche of an organisation is similar in nature to the psyche of the individual, and is similarly amenable to therapeutic interventions (although the actual techniques and underlying concepts may differ).

4. Mutual Benefits

Therapy sets out to improve the mutual well-being of both the organisation, the groups within the organisation, and the individual within the organisation. In other words, everyone involved is looking for win-win outcomes. Additionally, at the choice of the client, the scope may include other organisations, groups and individuals (and maybe wider society, too) in this seeking of mutually-beneficial outcomes.

5. Trust

Like any other therapy, the process of organisational therapy is one of building a network of mutual-trust relationships. It starts with trust in the therapist, followed by trust in themselves, expanding to trust in other members of the team, and maturing into trust in the organisation itself.

Patrick Lencioni, in his book “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” explains the nature – and strengths – of “vulnerability-based trust”:

Folks who are not genuinely open with one another – and themselves – about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust, which in itself is a fundamental requirement for the pursuit of mutual benefit and well-being.

6. Wellbeing First

As in therapy, Organisation Therapy has no agenda excepting the general wish to see the client organisation flourish and increase its level of wellbeing. Indeed, the therapist will seek to solicit an agenda from the client, probably over time as their relationship unfolds, rather than have an agenda of their own. See also: Positive Psychology, as described by e.g. Professor Martin Seligman.

7. Work in the White Space

Working on the relationships between people, groups and organisations has much more impact that trying to “fix” individuals. Indeed, some key developments (growth, improvement) can only happen in the context of relationships.

8. Cognitive Harmony

Many organisations, particularly in times of stress or change, suffer acutely from “organisational cognitive dissonance” – feelings of anxiety and discomfort resulting from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or sets of assumptions. Therapy aims to surface such incompatibilities and resolve them, through e.g. changing some of these cognitions, and thereby leading to improved “cognitive harmony”.

9. Evidence-Based

“In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

~ William Kingdon Clifford

I believe that wherever possible, therapeutic interventions should be grounded in evidence of efficacy. Some number of the other principles noted here (especially Risk Awareness, and Do No Harm) benefit greatly from an awareness of the evidence.

Summary

In summary, then, organisational therapy offers a powerful prospect of improving the well-being of an organisation, as well as the well-being of the people, groups and other organisations who come into contact with it.

– Bob

Further Reading

The Twelve Principles of Group Counselling ~ Irvin Yalom
Seven Therapeutic Principles in Group Counseling ~ “Counselor” article
Flourish – A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being – Prof Martin Seligman

The Face of the Mind

July 11, 2012
Article, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
2 Comments

The Face of the Mind

I write fairly regularly about how organisational effectiveness is a function of the prevailing collective mindset in an organisation – i.e. how everyone in a given organisation, collectively, sees the world of work. (Aside: This also assumes that organisations each have a collective psyche a.k.a. a shared memeplex – see the apocryphal story of the Monkeys and the Banana for an illustration of this idea).

organisational effectiveness = ƒ(organisational mindset)

I see many other writers and commentators sharing the view that it’s the culture of an organisation that determines – or at least significantly influences – its effectiveness.

We could just put this down to a minor difference in emphasis, or a slight variation in the choice of a word, and move on. But I think it’s much deeper than that, and that our choice of terminology constrains our ability to think about and discuss the issue – the cause(s) of organisational effectiveness. (See also: Linguistic relativity)

Why it Matters

I suggest the apparent slight difference – mindset or culture – masks a huge gulf in our ability to make practical interventions to change things for the better (or understand why things are changing for the worse).

How does one get a grip on “culture”? What levers exist to change the collective culture of an organisation? Given the vast number of words written on this subject, it seems that few folks have much practical advice or experience to share in making this happen. And I find this unsurprising. Let me use a simplistic analogy:

If we want to change the speed of a motorcycle, we might look at the speedometer and see how fast we’re going, but unless we know that the speed is (primarily) a consequence of the amount of power being delivered to the back wheel and thereby to the tarmac , we have no understanding of how to effect a change of speed.

“Culture” is like our speedometer – an outward, visible sign of other phenomena at work within the organisation. And like the speedometer, we have no means of interacting with it – it’s a read-only display.

A Vista of Viable Interventions

I suggest that if we realise that culture is just the “Face of the organisational Mind”, then we can choose to interact with the mindset of the organisation, via numerous paths and means – not least, systems thinking and organisational (psycho)therapy. Thus a vista of viable interventions opens up to us.

What do you think?

– Bob

Further Reading

Culture Change is Free ~ John Seddon (video)

The Shrink is IN

July 27, 2012
Coaching, Financial, Leadership, Management, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
8 Comments

The Shrink is IN

I have struggled for many years to find a model for positive and effective engagement with organisations looking to improve their effectiveness. Agile coaching has not worked for me – or for clients, much – because of its generally limited (i.e. individual, team or departmental) scope. Ditto Scrum Mastering (and this compounded by a widespread misconception about what Scrum Mastering even means, and just why it might offer any value).

Consulting likewise misses the mark, not least because clients rarely understand how to get anything like the best out of consultants and consulting advice. It’s often like the organisation needs consulting on how to use consultants. Of course great consultants should and can do this – clients permitting – but Sturgeon’s Law tells us these folks are rare.

So I’ve been on the lookout for a model of engagement that affords the following opportunities:

  • Models positive behaviours, such as fellowship, mutual respect and collaboration.
  • Promotes introspection and self-renewal, allowing folks to find their own way.
  • Respects the individual.
  • Avoids compounding common dysfunctions, such as parent-child dynamics (c.f. Transactional Analysis) and alienation.
  • Replaces dependency and learned helplessness with self-reliance and self-confidence.
  • Congruent with positive psychology (i.e. PERMA): Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships (social connections), Meaning (and purpose) and Accomplishment.
  • Offers incremental and tangible progress at a pace set by the folks involved.
  • Therapeutic (i.e. healing, curative, but also sometimes preventive or supportive).
  • Social and humane.

Accordingly, I have come to regard “therapy” as a model closely matching these attributes, and specifically, “psychotherapy“. But, from a systems thinking perspective, the clients or “patients” are not the individuals in an organisation, but the organisations themselves.

So these days I choose to call myself an “Organisational Psychotherapist”. What does that mean, exactly? What does Organisation Psychotherapy look like in practise? And how can an approach founded on the principles of therapy help  organisations improve their effectiveness?

Aside: We have to assume that an organisation wants help, wants to improve its effectiveness (or maybe some other aspect of its “personality”, functioning, or well-being). If thirty years of coaching has taught me one thing, it’s that there’s no helping folks (or organisations) that don’t want to be helped.

Why Therapy?

Maybe the first question folks have is “why therapy?”. Why take a therapy stance when most other folks choose to act as consultants, or coaches? Fundamentally, it’s because I believe an organisation, as a whole, has to work its issues through, and take responsibility itself for doing that. Too often, consultants get hired to shoulder responsibility on behalf of the organisation. And when these consultants leave, clients all too often find themselves back at square one – or worse. Like a game of Snakes and Ladders.

So, to organisational psychotherapy. As an analogy, we might consider the work of Virginia Satir, widely regarded as the “Mother of Family Therapy”.

“Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals.”

~ Virginia Satir, Peoplemaking, ch. 24 (1988).

“It is now clear to me that the [organisation] is a microcosm of the world. To understand the world, we can study the [organisation]. Issues such as power, intimacy, autonomy, trust, and communication skills are vital parts underlying how we live in the world. To change the world is to change the [organisation].

~ Virginia Satir (paraphrased)
The New Peoplemaking, ch. 1 (1988)

Organisational Psyche

In The Nine Principles of Organisational Psychotherapy, I stated as principle 3:

3. Organisations Have a Collective Psyche that Responds to Therapies

Organisational therapy procedes on the basis that the collective psyche of an organisation is similar in nature to the psyche of the individual, and is similarly amenable to therapeutic interventions (although the actual techniques and underlying concepts may differ).

That’s to say, the collective consciousness of an organisation is a thing in its own right, and we can examine it, interact with it and (help) alter it, for better – or worse.

“…the qualities that all human beings need and yearn for in other humans, a sense of being cared for, valued, wanted, even loved…what for a lifetime, human beings strive to find. Some of the most important :  empathic concern, respectfulness, realistic hopefulness, self-awareness, reliability and strength –  the strength to say ‘yes’ and the strength to say ‘no’.

~ Stanley S. Greben

I believe organisations, too, need these qualities. All too often organisations – in part or as a whole – come to regard themselves with some degree of self-loathing.

Where’s the Value?

Paul DiModica, in his excellent book “Value Forward Selling” suggests that people appreciate a clear communication of the value of an idea or proposition. To that end, here’s what I believe is the (unique) value in taking a therapy stance with respect to e.g. improving organisational effectiveness (a.k.a. Rightshifting):

The organisations with which I work consider therapy because some aspect or aspects of their “cognitive (brain) functioning” is not working as well as they would like. Despite these organisations’ basic competence, they have not been able to resolve these issues to their own satisfaction, from their own resources.

With improved functioning comes an improved ability to cope, to grow, to mature, and to build necessary capabilities. And with these comes increasing effectiveness, revenue growth, margins, and customer, employer, employee and shareholder satisfaction. Not to mention organisations which are able to play a more positive role in wider society.

How Does It Feel?

So, what does it look like and feel like to be an employee of an organisation that has chosen to work with an organisational therapist?

Firstly, it’s probably useful to understand that therapy does not try to “fix” anyone or anything. Personally, I most often choose  to approach a new engagement from a perspective akin to Solution Focused Brief Therapy:

“SFBT focuses on what [the client organisation] wants to achieve through therapy, rather than on the problem(s) that made it seek help. The approach does not focus on the past, but instead, focuses on the present and future. The therapist/counselor uses respectful curiosity to invite the client to envision their preferred future and then therapist and client start attending to any moves towards it – whether these are small increments or large changes.”

Given that we’re talking about organisational therapy, there’s the added dimension of working with many different folks within the client organisation – as opposed to working with just one person in individual therapy, or maybe half-a-dozen or so people, in family therapy situations.

This typically involves helping these folks improve their ability to think collectively and purposefully. I believe the key to this is the – often missing – ability to have effective, purposeful dialogue. For those (very few) organisations already skilled in this, little need to be done, but for the majority, basic work on dialogue, and thence to focus, shared visions, etc. will be required.  

What to Expect From Organisational Therapy

Some folks might have some experience of one-to-one, or group, therapy. But few indeed will have had any experience of organisational therapy. Here’s a brief run-down of what folks might reasonably expect from organisational therapy.

Who Receives Psychotherapy

Most organisations, at one time or another need some help. For some organisations, talking together, and assisted by a therapist, helps them understand ways they can improve things. Sometimes organisations seek therapy at the advice of a consultant, coach, executive or investor. Sometimes it is overwhelming stress or a crisis that causes an organisation to decide to choose therapy. In addition, many times organisations might choose therapy to gain insight and acceptance about themselves and to achieve growth and improved well-being. Therapy offers these benefits to any organisation that is unhappy with the way it acts, performs or feels, and wants to change.

What Is Organisational Psychotherapy?

Organisational Psychotherapy is a relationship in which an organisation, as a whole, works with a professional in order to bring about changes in its feelings, thoughts, attitudes, and/or behaviour. The task of the therapist, therefore, is to help the organisation as a whole make the changes it wishes to make. Oftentimes the organisation entering therapy knows changes are needed but does not know what changes to make or how to go about making them. Often, too, the organisation is fragmented not used to holding an organisation-wide “internal dialogue”. The organisational psychotherapist helps the organisation figure these things out. Therapists help clients in many ways. Exactly how depends on the orientation (approach to therapy). Here the therapist’s training and beliefs on how therapy should work can have some influence. The most common therapy approaches I use are Positive Psychology, Solutions Focus, Dialogue, Scenario Modelling and Clean Language, with influences from Eastern wisdom including Buddhism, the Tao, and Zen.

Positive Psychology

“We believe that a psychology of positive human functioning will arise, which achieves a scientific understanding and effective interventions to build thriving individuals, families, and communities.”

~ Professor Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Positive Psychology involves the use of findings from positive psychology research. It helps organisations to change – in the ways they would like to change. Positive Positive psychologists seek “to find and nurture genius and talent”, and “to make normal life more fulfilling”. There is an emphasis in positive psychology on promoting well-being, as opposed to treating illness.

Solutions Focus

While the method and scope of the Solutions Focus approach to organisational therapy are wide-ranging and comprehensive, the basic principles are simple:

  • identify what works and do more of it
  • stop doing what doesn’t work and do something different.

The Solution Focused approach was developed in America in the 1980s. Two simple ideas underpin Solutions Focus organisational therapy:

  • Even organisations with major dysfunctions will occasionally do good things, and achieve positive results. Solutions Focused practitioners will help uncover these exceptions –  whatever the organisation is already doing, which might contribute to progress on, or resolution of the issue(s) at hand.
  • Knowing where you want to get to, makes the getting there much more likely. Solutions Focused practitioners ask lots of questions about what life might be like if the problem was solved. As the answers to these questions gradually unfold the client begins to get a picture of where the organisation should be focusing.

Choosing a Therapist

“A psychoanalyst’s personality is his [or her] major therapeutic tool.”

~ Henri F. Ellenberger

You will probably want to ask potential therapists about their orientation. Ask them what this will mean for your therapy experience. Most therapists are not rigid in their orientations. You should also ask a potential therapist about use of evidence based practice. Ask them if they use methods that have been found to have evidence that they work for organisations like yours. Organisational therapy is provided in many ways, with a prevailing focus on the  organisational psyche, not individuals per se.

“…it is becoming increasingly obvious that the (psycho)therapist’s personality is a more decisive factor than the school to which he belongs.”

~ Arthur Koestler 

“Psychotherapy…is a craft, the aptitude for which derives more from a general experience of living than is generally supposed.”

~ Peter Lomas

What Happens in Psychotherapy?

The therapy process varies depending on the approach of the therapist. It also differs for each individual organisation, and its situation. However, there are some common aspects of therapy that organisations are likely to experience when they enter a therapy relationship.

The first session with a therapist is often a consultation session. This session does not commit the organisation to working with the therapist. This session helps you to find out whether psychotherapy might be useful to you. In addition, you decide whether this particular therapist is likely to be helpful. During this session, you may want to discuss any values that are particularly important to you and your organisation. This first session is a time for you to decide if you and your organisation will feel comfortable, confident, and motivated in working with this particular therapist.

You should also feel that you can trust and respect your therapist. You should feel that your therapist understands your organisation’s situation. This is also the time for the therapist to decide whether he or she is a good match for your organisation. At times, a therapist may refer you to another therapist who may be able to work better with your organisation.

After an initial assessment stage, the rest of therapy is to help your organisation gain insight and address current problems. It can also help your organisation alter the emotions, thoughts, and/or behaviours it wants to change. The therapy process focuses on the goals which the organisation surfaces during therapy. How these goals are met depends on the orientation of the therapist and the methods the therapist may use.

Organisational therapy typically requires more activity than just talking about particular issues. These activities may include such things as role-playing or homework assignments. This is where parts of your organisation can adopt and develop the new skills it decides are valuable for the future.

The amount of therapy an organisation receives will vary depending on the orientation of the therapist and the specific treatment plan used. Some interventions are relatively short. Others require a longer time commitment.

Each session of therapy usually lasts about an hour, with members of some part of the organisation. Longer sessions, with wider participation, are also sometime advised. The therapist will generally visit with your organisation once or twice a month. However, therapy timelines are rarely rigid (or predictable). Your organisation may change the schedule to fit the needs of various groups and/or the therapist.

It is a good idea to ask your therapist about the general methods he or she may use with you in therapy. Also, ask about the length and frequency of therapy you might expect.

Some therapists suggest other treatments in addition to talking therapy. These may include workshops, off-sites, conferences, reading or other things. They may also use support groups, with members drawn from different organisations.

After a period of time, you and your therapist may agree that therapy has been successful in helping your organisation achieve its immediate goals. Even after therapy has ended, some therapists may suggest a follow-up e.g. several months later to check on how you are doing. If your organisation has new problems or feel that past problems still are not better, it may choose to return to therapy.

One important thing to remember is that all types of therapy do not automatically work for every organisation. You should always consider other options when a particular therapy is not working.

What Makes For Good Therapy?

Even as far back as the 5th Century BC, Hippocrates had apparently expressed the greater importance of studying the patient than of studying the patient’s disease.

Rather than assert my own opinion directly, allow me to share the selected views of some noted folks:

“Experience has taught me to keep away from therapeutic ‘methods’ as much as from diagnoses … everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method.”

~ Carl Gustav Jung

“Some years ago I formulated the view that it was not the special or professional knowledge of the therapist, nor his intellectual conception of therapy (his ‘school of thought’), nor his techniques which determine his effectiveness. I hypothesised that what was important was the extent to which he possessed certain personal attitudes in the relationship.”

~ Carl R. Rogers

“…the crucial factor in psychotherapy is not so much the method, but rather the relationship between the patient and his doctor or … between the therapist and his patient. This relationship between two persons seems to be the most significant aspect of the therapeutic process, a more important factor than any method or technique.”

~ Victor E. Frankl

“…however much therapists may focus on the technical aspects of their procedures, an increasing body of evidence suggests that it is the personal relationship between themselves and their patients which is experienced by the latter as the most potent therapeutic force.”

~ David Smail

“There are many schools of psychotherapy but results appear to depend on the personal qualities, experience and worldly wisdom of the therapist rather than on the theoretical basis of the method. … There is growing evidence that effectiveness in (psycho)therapy is primarily dependent on the quality of the relationship between the quality of the relationship between therapist and patient and that, in turn, depends on the quality of the therapist.”

~ Robert M. Youngson

“If any single fact has been established by psychotherapy research, it is that a positive relation ship between patient and therapist is positively related to therapy outcome.”

~ Irvin D. Yalom

Organisational therapy works as it does because it is not a pseudo-science, magic or a kind of medical treatment, but simply because it is a highly refined method of therapeutic co-operation, both between the therapist and the organisation’s psyche, and between the folks in the organisation itself.

– Bob

Further Reading

How Psychotherapy Works ~ Online article

Stigma

July 29, 2012
Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
1 Comment

Stigma

Let’s talk about stigma. Specifically, let’s talk about the stigma organisations feel in admitting there’s anything wrong with them. I mean, customers will feel disturbed and anxious, won’t they? How would you feel if one of your suppliers admitted they weren’t perfect? That admission might come as a shock. If they hadn’t ‘fessed up to it, you would still be thinking they were perfect, wouldn’t you? Deflated illusions, shattered dreams. Heroes with feet of clay.

Or maybe we should just be more realistic? It’s an old adage of therapy that folks who don’t admit to a problem rarely make much progress in dealing with their issues.

Tough, Man

Traditionally, organisations seem to think that they must promote a Marlboro Man ideal – tough, independent and unemotional. And incompatible with even the consideration that there might be scope for improvement.

I have heard folks express disconcert at the very idea that there might be something “wrong” with their organisations, that they might need therapy. These concerns are widespread, and real – if rarely voiced.

Out of Touch

Organisations have emotions, and emotional states. We’ve all heard folks describe their organisations as e.g. “happy”, “sick, “dour”, etc.. And, almost by definition, organisations are rarely in touch with their emotions. Being out of touch, most organisations do not even realise that they are, for example, depressed or otherwise emotionally challenged. Maybe we can co-opt the term “normative organisational alexithymia” – literally “without words for emotions” – to describe this phenomenon?

Received Wisdom

Many organisations learn from their peers that they are not supposed to show vulnerability, or imperfection. They learn to suppress or hide their inadequacies, so much so that they are genuinely unaware of both their emotional state (not to mention their relative effectiveness) and how to express that emotional state in words.

Even when an organisation comes to awareness of its emotional state, and the effect this state is having on e.g. effectiveness, employee engagement, customer relations, and the bottom line, it is still unlikely to seek help – and highly unlikely to seek any kind of therapy.

To benefit from therapy, an organisation must admit that it needs help, must form a bond of trust with the therapist, and must openly discuss and express emotion. These requirements…conflict with traditional ideals of what it means to be in business: toughness, independence and absence of emotion.

Social Norms

Some organisations may also worry that customers, peers, and even society at large, will look down on any organisation that can’t “tough it out” on its own, and that seeking – or even needing – help is not “normal”, “healthy” organisational behaviour. Even organisations who do seek therapy may worry about what others think of their choice.

In general, organisations are much more likely to seek help with problems that they think are normative – that is, problems that many other organisations share (and seek help with).

If an organisation perceives that being depressed or otherwise dysfunctional is not ‘normal,’ then even if it does try to get help it may feel shamed and aberrant. So, instead, it might try to keep its depression or dysfunction(s) quiet, and maybe self-medicate with merely palliative interventions.

What Can We Do?

One way to convince more organisations to seek help, then, is to demonstrate that the things they need help with are “normal.” In this regard, we might take a cue from the erectile dysfunction drug industry:

“Men are going in to see their doctors much more about erectile dysfunction now, after the ads for Viagra and other drugs, because there’s so much more awareness”

This, in a nutshell, is what Rightshifting is all about. Demonstrating that ineffectiveness is normal, and increasing organisations’ awareness of what effectiveness means.

We can also work to make more palatable the words we use in describing therapy, and emphasise e.g. self-help, organisational capabilities, and achievement.

Is it reasonable to expect that organisations will ever acquire the capability to self-counsel and self-treat? Maybe some, now, and maybe in a hundred years, more. But until the majority do, there will be a role for specialist therapists, and a need for organisations to seek help.

What are the contexts that influence organisations to seek help, and why? That’s the challenge for us all to figure out, in terms of both theory and practise. Right now, we don’t seem to have even the beginnings of the answers.

– Bob

Further Reading

Helping Men to Help Themselves – How help-seeking is gender-related
Therapist Self-Disclosure Decreases Stigma of Therapy for Clients – Online article
Don’t ask, Don’t tell: The Stigma of Going to Therapy – Online Article
The Stigma of Therapy – Online article
Is There a Social Stigma Associated With the Words Psychotherapy, Therapy, and Counselling? – Blog post

Leadership or Fellowship

July 30, 2012
Coaching, Leadership, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
24 Comments

Leadership or Fellowship

“The 21st century doesn’t need more leaders – nor more leadership.”

~ Umair Haque

I used to be a fan of leadership. I saw it as a way – maybe THE way – out of the dismal, bean-counter, management factories of the Analytic mindset. Although, truth be told, and upon reflection, even when I was running my own business (Familiar) I didn’t do much “leadership”. Even now you can go to my website and see my thoughts (as they were several years ago – and yes, I know, the whole thing needs a serious overhaul, for any number of reasons).

Update: 16-Nov-2012 I’ve now overhauled my website, so its incongruity is now consigned to the obscurity of the Wayback Machine.

And even recently, I generally took the notion of leadership as a given, and a “good thing”, without really ever thinking about it much.

But in the run-up to ACE Conference 2012, and the preparation of my keynote on the topic of Alienation, something began to quietly nag at me. With the opportunity to reflect a little more, and as I teased at the loose ends, the fabric of the leadership ideal began to unravel before my mind’s eye.

Fish in Water

“I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.”

~ Marshall McLuhan

This quote is getting a little threadbare now, I think, but still relevant.

The idea of leadership, and preoccupation with it, seems to be about as old as history itself. Much of modern society has come to regard leadership – at least, of a certain sort – as a noble and revered calling. Accordingly, there is a wealth of research, opinions, models, etc. exploring leadership. Not to mention the global leadership “industry”. It’s as if it’s the only game in town for go-ahead businesses.

Setting aside the specific issues of pathological leadership (Caligula, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Gaddafi, et al), and the crimes committed thereby, I have come to believe there are fundamental flaws in the whole notion of leadership (however well-intentioned or competent). Be that Servant Leadership, Host Leadership, leader-as-coach, joint or shared leadership, whatever. To me they are all tarred with the same brush.

Leadership is a Sensemaking Construct

In his paper The Romance of Leadership and the Evaluation of Organizational Performance James R Meindl describes how the concept of leadership has all but transcended rational enquiry and passed into the realms of romantic myth.

In a nutshell, he observes that people overrate the value of leadership; external influences appears to have more impact on the performance of organisations than we generally assume.

“The significance placed on leadership is a response to the ill-structured problem of comprehending the causal structure of complex, organised systems.”

He asserts that the concept of leadership emerges from this sensemaking process “guided by the psychology and sociology of the observer”.

“The romanticised conception of leadership results from a biased preference to understand important but causally indeterminate and ambiguous organisational events and occurrences in terms of ‘leadership’.”

The Ideal

Let’s take a look at what we’re trying to accomplish in highly effective knowledge-work organisations. Dan Pink cites “Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose” as the key elements for intrinsic motivation in knowledge-work contexts. Anyone who has this software development thing figured out knows that great teams don’t need – or have – conventional “leadership”.

“When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It become quite clear that, for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.”

~ Peter M Senge

Peter Senge suggests the ideal social environment for knowledge work is the learning organisation:

“…where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together”

~ Peter M Senge

Senge postulates five “disciplines” of the learning organisation:

  • Shared Vision aka Common Purpose

    “The organisational vision must not be created by the leader, rather, the vision must be created through interaction with [and between] the individuals in the organisation.”

    ~ Peter M. Senge

  • Systems Thinking

    “The defining characteristic of a system is that it cannot be understood as a function of its isolated components. First, the behavior of the system doesn’t depend on what each part is doing but on how each part is interacting with the rest … Second, to understand a system we need to understand how it fits into the larger system of which it is a part … Third, and most important, what we call the parts need not be taken as primary. In fact, how we define the parts is fundamentally a matter of perspective and purpose, not intrinsic in the nature of the ‘real thing’ we are looking at.”

    ~  Kofman and Senge, 1993, p. 27.

    Which, to my mind, applies at least as much to the (undesirable) partitioning of roles into ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’ as it does to partitioning of the organisation into e.g. silos.

  • Personal Mastery

    “Individuals who practice personal mastery experience other changes in their thinking. They learn to use both reason and intuition to create. They become systems thinkers who see the interconnectedness of everything around them and, as a result, they feel more connected to the whole. It is exactly this type of individual that one needs at every level of an organisation for the organisation to learn.

    ~ Peter M. Senge

  • Team Learning

    “[In Team Learning] all participants must ‘suspend their assumptions;’ all participants must ‘regard one another as colleagues;’ and there must be a facilitator (at least until teams develop these skills) ‘who holds the context of the dialogue.’ [David] Bohm asserts that ‘hierarchy is antithetical to dialogue, and it is difficult to escape hierarchy in organisations.’

    ~ Peter M. Senge

  • Mental Models

    “Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior.”

    ~ Peter M. Senge

And not just any old mental models. A shared mental model of how the world of work should work, with the nature of that shared world-view dictating the effectiveness of the organisation as a whole.

The Dysfunctions of Leadership

The concept of leadership introduces a number of dysfunctions. Rarely are these discussable or discussed in our romanticised conception of the mythological leader:

  • Leadership inevitably produces implicit (or even explicit) Parent-Child relationships cf Transactional Analysis

“Just one of many examples of this type of parent/child exchange is the unwritten pact that if employees do whatever their bosses ask of them (regardless of whether it makes good business sense) the boss will take care of their next promotion/career move.”

  • Leadership validates “followership” and thus increased risk of “social loafing“
  • Leadership cultivates “learned helplessness”
  • Leadership can increases alienation, tribalism and the formation of in-groups
  • Leadership often encourages favouritism, patriarchy, deference, sycophancy and obsequiousness, with a consequent reduction in both the quality and quantity of meaningful dialogue.
  • Leadership compounds and perpetuates the Analytic mindset
  • Leadership subtly undermines systems thinking, by breaking the social body into discrete parts (leaders, followers), and focussing attention on those parts rather than on e.g. the relationships between them, and the whole itself.

Comfortable

“People hate to be managed, but love to be led.”

~ Scott McNealy

And people love sitting on the couch, with beer and pizza, watching a game on TV, too. This doesn’t mean it’s good for them (at least, health-wise), or productive. By all means, folks should be free to choose their own poisons, but from the perspective of the effective organisation, we might hope that we’re working alongside folks that do have some motivation towards the well-being and productivity of themselves, their colleagues and their collective endeavours.

So to Fellowship

I posit that, unlike leadership, fellowship is much more congruent with the ideal social environment for knowledge work, as outlined above. I recently wrote a post describing the idea of fellowship and contrasting it with the more established concept of leadership.

Conclusion

In conclusion then, I believe the idea of leadership has some merits – generally in the context of Ad-hoc and Analytic mindsets (cf. the Marshall Model), but popular mythology, plus certain pernicious cognitive biases, crowd out the greater benefits that fellowship can offer. I feel the Synergistic mindset offers a great opportunity to leave behind us the dysfunctions inherent in the idea of leadership, and thus open the door to the uptake of the idea of fellowship.

– Bob

Further Reading

The Romance of Leadership and the Evaluation of Organizational Performance ~ Meindl, Ehrlich and Dukerich (1985 paper, pdf)
You Are The Messiah And I Should Know – Why Leadership Is A Myth ~ Justin Lewis-Anthony
Leadership Becomes Fellowship ~ Bruce Morton (MIX article)
First Break All the Rules ~ Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
The Builder’s Manifesto ~ Umair Haque (blog post)
Leadership is Overrated ~ Rick McLaughlin (pdf)
Could Leadership Not Matter At All? – Forbes.com article
Good to Great ~ Jim Collins

The Advantage – A Book Review

August 1, 2012
Book Review, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
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The Advantage – A Book Review

“The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it.”

~ Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

I don’t usually indulge in book reviews as blog posts (for which check out my Goodreads page), but the new book from Patrick Lencioni has prompted me to make an exception.

Not that I think it’s a great, must-read book. Far from it. But because its topic – organisational health – is sufficiently close to my core focus (organisational psychotherapy), I’ve decided it’s worth mentioning by way of this review.

“After two decades of working with CEOs and their teams of senior executives, I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.”

~ Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

Lencioni

For those unfamiliar with Patrick Lencioni and his works, he has written a number of great (IMO) books including:

  • The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive ★★★★★
  • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team ★★★★★
  • The Five Temptations of A CEO ★★★☆☆
  • Getting Naked ★★★☆☆
  • The Three SIgns of A Miserable Job ★★★☆☆
  • Death By Meeting ★★★★★
  • Silos, Politics and Turf Wars ★★★★☆

Each of these, in their own way, has been great reading; informative, thought-provoking and grounded in Lencioni’s 20+ years of consulting practice. Each has been a notable influence in my own practice.

The Advantage

Simply put, I found this book a disappointment. I guess this is because it’s mainly a rehash of much of his other work. I had been hoping, from the free sample, to find a book centred on the issues of organisational health. But apart from the first chapter, there’s nothing much here about organisational health per se at all. It’s as if the author has suddenly found a smart label to stick on his collective works, and tied a whole bunch of stuff together under one umbrella. Kudos for the marketing chops, at least.

His continual emphasis on the role of leaders and leadership also grates with me. For the majority of organisations – i.e. those of the Analytic mindset – I’d agree that leaders (senior execs in particular) set the tone and model the behaviours that the rest of the organisation tends to follow. But doing the wrong thing righter is, I posit, not anywhere near as useful as doing the right thing – for which I offer fellowship as a prime candidate. Ironically, then, it seems to me that an organisation that emphasises the hegemony of leaders (and the relative diminution of the role of others) is likely less healthy than it might be.

These things being said, you might like to read this book if you haven’t read much or any of his other works before. The Advantage offers a convenient entry point into his collective works, with sufficient references into his other books for following up on details and specifics.

The Advantage is also a departure from the author’s more usual business novel (a.k.a. ‘Fable’) format. So if you shy away from business novels, then this more prosaic, text-book approach might appeal to you. ★★☆☆☆

– Bob

P.S. For the Rightshifters amongst you, I suggest that the author’s enthusiasm for organisational heath, and the benefits he attributes to it, correspond fairly closely to an organisation’s relative position on the horizontal (rightshifting) axis (i.e. the healthier an organisation, the more effective it is). More specifically, I’d say that organisational health corresponds more or less to the green (fun) line on this ‘Perspective on Rightshifting’ chart.

Further Reading

Flourish ~ Prof. Martin Seligman See also: PERMA and the Positive Business
Table Group website page for The Advantage

Power, Hierarchies and other Dysfunctions

August 5, 2012
Article, Fellowship, Leadership, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
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Power, Hierarchies and other Dysfunctions

I’m thinking that some folks may interpret my stance on leadership (dysfunctional) and fellowship (beneficial) as fanciful or idealistic, borne of personal bias and certain marxist tendencies.

Actually, my stance is based on emerging research and reasoning-from-first-principles. (Inevitably, some biases will be at play, though).

I accept that neither evidence nor reason seems to sway the majority of folks in the field of leadership or management.

Here’s just some papers related to the dis-benefits of power hierarchies and the command-and-control style of management (and, often, leadership):

Having Less Power Impairs the Mind

“New research (2008) appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science, suggests that being put in a low-power role may impair a person’s basic cognitive functioning and thus, their ability to get ahead.”

~ Smith, Galinsky APS (Association for Psychological Science), May15, 2008

Cognitive Disenhancement

22 May 2008
From The Economist print edition (via Jeff Sutherland’s blog)

“IF YOU ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE HEAP, MENTAL PROCESSES MAY KEEP YOU THERE

NEW drugs may help to enhance people’s mental powers (see article). But a study carried out by Pamela Smith, of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and her colleagues suggests a less pharmacological approach can be taken, too. Their work, just published in Psychological Science, argues that simply putting someone into a weak social position impairs his cognitive function. Conversely, “empowering” him, in the dread jargon of sociology, sharpens up his mind.
Dr Smith focused on those cognitive processes that help people maintain and pursue their goals in difficult and distracting situations. She suspected that a lack of social power may reduce someone’s ability to keep track of information and make plans to achieve his goals.
To explore this theory, she carried out three tests. In the first, participants were divided at random into groups of superiors and subordinates. They were told that the superiors would direct and evaluate the subordinates and that this evaluation would determine the subordinates’ payment for the experiment. Superiors were paid a fixed amount. The subordinates were then divided into two further groups: powerless and empowered. A sense of powerlessness was instilled, the researchers hoped, by having participants write for several minutes about a time when they were powerless or by asking them to unscramble sets of words including “obey”, “subordinate” and so on to form sentences. The empowered, by contrast, were asked to write about when they had been on top, or to form sentences including “authority”, “dominate” and similar words.
The first test was of concentration. Participants saw words that meant colours—red and blue—written in different colours on a computer screen. They were asked to name the colours of the words (as opposed to the colours described by the words) as quickly and correctly as they could. Because most people read words more quickly than they can identify and name colours, this widely used method tests their ability to inhibit the urge to read what is written and instead focus on the task of naming the colour.
The second test was of memory. It involved a series of black letters presented in the centre of a white screen. Each letter was shown for half a second and followed by a blank screen for two seconds before the next letter appeared. Participants were instructed to indicate, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether each letter matched the letter shown to them two letters previously.
Finally, the volunteers were given a planning task that required them to move an arrangement of discs from a starting position to a final one in as few moves as possible. To perform this task well, they had to realise and accept the need to move their discs away from their intended goal before moving them closer.
In all three tests Dr Smith found that low-power participants made 2-5% more errors than their high-power counterparts. She argues that these results were not caused by the low-power volunteers being less motivated, as they had the same financial incentive as the high-power volunteers to do well. Instead, she suspects that those lacking in power suffered adverse cognitive effects from that very lack, and thus had difficulty maintaining their focus on the tasks.
If this is borne out by later experiments, it has important implications. Managers, always suckers for jargon, talk a lot about empowering their workers. However, they often fail to do so in practice. This is another reason why they should—unless, of course, they fear for their own authority.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices

“I am pleased to be able to offer my thoughts and evidence as the Federal Government thinks about how to manage its substantial civilian workforce to ensure even higher levels of performance and service. There is no doubt that people and how they are managed matter tremendously for organizational success — as literally scores of studies show. However, much of the conventional wisdom about and current practices in managing people are inconsistent with both theory and evidence about how to attain the best from a workforce.

~  Jeffrey Pfeffer, Hearing on the Status of Federal Personnel Reform

Power and Moral Hypocrisy – Dan Ariely

Update: 18 August 2013

My thanks to @drunkcod and @jchyip for this contribution:

The researchers found that compared to participants without power, powerful participants were stricter in judging others’ moral transgressions but more lenient in judging their own: “power increases hypocrisy, meaning that the powerful show a greater discrepancy between what they practice and what they preach.”

~  Dan Ariely, Power and Moral Hypocrisy

Please Contribute

If you find, or know of, any other papers on the subject, please let me know so I can cite them here.

– Bob

Further Reading

Freedom From Command and Control ~ John Seddon
Jane Elliot’s Blue Eyes / Brown Eyes experiment

Zen and the Art of Organisational Enlightenment

August 8, 2012
Familiar, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
3 Comments

Zen and the Art of Organisational Enlightenment

The Enlightened Organisation

I think it’s fairly safe to say that most organisations lack enlightenment. That is, few indeed are those that perceive their true nature, are self-aware (in the sense of consciousness of their own thought processes, motivations and behaviours) and can act on that perception for positive change. I think it fair to say that most organisations exist in a perpetual state of dukkha.

Does this matter? Does it, for example, impact the bottom line? I’d say yes on both counts (yes it matters, and yes, it impacts the bottom line).

The Buddha described it thus:

Insight into the Four Noble Truths we call “awakening”. This awakening allows us to attain the unattained supreme security from bondage.

Ok, enough of Eastern mysticism already. (BTW There’s a similar Western tradition, Transcendentalism, exemplified by Emerson, Thoreau, et al.).

How does this all relate to “the enlightened organisation”?

Self Awareness

If a person lacks awareness of themselves, of their own thinking, of their way of being in the world, then:

“The more asleep we are, the more out of touch we are with what we are doing, the more unaware we are likely to be of consequences, and the more unaware we will be regarding how what we are doing is affecting us and others – so the fewer opportunities we will have to recognize how often we create our own problems…”

~ Milton Dawes

Or from the Mahout and the Elephant perspective: the reflective, self-aware part of our brain governs our ability to overcome the strong psychological hurdles to our understanding ourselves – and why we do things.

In the context of the collective organisational psyche, I suggest that self-awareness (the organisation’s collective awareness of and sense of self) poses the same kinds of challenges and offers the same kinds of benefits if achieved – but at the organisational level.

By What Method

If the goal is a healthy, self-aware organisation, then how can we set about making this happen?

“A goal without a method is nonsense.”

~ W.E. Deming

Personally, I’d suggest taking a look at how individuals go about transforming their outlook and self-awareness. Effective techniques I myself have used include:

  • Meditation
  • Zen and zazen
  • Coaching
  • Therapy (i.e. help from experienced helpers)
  • Dialogue on the subject (i.e. with others)
  • Reading and study (including much study of Koans and the ineffable Tao)

For me, the organisations I see are much like those individuals trapped in a cycle of self-ignorance – unwitting prisoners of their own psyche.

In Conclusion

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes
Everything under heaven bows together
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

~ Wumen

– Bob

Further Reading

Satori – Japanese term for “Enlightenment”
Samadhi – Buddhist term for “mindfulness” or “no mind” (Japanese; mushin), Flow
The Wedge of Consciousness ~ Online article by Milton Dawes
Knowing Why Beats Knowing How ~ Whitney Hess (blog post)
Innovation and the Art of Riding an Elephant – Online article by Bengt Järrehult
Self-awareness is Vital to Self-improvement ~ Blog Post at PsychologyToday
The Polar Opposite of Self-Awareness: Image Management ~ Steve Beckow (blog post)

Creating Sane Organisations

August 18, 2012
Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
4 Comments

Creating Sane Organisations

Premise: If we want to work in sane organisations, and given that many organisations are quite insane, we are faced with the challenge of improving “organisational sanity”.

What is Insanity?

“insanity is doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results.”

~ Benjamin Franklin

Whilst cute, and widely quoted, this definition doesn’t quite cut it for me. I prefer:

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

or this:

“Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

~ R. D. Laing

And perhaps the best quote I’ve found – in the context of organisations, at least:

“Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it.”

~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

So What is Sanity?

Alfred Korzybski wrote in his Theory of Sanity,

“Sanity is tied to the structural fit or lack of it between our reactions to the world and what is actually going on in the world.”

He expressed this notion as a map-territory analogy:

“A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

Given that science continually seeks to adjust its theories structurally to fit the facts, i.e., adjusts its maps to fit the territory, and thus advances more rapidly than any other field, he believed that the key to understanding sanity would be found in the study of the methods of science (and the study of structure-as-revealed-by-science).

Organisations and Sanity

Wouldn’t it be great if society and business knowledge had advanced to the point where creating sane organisations was a well-understood problem, with trusted and well-tried solutions? I have hopes that one day we may get there, although I doubt whether it will be in my lifetime, or yours.

“I have found that humans, even ‘insane’, are extremely logical provided you trace their premises – except their premises have no realization in actuality. So that’s the main point, not a problem of logic. From some premises, some consequences follow.”

~ Alfred Korzybski, 1947

Until that far-off day, we must accept that organisations are born, and grow up, with precious little thought to their sanity – or otherwise. This being the case, and assuming that we would like the organisations within which we work to be sane – or at least, saner than they are presently – we are faced with the challenge of improving “organisational sanity”.

What is a Sane Organisation?

Korzybski believed that sanity is the ability to consciously adapt to a changing environment (model it, map it). If the world changes, the sane change with it, while the insane refuse change.

Erich Fromm wrote in his book “The Sane Society” that not only can individuals be insane, but entire societies (and by reduction, organisations):

“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth… Just as there is a ‘Folie à deux’ (madness shared by two) there is a ‘folie à millions.’ The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

So what is a sane organisation?

For me, it is any organisation which thinks for itself, in context. Which knows itself, and recognises that it needs to continually monitor its context, in case that context changes.

And by “knows itself” I mean something akin to the inscription in the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: “Know Thyself”, and in particular in the manner Plato uses the phrase as a maxim for Socrates in describing his motive for dialogue.

“To find yourself, think for yourself.”

~ Socrates

See also: Self-knowledge (Psychology) and in particular, Self-perception Theory, the latter involving as it does validation or ‘testing’ of one’s supposed presuppositions, attitudes, and beliefs through examination of actual behaviours.

Is a Sane Organisation More or Less Effective?

Whilst sane organisations sounds like it might be a good idea, not least from the perspective of the folks that have to work in organisations, can we justify the effort in improving sanity? Do saner organisations have any tangible advantages over their typically less sane cousins? Does it translate to the bottom-line? And is that a sane question, in itself?

Personally, I think it’s self-evident that saner organisations have advantages, both for the folks working in them, and for the folks who have to deal with them (e.g. customers, suppliers). And if we believe (many do not, it seems) that happier employees means more productive employees (and happier customers too, btw) then we can predict a positive impact on the effectiveness of the organisation (and thence to the bottom-line).

Caveat: In an insane world, sanity may be less of a commercial advantage than we might first think?

“We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.”

~ Socrates

Sanity, Enlightenment, Love and Wholeness

In a recent post i wrote about Zen and the enlightened organisation, making a plea for the benefits of bringing “enlightenment” – in the classical Zen sense – to organisations.

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”

~ Erich Fromm

I’ve also written before about the problems of balkanisation and alienation within organisations – both aspects of a lack of wholeness c.f. David Bohm:

“A corporation is organised as a system – it has this department, that department, that department… they don’t have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.”

~ David Bohm, Thought as a System (1992)

For me, these four ideas – sanity, love, enlightenment and wholeness – seem inextricably interwoven.

– Bob

Further Reading

Sanity – Wikipedia entry
Science and Sanity ~ Alfred Korzybski (full book online here, quick intro here)
Korzybski Quotes in Context – Web page
Neurological Relativism and Time-binding – Interview with Robert Anton Wilson (audio)
Symptoms of the Dysfunctional Organisation – White Paper
Wholeness and the Implicate Order ~ David Bohm

On the Radar

August 23, 2012
Dialogue, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Rightshifting
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On the Radar

Pawel wrote a nice blog post recently about using radar charts (a.k.a. spider charts) to visualise the maturity of a Kanban implementation.

In formulating a treatment plan (forthcoming blog post) at the outset of an organisational therapy intervention, it can be useful to visualise how the organisation sees the world of work, i.e. how it thinks that work should work. At the very least, this visualisation allows each person to relate their own personal beliefs, ideas and assumptions about work to the collective viewpoint.

Further, we can use visualisation as a basis for encouraging dialogue on the direction in which folks would like the organisation’s perspective to evolve in the future.

Starting Out

When starting out on mapping an organisation’s perspective on the world of work, it can help to come up with a starter-list of “dimensions” or axes to bound the visualisation. How any one organisation arrives at such a list will, of course, depend on how that organisation believes how such things should be done – autocratically, by an expert or experts, through a special team, via collaboration and joint discussion, etc..

In any case, I’d expect this list to evolve as people discuss and decide what’s important, and as priorities change.

Here’s a sample list of dimensions (also used in the later examples):

ABCCo Mindset Dimensions [Top Level Critical Dimensions]:

Note these are not yet defined in more (quantified) detail
Version: Initial illustrative list, rough draft 23.08.2012 by RWM, author
Owner: Bob Marshall, bob.marshall@fallingblossoms.com

    • Breadth of participation in decision-making
    • Alignment of preaching with practice
    • Regard for happy, healthy staff as a business advantage
    • Focus on customers
    • Collaborative, win-win approach to customers
    • Use of quantification
    • Accounting principles (0: Cost accounting; 5: Flow/Throughput accounting)
    • Conformance to process (0: Irrelevant; 5: Essential)
    • Workflow model (0: Big batches and queues; 5: Single piece, continuous)
    • Team longevity
    • Rapid feedback
    • Respect for the individual
    • Use of appropriate measurement and metrics
    • Understanding of principles
    • Emphasis on learning
    • Mutuality
    • Emphasis on product quality
    • Flatness of management structure (hierarchy)
    • Explicit risk management
    • Importance of due date performance
    • Tolerance of cost issues
    • Emphasis on continual improvement
    • Eagerness for change
    • Perspective on change initiatives (0: entirely local, 5: systemic, holistic)
    • Eagerness to seek out new ideas, methods, thinking tools, principles
    • Clarity and ubiquity of shared purpose
    • Self-awareness (as an organisation)
    • Organisational health
    • Purposeful discussion and mutual learning

Note: I’ve described/labelled each dimension so that we can represented each data value by a single number in the range 0-5, where 5 is ‘best’. This makes plotting, reading and comparing the charts simpler.

Examples

Here’s a simple sparkline-ish chart showing a (current) consensus view of an organisation’s perspective on how it believes work should work (a.k.a. mindset). Note: order of the columns corresponds to the list, above:

Following discussions and/or deliberations, we might imagine another chart illustrating the desired target-condition (a.k.a. mindset), say at a point in time some  months hence:

Of course, if you’re using e.g. a spreadsheet to make these charts, you could slice and dice the data in other ways, to show e.g. the dimensions of greatest difference (and thus maybe requiring greatest effort or attention).

Caveat

One thing to look for: how will the organisation in question (here: ABCCo) respond to this kind of visualisation and quantification? It may not appear too contentious, but for severely left-shifted organisations, even these simple formalisms may be too much to stomach.

Conversely, for devoutly Analytic-minded organisations, this simple formalism may prove insufficient. And for significantly right-shifted organisations, entirely other approaches may find favour.

Know thy client!

Further Reading

Competitive Engineering ~ Tom Gilb
Spider Chart Alternatives ~ Jon Peltier

Planning to Flourish

September 2, 2012
Ethics, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
2 Comments

Planning to Flourish

This is a follow-on to a previous post entitled “Focus”, and looks at what might happen after an organisation has held an initial focussing session.

For organisations on a rightshifting journey, thinking and talking with terms such as “assessments”, “symptoms”, “problems” and “solutions” (a.k.a. “treatments”) can in fact add to folks’ anxieties.

Assessment

Most therapeutic interventions start out with some kind of “assessment” by the therapist. From the therapist’s point of view, this is mostly about getting to know their new client, and establishing some rapport. But the very use of the term can be interpreted by the client, unfortunately, as that the therapist is making some judgements or evaluations of the client’s state of mind. And this in turn can lead on to some degree of dependency and learned helplessness. Not good outcomes for the client.

Anxieties

As a consequence of participating in a focussing session – where many symptoms (or as Theory of Constraints calls them, “Undesirable Effects”) are surfaced, perhaps for the first time – I suspect many of the folks involved form the idea that there’s something decidedly “wrong” with their organisation (and, by association, maybe with themselves, too).

In this context then, the organisational therapist can come to be seen as having the role of helper – or worse, judge or validator of the organisation’s ideas and plans. And therapy becomes a byword for “returning the organisation to normal”.

“If we can give up attachment to our roles as helpers, then maybe our clients can give up attachment to their roles as patients and we can meet as fellow souls on this incredible journey. We can fulfill the duties of our roles without being trapped by over-identification with them.”

~ Ram Dass

As an organisational therapist, I believe in the power of compassion and equanimity.
But these are not the sole prerogative of the therapist. On the contrary, they are available to, and potentially valuable for everyone in the organisation.

“I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It is the ultimate source of success in life.”

~ Dalai Lama

Treatment Planning

This was going to be a post about how to write a Treatment Plan (a.k.a. Care Plan). But simply regarding the state (symptoms and root conditions) of the organisation as something that “needs fixing” seems like a problem in itself. Hence the long preamble, above. The term “Treatment Plan” I think might contribute to the confusion, and to the risks, as well as to the state of mind that organisations can unwittingly adopt where they see “Treatment” a.k.a. problem-elimination as the means to achieve their end (a healthy and flourishing business).

To paraphrase some wisdom from the world of Positive Psychology:

“The absence of problems is not success.”

Until we come up with a better label than “Treatment Plan”, then, let’s continue anyway and look at how we might plan some positive interventions for the organisation.

For those familiar with Agile methods, we can see a Treatment Plan as much like a product backlog. Initially empty, as the organisation decides to focus on particular issues, various “improvement stories” can be added to the backlog, and prioritised for action. The highest priority “improvement story” becomes the focus of the moment. If using Theory of Constraints as a framework, this will be a story about the current constraint of the organisation.

Like a product backlog user story, each improvement story may benefit from some grooming prior to implementation. Theory of Constrains suggests various tools, including the Negative Branch Reservation and the Pre-requisite Tree to help in this.

Note: In the FlowChain approach, organisation-wide treatments (“improvement stories”) are integrated with the continuous flow of new product features and user stories in one seamless enterprise backlog.

“If I don’t know I don’t know, I think I know. If I don’t know I know, I think I don’t know.”

~ R. D. Laing

[My apologies for the relative incoherence of this post. A sign of thought-in-progress.]

– Bob

Further Reading

Flourish ~ Martin Seligman
The Solutions Focus ~ Mark McKergow
The Happy Secret to Better Work ~ Shawn Anchor (TED video)
The Advantage ~ Patrick Lencioni
Scientific Proof That Happiness is a Choice ~ Shawn Anchor

There is no Organization, but…

September 5, 2012
Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Snippet
10 Comments

There is no Organization, but…

Ari-Pekka Skarp makes an interesting and relevant observation in his recent blog post  “There is no Organisation…“.

Actually, the title seems a tad misleading, as I take the body of the article to say that the idea of an “organisation” is a product of an implicit, collective agreement (or delusion) between those for whom the idea of that thing-perceived-as-an-organisation has some shared relevance.

From the Solipsist perspective (at the root of The Matrix trilogy), there is no anything, excepting that which is a product of our minds. So in that context to say that “there is no organisation” seems a bit of a non-statement, and somewhat like saying “there is no Bandersnatch”.

Anyhow, from my perspective as an Organisational Therapist, I can agree that there is no physical “organisation”, (except maybe in a legal-entity sense). But I also observe that there is a collective something, which I choose to call “the organisational psyche”, which in a sense exists outside of all the individuals participating in the delusion.

Put another way, the thing that I refer to as the collective (organisational) psyche is a legacy of – and product of – the perceptions acquired by the various individuals during their participation in the shared delusion – including perceptions acquired from other folks who have also participated in the same delusion.

Fundamentally, we approach a discussion about the nature of reality – which I’ll leave for another day.

– Bob

Further Reading

The Monkeys and the Banana – Explanation on Answers.com

If You Were a Car…

September 5, 2012
Coaching, Dialogue, Organisational Therapy
1 Comment

If You Were a Car…

One technique I find useful, when helping individuals, groups, teams and organisations understand themselves a little better, is to ask the question:

“If you were a car, what kind of car would you be?”

where “you”, here, refers to the entity in question. i.e.

“If your team were a car, what kind of car would it be?”

The answers highlight some essential attributes of the entity in question, as well as the differences in different folks’ perception of that same entity. The answers also provide fertile ground for further questions and conversations around folks’ perspectives, and about their aspirations for the entity’s future, and their part in it, too.

Variants

Other variants I have used include:

  • If you were a vehicle, what kind of vehicle would you be?
  • If you were a City, which City would you be?
  • If you were a movie, which movie would you be?
  • If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?
  • If you were a song, which song would you be?
  • If you were a band (popular beat combo, pop group), which band would you be?
  • If you were a cartoon character, which character would you be?
  • If you were a superhero from a comic strip, which superhero  would you be?
  • If you had a superpower, which superpower would that be?

Sometimes, too, it can help to suggest that the people in question choose or invent their own variant. Particular if they find amusement in, or ridicule, the variant you have chosen for them.

Organisational Personas

Olaf Lewitz has just raised the possibility of using this kind of question, e.g.:

“If your organisation were a person, what kind of person would it be?”

to help folks in organisations explore their subconscious attitudes and collective self-image, and maybe to forge a new identify towards which to strive in the future.

He also usefully suggests that this may offer a better approach – avoiding some of the implicit connotations and thus dysfunctions – than the typical “initial assessment” of which I have recently been writing, in the context of Organisational Therapy and e.g. Planning to Flourish.

See the comments on the post “There is No Organisation, but…” for more about all this.

What do you think?

– Bob

Medication, Meditation and other Analogies

September 11, 2012
MMA, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy
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Medication, Meditation and other Analogies

As you may know by now, I generally describe myself as an Organisational Therapist. That is, someone who applies the principles and techniques of (psycho)therapy to the collective psyche of an organisation. (This, in itself, is not intended as a metaphor).

I think it fair to say that most organisations, looked at as a whole, have some kind of neuroses, if not actual psychoses. Of course, having organisations realise this, let alone wanting to do something about it, is another matter (for which, see e.g. Rightshifting).

Therapies and Other Analogies

Over the years, folks have come up with a multitude of different approaches, or therapies, to try to help individuals with their psychological “problems”.

As an Organisational Therapist, I take such therapies, developed with the individual in mind, and apply them with a view to improving the well-being and effectiveness of knowledge-work organisations as a whole. In this, I concur with Patrick Lencioni’s perspective:

“The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to everyone who wants it.”

~ Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

I believe when he says “health”, he has the mental health of a company in mind.

Borrowing from the World of Psychiatry

The field of organisational therapy is in its infancy (although I’m not the only one working in this space). Few are the organisational therapies that have been studied, and proven, with the kind of scientific scrutiny now commonplace in the world of therapies for the individual.

Nevertheless, I posit that many of the concepts and therapeutic approaches now known to have positive outcomes for individuals can be applied, analogously, to the therapy of organisations.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be exploring some of these analogies in more detail.

This post serves as an introduction to the series, as well as as an invitation to join in the ongoing conversation.

Types of Therapy

Here’s just a sample of articles, posts, etc. describing the cornucopia of therapeutic techniques available to the individual:

Posts in the Series

Further Reading

Mapping the Organizational Psyche ~ Corlett and Pearson
The Advantage ~ Patrick Lencioni

Just One Fix

September 13, 2012
MMA, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy
3 Comments

Just One Fix

This is the first post in the series “Medication, Meditation and Other Analogies“. In this series, I explore analogies between concepts in individual therapy and their counterparts in Organisational Therapy.

Drugs

I used to love the music of the band “Ministry”. For that matter, I still do. One of their finer tracks is named “Just One Fix”.

The lyrics hint at the band’s anarchistic perspective, alluding to the destructive impact that drugs have on both the individual and society. Overtly, the lyrics focus on the junkie’s – or is it society’s? – insatiable search for “just one fix”. As if just one fix is going to be all that’s ever needed.

Some time ago I was musing on the idea of “medicating”, or using pharmacotherapy on, organisations. Now, medication of individuals seems controversial amongst the psychotherapy community, and indeed within society at large.

And at the time, I saw little relevance in pharmacotherapy for treating organisations – after all organisations have no biology as such, no organic brain, no corpus. But I was thinking too narrowly. Upon further reflection, if we regard neurons of the brain as analogous to the individual people within an organisation, and look at the way drugs work on modifying the chemistry (neurotransmitters) of connections between neurons in the brain, we can see an analogy emerging.

What do organisations use to modify (e.g. enhance) the connections between their people? Setting aside the whimsical answer of “meetings”, I posit that the use of information technology, and its products, in organisations, is a fair analogy to the use of drugs in individuals.

Aside: Thirty years ago, maybe the inter-office memo system would have been a relevant analogy.

Information Technology, Drugs, Ambiguities

I like this emerging analogy, not least because of the ambiguities inherent in the idea of “drug as solution” – ambiguities I also see as present in the idea of “information technology as solution”.

We may believe that drugs prescribed by medical professionals offer health benefits to the patient. Or not. We may believe that “IT Solutions” prescribed by IT professionals offer, similarly, health benefits to the organisation. Or not. In any case, the ethical and practical dilemmas seem to me to bear an uncanny resemblance.

“Big IT” has as much of a vested interest in seeing IT solutions prescribed as treatment in organisations, as does “Big Pharma” in pharmacotherapy. And the resulting distortions in treatment regimes seems to have resemblances, too.

Many folks self-medicate, whether with legal drugs or illegal (controlled) ones. Many organisations self-medicate on information technology likewise, although many organisations seem to use IT suppliers more like pharmacists than psychotherapists. Maybe there should be a classification system for IT solutions, i.e. over-the-counter, prescription-only, and various classes of “controlled”? Myself, I’d put most of Microsoft’s “solutions” in the controlled category (for example, Sharepoint – Class B).

And information technology can be habit-forming much as drug treatments. Many drugs – even those prescription drugs taken under professional supervision – can be habit-forming, if not downright addictive.

Information Technology as Therapy

There may be psychiatric patients for whom the benefits of pharmacotherapeutic treatment outweigh the costs (both financial and in term of e.g. side-effects). There may be organisations for whom the benefits of information technology “solutions” outweigh the costs, too.

If we regard IT as a form of organisational therapy – and so often the claims are like “better communication within your organisation”, “better relationships with your customers”, and so on – then maybe that gives us another way to look as the use of IT within organisations. And another potential kind of therapy in our therapist’s bag.

Maybe, too, we can recognise that information technology, however well produced, is but one form of therapy, and not always the best one for a given patient or situation.

– Bob

Further Reading

Legal Classificaion of Medicines (UK) – Royal Pharmaceutical Society website

Respect For People

September 25, 2012
Agile, Coaching, Dialogue, Ethics, Organisational Therapy, Psychology
10 Comments

Respect for People

I’m just back from a great Lean Agile Scotland 2012 conference (of which, more in a later post). I very much enjoyed presenting a session as part of the Rightshifting Fest, as well as participating in some great sessions by other folks I have come to admire.

Liz Keogh’s keynote, opening the Saturday morning, impressed me, both with the depth of its research and thoughtfulness, and the courageous choice of topic – plus setting a very appropriate tone for the Rightshifting sessions that followed.

Liz focused on “Respect” as one of the two “Pillars of the Toyota Way“. In particular I felt the etymological root of the word chimed with my own understanding of the term:

Respect – re-spect (from Latin rēspicere  to look back, pay attention to,  re- “back” + specere “look at”) i.e. to look again, to challenge or reconsider our initial judgement or assumption(s) about someone or something.

Even the simple notion of respect in the workplace often seems contentious, or at best a nice-to-have. Liz echoed my own feelings that much of the language of work – including much of the language of Agile – actively undermines respect, and in doing so reduces folks’ joy and engagement in their work. For knowledge-work in particular, this can be highly dysfunctional.

If I were not presently so enamoured of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I may well have applauded Liz’s presentation unreservedly. But I do have one reservation I’d like to explore: Judgmentalism.

Judgmentalism

Even as long ago as the era of the New Testament, Matthew cautions against the hypocrisy and censoriousness of passing judgement on one another:

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

~ Matthew 7:1-5

Setting aside the language of obligation and domination (what Rosenberg calls “Jackal language“) common to many religious texts, how does this relate to respect?

For me, implicit in the idea of respect, as Liz indicates, is the implication that we will look again. I take this to mean that a respectful position is one where we may afford ourselves the opportunity to judge again.

“[Our] judgements of others are alienated expressions of our own unmet needs.”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

Personally, I would feel more comfortable to recast this as the opportunity to reject our initial (and nearly always automatic and subconscious) leap to judgement in favour of compassion (both for ourselves and the person we’re judging). This stance also seems aligned to the idea of equanimity. In other words, I share Rosenberg’s view that:

“Classifying and judging people promotes violence.”

and violence (and abuse) makes me feel both sad and angry. I believe that I have a need to see folks treated with honesty, kindness, empathy and non-violence – and judging someone, however implicit or unintentional, feels inimical to that.

What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.

Note to self: I’m still learning the ropes, here, myself, and feel a need to be more authentic, more skilful.

“The Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti once remarked that observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence. When I first read this statement, the thought, “What nonsense!” shot through my mind before I realized that I had just made an evaluation. For most of us, it is difficult to make observations, especially of people and their behavior, that are free of judgement, criticism, or other forms of analysis.”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

If you don’t chime with my discomfort regarding the notion of judgmentalism, but would like to know more, I can but recommend Marshall Rosenberg’s book “Nonviolent Communication”.

“There’s nothing wrong (or right) with judgmentalism, but do folks understand the impact it has on their life and their way of being in the world?”

Relevance

“It is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving compassionately. We have, however, learned many forms of life-alienating communication that lead us to speak and behave in ways that injure others and ourselves. One form of life-alienating communication is the use of moralistic judgements that imply wrongness or badness on the part of those who don’t act in harmony with our values. Another is the use of comparisons, which can block compassion both for others and for ourselves. Life-alienating communication also obscures our awareness that we are each responsible for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Communicating our desires in the form of demands is yet another characteristic of language that blocks compassion.”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

Is this nit-picking, or has the distinction between judgemental and non-judgemental respect any significance in the world of work? I’d say yes, but then, that’s why I wrote this post – to draw the distinction. Would you be willing to share how you feel about it?

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

~ Rumi

– Bob

Further Reading

Crucial Conversations, Respect and Kanban ~ Mike Burroughs blog post
The Mote and the Beam – Wikipedia entry
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
Power and Love ~ Adam Kahane

How to Give Feedback

September 26, 2012
Agile, Coaching, Dialogue, Ethics, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Rightshifting
36 Comments

How to Give Feedback

I’ve always sought feedback on my work. Not out of a need for reassurance or approbation, but out of a desire to improve. And maybe out of a need for meaningful human connection, too. At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I see a lot of other folks asking for, or hoping for, feedback too – mostly with very limited success.

Setting aside the value of effective feedback for a moment – there’s been much written about this, especially in the context of reducing cycle times and shortening feedback loops in software and product development, as well as in organisational change – I’d like to share some ideas on how to give feedback.

“As more and more people learn to offer feedback…the overall dread of feedback-giving can diminish, and feedback can be restored to its fundamental function: a method for people to work together to create environments where productivity flows, where trust and goodwill flourish, and where individuals thrive.”

~ Miki Kashtan

Shortage of Feedback

I don’t get nearly as much feedback on my work as I’d like. Or even as much as I need to improve it. I used to think it was because people are unused to giving feedback, or don’t realise how valuable it can be. Or have worked themselves for so long in organisations where feedback is given so poorly that they want to avoid inflicting the same pain on others (including me).

“Knowing how painful it can be for people to hear a criticism, and how rarely feedback leads to productive conversations or satisfying change, it’s sometimes difficult to imagine that giving feedback can have beneficial consequences. ”

~ Miki Kashtan

Now, though, I’m coming round to the idea that maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s just that folks are uncertain about how to approach giving feedback. Hopefully this post can make a contribution towards testing that hypothesis – and in addressing that uncertainty, too.

The Perfection Game

For some years now, I have favoured the Perfection Game as the best format I know of by which to give and receive feedback. I commend it to you as a means to focus on the positive, and exclude or reduce negative criticisms.

But it still strikes (sic) me as coercive and violent – what we might call call “life-alienating communication” – both in its giving and its receiving. At least in the terms of Marshall Rosenberg‘s Non-violent Communication.

Non-violent Feedback

This kind of feedback is not just a small change or tweak, but a major realignment of our understanding of what it means to “give feedback”. From expressing “what we think”, to seeking to understand the feelings and needs of all concerned. This may sound like it’s turning each occasion we give feedback into a major piece of work, and it can be – at least until practice reduces the effort involved.

“If we are able to remain open to creating a solution [or improvement] together, instead of being attached to a particular outcome, others can sense that their well-being matters.”

~ Miki Kashtan

Use Positive Action Language

Express what you do want, rather than what you don’t want.

“How do you do a don’t?”

~ from a children’s song by Ruth Bebermeyer

Also, expressing your requests in terms of concrete actions can better reveal what you really want . Avoid vague, abstract or ambiguous phrases:

Ask for a Reflection

The message we send is not always the message that’s received. To be more confident that we’ve been understood when giving feedback, we can ask others – e.g. the listener – to reflect back in their own words what they heard us say. We then have the opportunity to restate parts of our message to address any discrepancies or omissions we might have noticed through their reflection. Express appreciation when your listeners try to meet your request for a reflection. And empathise with listeners who don’t want to (or can’t) reflect back.

Avoid Compliments

“Compliments are often judgements – however positive – of others.”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

Rosenberg regards compliments and expressions of appreciation and praise as life-alienating communications. I share that viewpoint. Instead, he suggests we include three components in our expressions of appreciation:

  1. The actions that have contributes to our well-being.
  2. The particular needs of ours that have been fulfilled.
  3. The pleasureful feelings engendered by the fulfilment of those needs.

(Non-violent Communication ~ Rosenberg p.186)

In other words, saying “Thank you” consists of sharing:

  • This is what you did;
  • This is what I feel;
  • This is the need of mine that was met.

Like receiving feedback effectively, receiving appreciation effectively takes some practice and skill, too:

“I kiss the Spirit in you that allows you to give me what you did.”

~ Nafez Assailey

And if you, like so many of us, crave some kind of appreciation, why not tell people what kind of appreciation would leave you jumping for joy?

How often do you go out of your way to express appreciation for someone? If receiving sincere and effective appreciation is a joyful experience for you, imagine the similar joy that your actions might bring to others.

Solicitation

When feedback is solicited, the exchange can often feel less confrontational than when “feedback” is unsolicited. Unsolicited feedback, however well intentioned, can feel more like some kind of blame, coercion, judgmentalism or personal attack.

I have seen advice to the effect that if one is not explicitly asked to provide feedback, then one should refrain. That seems to me to be avoiding the issue – maybe acceptable as a coping strategy in the face of absent or limited skills, but dysfunctional nevertheless.

Maybe we might more usefully reframe “giving effective unsolicited feedback” as “learning to more effectively express ourselves and our own feelings, needs and requests”.

Receiving Feedback

Not only is the ability to give feedback (effectively) a useful skill, receiving feedback effectively is also a useful – and similarly often under-appreciated – skill.

Do you like receiving praise? Does it stroke your ego? Can you act on it?

“Compliments are often no more than judgements – however positive – of others.”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

What do you do – what CAN you do – when someone tells you something like “You’re great” or “That was fantastic”? Here’s an example:

Praiser: “Bob, that was a really good presentation.”
Me: “Thank you. But I’m not able to get as much out of your appreciation as I would like.”
Praiser: “Errm. What do you mean?”
Me: “I’ve been called many things over the years. I can’t remember ever learning much by being told what I am. I’d like to learn from your appreciation and enjoy it, but I’d need more information.”
Praiser: “What kind of information?”
Me: “First off, I’d like to know what I said or did that made life more wonderful for you?”
Praiser: “Oh. Ok. You said X. And later showed slide Y.”
Me: “So it’s those two things that you appreciate?”
Praiser: “I guess so.”
Me: “Next up, I’d like to know how you feel, consequent on those two things.”
Praiser: “Hmmm.” (Pauses, thinks) “Enthused. And enlightened.”
Me: “And now, I’d like to know what needs of yours were met by hearing and seeing X and Y?”
Praiser: “I have colleagues who always undermine my belief in the value of X. Hearing your view on X tells me I’m not completely crazy. And I never really succeeded in understanding Y until now.”

Only upon hearing all three pieces of information – what I did, how they felt about (some of) it, and what needs of theirs were fulfilled – can we then celebrate the appreciation together.

Of course, if the praiser had some skills in NVC, they might have said directly: “Bob, when you said X, and later showed slide Y, I felt enthused and enlightened, because I’ve been searching for support and encouragement with my ideas on X, and I never really understood Y until now.”

“NVC encourages us to receive appreciation with the same quality of empathy we express when listening to other messages. We hear what we have done that has contributed to others’ well-being. We hear their feelings and the needs that we fulfilled. We take into our hearts the joyous reality that we can each enhance the quality of others’ lives.”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

Feedback on this Post

I would really like to hear about your viewpoint on this article, and in particular what changes (actions) I might take to improve it. This would help enrich my life through meeting my need for improvement, as well as for meaningful (human) connection. I would also value hearing about what, if anything, in this post has causes you to reflect, research more, or  change your views – as this would meet my need for making a difference in the world.

– Bob

Postscript

“There’s no question that feedback may be one of the most difficult arenas to negotiate in our lives. We might choose to remember, though, that victory is not getting good feedback, avoiding giving difficult feedback, or avoiding the need for feedback. Instead it’s taking off the armor, showing up, and engaging.”

~ Brené Brown

Further Reading

Feedback Without Criticism ~ Miki Kashtan (Online article)
NVC Feedback – The Executive Advisory
Non-violent Communication: A Language of Life ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg
The Core Protocols ~ Jim and Michele McCarthy

Progress with Nonviolent Communication

October 4, 2012
Dialogue, Organisational Therapy, Psychology
6 Comments

Progress with Nonviolent Communication

Upon beginning to read Marshall Rosenberg’s book “Nonviolent Communication” two or three weeks ago, it felt like coming home.

As a coach, consultant (long time ago) and more recently Organisational Therapist, I have long felt that the key to meaningful change in people’s lives – and incidentally, in organisations – is the quality of the dialogue they manage (sic) to have.

Dialogue is a Skill

Dialogue – more explicitly, meaningful dialogue, requires much practice to acquire the necessary skills. And it’s hard, no matter into whichever “school” of skilful dialogue you might enrol yourself. Absent such hard-won skills, dialogue can often be insipid and superficial, or worse, a minefield.

I stand in awe at @benjaminm‘s dedication to learning the art of skilful dialogue the Argyris way. For me, the tenor of Argyris’s ideas always made me feel a little uncomfortable, notwithstanding their obvious strengths.

It wasn’t until I came across Rosenberg that I could even begin to articulate my reservations. Again, for me, Argyris seems a tad cold and clinical in its style, compared to the warmth and fuzziness of Nonviolent Communication. I mean, who could fail to love glove puppets (see the Jackal and the Giraffe, below), or indeed Rosenberg himself?

Progress in Practice

Since reading the NVC book, I’ve been diligently practicing, writing (you may have noticed) and thinking about the techniques and implications of Nonviolent Communication.

I’m finding it hard to slough off a lifetime of judgmentalism and thinking, and focus more on feelings. One of the most challenging aspects, for me, has been trying to identify just what I am feeling in any given situation. I had no idea how unpractised I was at finding a suitable label – free from thinking and judgement – about my feelings.

I’m finding much benefit in the practice, though. Especially in terms of dealing with some folks who until recently I would have judged as “difficult” people. Choosing to see them as, instead, needful and worthy of compassion seems to suit me well.

Not that it’s all been a bed of roses. It seems I need more skill before I can truly engage with the more extreme cases of angst or need. Or maybe it’s just always going to be that much harder to apply the ideas through e.g. Twitter.

And when I’ve not been able to produce the kind of dialogue modelled in the book and by Rosenberg in his videos, I’ve found it quite natural to jump to self-judgement, rather than step back and take another look at my own feeling and needs. Still, even Rosenberg relates a number of tales of his own foibles in that regard. More practice required here.

Still, I have my Giraffe Ears now, and I’ll be listening from the heart more, at least, as my energy levels permit.

If you’re wondering whether there’s anything in Nonviolent Communication for you, I thoroughly recommend the book. Who knows, it might suit you.

– Bob

Further Reading

Nonviolent Communication: a Language of Life ~ Marshall Rosenberg
Discussing the Undiscussable: A Guide to Overcoming Defensive Routines in the Workplace ~ Bill Noonan
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High ~ Kerry Patterson
Difficult Conversations ~ Bruce Patton
Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together ~ William Isaacs
More Time to Think: A Way of Being in the World ~ Nancy Kline
Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities ~ Adam Kahane

Nonviolent Programming

October 18, 2012
Agile, Dialogue, Ethics, Organisational effectiveness, Organisational Therapy, Psychology, Software development
10 Comments

Nonviolent Programming

The idea of Linguistic Relativity has been around since at least the Eighteenth Century. Many folks may have heard of the (misnomerous) Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

In a nutshell, Linguistic Relativity suggests that language influences the way we humans think. ‘Whorfianism of the third kind’ proposes that language is ‘a key to culture’.

Setting aside the Rightshifting implications of this for now, I’ve been considering the implications of Linguistic Relativity from the perspective of the humble programmer (a.k.a. coder), especially in the light of Donald Knuth’s description of the job of programming:

“Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”

~ Donald Knuth

Most programming involves the imperative style. Defining instructions to the computer to tell it what to do. If this, then that. Do this. Do that some number of times.

Actually, I’m surprised there is, as yet, no programming language called “Jackal”. (Although, for the record, there is a ‘compiler-driven distributed shared memory implementation of the Java programming language’ named Jackal).

Does daily immersion in the imperative style of communication, in imperative languages, shape the programmer’s thinking in such a way as to increase the tolerance for command-and-control behaviour? Does such implicit imperativism contribute to the preservation of the status quo in our knowledge-work organisations?

Should We, Could We?

In Rosenberg’s NonViolent Communication, he cautions against the assumptions implicit in the word “should”:

“Avoid ‘shoulding’ on others and yourself!”

~ Marshall Rosenberg

I note with irony the use of the word “should” at the heart of modern BDD, for example. This is but one example of what we might choose to call “rampant imperativism”.

E-Prime

The idea of modifying language to aid thinking is not without precedent. D. David Bourland, Jr. first proposed E-Prime (in my mind, a close cousin of Giraffe language) in order to help people “reduce the possibility of misunderstanding or conflict”.

New Language, New Feelings

Could we conceive of a different style, a different language of BDD, of coding in general, built upon the Four Steps of Nonviolent Communication? What would a Nonviolent Programming language look like, feel like to use? Would there be knock-on advantages to Nonviolent Programming and e.g. Nonviolent BDD?

If Gandhi had been a programmer rather than a lawyer, what might his code have looked like?

Conversely, If he had been immersed in COBOL, FORTRAN or Java for forty-plus hours a week, would he ever have come hold his views on the paramountcy of non-violence?

What implications – seen through the lens of Linguistic Relativity – would adoption of such a language and style have in our communications as individuals? Could forty hours a week of Nonviolent Programming contribute positively to the health and well-being of our human dialogues, our personal interactions and our organisations?

– Bob

Further Reading

Linguistic Relativity ~ Lera Boroditski MIT paper
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis – Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy