At long last, here it is

The key idea: organisations are designed to encourage variations of Parent/Child behaviour, whilst true collaboration and creativity depends on true Adult-Adult modes.

Download the essay by clicking here, and then let me know what you think:

being-adult-in-organisations

I wrote this post ages ago, and wanted to refresh it after watching a collective kicking of G Brown on Question Time, BBC TV. The point’s the same: our technology has a built-in obsolescence and so does our desire for being saved. Hey, I’m already disappointed in Obama, Clinton, McCain…

Have you ever noticed how the desire for more and better leadership is followed so closely by our disappointment in leadership? Bye, Ming .

Line up, Gordon Brown . Get ready, your boss. And still we believe it’s the answer. Still we buy it. Still we peddle it.

‘We don’t need more leadership…we need more awareness’ AM

My brochure for 2009

For further information about the work, please download the pdf and let me know if you’d like to talk more about it.

…which ones do you play?

Organisations are intellectual products. They are complex webs of beliefs and knowledge, the result of how people agree to think about such things as customers, the future, business processes, buildings, competition. Organisations are also social creations - they are webs of convention, rules and behaviour, the result of how people agree to relate to each other. To change an organisation you need to challenge both the intellectual and social assumptions that underpin it.

We need as a role model someone who already has lots of experience of thinking and acting in an unconventional way and, just as crucially, someone who is not afraid to speak up about it. Here is such a model: The Corporate Fool.

Fools have existed in all world cultures throughout history. Fools speak out against those who have power, question accepted wisdom, embody controversy and taboo, cast doubt in the face of certainty, bring chaos to order, point out the obvious when everybody else is apparently too scared to, throw a spanner in the proverbial works, turn the world upside down. It’s the best job spec you’ll ever read - unless you happen to be a Bad King.

But what would a Fool (as opposed to a fool - the distinction is important!) do all day in a modern organisation? Well, here are ten roles that we badly need in times of change and which we always seem to leave to somebody else (with the result that nobody ends up doing them). They are ten challenges to the intellectual and social traditions which obstruct change:

1. ALIENATOR, representative of otherness
2. CONFIDANTE, of the king
3. CONTRARIAN, challenger of the norms
4. MIDWIFE, generator of creativity and problem-solving
5. JESTER, entertainer and ‘humorist‘
6. MAPPER of knowledge
7. MEDIATOR of meaning
8. SATIRIST, deflator, pricker of pomposity
9. TRUTHSEEKER, teller of the truth
10. MYTHOLOGIST, maker and breaker of myths

Which do you play?

…and so living it needs care.

The history of business has been the history of division. We have long emphasised the head-based skills of separation: logic, analysis, control and measurement. It was these very same skills that gave us the industrial and technological revolutions and with them the power to manipulate our physical environment. We have transmuted that desire to manipulate into our relationships with others, characterised as they are by our struggles for power and dominion. And, seemingly encouraged by our success in bringing ourselves material comfort, we have taken this urge to separate inside ourselves, placing our faith in the rational and scientific and ignoring or belittling the energy of our own emotions, bodies and spirit.

The drive towards separation has brought environmental crises to our outer world and psychological and spiritual crises in our inner worlds. There are strong signs now that we are waking up to these outcomes and beginning to understand that it was we who caused them through the choices we made. We have forgotten our place in the undifferentiated web of life which connects us to nature, each other and ourselves. It is time to put ourselves back together again - to re-member.

The central idea of Sacred Business is that uniting in a whole that incorporates the wonderful diversity in our organisations will help us learn, grow and do better business, without the stresses, tension and imbalance that living in detachment brings.

“People draw together by their very nature, but habit and custom keep them apart…” Confucious

What are your experiences of wholeness in organisations, as compared with fragmentation and silo-thinking?

It’s always struck me as odd that someone would earn a living at something that didn’t bring them joy as well as cash. Occasionally maybe, but not their whole career…

Years ago, when I was doing the promotional tour for How to Make Work Fun!, more often the not the interviewers would assume that I was American, work-as-fun being, I guess, a ‘not very British’ aspiration. And yet still I meet managers who genuinely want their company, or their projects, to be fun as well as delivering value and making money. They want it to be a both/and.

I’m still interested in the concept because it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they know what they mean, but do they? What does fun mean at work? What does it look like? How would we show it? How would it help?

The answers to those questions will no doubt vary from company to company, and, for me, that’s part of the value. Open up a conversation about work being fun in your organisation and you will open up a passionate discussion which touches on many aspects of being human in modern society, its constraints as well as its freedoms. Or at least that’s my experience!

How would the conversation go in your organisation?

I facilitated at a conference recently at which some very impressive people from the Institute of the Future also spoke. The Institute, in their own words, “works with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. We provide the foresight to create insights that lead to action.”

They were there to present their 2007 Map of the Decade, six stories or perspectives on the trends that were going to shape society and the decisions we make for our lives.
I was given a version of the Map. I found it significant that, in all the detail, the word leader only appeared once, as did the word leadership.
These concepts and the roles and contexts they point to are, apparently, not part of the future. What was described again and again in the Map were individuals gathering together and organizing themselves around issues, themes or opportunities. Think groups, networks, collections, gatherings, communities – a distribution of power around passion, competence and responsibility.

Forget leaders and followers.

I read in Professional Manager magazine another article advising us to care for our employees as they struggle with the rate and pace of change. All that stress they’re suffering…The writer was a business psychologist, so you could see his point, I think.
This babyfication of grown adults has been an unintended (I hope) side effect of the “people are your most important asset” thrust of the last 15 years. It is now unquestioned that it is part of a boss’ job to protect me from pain – as opposed to allowing me to construct a mature set of responses to the reality of pain in the world. That protection-instinct feels good for the giver and the taker perhaps, but is not the healthiest long term choice.
How about some different places to run when change comes knocking, instead of always under the stairs where we can convince ourselves that change is hard and the boss ought to make it better. How about:
Responsibility: “No matter how I choose to respond to change, last time I looked I was still drawing a monthly salary from this company that is changing. The salary is a reward for me giving of my best – in any set of conditions…”
Duty: “I have a duty to confront the complexity of change head on, to work out its workings and our contributions to it, good and bad. By doing so I increase my company’s capacity for coping with change in the future. In other words, how I choose to respond to change – as baby or adult – is a legacy I leave. (And what do I show to my children of resilience, courage and creativity?)
Enjoyment: “And in this way, I might even begin to break away from the pack and suggest that change is fun, bringing as it does opportunity, challenges, growth and new life.”

But you won’t see that if you’re under the stairs.