One upon a time there was the “Unqualified Apology” when we could freely say “I’m sorry” and it would be accepted at face value. It was a measure of the person that they could acknowleg wrong doing, accept responsibility and offer some kind of reparation via the expression.
Then we moved into the area of the “Qualified Apology”. In those days we were sorry “IF” someone else felt hurt by some act perpetrated upon them by us. All of that self help stuff really helped us see that we were responsible for our own experiences, and as such, someone else’s hurt was really nothing to do with us.
Now I see a shift into what I call the “General Pre-emptive Apology”. I’ve seen this in a lot in cases of institutional abuse where a spokesperson comes straight out and apologises at the outset for all and everything the instutition did, could do or may do to people.
What’s the point of an apology anyway? I’m not in any way undermining genuine cases of bullying and harrassement – but I see so much hurt in the work I do that appears so simple in comparison and part of me wants to make it safe for us to be able to say those words. We live in a world that is increasingly litigious and those simple words which alleviate hurt, build trust and cement relationships are more often than not, simply not allowed any more. So much inter-personal conflict in organisations could be alleviated if we accepted that in all relationships we bump into each other, we hurt, we love, we can apologise and we can recover. But if I can’t say “I’m sorry for hurting you” what hope is there for meaningful reparation, a letting go and a move to another level? Will it ever be possible to experience the "Genuine Apology" without systems, procedures, policies and lawyers hovering in the background?
Andy Wibbels is writing about mixing Business and Personal blogs and this is something very pertinent to me because I started blogging by creating a personal site and I've only been biz blogging for a few months now. I'm really interested in how many (or not) of my personal blog readers have come over here and how many new readers I've picked up here that I never would have over there. While Wibbels is positive about mixing it up
My background is as a creative writer/playwright so I have a certain 'license' (licentiousness?) to be a bit nutty on my personal blog - and this spills into my business blog. I'm nuts about politics lately (reading my 6 years of blogging shows my transformation into being more political aware) and know that in a polarized, fundamentalist, rapture ready country like we have now, that might turn folks off. At the same time if someone is completely turned off by that and doesn't want to work with me - they probably aren't going to be any fun as a client anyway. If I wanted to work with assholes, I'd stay in the corporate world.
Other bloggers aren't and I'm frequently fascinated by how either/or the discussion tends to become in double quick time. It's not about one or the other for me - it's about the boundaries between them. I'm sure I'm revealing lots of "personal" stuff here even though some commenters may be a bit disappointed that this site is not revealing enough. But that's because we tend to view "personal" in a particular way. I'm not talking about dating, my family life or what I had for dinner. BUT if I could draw a business lesson from any of those activities then I just might be. Life doesn't neatly break down into what's personal and what's not- we bring our personal stuff into the office and what happens in the office is frequently personal. I'm all for drawing lines between experiences - but the context in which we're operating; the relevance of the line and the lesson we're trying to learn are all important considerations.
Andrew says we should be more comfortable with not knowing and I have to admit I don’t entirely know what he means.
I also have real issues with the way in which the benefits of "not knowing" are bandied about sometimes. In fairness, the Fast Company article is interesting and the following suggestions are offered:
Practice admitting when you're stuck or don't know what you're doing (perhaps in safer environments at first)
Open up to others to help you begin to find answers to your challenges.
Begin to notice the sense of freedom that can come from not having to "know" all the time.
For me, the issue is less about being comfortable "not knowing" but more - can I manage the anxiety of not having the answer? It's a bit like our relationship with silence. Most of us find certain kinds of silence uncomfortable - there's an expectation of dread; something awful might happen; I am expected to come up with an answer and if I don't then I'll get into trouble etc. Most people will rush to fill that silence because it can be an awkward place to be. So adopting a position of "not knowing" is, in fact a sophisticated response to managing my own and others' anxiety. My own suggestions for managing those moments are:
Talk about the pressure to know - if you are experiencing this the chances are others are too. Naming the pressure to "know" can relieve the tension of "not knowing"
Adopt a position of curiosity about the stuckness - what's the useful information contained in the dilemma that is related to the question we can't answer? Very often they are related
Stand back from the dilemma and wonder what a stranger looking in at this conversation might see
Pay attention to the emotional temperature of the discussion - if necessary, use imagery to describe what's being felt but not being said in the moment
Ask yourself - if I don't know the answer - what is the question that is causing us to feel stuck? What is it about the way in which we're asking the question that's evoking "not knowing"?
So far from "not knowing" - those moments offer a creative way of engaging with what we do know - we just need to pay attention to different kinds of communication.
I’m a bad blogger and before I go any further I want to issue a generalisation alert – you have been warned.
I have discovered in my travels through cyberspace that my blog is breaking all of the rules…I don’t offer “ultimate” solutions; “rules” for getting things done right (apart from this entry which in fact happens to be they way I do work with groups); I can’t come up with too many bullet pointed “top tips” entries and I rarely spend enough time trying to compose sure fire headlines that work. Is this rush to certainty purely an American phenomenon? I say this because I see stark differences between the ways in which many American and European business bloggers approach their craft. We appear to be less comfortable offering certainty on this side of the pond – it’s a bit more conversational, less hard sell. What happens when you are so used to being offered the ultimate, no holds barred, sure fire, guaranteed solution to every problem? Do you become immune? What does the more conversational – let’s co-create something together approaches evoke? Do we look touchy-feely in a world that demands certainty? I don’t know….I have found it interesting to explore various voices on this blog but ultimately I don’t believe in certainty. I don’t believe there’s a 10 step plan to achieving anything you want to achieve that is simple to execute and follows in a logical progression.
The bit that is always missing in these foul-proof plans is emotion. Emotion is a no go area in business for a good reason – it’s the thing that makes or breaks plans. Our decisions, while they may look on the surface to be rational and planned are fuelled, contextualised and informed by emotion and there’s no 10 step bullet pointed approach to putting manners on how we feel. It requires work, it requires bespoke interventions; it requires listening and storytelling, it requires expertise; it requires process, it requires courage. That’s if you want the solutions to stick.
If emotion didn’t matter then we’d all be fit, slim, non-smoking, world travelling, happy camper workers and family people with not a care in the world and a bullet pointed map to get us there. Does that sound like anyone you know?
I don’t live in a bite sized world and while I would love to believe that there’s a bullet pointed list out there with my name on it I simply don’t buy it….My world is richer, more complex, operates on myriad levels, attends to conscious and unconscious processes, is rational as well as emotional. I assume the worlds of my clients are equally sophisticated. And yes, I do get results and yes I do get asked back to work with clients so something works about an approach that doesn't offer false hope.
So now I need to go away and write a snappy headline for this post that will get me noticed ..any ideas?
When Adam Phillips' American publishers were planning a US edition of his book Going Sane, they insisted on giving it an upbeat subtitle. The idea drove him, if not insane, then to distraction. "The woman at the publishers said to me: 'How about Maps of Happiness.' I thought she was joking, so I said: 'How about Maps Against Happiness?' And she said: "I don't think so. Against is such a negative word.'
The proposed subtitle rankled because Phillips is against guidebooks to happiness. "A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn't it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all?" asks the psychoanalyst, closing his eyes as he does repeatedly during the interview when he wants to clinch a thought, and then leaning forward to put his head in his hands. "It's become a preoccupation because there's so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough and we'll all cheer up is preposterous.
Oh I wanted to clap and cheer when I read that. Philips is railing against the instant-fix, one-size-fits-all approach to being perfect, happy, sorted - call it what you will. I, like him, believe that you can only be happy if you are able to experience the darker side of life - I mean - how would you know what happiness was if you couldn't relate to not happy? And if we don't attend to not-happy then happy is merely a myth that can never be realised in real life. Consulting and coaching must attend to the "nots" in a meaningful way. Simply glossing over them won't work and the energy expended (particularly on change projects) will be wasted.
Is he saying suffering is necessary to the examined life? No: suffering is not essential. It's just unavoidable. All forms of sufferings are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them.
And on the current craze for books on happiness he has this to add:
I've looked at them. They seem to me to be the problem rather than the solution.
We've got to move out of seeing things in such stark polarities - Adams is merely saying that our ability to be happy, be fulfilled is as a direct result of our being able to handle happiness, unhappiness and all that comes in between. Life isn't one or the other - it's both.
It's like [Beckett's play] Endgame: 'We're on Earth. There's no cure for that.
There's a great thought provoking post at Anecdote that asks the question - are organisations losing their humanity? I'm going to re-post Andrew's piece here with my own thoughts to follow:
For some time now we have wondered whether organisations may be starting to lose their humanity. Maybe its a good question whether they ever had it, but the “Time is money” metaphor predominant in business today seems to have a lot to answer for. Tick Tock. To busy to spend time in dialogue. To busy to explore, we need to know the outcome. “How are you today” – “Busy”. To busy. Time is money.
And then, what about the “no asshole” rule suggested recently by Harvard professor, Bob Sutton.
Don’t hire assholes regardless of their earning potential and if someone has developed into one, help them see the light or get rid of them.
Its interesting and ironic that things have gotten so bad that we need to become more mindful of assholes and asshole behaviour in organisations.
And all this is not without cost. Organisations should care. As Leon Gettler a senior business journalist and blogger at The Age has found:
Workplace bullying is estimated to cost Australian business in excess of $3 billion a year and employers could be liable under a stack of laws, including Occupational Health and Safety, discrimination and workers' compensation.
So, I wonder, are organisations losing their humanity? What do you think?
I think organisations were and continue to be "humane" places - however, the discourse has been changed in the past 10 years with as Andrew rightly points out, increased legislation to protect organisations from being liable for what in many cases is ordinary behaviour. I think we have to move to a situation where we recognise, that to be human means bumping into each other, pissing each other off, falling in love etc - we do those things and we recover from them. If we teach people that the only way in which humane behaviour can be expressed is as a negative, potentially litigious and costly endeavour is it any wonder that we're becoming more “inhumane" – the rule then becomes – do not show your humanity here – it is dangerous.
Not withstanding serious infringements (which should be dealt with under existing laws anyway) a lot of what ends up in formal processes is ordinary behaviour which generally has at its root one of three issues (each one leads to the other if they are not attended to)
I am hurt
I am disappointed
I am angry
Let's start listening to those conversations first and putting in place mechanisms for attending to them before any formal processes get underway. We need a “before” process which looks at the systemic issues behind behaviour that is deemed to be “inhumane” – I don’t believe that people come to work having made a firm decision that this is how they will be at work today – there is always a more sophisticated picture and legal processes, while important sometimes, rarely deliver a win-win for anyone. They really are the end game. The processes I’ve designed (with brave and risk taking clients!) have done that – allowed room for the feelings to be vented, looked at individual and systemic responsibility and allowed everyone to contribute to a better solution. But I also know that those clients were unusual - it's not everyone who is able to unpack the emotional environment in which they are working and then wonder what their contribution to that is. But I'm hopeful...so longs as organisations are networks of people - they will always be humane!
If we’re not making New Year resolutions today then we’re actively “not” making resolutions – there’s no escaping the pressure to think about doing things differently in 2007. But so often, New Year resolutions turn into a persecutory list of “shoulds” as distinct from a list of “coulds” and some time around mid January we give up and say “what’s the point?” I don’t want to live my life as a “to do” list so this year I’m trying to think about it differently.
Most resolutions or plans are really a way of us articulating how we want to “feel” when we’ve achieved the task in hand. Yes – we’ll have tangible outcomes etc but more often or not we’re trying to achieve a gut reaction, a new sensibility that tells us that things are “right”; on the “right track”; we feel confident or secure that there’s a shape to what is about to unfold….Lists are a way of managing our anxiety about the unknown that is the future.
So for 2007 I’m not making any lists of things I should do. Instead I’m making a list of how I want to feel as the year unfolds and so far it looks like this.
1 I want to feel confident that the work I’m doing matters to my clients and to me
2 I want to feel excited by the relationships I create with clients, co-workers and those I bump into along the way in 2007
3 I want to feel intellectually stimulated by the projects I embark on
4 I want to feel “full” intellectually, emotionally and creatively by the conversations I participate in in 2007
5 I want to feel satisfied that the choices I make in all areas of my work life are nurturing, healthy and contribute to my growth and deveolopment as a consultant
6 I want to reach December 2007 happy that I was present – really present to my self, clients and colleagues throughout the year.
How do you want to feel about your professional self as 2007 unfolds?
I am researching Disappointment as a phenomenon in organisations for a PhD and would like to do some small group interviews and explorations of the topic with people who would be willing to share some of their experiences. I've done quite a bit of one to one interviews and now want to move on to group sessions. Of necessity these sessions will take place in Dublin - day and time to be negotiated depending on who might like to participate. If anyone is interested, please email me at ideas AT inter-actions.biz and I can let you have more details.
Alternatively if anyone wants to post a comment or share a story on the blog then I'd be delighted to hear from you
I spent a couple of days last week with a group of highly creative and artistic people assisting them think at a strategic level about their sector. Like many people in the arts they are passionate, committed, enthusiastic and are not afraid of moving between their personal and professional selves in the service of the task. One of the things I noticed from the outset was how long it took some people to “arrive” both physically and psychologically. Some were late for our sessions and others were on time but not on message. I guessed that many mobile phones were on vibrate or silent and not many had been switched off entirely. (As it turned out, I was right).
This was a really experienced group of practitioners who were interested in the dilemma I reflected back to them about being in the room. I wondered what was going on that made it challenging for people to be really connected in the task. We worked through those challenges and emerged at the end of our work with a manifesto of responsibilities each was willing to sign up to in order to work productively in the future. They recognised that there was important information in not turning the phones off and being psychologically “outside the room”.
Physically “showing up” isn’t enough. The key question is – are you present? Being present requires a psychological and spiritual connection to the work that is happening in the moment and to the people with whom you are working. It requires intimacy and connection and it also means dealing with the fear of being connected. Being connected brings responsibilities and commitments and if we’ve left the phone on or are making ourselves available somewhere else it means our sense of commitment is also somewhere else. Agreements about tasks and decisions will then fail to deliver because that bullet pointed list may be a way of avoiding something deeper.
There was a time at the early stages in my consulting career when this kind of dilemma would have bothered me and I would have tried to “fix it”. These days I see it as a rich opportunity to introduce more of the shadow into the room – if people are willing to have their “resistance” seen then it’s a clue that the time may be right to have a look at what’s important about that resistance.. So it’s not only the participants who need to show up, it’s also the consultant or facilitator who needs to pay attention to what’s actually going on in front of them rather than what they think should be going on. In my own case, the less attention I pay to the detail of the discussion and the more I pay to the context and tone of the discussion the better I am able to work between the levels to create a space where everyone can be present. I can’t make them show up but I can wonder out loud about the quality of presence.
Hat tip to Johnnie for finding the following in Phil Dourado’s free book chapter for February:
Tim Collins, a career soldier, rose to prominence when an impromptu speech he gave to the Irish regiment he commanded in Iraq ended up in newspapers all over the world. Collins says…that “to lead effectively, you have to love people”. Collins goes on to explain ‘love’ as knowing and caring about what motivates people and what is important to them, and helping them fulfil those aspirations at work. This, he says, is a foundation of leadership.
Sharing knowledge, looking after employees’ wellbeing, giving people your time and attention, respecting and acknowledging the contribution of others, all are incontrovertible aspects of good leadership. It only becomes controversial when the ‘L’ word is applied.
"Leadership is emotional. Leadership deals with feelings. Leadership is made up of dreams, inspiration, excitement, desire, pride, care, passion, and love. The areas of our lives where we show the strongest leadership – including our communities, families, organizations, products, services, hobbies, and customers - are where we're most in love." (Jim Clemmer)
Ever wondered why hiring the wrong consultant is very often the right decision for organisations? There may come a point when you know that the task you’ve been hired to do or facilitate simply isn’t the task that needs to be done – what on earth are you going to do? How are you going to manage the mounting pressure to deliver when all around you the signs are telling you that failure is on the horizon?
Change processes evoke anxiety – whether it’s at a personal or professional level – that’s one reason why the change industry is outsourced to consultants. Anxiety is difficult to talk about or deal with at a conscious level but its presence is felt everywhere in what may look like irrational behaviour and illogical decision making.
You’d imagine that choosing a consultant to manage the change process and deliver on the strategic goals would be important? After all, this is an important stage in the organisation’s development isn’t it? All well and good with our rational hats on. Unconsciously it may be more important to choose a consultant who can’t deliver, thereby protecting ourselves from the anxiety of change by blaming the consultant for not being good enough.
Consultants can be “not good enough” in various ways. They may not have the right people skills to work with the emotional issues that change presents. The IT system will be up and running in no time but people won’t have a clue what’s happening and where they may end up next week. A consultant may simply not have the professional experience to engage with the task at a strategic enough level. The project will be micro managed, take enormous amounts of time and may be discontinued due to excessive costs. The consultant may not have the authority in the system to roll out the changes that have been agreed – s/he may be de-authorised by the board from actually delivering on the task.
In all of these scenarios the consultant will absorb the organisation’s anxiety by feeling unwelcome, not good enough, set up to fail, disappointed, confused and angry etc. Very often, the consultant will be scapegoated for failing to deliver while not knowing that they were hand picked to fail.
When the wrong consultant is picked it may be the right decision for an organisation not ready to deal with change. A ritual sacrifice is often required and on many occasions the consultant is that offering. In this instance failure isn’t failure it’s a strong signal that there is other work to be accomplished before change is actioned. Very often that other work is finding a safe way to address the underlying anxiety that all change evokes. If a company is brave enough it may look to its “failures” as rich learning about the need to connect with the very real and very human fear of change.
Welcome to the March 19, 2007 edition of emotion at work. (The first edition in fact) and thanks to everyone who submitted a post. I'm fascinated to see what a topic like "emotion at work" has evoked - there are really interesting and different approaches to the topic here that echo much of the management discourse around emotion as something that needs to be valued in its own right (my own view) or controlled in the service of organisational harmony. I'm also curious about the fact that no women submitted posts around this topic and wonder what might be going on there that's interesting.
Mark McGuinness presents 7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm posted at Wishful Thinking. Mark talks about tapping into your natural enthusiasm and how reconnecting with your curiosity is a critical first step in banishing procrastination and keeping the creative juices flowing.
Erik Mazzone presents Deciding to Quit your Job posted at Erik Mazzone's Blog. Erik advocates tapping into your feelings as distinct from your rationale when you have to make a decision to stay in or quit a job.
Alan presents There is always a way posted at Made to Be Great. Alan advocates stillness as a way of connecting with the sense of what’s possible and he also talks about reframing problems as potential solutions (something I’m a huge advocate for).
The Positivity Blog presents 5 life-changing keys to overcoming your fear posted at Henrik Edberg. Henrik offers some strategies for overcoming fear which are useful for work and personal life beginning with a non-judgemental approach.
Noel Kuhlman presents How To Destroy The Lazy Drones In Your Team posted at Self Help Can Be Fun. Noel offers some no nonsense approaches to co-dependency in the workplace. The title is challenging but I think he’s addressing the way in which we enable people to adopt less than helpful roles in the workplace and he asks us what our part in that is.
Craig Harper presents A Letter to all Blokes.... posted at Renovate your life with Craig. Craig invites blokes to reconnect with their emotions in a witty and “bloke-friendly way”. I'd like to hear Craig's view on the relationship between blokes, their emotion and the world of work as I imagine he'd have an interesting take on that subject.
The Silicone Valley Blogger presents Work Place Drama Ends In More Money at The Digerati Life which is an interesting piece on how the organisation in the mind (or the boss in our mind) is very often out of kilter with the external experience and how our emotions are central to that experience.
Scott Young presents Introduction - Emotional Mastery (Series) posted at Scott H Young. Scott offers an introductory blog post on the "secrets to emotional mastery". The rest of his series focusses on the issue of control and emotion.
That concludes this edition. Thanks to everyone who submitted an article for this first carnival. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Welcome to the April 2, 2007 edition of emotion at work. I am publishing the submissions that directly relate to emotion at work - many more were received but had very little to do with the topic in question - so check out these posts and enjoy the contribution these bloggers are making to the issue of emotion at work.
Neal presents Brain Fitness: Shift Happens posted at SharpBrains, saying, "How a Head Coach can help us navigate through difficult emotions"
Karen Lynch presents Butterfly posted at LivethePower, saying, "Negative emotions are the gift of directions. We need to pay attention."
That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of emotion at work using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page
should, for the most part, forget about issues, policies, even facts, and instead focus on feelings.
In an article in yesterday's New York Times (free subscription required) Westen is described as wanting more passion in politics - Bill Clinton thinks it's great so it won't be long before the rest of the Democrats row in behind establishing their USP as the party that's emotionally intelligent. The New York Times piece goes on to outline the rational and scientific justification for attending to emotion in political life which is awfully familiar if you're aware of the EI industry. For the record I'm not a fan of EI - while it may be a useful tool to begin a conversation about emotion in organisations it's still a rational instrument for the control of feelings and largely designed to manage and hide "negative" emotion. Cognitising emotion is reason not feeling and if we don't pay attention to how feelings (and their public performance as emotion) are generated in systems then we get more "irrational" behaviour and less intelligence about what's really going on. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments so feelings are valid intelligence in their own right and not experiences that should be considered toxic, dangerous or 'out of control'.
We also need to be aware that reason and feeling are inter-related and not separate domains that exist in parallel universes...but maybe I'm getting too emotional about this stuff?
Ever wondered why hiring the wrong consultant is very often the right decision for organisations? There may come a point when you know that the task you’ve been hired to do or facilitate simply isn’t the task that needs to be done – what on earth are you going to do? How are you going to manage the mounting pressure to deliver when all around you the signs are telling you that failure is on the horizon?
Change processes evoke anxiety – whether it’s at a personal or professional level – that’s one reason why the change industry is outsourced to consultants. Anxiety is difficult to talk about or deal with at a conscious level but its presence is felt everywhere in what may look like irrational behaviour and illogical decision making.
You’d imagine that choosing a consultant to manage the change process and deliver on the strategic goals would be important? After all, this is an important stage in the organisation’s development isn’t it? All well and good with our rational hats on. Unconsciously it may be more important to choose a consultant who can’t deliver, thereby protecting ourselves from the anxiety of change by blaming the consultant for not being good enough.
Consultants can be “not good enough” in various ways. They may not have the right people skills to work with the emotional issues that change presents. The IT system will be up and running in no time but people won’t have a clue what’s happening and where they may end up next week. A consultant may simply not have the professional experience to engage with the task at a strategic enough level. The project will be micro managed, take enormous amounts of time and may be discontinued due to excessive costs. The consultant may not have the authority in the system to roll out the changes that have been agreed – s/he may be de-authorised by the board from actually delivering on the task.
In all of these scenarios the consultant will absorb the organisation’s anxiety by feeling unwelcome, not good enough, set up to fail, disappointed, confused and angry etc. Very often, the consultant will be scapegoated for failing to deliver while not knowing that they were hand picked to fail.
When the wrong consultant is picked it may be the right decision for an organisation not ready to deal with change. A ritual sacrifice is often required and on many occasions the consultant is that offering. In this instance failure isn’t failure it’s a strong signal that there is other work to be accomplished before change is actioned. Very often that other work is finding a safe way to address the underlying anxiety that all change evokes. If a company is brave enough it may look to its “failures” as rich learning about the need to connect with the very real and very human fear of change.
Steve Roesler googled "emotions at work" and came up with a list of topics that confirms something I've always known - that emotion at work is a fearful topic for many people. The assumptions are that
• Emotion happens at home i.e. it's personal
• Being emotional means being out of control
• Emotion is not masculine
• Emotion is negative
• Emotion is extraneous to everything the organisation stands for
The discussion on emotion at work invariably centres around the notion that emotion happens "somewhere else" and that emotion is destructive - nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments and most of my work concerns working with individuals and groups helping them to understand what systemic intelligence is contained in emotional situations. Very often the emotional person (aka the scapegoat) is voicing a concern on behalf of a system - i.e. they are doing a job in the system that needs to be done..How many people do you know who roll home after a day at the office talking about the activity they did today as distinct from how they felt about the activity. Most "irrational" behaviour in organisations is very often a conscious representation of unconscious emotional issues that are repressed because of the "rules" that suggest that emotion is not welcome...
I'm one of those odd people who believe that we can't decide to be rational-only because let's face it, that's a fairly irrational request...emotion is a vibrant and compelling type of data that can really contribute to learning .. But then again, we have examples of rational only entities - they are called bureaucracies - and the individual equivalents? sociopaths...Allowing emotion a place to breath doesn't mean abandoning reason - it means allowing the whole person in the room and that can only be a good thing in my view.
Sutton is writing about the difference between quantitative and qualitative data generation and the assumption in business that the former is always better than the latter. I come across this assumption regularly and it’s particularly prevalent when you work in an area that’s about emotion and unconscious processes in the workplace
Sutton gives three examples of when qualitative is better than quantitative:
1. When you don’t know what to count. Unstructured observation of people at work, open-ended conversation, and other so-called ethnographic methods are especially useful when you don’t know, for example, what matters most to customers, employees, or a company. Just hanging around and watching can have a huge effect.
2. When you can count it, but it doesn’t stick. ..people are swayed by stories , not statistics.
3. When What You Can Count Doesn’t Count. Researchers are always looking for things that are easy to count, so they can get numbers that are amenable to statistical analysis. There are times when these numbers do matter. Sales, numbers of defects, and so on can be valuable. But in the hunt for and obsession with what can be counted, the most important evidence is sometimes overlooked. As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Quantitative data collection will give you the “what”– what has worked, what needs to work and what actions should be taken next. What it won’t give you is the “why” and very often the “how”. Why it happened, why it hasn’t and how action is sometimes stifled by other processes. Knowing what needs to happen and making the leap to making it happen requires a different kind of data generation and management which is why so many change processes aren’t as successful as they might be. How many organisations do you know that spend a fortune making sure the IT system communicates properly but leaves the human communication to the bottom of the “to do” list?
I haven't had a lot of time to blog this week but one thing that's going around in my mind is "stress" management and how that actually works? I'm thinking that before you get there you may need to engage in some "dis-stress" management which is really what people present with and then maybe you get to "de-stress" management....But "stress" management..I don't know...I don't think I've ever been useful helping anyone to manage stress...live with it yes, manage it? I don't know...any thoughts anyone?
Matt Moore continues to write really engaging posts and his latest one The Technology of the Secret really piqued my curiosity. He's writing about the process of telling and keeping secrets and how much of his work (and indeed my own) revolves around secret keeping.
Simply hiding something makes it more desirable to others. We may hide it for any number of reasons. It may be shameful, boring, illegal, hurtful. Whatever it is, we don't want people to know about it. We manage & maintain our identities and the exposure of a secret threatens that. Our secrets make us vulnerable. And because they are a part of ourselves that form us that we cannot publicly acknowledge, they can be a heavy burden. Many cultures have developed rituals & roles for the entrustment of secrets to others. The catholic confessional, the psychiatrist's couch.
Secrets (of ourselves & also of others) are powerful tokens of exchange. The secrets of others might be exchanged for material gain but our own secrets are offered to people to build trust between us. We often start with little vulnerabilities and then move on to the bigger things. And in a world where random connections are increasingly common, we sometimes fell happier giving our secrets to complete strangers instead of those close to us.
In my experience there are 4 reasons why someone "tells" their secrets to someone else.
1. I’m telling you a secret because if I say it out loud in the presence of another person then I can begin to hear it myself for the first time.
2. I’m telling you a secret because I feel lonely holding this and I want some company in my isolation.
3. I’m telling you a secret because you can then have the worry about what to do with it and I can absolve myself of that responsibility.
4. I am telling you a secret because I need you to “mind” this for me until I can work out what to do about it.
I'm ambivalent about secret keeping primarily because there is an assumed contract around confidentiality which is rarely negotiated. It's fairly clear if someone is breaking the law but outside of the legal requirements to disclose what about the moral or ethical issues?
I remember one consulting assignment where 10 people revealed their (competing) views about the organisation and made it clear that they expected me to keep their stories confidential. At the end of the few days they were relieved to have told someone and I was burdened with the content and the expectation that I would miraculously come up with a “solution” to a problem nobody was prepared to talk about.
In the end, I gathered the group together, told them I’d maintain confidentiality around their stories but I wanted to talk about the formal and informal ways in which communication was conducted in the company. The assignment turned out ok in the end because my interpretation of the balance between container and contained was a good fit and we had a very meaningful discussion but what I learned from that assignment was never to take confidentiality for granted so now it’s an ongoing part of my contracting with clients.
My work as a therapist brings up all sorts of issues about secret keeping but at a macro level I wonder why psychotherapists are so absent from public discourse when doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists appear with regularity in the media. One of the stories therapists tell themselves is that they have to maintain the confidentiality of the clients’ stories. Yes and no. Keeping secrets is also a way of colluding with the powerlessness of being unheard. Is it ethical to “fix” clients to return them to wider social systems that may have contributed to their distress in the first instance? Is it “ethical” to maintain a vow of silence about family life; relationships; abuse and all of the other secrets we are entrusted with? Who does secret keeping really benefit?
So you could say I’m ambivalent about secrets and my instinct now is to wonder what’s behind the giving of a secret to a secret keeper and how are we both being made and re-made in that process.
One incident that’s stuck in my mind was an interview I had 24 years ago for a financial consultancy. The interviewer talked about money, about wealth, about owning yachts.
Then he began to talk about the losers, the [sorry, but I’m quoting] c**** who didn’t recognise money and its importance, that in five years you could walk away, that you could have other people doing the work for you. That the world had two kind of people - people like him and the “stupid c****” who didn’t understand. He went on and on. It was like talking to low-end devil.
Finally, he let me get a word in. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m one of the c****.” And I walked out. One of the more terrifying experiences of my life.
At an individual level, each of us needs to do the same. I have something of an email habit, clicking "refresh" on my inbox like a rat in a Skinner Box - but I don't have a PDA/Blackberry (which is a bit like a meth addict proudly claiming not to touch heroin). I have decided I need to have one email-free day a week. The computer will stay off*.
We also need to examine the relationships that are mediated through these technologies. Are we driving people crazy with our behaviour? How do we manage ourselves to get the best out of our interactions with others? For some of us, this might be too painful. Best get back to hitting them with emails/txts/IMs I guess - that'll learn 'em.
I've just started to read The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld (more about why later in the month) suffice to say it has one of the best opening sections of anything I've read recently.
There is no mystery to happiness.
Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.
But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
I like this video of Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice at the TED conference talking through his thesis that too much choice results in too much misery. I'll write more about this at a later stage, particularly as it relates to my own research but for now, from the TED site:
Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz's estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.
Last weekJohnnie Moore, Matt Moore and I had a conversation about the shadow side of organisations. Part one of this is available as a podcast (click here) - show notes will follow and thanks to Johnnie for all the technical work. I hope you find the discussion interesting and do leave comments and feedback.
Here are the show notes. Warning: These are unreliable. The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.
The elephant in the corner
0.00 Introductions and what this is about: the Elephant in the Corner and things that don’t get talked about
0.50 Annette asks Johnnie what prompted his focus on this? Why now? Johnnie describes a client conversation that may have pointed to his own shadow side… the “deep sense of ranklement” that suggests that there’s something for him to work on…
3.25 …and prompts Annette to look at how this might also be seen as a shadow on the client side “what job was your sense of shame doing for the organisation for which you worked?” Why does the shadow need to be hidden? Do we collude in scapegoating people inside organisations, or consultants that advise them?
Part two of my conversation on the shadow side of organisations with Johnnie Moore and Matt Moore has now been posted by Johnnie - you can download it or listen to it here. Johnnie has also complied some great show notes which I am re-publishing I'm curious to know how long it took Johnnie to edit and prepare the audio and show notes...looks like lots of work to me (thanks Johnnie).
Here are the show notes with the same caveat as for part one: The timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally. This was a conversation and not as linear as even these rough notes might suggest.
0.00 Annette asks Matt, with what I’d say is a slight sense of irony in her voice, what knowledge management really is. Is it a gatekeeper? It sounds like a very powerful position…
1.00 Matt says knowledge managers don’t wield a lot of power but they do wield influence. It’s about linking people together. Matt toys with the alternative label of “knowledge courtesan”. Some of the best knowledge managers were those women who ran the salons in eighteenth century France, who created environments for others to have conversations in.
2.50 It struggles with issues of control and secrecy.
3.05 Johnnie and Annette banter before Johnnie slips into Dr Rant mode. (So that’s the connection to the shadow, then.) What’s the problem with these knowledge management people? Are they just trying to raise their status with fancy language? Johnnie drags HR into the fight too.
5.15 Annette asks if Johnnie’s feeling better now.
5.25 Matt talks about how some professions are marginalised, and adds communications/PR to the list. In organisations some divisions have the power and everyone else wants a piece of the action and get into the limelight.
6.25 Annette: how did we end up vilyfying HR etc?
6.35 Johnnie tries to put his rant in context. (Nice try.)
7.10 How could the put-upon divisions be more in their power? Annette asks (great question): what’s useful about having a department to bully? How does that contibute to the established power systems in an organisation?
Annette talks about how HR can get stuck with giving out the bad news for others. Maybe HR, marketing and KM are saddled with trying to manage the mucky stuff of relationships that others don’t want to deal with.
8.55 What role does knowledge manager take up as a gate keeper? Matt responds. Problems of managing intangibles. How KM gets saddled with document management.
10.25 Annette: so there’s some truth to my idea of knowledge managers as gatekeepers.
11.15 There’s anxiety about control of information.. is it about controlling identity?
12.00 We can create the conditions in which stuff is produced but we can’t control what happens. It’s easy to blame the gatekeeper/scapegoat than look at what’s really going on. How do you get out of being the whipping boy? Looking at both sides of this – what’s the “problem department” doing to put itself in this role, and what’s the organisation’s investment in keeping it there?
14.20 Bringing conversation to a close and marking the anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s death.
Stephen Fineman's distinction between feeling (the private experience) and emotion (the public performance of that feeling) is interesting to consider through the lens of this quote from Adam Phillips' New York Times piece Grief on Demand from 1997- a reflection on the death of Diana and the scolding of the royal family because of their lack of publicly expressed emotion.
If emotions are considered to be real only when one is seen having them, preferably by people one doesn't know, it implies that for better and for worse, we no longer know what to make of what we once called privacy.
That quote is so rich it refuses to leave me alone...
I am so enjoying the newly liberated archives of the New York Times..
At the New York Regional Meeting of ISPSO on Saturday I shared some thoughts on the Cyber System in the Mind. I'm intrigued as to why there are so few psychodynamic practitioners (particularly those working with organisations) using social media applications to talk about the work. I shared my own experience of being invited to present on this topic (a relatively new one for this organisation) and the levels of anxiety it raised for me. At one stage it looked like the Aer Lingus pilots in Ireland were going to strike and there was a part of me that was almost relieved to have a legitimate excuse to cancel. If I'm honest, I was scared of being attacked, criticised and ridiculed - thinking through my emotional reaction to the invitation (and some subsequent email correspondence) I realised that I was having a similar emotional experience to many of the clients with whom I work. In some cases their fear of an attack on their expertise or artform area etc prevents them from sharing what they know in cyberspace. Sometimes it's easier and safer to talk to ourselves. But while talking to ourselves has its benefits it is also exclusive...I remember the loneliness and isolation of being out for dinner with friends after a week of working with therapy clients and knowing I couldn't share what happened to me in the office that week. I've learned to trust my emotional reaction to situations because it's the only thing I have when I'm working with a client. So thinking through all of the above led me to offer three hypotheses and a paradox to my colleagues yesterday:
There is anxiety about succession in psychoanalysis - the new replacing the old
The cyber system in the mind is not a virtual but a hyper-real place – a place of regression - where incestuous desire is potentially realisable.
The silence of psychoanalytic practitioners in cyber space is a defence against the potential murder/death of psychoanalysis from the oedipal attack of the new.
The paradox this raises is then
Creating & telling stories in cyberspace places us on an equal footing with everyone else – we become ‘ordinary’ potentially divested of authority and status – it’s easier to talk to ourselves
yet
The future of a psychoanalytic approach to organising and organisations may rest in how ‘ordinary’ it becomes
Here is the set of slides I used (minus the case study which was only relevant for members of ISPSO).
I've put up a page containing links to all of the sites I referenced and have also included a few more for background information - you can access that page by clicking HERE.
I couldn't find an appropriate place for Rives on the day but somehow he seems so relevant in hindsight!
Doris Lessing’s Nobel Prize speech is a wonderful and impassioned plea for the importance of education and telling our stories. In her speech she talks about illiteracy and the lack of books in Africa and compares the passion for learning with our comfortable complacency here – which is particularly apt at this time of the year.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
She’s not a fan of the time spent surfing and wonders
How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?
But of course the irony is, that blogging and social media have become important ways of telling stories – and Lessing’s words will permeate many imaginations by virtue of bloggers picking up and sharing what she has to say. But I take her point – I love books - I love the kinaesthetic experience of holding a document in my hands – and while others herald paperless books – they miss the point. Reading is not a delivery mechanism, it’s an emotional and spiritual experience and that can certainly be enhanced by the digital revolution but not supplanted by it. Unlike Lessing I'm hopeful about the future of literature, and the book, and can only hope that digital and traditional ways of telling stories can continue to co-exist.
And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears. "Have you still got your space? Your sole, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don't let it go." There must be some kind of education.
Happy New Year. Broken any new year resolutions yet? Or maybe you’re the kind that refuses to make them – that way ensuring a 100% satisfaction guaranteed rating at the year’s end. Like so may people I think about resolutions at this time of the year – I sometimes act upon them, but often than not by the end of January I’ve quietly put them away for another 11 months. This year I’ve decided to take a different approach. For the past 6 months I’ve been thinking about change – personal and professional – and spending a lot of that time asking myself what’s useful and productive about not making the changes I say I want to make. What kind of satisfaction (or secondary gain) am I getting out of my stuckness that’s more useful than the imagined newer version? I invariably come up against comfort (with the status quo) and fear (of the unknown) not highly original but pretty real in my case.
I have a couple of major personal change projects for 2008 and instead of writing a ‘to do’ list and an action plan I’ve made a mental list of how I am feeling now and how I want to feel when I’ve achieved those changes. I’ve decided to make the emotional engagement with these resolutions the focus of my attention while also embarking on some practical actions. So often it’s the emotional stuff that derails our best laid plans and in my case I can revert to a comfortable and controlled emotional relationship which inhibits my progress with outward action. So far it’s working –I’m delving into the value of my fear and comfort and discovering all kinds of interesting insights. I’m taking on my inner saboteur and am going to make ‘her’ my closest friend for the next year and I know that by the end of January I won’t be consigning any ‘to do’ list to the back of the drawer for another 11 months.
How are you getting along with your resolutions? And what’s your plan to befriend your inner saboteur?
For a great article on New Year Resolutions head over to Escape from Cubicle Nation where Pam asks ‘what’s perfect about your problem?’
Ryan Tubridy asked ‘is it ever right to show emotion in the workplace” on last Wednesday’s show. While I was glad to see this issue discussed on national radio I was really disheartened that the show didn’t appear to take the opportunity to challenge the most basic of myths about emotion i.e. women cry and men get angry; emotion has to be ‘controlled’; emotion is ‘personal’; emotional behaviour has to be taken out of the work environment. Hopes for a more sophisticated discussion that might have included reference to work as an emotional and emotion generating environment; the difference between feelings and emotions in the workplace; emotion as systemic intelligence about what is going on in the workplace and the fact that there’s no such thing as an emotion free environment (well maybe in the case of extreme bureaucracies) and the ‘rules’ about emotion were quickly dashed. The increasing body of research into this area wasn’t referenced even in passing.
Yes, if only we could get those pesky emotional people out of the workplace then all would be well eh?
I'm preparing a workshop for a group of psychotherapy students on 'contemporary issues in psychotherapy' and am interested in unravelling assumptions (well some assumptions) about therapy being useful and a good idea so if anyone would care to contribute some thoughts I'd be really interested...I'm particularly interested in the cultural and political aspects...I won't say any more for now - comments and email would be welcome. I'm hoping Johnnie, Mark, Mike and a few others might chip in?
I'm one of the lucky ones who has tickets for four of the concerts in RTE's Living Music Festival which is dedicated to the work of Arvo Pärt this weekend. The opening concert on Friday night at the National Concert Hall was magnificent and more than a few people commented on how long it has been since they experienced the kind of electricity in the air that was present in the building that night. Perhaps it had to do with the presence of the composer who received rapturous applause when he came to the stage - combined with the fabulous performance from the RTE Philharmonic Choir and the National Symphony Orchestra (and guest soloist Joanna MacGregor) which made the night a very special and memorable one. It was clear from the mix of people in the building that Arvo Pärt attracts a 'non traditional' classical music audience - 'total crossover' is how one colleague described. When I hear people moan about the licence fee and the paucity of programming on our national station I'd like to point them in the direction of what's happening this weekend. I, for one, am delighted that my licence fee and my taxes are going to support this event.
This afternoon I'm off to hear the RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet at the National Gallery, then Crash Ensemble at the Samuel Beckett Centre and back to the National Concert Hall for the final concert in the series tonight. The full programme for the event is here. And here's one of my favourite Pärt pieces Spiegal Im Spiegal (thanks Sinead).
Why, when we can choose any level of happiness, do so many of us choose something less - often much less - than bliss? Most of us - most of you reading this blog - lived truly charmed lives. And yet we choose other emotions like sadness, frustration, envy, disappointment.
So asks Lisa over at Management Craft. I don't believe we can control our feelings .. neither do I really believe we can control our emotions. I also have to admit to being somewhat sceptical of the 'happiness industry' that's blooming right now. I simply don't believe that applying a cognitive frame to our emotional lives works. So much of what we feel is generated in work environments where there are socially negotiated 'rules' about what emotion is acceptable/preferable in that setting. Organisations are emotional and emotion generating environments - if my team wins a contract and I'm happy is that because I'm a happy person and brought that to work with me this morning or is it as a result of something that happened at work? Likewise with other emotions. Splitting off happiness as something we can have more of by excluding the rest of the emotional spectrum doesn't fit with any frame of reference I know - short of sublimating or splitting it really doesn't work.
Sitting amongst 1000 other people listening to Joe Jackson on Friday evening I was struck by the importance of remembering. I, like many of those present, remembered the first time we heard Is She Really Going Out With Him? Most people knew the lyrics and sang along to the set list..we were transported back to 1979 and the overwhelming feeling was one of nostalgia, belonging and the collective sense of remembering.
Why do we spend so much time in organisations dreaming about the future? Strategising? planning? hoping? moulding ourselves into a fantasy of what the future will bring? Why don't we spend more time remembering? Remembering what brought us together in the first place? the ideas, values and dreams that were supposed to be worked out in this gathering of people.
If more planning processes attended to the reasons why we started this rather than rationalising why we should stay together then like most relationships (personal and professional) we could start from a place of shared commitment..maybe I'm wrong about this .. but sitting in that theatre on Friday night I know that we could have moved mountains out of our shared emotional connection. Remembering is a present tense activity .. maybe we need a bit more of it, more of the emotional connection.. In the meantime...
The annual meeting of ISPSO takes place in Philadelphia between 20 and 22 June this year. The title of this conference is Meaning and Motivation at work. If you are interested in how organisations 'really work'; and are curious about how emotion and unconscious processes influence how and what gets done then this gathering of consultants, managers and academics is the place to be. Before the main part of the proceedings there are four days of professional development workshops (16 - 19 June) open to anyone to attend. The questions being covered this year include:
How does one effectively market psychoanalytic work?
How does photography introduce new power into understanding organizations?
When consulting or coaching assignments involve working through impasse, what methods can encourage transformation?
What can organizations do to build resistance to corruption in their work?
There are any more fascinating topics - so if you are in the Philadelphia area and are curious about a psychoanalytic approach to working and organising check out the full schedule here.
There's more information about ISPSO here and the full conference schedule is available here.
How important is confidentiality at work? and how much of my product offering as a consultant is the guarantee that whatever is told to me will be held in confidence? Are consultants professional secret keepers? and how much of our work is containing and sanitising misdemeanours offering them back as palatable organisational learnings? What or whom are we minding?
Following my previous post on confidentiality I invited Johnnie Moore and Matt Moore to talk about these and other confidential matters via Skype this morning and here's the resulting podcast. Show notes follow and thanks to Johnnie for being the sound engineer on the project.
Download the podcast by clicking HERE. This is a 9MB file lasting just under 29 minutes.
Disclaimer: These are a rough summary of the conversation accompanied by flexible/rough timings.
0.0 Annette
How important is confidentiality at work? and how much of my product offering as a consultant is the guarantee that whatever is told to me will be held in confidence? Are consultants professional secret keepers? and how much of our work is containing and sanitising misdemeanours offering them back as palatable organisational learnings? What or whom are we minding?
Introductions
How important is confidentiality at work?
0.50 Johnnie
It’s ‘very important’. It means different things to different people at different times – is it a way of addressing status – I had to sign an NDA etc. Sometimes it’s a status play. It is a way of entrapping the other person in something – am I doing you a favour or am I inviting you into a trap? It’s complex isn’t it?
2.08 Annette
How much of the conversation around confidentiality is in fact a seduction – around secrets?
2.18 Matt
One way of taking someone into your confidence is to offer them a secret and that has all kinds of levels and layers – does it happen once? Several times? And what happens when you break that trust?
Matt talks about his role as an internal consultant and how people entrust him with their secrets and the complexity of the messages and seductions contained within those secrets.
5.18 Annette
Annette notes that both Matt and Johnnie are talking about ‘intimacy’ and asks how we set up the conditions for that to take place. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips talks about how we can set up the conditions for romance but there’s no guarantee that romance will happen – what kinds of ploys do Matt and Johnnie use to set up the romantic conditions for intimacy in the workplace?
6.32 Johnnie
Johnnie professes his interest in intimacy and his interest in web tools which foster intimacy.
Johnnie talks about the shift from confidentiality as control to a more open sharing of information via Open Space and other similar processes. He talks about relinquishing his role as ‘consultant confessor’ which has become an uncomfortable role. Am I getting in the way by holding a secret?
9.19 Annette
What burden is placed on someone designated as ‘knowledge manager’ to manage hidden knowledge – how does Matt manage the externalised ‘known knowledge’ with the internalised ‘unknown’?
9.41 Matt
Matt admits to being a hypocrite! The official versus the ‘real’ version of events often conflict. Matt then goes on to say how hypocrisy works in practice – including sanitising stories; the pleasure of being taken into someone’s confidence; the manufacture of intimacy and how hypocrisy functions as a social lubrication.
13.13 Annette
Consultants are also politicians in organisations and are we talking here about the context we create (or wish to create) rather than the content of what people are saying?
13.40 Johnnie
Creating explicitly ‘confident’ scenarios aren’t particularly enjoyable and neither do they work. Johnnie talks about how this works in practice.
15.43 Annette
There is often an assumption that the stories revealed in confidence have more truth than those revealed in public and also we are not capable of hearing or speaking truth in organisations. Does being an internal consultant add another layer to that mix?
16.23 Matt
Openness versus closedness is an interesting concept – we need to keep some things private. Matt is often asked to take sides – to join a tribe - and secrets are a way of extending this invitation. Matt talks about respecting the invitation while not getting pulled in..
19.15 Annette
Scepticism is useful – our relationship with secrets and confidences is influenced by splits good/bad; useful/unhelpful – can we strike a balance between them? Respecting what this intervention has to offer for this system?
20.12 Johnnie
Explicit confidentiality agreements can serve to shut down the sharing of confidences and sensitive information – the opposite is often the case. The paradox here is that less is shared when the discussion is explicit – when it becomes ritualised it becomes less effective. Johnnie talks about the difference between hard and soft trust.
22.07 Annette
There is a dance in negotiating confidence – in removing that dance we give a message that there is apart of me or thoughts I want to share that are unacceptable.
22.48 Johnnie
Johnnie asks about what that negotiation means – is it explicit? Is it implicit? What does it look like?
23.21 Annette
Annette talks about unconscious and non verbal negotiations that invite revelation – seeking permission to inquire about someone’s personal story.
23.50 Matt
We prefer to have soft trust – informal trust but we fall back on hard trust and the rules when that isn’t guaranteed and when there are issues of power and status at play. If you are genuinely sharing yourself you make yourself vulnerable and organisations are treacherous places…
25.07 Johnnie
Perhaps it’s our job to be the ones who are willing to be vulnerable – it’s easy to revert to rules but it’s useful to talk about our own vulnerabilities as it gives permission to those we work with to talk about theirs.
26.16 Annette
We have all kinds of things in our consultancy toolkits but feelings are the primary ones that I draw on
26.30 Johnnie
Suggests pausing the conversation there for now..
27.07 Annette
Thanks to Matt and Johnnie for sharing their thoughts.
I cried on Saturday listening to Nuala O'Faolain talk, in a raw and emotional interview, with Marian Finnucane, about her recent diagnosis of terminal cancer. Her shock and anger was palpable and as with so much of her writing, she spoke from a deep place full of honesty and grace. When asked about having more time she said
Yeah, I was just reading about some best-selling man who says 'Live your dream to the end' and so on and I don't despise anyone who does, but I don't see it that way. Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.
O'Faolain's memoir Are You Somebody resonated so strongly with me. The depth of her emotion was breathtaking, just as it was on Saturday morning. The raw, real experience of one woman's journey which in its total emotional honesty becomes universal in its meaning. It's hard not to project a set of feelings onto someone else's tragedy - to make it about me and not them particularly when I never had the pleasure of meeting her in the flesh. I hope that however she plans to spend her remaining days she'll find some solace and meaning and be surrounded by a lot of love and I also hope she knows that she is somebody.
The full transcript of her interview is here and the podcast of the interview can be listened to here.
Sometimes being in a familiar place can be an unfamiliar experience. I’ve been in New York for the past ten days and the place should technically look and feel the same as it always does. But it doesn’t. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m a regular visitor to the city now (at least twice a year) or maybe it’s that I’m taking it for granted – but I think it’s probably the people and relationships I am building here that makes the difference. I’ve always felt that I make more sense to myself in this city. The grass is always greener I know, but there’s a constellation of people, places and feelings that are evoked in me when I’m here that’s unlike anywhere else I’ve travelled. New York is the city that never disappoints – and technically it should. I know the city very well, the ride from the airport should be passé – but the Manhattan skyline takes my breath away every time, each time anew, each time a renewed beginning.
I’m thinking about this in terms of organisations and what would make going to work a renewing experience every day. With so much energy going into staff retention; work/life balance and work related satisfaction I wonder is it as simple as the relationships we build while we’re there? Work is a social place and organisations are networks of human systems. If, like me, you’re driven by curiosity and a need for conversation then the quality of those relationships make or break an environment. I can’t imagine not having my imagination fed through my work. I can’t imagine not having my heart stimulated by relationships.
I know I’ll look back on this trip and see it as pivotal in the relationship I’m having with myself – I look in the mirror each morning and see a difference - the difference is down to the people I know here. If the old cliché that home is where the heart is, is true then the fact that I’m feeling at home here and within myself has to do with that heart connection. I wonder how many of us can say the same of our work lives?
I spent a great evening at the White Institute last night where I shared some of my research on disappointment with a fantastic group of people who in turn, shared their experiences of disappointment in organisational settings. This was the first time I’d spoken about my work and I was very nervous and also very excited to see how my thinking would be received. As ever with psychodynamically informed practitioners, the conversations were rich, pregnant and enormously satisfying – I took away more than I contributed and I’m grateful to everyone who participated in the conversation for their generosity and indeed for the welcome I received.
Apart from the rich learning around my research topic I learned (again) that I speak too quickly when I am nervous and I really need to address this for future presentations. I get in my own way sometimes in my rush to get out of my own way (if that makes sense) and I’m much more comfortable in conversational spaces than I am in formal presentation ones – but perhaps that’s just another thing to think about and add to the mix. So thanks to everyone who contributed to my thinking and thanks to the White organisation programme for the invitation to share some of that thinking in such welcoming surroundings.
About Emotion
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Interactions - Creative Strategies for Business in the Emotion category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
