There is a certain irony in arriving at a conference that is ostensibly about transform-action on a day when the French have decided to stage a day of non-action. But such are the things that these kinds of experiences are made of. I made it to my hotel with 5 minutes to spare before the start of my conference and what a day it has been so far.
For those of you who might be wondering what the agenda is - there simply isn't one that looks remotely like anything you might imagine. The purpose of the conference is to participate in the creation of a temporary organisation, to reflect on the experience and to use that experience to act. There are "staff" who consult to large working groups and smaller learning groups. Participants are divided into two groups - those of us who are new to the group relations process (called the Access Group) and those who are more experienced (called the Application group). There doesn't appear to be much different in the process, but the Application Group do spend some time planning the conference with the staff and are invited to think in a meta way about what is going on at the conference and how that relates to their group.
We have sat in two plenary sessions and two small working groups. The space is left open. Anyone can speak about whatever they wish. Already the fantasies about what the staff are "planning" are already rife.. The emotional temperature of the groups wanders all over the place. People take risks and talk about their experience of being in a temporary organisation with "no rules". The challenge to lead, follow, negotiate, participate, make meaning are all very live. All of a sudden it's very clear to everyone who is here that the "task" is rarely the focus of our attention when we come together to organise. The consultants who sit in the sessions offer their interpretation of what is happening. The distinction between this kind of process and group therapy is that personal emotional work is not processed and what is experienced by the individual is seen to in some way "belong" to the group. Already there are scapegoats who are doing the work of others. In a traditional organisational structure the action might be to take them out of the system - to "fix" or "control" them because of their non-conformity. In a group relations conference the question is asked - "what is this behaviour saying about the way the group is performing and behaving?"
On the surface is should be quite easy. Sit, listen, talk if you want, stay silent if you don't. No pressure to perform. No pressure to deliver. But the silence can be persecutory for some. Already there are "demands" for direction. Having the power to create our own experiences isn't as simple as it looks. The whole concept of leadership is now up for discussion and interpretation.
I find myself comfortable as a participant/observer. I can be "in" the group and reflect "on" the group. While that is a comfortable position for me, it isn't perceived as such by everyone with whom I'm currently working. Sometimes its best to avoid or ignore the large elephant in the room. I have to ask myself the question - why do I occupy this position? and what is it I'm doing that belongs to the group I'm in? and who am I trying to ally myself with in the room - is it a way of avoiding being part of the group?
As a consultant, these are the questions I ask (generally quietly and silently) when I work in organisations. What a privelige it is to be in a temporary organisation of people who are brave enough to ask them out loud.
There are over 80 participants at this conference, complemented by a team of ten “staff”. All are drawn from the four corners of the earth. I’ve met people from France, the United States, Peru, India and every place in between. The working languages of the conference are English and French and for many neither of these languages is their mother tongue. To compound matters there is no formal translation service.
What this does is challenge us to look at dominant discourses. How does one language (vernacular) get privileged over another? Who requires interpretation? And who offers to supply it? Each of these challenges evokes a response in participants. There are more than three languages. There is French, there is English and there is the interpretation in the middle. Those who offer to facilitate understanding hold a key position in the discourse. Often times, the consultant holds that position in organisational life. Today, I deliberately sought out a group in which everyone was an English speaker. I wondered what it would be like not to hear the negotiation of translation, not to have to wonder what was being said in a language with which I have a passing acquaintance.
I was surprised by my responses.
Today I felt more misunderstood and I think I, in turn misunderstood my colleagues in a group that, on the surface, offered more possibilities of what we had in common than not. As soon as we had negotiated a “sameness” (language of communication) other differences emerged – nuance, intention, conscious and unconscious projections and inferences. I realise that not understanding the language also offers a respite from the words and offers the possibility of playing with meaning, non verbal and symbolic communication. I ask myself – how is the discourse affecting me? Is how I am being affected useful in terms of what is transpiring? The advantage of exploring this in a group relations conference is that is precisely the kind of exploration, reflection and learning we are invited to participate in.
The learning for leadership is to challenge the assumption of common languages. What and who does it include? What and who does it exclude? When I say that I assist organisations to review, evaluate and strategise I am assuming a familiarity with the terminology. I assume that those I speak with understand my vernacular and when they approach me, they assume I understand what they mean. But there is also the possibility that the interpretation of each of these terms is contingent on what each brings to the table. And that’s where negotiation and reflection step in.
When a client approaches me to assist them draw up a plan or a strategy I can’t afford to assume we are talking the same language. Their need and my offering may or may not be congruent. Unless we explore the taken for granted starting points we may end up having misunderstandings as the process evolves.
When I am consulting with clients I build in time for reflection. How has this been working from both our perspectives? Do we need to challenge our assumptions? What value do our assumptions hold for the piece of work we are engaged in?
Sometimes talking the same jargon is a barrier to effective communication. Sometimes how that jargon makes me feel and invites me to respond can be a more authentic starting point for more meaningful connections.
We’ve spent about 4 hours talking about chairs. Moving them, not moving them, what they “symbolise”, who’s not sitting in one, who is sitting in the middle of the group, who’s sitting on the outside of the group. Were anyone to walk into the middle of these conversations I’m convinced they’d think we’ve all lost the plot. In the absence of an agenda and something “to talk about” a group starts looking for things to talk about to replace the anxiety of the silence. Think of how difficult it is to sit on a three hour train journey with no newspaper, iPod, coffee, book and you get some idea of what I’m talking about . Paranoia about senior management and their intention towards the group starts to rear its ugly head. It didn’t take long for people to feel like we were like lab rats in a cage, being manipulated for some other external reason. The “management” deliberately arranged the chairs to “make” us react in this way is a popular fantasy.
A group relations conference is a laboratory environment. One which people willingly enter into in order to get a real, lived and heightened sense of the dynamics of groups, organisations and systems at first hand. Normally we’re so busy focussing on the external task or mission of the organisation that we aren’t aware of the unconscious processes like fear, paranoia, seduction, etc that are informing how we go about our business.
One of the manifestations of this is the attempt to reach “consensus”. Power plays are being worked out all over the place. There is a desire for consensus on who sits where, how the room is organised etc because there is a fantasy that consensus avoids chaos. The groups are grappling with difference – is it possible to be in a system with someone and tolerate their difference? We spoke about this in a group yesterday and there was a “consensus” that “difference” was acceptable. Until, someone expressed a view that was contrary to the consensus and the group wasn’t one bit happy at all. The paradox was not lost and after a robust discussion there was a genuine and felt sense that difference did exist and when we let go of consensus as a control mechanism it really is possible to handle the anxiety of it all.
I realise as I’m writing this that it gives no flavour whatsoever of the experience of being in the middle of the robust discussion. But each day organisations and leaders are faced with how to manage with diversity and difference. Policies are drafted, statements are made and the spoken story can sometimes be very different from the lived.
It’s extraordinarily hard work to accept and tolerate difference in a lived way. It’s neurotic work to avoid it. When I’m working with groups I try to help them live with the difference and avoid the compromise of consensus. My question always is – “what is being avoided by the group’s need to be in agreement?” If groups are brave enough to attempt an answer then there is rich learning and authentic connection.
What happens when you have 80 people in a confined space over 8 days?
Emotions start running high, that’s what. And in some cases – very high and I include myself in that description. It’s interesting to find myself in an institutional setting experiencing much of what my clients experience when they invite me to work with them to “solve” the problem.
Many organisations fear emotion. There is an assumption that to be emotional = out of control and to be out of control = inevitable chaos. Often the point at which someone starts exhibiting emotional behaviour in an organisation the three Cs will be called for – the Coach, the Consultant of the Counsellor. Taking the “problem” out of the system is seen as a way of containing and controlling the situation.
Here in Paris there’s nowhere to go. The hotel is about 25KM from the centre of Paris, there’s little outside the hotel in terms of distraction, (in fact the location has all the charm of an industrial estate on the edge of nowhere) there are limited circulation spaces and many people are sharing rooms. From an outside perspective it looks like a recipe for disaster. But we’re being challenged to look at, experience and understand emotion as a systemic manifestation. Why is it that people get “set up” in organisations to be the carriers of emotion? In my own experience, many of the trouble makers in organisational life are expressing what the rest of the system is too afraid to say. Here in Paris there is a lot of emotion – frustration, anger, intimacy, sadness etc and we are exploring how the relationships in our temporary institution create carriers of emotional messages. Both how we accept the invitation to act on behalf of the group and how we assign that invitation and responsibility to others.
Increasingly I’m becoming more interested in keeping the learning about this kind of systemic interaction within the organisations with whom I work. If I can help the organisation understand why particular kinds of behaviour speak on behalf of the organisation then the intervention can be appreciative as distinct accusative. That’s not to suggest that people don’t have choice about how they behave in organisations either – not everything can be blamed “on the system”. Systems can generate emotion but individuals make the choice about how to express it. Coaching and consulting can work hand in hand to bridge the gap between the individual and the organisation and when I’ve been privileged to have access at both levels the results in terms of organisational learning are impressive. It takes bravery to contain rather than control emotion and then use the wisdom to advance the learning of the entire organisation.
The director of the conference I attended in France made a short presentation at the last session in which he encapsulated what he and the management had been doing for the 8 days of our experience.
“We have been managing boundaries, not policing rules”
That’s the most concise description of management and leadership I have ever come across. If we’re managing boundaries then we are on the edge of difference. If we’re policing rules then we are imposing conformity. All problems in systems are caused by an attempt to control someone else’s actions and behaviours. Attempting to police those situations more often than not results in the suppression of difference and generates the fantasy of collaboration. If we’re brave enough to accept that difference exists and is enriching and is part and parcel of all systems, then the task becomes one of managing and engaging with that difference. If there is room for difference then there can be a realistic and authentic agreement to move forward from that perspective. That, to me, sounds like a more authentic form of consensus than an imposed “rule” that we all have to be the same.
The real reason I'm currently in Amsterdam is to attend the annual symposium of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations which starts tomorrow morning. The theme of the conference is "The Dark Side of Competition" and I'm looking forward to the papers and presentations, not to mind meeting up with some people I discussed chairs with in Paris earlier this year. I'll write something more detailed after I've participated in some of the sessions.
In Manfred Kets de Vries' presentation at the recent ISPSO conference he highlighted the key concerns of top executives. I captured 9 of them and there may have been more – but here you go:
1 Interpersonal conflict
2 Management of disappointment
3 Nobel Prize complex – can I be number 1?
4 Feeling like an imposter/fake
5 Faust syndrome (boredom)
6 Life balance
7 Fuck you money – how much money is enough?
8 Relationships with others
9 Body stress
I found this list fascinating – because all of these issues are “personal” and “inter-personal” – I don’t see much here in the way of organisational or business angst – even the issue of “fuck you money” is one of value and how we know what we are worth. It appears that there comes a time when existential issues take over. There’s much to think about that relates to every level of organisational functioning in here – leadership, power, politics, management etc etc… I’m sure this list could be extended by miles. I also suspect this list could be re-drawn for different stages of career development (mmm I might think about that a bit more).
On a side issue, number 2 is the precise topic I’m researching for my PhD and to be honest, there is not much in the way of management literature about this subject (which presents a great challenge and opportunity for me naturally!).
All quiet on the blogging front this week as I am at the university being a student. It's a very odd experience being on a college campus, as a student, feeling 25 years too old to be here and at the same time secretly wishing I could do this full time...Oh the joy of dreaming eh? It's great to meet other PhD students as most of us are working on our own on individual projects that very few people will ever be interested in or indeed, read. It's interesting also how the sharing of the unique experience creates a common ground - who needs consensus when you can have a shared experience of difference?
Over at Wishful Thinking Mark is pointing out the differences as he sees them between Coaching and Counselling. He's making the traditional distinctions but I would take issue about the assumptions on which they are based and have posted here about this difference before (I’ll repeat some of it in this post). Mark says:
Counselling and therapy deal with personal problems - Coaching addresses workplace performance.
The idea that our personal and professional lives are separate and distinctive is not something I agree with. Organisations don't exist - they are networks of human relationships and as such are emotional and emotion generating environments. We don't come to work and leave our personal selves at the door and I don't know about you - but I have rarely heard someone come home from work talking about "the bottom line" - if they do they are expressing their feelings about the bottom line. Workplace performance is interconnected with personal issues and problems and vice versa. When I am coaching I am always observing why someone brings this problem (personal and professional) to me at this time. The permission I seek to inquire, and the level at which I work is what differentiates coaching from counselling and psychotherapy.
Counselling begins with a problem - Coaching can begin with a goal or aspiration
and
Counselling is sought by people having difficulties - Coaching is used by high achievers as much as beginners or people who are stuck.
People can often come to counselling or therapy with a goal that is framed as a problem. Nobody I have ever worked with has come to therapy to purely talk about problems - they are there to understand and resolve that problem. I have also worked with people who come to counselling and therapy to gain a better understanding of themselves - not just when a problem manifests. And I have also worked with coaching clients who have come and been referred because there is a problem with their workplace performance, so this distinction doesn't stack up for me.
Many (but not all) forms of Counselling focus on the past and the origins of problems - Coaching focuses on the future and developing a workable solution.
Many forms of counselling and therapy seek to understand the past as it impacts on the present. It's essential (in my view) to understand transference - living the past in the present - if you are going to change the future. You can't come up with a 10 point plan and expect it to be implemented overnight if you don't understand what is driving the behaviour in the first place. If this were doable then we'd all be rational only entities with no bad habits.
Mark's differences are the standard ones I have seen when coaches want to differentiate themselves from therapists and it speaks to me of the anxiety many coaches have about the training therapists undergo to understand the unconscious and how that impacts on the present behaviour both in and out of the workplace.
The similarities between both are important to note:
• All individuals who work with a coach or a therapist are interested in a “better” future
• Therapy and Coaching offer skills and possibilities for that future – the methodologies employed are different
• The quality of the relationship is the essential mechanism by which change is effected
• Self awareness on the part of the coach and therapist is essential for successful work with clients
• Unconditional positive regard, empathy and a person-centred approach are key to both approaches
While I apply psychodynamic thinking to my coaching relationships the key difference is about the permission sought to inquire into a client’s personal story and how that information is worked with in the coaching relationship. There are times when it is helpful to know more about family of origin – it may help to understand a dynamic being played out in organisational contexts. But unless a coach is trained to work with this material they run the risk of opening up emotional responses that may be difficult to contain. It’s also essential to know when to refer a coaching client to a therapist. Very often this is when a repeating pattern of unhelpful behaviour, rooted in unresolved personal relationships in the past, is unhelpful in the present.
As a therapist and a coach I bring distinctive skills to the client relationship that are based on my psychodynamic training and which allow me to:
• Meet a client in an authentic person-to-person encounter.
• Process my own feelings in the coaching relationship and to use them as constructive interventions.
• Spot a client who may need a therapeutic relationship and to refer on appropriately.
• Translate psychodynamic insights into powerful work related interventions that impact on work performance and behaviour.
One of my favorite shows on TV is called "Intervention" on A&E, which is about the struggles of people dealing with addiction. On the show, families stage interventions with the addicted member of the family in order to get them to seek help and change their ways. One of the principles that is encouraged is not only that the person is willing to change and get help, the family needs to come together in order for the change to work.
I haven't seen this particular programme on this side of the pond but am familiar with the concept - Travis applies the thinking to organisational change processes and suggests that there needs to be a healthy "family" and a desire for change if this process is to work effectively in organisations. He goes on to say:
The dynamic of the workplace, whether it be a team, group, division, or whole organization, has to be in a healthy state for the organization to undergo serious and permanent organization change. It is almost a paradox that in order for change to be successful, there must be some level of stability in terms of relationships, communication and culture before the instability of change takes place.
This got me thinking about the way in which interventionists are used - the 3Cs Counsellors, Consultants and Coaches. Very often (not always) the 3Cs are called in when an individual is perceived to be "unhealthy"...the 3Cs are marshalled in the service of keeping the organisation healthy by splitting off the unhealthy individual to be made more healthy externally and reimported once s/he is sorted out. To take Travis's example above (and addiction is a great example of a systemic approach) there are other questions to be asked about what work the individual does on behalf of the system and how the system itself contributes to and informs how the individual behaves within it. Increasingly I am working with client organisations to feed back into the system the dynamics that emerge within the coaching relationship and this is having significant impacts. The contract with the individual respects the content of the discussion but also makes space for the overall themes to be explored in the context of the whole system and as such is fed back as organisational intelligence.
Both the patient and the analyst are the recipients of these side effects, of all the things said and implied and unintended and alluded to as the patient speaks as freely as he is able, and begins to understand the ingenuities of the censorship he imposes on himself…Psychoanalysis, essentially, is an attempt to redescribe the whole notion of concentration (Side Effects, p.xi).
Phillips’ suggests that you can only be distracted if you have a plan and in attending to the distractions our plans (ones we may not even be aware of) are revealed. So when people ask me “how I work” and “what I do” I refer them to Phillips because his accessible interpretation of psychoanalysis (and indeed, pscychodynamic approaches to working in general) make sense of the ways in which my interest is captured by “oddness” and incidents and issues that somehow “don’t fit in”. Working below the surface of organisations and with people, means drawing clients attention to their plans – the ones that are unspoken and unconscious. Very often those unconscious plans derail the conscious ones and getting to the heart of that difference (very often exposing it for the first time) is the key to unlocking blockages in the system.
If I am working with a group then there’s the “group” plan; the conscious plans of the individual members of the group and the myriad unconscious plans of the group that nobody may be aware of. Add to this the consultant or coach’s plans – conscious and otherwise and there’s a lot going on. All of these agendas are organised in different ways depending on the life stories of participants and the organisational system in which they work. It’s complex work and finding the right time for a client to hear an interpretation of what’s going on is also an important factor in the mix.
So distractions and interruptions are very welcome intrusions into my work space because they help reveal the agendas and plans of a group and as such are such fantastic resources to work with. Phillips also talked about anxiety – and how anxiety leads people to try and engineer pleasure – distractions may be part of that coping mechanism…so attending to distractions generally means we are getting closer to the issue at hand. But pleasure is such an ephemeral thing – can we engineer pleasure? Phillips doesn’t think so – at one point he talked about dinner parties and how we can’t engineer the perfect dinner party – we can only create the context in which it might happen - therefore anxiety – the calcuation of pleasure is the bridge and negotiation between pain and pleasure and as such a wonderfully rich place to begin to understand our fears and desires in a business context.
I’ll leave the final word on this one to Phillips:
If someone were to invent a drug – say, in this context, a psychotropic drug, one that is designed to improve people’s mental health - and to say that the point of this drug, the whole value of it was its unpredictable side effects, there would be a public outcry. (Side Effectrs p. xii)
The full interview with Adam Phillips (in which yours truly is heard asking about collusion among psychoanalysts and about Woody Allen) is available as an audio download at the NYPL website. Pic of Phillips and Holdengräber from NYPL.
I've just returned from Stockholm where I attended the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations annual symposium. The symposium is an opportunity for those of us working in a psychoanalytic way with organisations to meet and share knowledge about this area of practice.
There were numerous interesting papers and one in particular on a group relations conference conducted via the internet caught my attention. I have to admit to being mystified by how a group relations conference that didn't deal with the territory (i.e. cyberspace) would work. The consultant presenting the case paper bravely stepped into the project and fed back his experiences of how it was managed and conducted. The detail of that isn't of particular interest here. But what did interest me is how systems-psychodynamics needs to be applied to working on the web. There is a whole body of literature at this stage (particularly from psychology and systems thinking) about operating and working on line which I think systems-psychodynamics needs to attend to and build on, not merely replicate. Working on the web seemed to be a very new idea to many people who were at the conference and to some extent mirrors my experience of therapists and consultants who work psychoanalytically, many of whom have a sometimes neurotic attachment to being "in the room" and privilege this as the primary way of generating the transference. (As an interesting aside, of the 14 people who attended this workshop only 2 of us were women...I'm not sure what that means but the gender imbalance was more pronounced here than at any other event I attended).
Some of the thoughts that occurred to me about this..
1. The web doesn't exist - it is a wonderful manifestation of the collective unconscious - everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
2. The web is a boundary less space and many of the conversations (particularly in the wake of the Kathy Sierra incident) about placing boundaries on it have resulted in strong reaction and an acknowledgement that formal rules simply won’t work in this space which means it’s ripe for persescutory experiences and a regression to primitive drives.
3. The only thing that stops any of us committing an “offence” online is our own conscience or sense of what is right and wrong. So our internalised boundaries and how those boundaries are negotiated and made meaning of, are of primary importance in this space.
4. The absence of the social clues that assist us make meaning of, and interpret, relationships offline are absent online so this heightens the transference and counter-transference in a way that can be persecutory. This is why I’m mystified as to how a group relations conference that doesn’t address the territory can operate with integrity in this space.
5. When a conference finishes we have our experiences of the people who attended and how we entered into relationship. When contact online ends we have that, minus the physical presence of people but we also have the written correspondence. What happens to the text afterwards? And how are boundaries around text negotiated? We all know that once something is out there in cyberspace it is never coming back so the archiving function of the web is something that has to be looked at?
I'd love to hear from any psychodynamically informed practitioners working online about their own experiences of this area..
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.
Every problem is a solution to a set of circumstances – so you could say that the problem is both the problem and the solution.
One of the things I try to do with clients is help them “appreciate” the problem they are having. No, that’s not some new age methodology that doesn’t deal with the issues. It’s more a case of asking them – is there any way in which this problem has truth to it? Most particularly if it’s a problem person we’re talking about. I try to encourage my clients to look at the “job” this person is doing for the organisation first before we talk about what to do about it.
Here are some examples of the work problem people have done in organisations I have been invited to consult to.
A technical director in an engineering company made the working life of the sales department “hell” (their words) by refusing to co-operate with them. He withheld his staff, demanded more appropriate briefing, took the sales requests back to his department and sat on them for days holding up the closing of business. When we actually looked at what was going on here, this technical director was seen to be protecting his division and team from an increasing set of demands by all departments that were impossible for his technical team to meet. The technical director was, in fact, offering leadership to his team by protecting them from being overwhelmed by demand. By helping the sales team appreciate the problem they were able to articulate the real problem which was an unrealistic set of sales targets that had been imposed by senior management on both the sales and technical teams and not negotiated with them.
The manager of a cultural organisation was increasingly vilified by her board of directors as being “useless” and having “terrible” communication skills. The board never knew what was going on and more to the point this manager wouldn’t take their calls when they phoned. On closer examination it emerged that the way of communicating in this company was informal. The 10 directors on the board would frequently phone the manager at all hours of the day and night sometimes requesting the same information. The manager was in 10 different relationships and each director was comparing notes with the other. It was a fact that she was “useless” and had “terrible” communication skills when you looked at it from this perspective – who wouldn’t be? The organisation had transitioned being a voluntary organisation to a company limited by guarantee with a board of directors. While they had hired a professional manager, the board themselves were still operating like a voluntary group – which meant that the company business was done informally and out of traditional business hours. The director was trying to run the business during the business day and the directors hadn’t settled in to their new roles. By helping them look at the “problem” as the “solution” they were able to openly negotiate a way of working that resolved the tension and achieve what they really wanted.
More often than not, problem people are articulating something in organisational life that others refuse to do. When you’re on your own you sometimes have to shout louder to make yourself heard – the louder you shout, the more problematic you are and the more isolated you become. “Problem” people can emerge for lots of reasons and the person who carries this role may have a personal back story that makes them the perfect candidate for the job. A person’s back story may also be where the intervention is required so knowing when to refer someone on for more personal work is a key part of any consulting in this area. The working environment and context for the issue is of course an essential part of the story as well.
Building a good working alliance with a client is essential if we are going to have that kind of conversation. Organisations have an unconscious life. Because it’s unconscious it’s unseen and difficult and very often threatening to look at and my clients have to trust in my skill that I have some idea of what I’m talking about. But if you can have an appreciative relationship with the problem, then that’s a really great place to start the conversation.
Whereas all human sciences advance towards the unconscious only with their back to it, waiting for it to unveil itself as fast as consciousness is analysed, as it were backwards, psychoanalysis, on the other hand, points directly towards it, with a deliberate purpose - not towards that which must be rendered gradually more explicit by the progressive illumination of the implicit, but towards what is there and yet is hidden.
M Foucault (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Vintage Books, New York, NY.
in
GABRIEL, Y. & CARR, A., (2002) Organizations, management and psychoanalysis: an overview. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 17, 5, 348 - 365.
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.
Different points of view about psychoanalytic education and theory can be grouped, I think, into two categories. One camp argues that psychoanalysis must be safeguarded from those who would debase it by using the name to include therapies that are scheduled for less than three times per week. The other camp argues that psychoanalysis is, as Freud himself defined it, the use of the concepts of transference and resistance to understand the unconscious and especially unconscious affects, wishes, prohibitions and fears. Who is right?
She then adds
People who have sought psychoanalytic training have complained of being excluded as not good enough or smart enough to do psychoanalytic work. Those who are excluded then turn around and denigrate the group that excluded them. It should be no surprise to a sophisticated audience to learn that excluding people does not make them friends. But psychoanalysts have been doing such excluding for over a century. How do we get away with it? I think that we get away with it because we have a very valuable technique that speaks to people’s hearts and minds in a way that no other technique does.
I'm not a psychoanalyst but my work (therapeutically and organisationally) is all about the transference - the issues Ms Richards raises are of course relevant to any professional association or group, As the old Irish saying goes - the first thing on the agenda of any political party meeting is 'the split'. She is arguing for more fluid boundaries between the rigid definitions of who is and who is not an analyst - suggesting that an understanding of the transference process is the key component of the practice.
For both the practical reason that we want to continue the field of psychoanalysis and our own analytic practices and the theoretical reason that transference and resistance are the firmest foundation for analytic understanding, I think we need to welcome our colleagues who practice at different frequency from ourselves as fellow psychoanalysts and welcome ones.
I like the idea of people practising at 'different frequencies' as ourselves and I would suggest that not all types of therapy are suitable for all kinds of people - neither is one type of therapy necessarily the right answer for somebody at each stage of their journey. The article is the text of a presentation she is making at a conference The Future of Psychoanalytic Education to be held in New York at the beginning of December and the post also has a number of very considered comments (you can register to comment at the bottom of the sidebar on the right). I'm looking forward to reading more at this site and if any readers know of other psychoanalytic/psychodynamic blogs that aren't on my blogroll, please let me know.
I'm on the way to New York where I will be for the 10 days or so and am looking forward to another visit to my favourite city. I'll also be attending the New York regional meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations where I'll be presenting on the 'cyber system in the mind'. I'm going to do a swift overview of social media; reflect on some of the issues presenting in my therapy and consulting practice arising from internet activity; offer a case study and some some hypotheses about the scarcity of psychodynamic practitioners online. (So far I have only come across one other - Irish man- Mark Dowds who is based in Canada these days). I'll post some of my thinking here after the event along with links to the sites I'll be referencing in the presentation and some other resources. I'm hoping to catch up with Terrence Seamon for a cup of coffee during my stay and if anyone else out there is interested in getting in touch please do drop me an email.
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!
A psychoanalytic perspective on the organisational dynamics of music groups (and other kinds of organisations) that's what my American colleague Mike Jolkovski from ISPSO will be blogging about over at Working Through. Ever since the release of Metallica - Some Kind of Monster in 2004 I've been running into people who have a fascination about the application of 'therapy' in all its forms to the performing arts so I'm really glad that Mike has decided to start blogging (again!) about his work in this area. I asked Mike when we met at in New York what had happened to his blog (he started writing a year ago and stopped writing 10 months ago) I found it compelling reading and really missed his voice - well he answers that question and thankfully has posted up some of his archives from his previous outing..one more systems psychodynamics person using social media! Check out Working Through and add him to your blogroll.
Former urban planner, cycling advocate and doctoral researcher Adrian was almost run over by a car while cycling to his Lacanian seminar. So he wondered what Lacan might have to say about motoring and roads...and then wrote a paper about it called The Road to Nowhere
I have attempted to develop a few loose observations about how we may think about automobiles and roads via the detours of psychoanalysis and popular culture.
It's a compelling read and I'm liberally stealing quotes here:
when Lacan began his psychoanalytic seminars, the ‘Golden Age’ of the automobile had truly begun. Lacan often refers to the road, the highway, and detours within his psychoanalytic theory. Furthermore, unlike many other ‘post-Freudian’ thinkers, Lacan was also concerned with another kind of ‘drive’ – the Freudian drive – that he regarded as a fundamental concept of psychoanalysis
Like the excited child who walks for the first time, the adolescent driver also finds joy in the initial act of driving, which allows him/herself to experience the world anew. Therefore, it is perhaps this deeply affective dimension of driving appeals to our conception of subjectivity.
Speaking of the place of the car in contemporary culture he goes on to say
Whether Thelma and Louise should be regarded as a story of feminist liberation or a pseudo-feminist valorisation of masochism is difficult to answer. However, what interests me about the film is the way it articulates how life is represented in the act of driving and through a passage of detours. According to Lacan, the libidinal drive also undertakes its own adventures along what he calls ‘the roads of life’. However, while the roads of life may lead eventually to death, according to Lacan (1988:2) ‘we cannot find death along any old road’. The drive, as such, is an endless detour that passes along the road to nowhere.
Fascinating stuff and I wish I was as adept at turning road rage into something as interesting and productive as this!
But overall social science had a very low profile. I cannot decide whether that is because of a mature aversion to Grosvenor House, a lack of pride, a bias among the judges, or because it didn’t deserve any prizes.
I'm looking forward to reading more over at Swann's Way.
About Systems Psychodynamics
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