In my last post, I succumbed 🙂 to using the dance analogy for describing how we negotiate what is taking place in any interaction or relationship. We could use the term “negotiation” or “game” but the first suggests conscious “strategy” and even manipulation, and for me, the second invokes transactional analysis, which describes some common scripts or “dances” that people tend to engage in together.
No, the term “dance” works well because while it can involve conscious intention, it’s more holistic, reflecting both the mental and physical, conscious and subconscious interactions. Given that 80% or more of communication is non-verbal, this analogy reminds us that our body language and tone of voice are conveying much more than our words do.
These dances happen on a very small scale (what kind of conversation are we having with ourselves?) to a very large scale (national and global). For example, most of us are familiar with the classic “dysfunctional family dance” in which grown children return home only to find themselves in the sway of old roles and communication patterns. There are the all-too-common painful dances of co-dependence and addiction, of victim and victimizer, and conversely, the constructive and pleasurable dances of supportive friendships and high performing teams.
The dance we do is always at least partly a reaction or response to the dance that other people are doing. Just as in some forms of dance, one person moves forward and the other moves backwards, people tend to respond to each other in complementary ways, which may evolve into more structured roles. As a day-to-day example, after dinner, I clear the table and my husband does the dishes. We didn’t plan it that way — it just evolved. Small, organic organizations typically evolve this way, and as they grow the roles become more formalized.
Therefore, one way of thinking about culture, including organizational culture, is as a dance of complementary relationships. As with families, these dynamics can be constructive or dysfunctional. Either way, the power of the situation very often leads us to react in ways that tend to perpetuate that situation.
In my next post, we’ll consider the Stanford Prison experiment as an example of how easily a professor and a group of college students were able to slip into a highly dystopian dance within a very short period of time through the power of role playing. The purpose is to illustrate the power of role playing to create rather gripping realities. We are all already doing this today, but we are not always consciously aware of it. By becoming consciously aware of these dynamics, we are better able to respond in ways that create the outcomes we want.
Practice
1. Make a list of your significant relationships. These may include work-related relationships and can include relationships with groups as a whole.
2. What role do you play in each relationship? What role do others play in relation to you?
3. Do you notice any patterns?
4. What are the outcomes for you? for others?
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