Another valuable post from Steve March that is pertinent to the philosophy and embodiment of Partnership: http://stevemarch.typepad.com/on_living/2008/08/the-body-of-s-1.html
Archive for Philosophy
The Body of Sustainability (A Must Read)
I highly recommend this post if you haven’t already seen it:
http://stevemarch.typepad.com/on_living/2008/08/the-body-of-sus.html
Steve March writes about how we inherit our ways of being, and that our ways of being are “self-sealing” — “the ways we act bring forth the world we live in.” And, at the physical, psychological, socialogical, environmental levels, our way of being has not been sustainable. So, he raises the excellent question: what is the body (or embodiment) of sustainability?
I would like to suggest that Partnership http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2007/12/09/what-is-partnershipwhat-is-partnership/ is a philosophy and way of being is deeply related to the embodiment of sustainability — for ourselves (flourishing rather than existing, or burning out), for sustainable relationships, sustainable organizations, and of course, a sustainable economy and ecology.
Kudos to Steve on an excellent article!
How can perspective shape reality? (philosophical reflections)
In my last post, we considered how our perspectives can shape the conditions that reinforce our perspectives — how they help shape our realities. For those of us raised in a Western culture, this idea can take some getting used to. Our ideas (and hence experience) about ourselves and the world have been strongly shaped by Newtonian physics (1), which imagines the Cosmos as being built-up from tiny particles — each separate from the other. Consequently, we tend to think of ourselves as essentially separate from each other and the rest of the world, selecting elements of our experience that conform to our belief, and taking actions based on this assumption (including the development of institutions) which tend to reinforce experiences that support this worldview. In this way, we can be seen to substantially build the worlds of our experience. Organizations are one of these worlds of experience.
However, an emerging paradigm, which might be termed the systems view, based on the new sciences, holds that this idea that we are separate — islands, is an illusion. As Einstein famously reflected, “A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in space and time. He experiences his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a sort of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisons to affection for a few persons nearest to us” (qtd. Laszlo 2007, pp. 50-51).
We both shape and are shaped by the larger Cosmos because we are not separate from it. In the weak form of this idea, there are millions or billions of causal threads that connect us to others, such that they shape us and we them. In the strong form of this idea, the world is imagined as holographic in which each part contains the whole; because we are continuous with the whole, we are each the the totality of the Cosmos, from our unique perspective.
For this reason, the scientific ideal of the objective detached observer can only be approximated: as observers, we are part of the system that we observe. Therefore, both our observations and our responses to our observations affect the system, including ourselves, in gross and subtle ways.
For most of us, this is a really unfamiliar way of thinking about and experiencing the world, and it is more comfortable to make a mental note of it and continue on with our day. Neurologically, our brains tend to prefer the ideas we already have: each time we reinforce an existing belief, we experience chemical rewards. On the contrary, when a settled worldview is challenged, we experience the uncomfortable sense of needing to “find our feet” once again — to reintegrate our knowledge and experience so that we once again inhabit a coherent and integrated reality; it takes energy, work. For this reason, we tend to resist changing our perspective unless/until the old one become too painful or dysfunctional. (No wonder change is hard — no one little thing shifts in isolation: the whole system must adjust…)
For this reason, I don’t want to gloss over this really key idea of how perspective shapes reality (or its complement, that perspective is not the only determinant of reality!). As promised, we’ll continue to look at examples of how this works in practice. My hope is that, as the power and utility of this emerging paradigm of reality for addressing felt pain in organizations becomes more clear, that attraction and pleasure become the stimulus for learning and growth. We still experience the tension of the integration and reconciliation of new knowledge, but it’s now part of a larger, exciting process of discovery…
A big goal — we’ll see how I do 🙂
So, next time, we will continue with the promised topic of how our perspective can draws out or diminishes the potential of ourselves and of others — which is (clearly) key to leadership and organization. This will lead us a discussion of the power of the situation (or structure) and some insights on diversity and creativity. Eventually, we’ll use these various insights to build our Wheel of Freedom …
Notes
(1) I hope you will forgive this oversimplification – if there is time and interest, we can expand on the topic of how our understanding of self and world have evolved, and the areas where culture has yet to catch up with new advances in science – especially “new” physics and biology.
References
Laszlo, Ervin. Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, 2nd ed. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007.
Newberg, Andrew and Mark Robert Waldman. Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Organization as Organism & Machine
In my last post we backed our way into a discussion of an emerging way of thinking about leadership and organization: the metaphor of the organization as an organsim.
http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/01/the-brain-as-a-metaphor-for-organization/
As we talked about earlier, metaphors are maps of the terrain that can yield some useful insights, so we don’t need to hold on to them too tightly (as an ideology). Rather, when considering a metaphor we might ask two questions:
- Does it have some basis in reality?
- Is it useful?
Whereas the organization as a machine metaphor can be seen to have arisen out of Newtonian physics (the view of the Cosmos as machine) and the industrial revolution, the metaphor of the organization as an organism has its recent roots in new physics and biology, and the framework of systems theory, which observes that the whole has emergent properties that can’t be fully explained by examining each of the parts. Rather these properties emerge as a result of the relationship and interaction of the parts.
I’ll apologize in advance for this: A useful but gorey example that is often given is that you sacrifice an animal and examine each of its parts, you won’t find life; life is an emergent property of the whole animal. The same could be said of a well-functioning team: a quality emerges in the interaction that only exists in potential in the individual team members.
Seeing relationships vs. parts requires us to shift our vision. Are you familiar with the famous cognitive optical illusion: the figure-ground vase? http://www.123opticalillusions.com/pages/Facevase.php
The image can be validly interpreted as two faces or as a vase. The one we see is the result of a mental interpretation, which may or may not be conscious. Once we’ve seen one view, it can be a challenge to see the other, because our current perspective is so obvious to us! Yet, if we look for the other figure, as described by others (or the text), we can see that as well.
And so it is with our metaphors of organization (and the cosmos). We might see the parts or we might see the relationships/interactions of the parts and the structures formed by those interactions. As Westerners, our cultural history has attuned us to see the parts very well. However, most of us have not been trained to “see” the tangible reality of the qualities that emerge in relationship and how these materially influence what emerges as the whole.
Coming back to our earlier post on the brain analogy for organizations … Scientist Fritjof Capra (1988) observes that biological organisms often have some machine-like qualities (Turning Point, p. 266). Our knowledge of these qualities has empowered the accomplishments of modern medicine. And, it is also true that biological organisms (and as it turns out, social organizations) also have emerging systemic properties. To “see” how relationships give rise to these properties, we need to shift our field of vision to look at relationships and patterns of relationship. (This is where Riane Eisler’s concept of Partnership can be seen to be very relevant to leadership and organizational development).
This is just one example of how a shift in perspective can be extremely powerful in opening up a whole new set of tools and possibilities. And that is what coaching is all about…
Category: All Posts, Coaching, Collaboration, Communication, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy, Science, Teams /
Leadership & the Machine
Theories of leadership are informed by our understanding of the world, including our understanding of others. This post will consider the worldview out of which the bureaucratic organization arose, including its understanding of creativity and intelligence, and then examine the nature and role of leadership in light of that understanding. This is valuable to us because it builds towards an understanding that organizational realities are substantially shaped by leadership perspectives — which is a key insight of transformative leadership and a potential source of power for us as we seek to overcome the challenges we are facing both within and without our organizations.
The concept of the organization as machine evolved from a worldview in which the world itself was seen as an unintelligent mechanism. In this worldview, the apparent intelligence (and indeed, according to some philosophers, causation itself) arose wholly from God. One prominant scientist later dropped “that hypothesis,” leaving us to imagine the world to be, for the most part, to be a “heap” of unintelligent atoms. Intelligence (or the appearance thereof) was primarily attributed to human beings.
Further, in this worldview, the idea of intelligence came to be especially equated with rational thought. Some philosophers proposed that rational thought, sealed off from the “corrupting” influence of the body and emotions, participated, in a sense, in the divine.
According to philosopher Charlene Spretnak, “Plato intensified dualistic thought […] by perceiving not only a divine order […] but a sense that the order created by divine, or ideal, forms was radically other than the material world we inhabit. He established a dualism of universal and particular, of noumenon and phenomenon, of mind and body, and of spirit and matter that shaped all subsequent philosophy and religion in the European tradition [italics added for emphasis] (Resurgence of the Real, 47).
Although, according to this view, the realm of divine order, truth and beauty existed in a realm outside the material universe, Plato held that it could be approached by man through his rational facilities: “[R]ational thought could be experienced only if sealed off from “corrupting” influences of the body (sensations, emotions, desires) and properly isolated from “lowly” nature. Plato felt that we, that is, our minds, are imprisoned in the dumb matter of our bodies. Although he considered the cosmos to be sacred in its orderliness, he shared with his teacher Socrates, a belief that nature is irrelevant….” (45).
However, not all human beings were considered equally capable of such thought. The relationship between knowledge and power becomes clear in Aristotle’s rendering of gendered reality: “[M]ale rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature (“Politics” 1260b; Code, What Can She Know?, 9 n. 5).
Therefore, some men (who per chance :-/ happened already to be in power and serve as the gatekeepers of knowledge…), were, by virtue of their asserted superiority of mind, considered to be closer to the divine order of things and thus “better suited” for leadership. (There is a historical parallel in the claim that wealth is a sign of divine favor).
So, coming back to the topic of leadership and “the machine,” in the industrial-age organization, relatively well-educated managers sought to maximize economic outputs (roles requiring some intelligence and creativity), and “workers” were considered interchangeable “cogs in the machine.” Work was routine and boring, and working conditions were often unsafe.
Metaphorically, leaders were the operator of the machine; the workers were part of the machine itself.
The leadership style associated with this philosophy and approach to organization has been called, “Theory X,” or what Robert Hargrove calls the “command, control, and coercion model” (Masterful Coaching p.7) and Riane Eisler calls the “dominator model.”
In such a model, vision, communications and control flow from the top down; management ensures the efficiency and predictability of the machine, through planning, organizing and controlling.
Such highly structured and controlled organizations allow control by a centralized group and support a high degree of efficiency and predictabiliy. The flip side of that coin is that they are also exceptionally good at suppressing creativity and resisting innovation …
In this post, we might begin to notice how leadership assumptions and values substantially shape organizational realities. In upcoming posts, we will consider this core insight of transformative leadership in much greater depth, to demonstrate how and why this is so, and how we can use this insight to overcome some of our most previously intractable problems…
Category: All Posts, Communication, Creativity, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy, Values, Vision /
The Organization as Machine:Industrial-Age Strategies of Rational Control
I must say that it is a challenge to write about industrial-age models of leadership and organization, as I am so eager to move on to talk about emerging models, which are much more interesting and useful to those of us in the knowledge economy – which is practically everyone…
Still, this philosophical, psychological and sociological review of the current situation is useful because it helps to show why modern organizations have the challenges they do, and why, emerging models can be so much more helpful to us in dealing with a very dynamic environment.
In my last post, I discussed the hierarchal organization as a control strategy, in that it allows one or a small number of people to control a broad scope of resources and activities. It’s also very rational in that rational (vs. creative) thought involves breaking the whole into different parts for individual study (and control).
The hierarchal organization was therefore a natural choice of 19th century industrial-age capitalists, seeking the market power and economies of mass production:
1) It provided owners of capital with the necessary means of control;
2) The specialization implied by rational forms of organization supported the operational efficiencies of mass production.
3) The workforce at this time was largely uneducated; relevant knowledge and control were concentrated at the supervisory level.
4) Culturally, it fit well with an orientation to hierarchy based on economic class and modern rational strategies of control.
This form of organization, as factory, was compared to a perfect machine, rational and efficient. In the next post, we’ll talk about the leadership styles appropriate to managing “the machine.”
Origins of the Modern Bureaucratic Organization
If you were to choose the organizational form that maximizes the number of people and functions that can be controlled by a single leader, what style would you choose? (The correct answer can be found at the bottom of this post).
- Flat organization
- Bureaucratic organization
- Leader-full team
- Matrix organization
Since thousands of years before the dawn of the industrial revolution, “strong men,” wanting to maximize their control of people and resources have employed a pyramid-shaped, hierarchal form of organization: small societies based on “strong-man rule” evolved into kingships with their own militaries, which evolved into nation states …
Hierarchal societies are based on a hierarchal flow of power from the top down. Anthropologically, they tend to be male dominated (in that men dominate women). Human order is frequently understood to reflect divine order, and since early times, rulers have often claimed a special relationship to divinity, which justifies and endorses their power. They were sometimes understood to be incarnations or partners of the gods (as in Sumeria), or, more recently in Western cultures, to be chosen or annointed by God. For example, in the late 19th century Germany, childrearing manuals emphasized disciplining the child in such a way as to exact unquestioning obedience to the father. This practice was thought to prepare the child to submit to governmental authority and thereby live a godly life (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good).
The values and ethics of a culture cannot be entirely separated from the power structure in that those in power shape the rules that define “goodness.” “Rules favor the rule makers and when they don’t, the rules are changed.” Therefore, “good citizens” conform to power; those who both are not powerful and do not conform are “bad citizens” and risk punishment. The culture of these organizations tends to be paternalistic. Loyalty is rewarded (for example, with position and lands — a share of the power) and disloyalty is punished.
More subtly, the worldview of the rulers, in which light the rules seem right and appropriate, is the correct view. Therefore, loyalty includes endorsing the worldview of those in power. Challenging this perspective, in a sense, also challenges the legitimacy and power of the ruler. For this reason, challenging this worldview entails some risk and is best done with diplomacy, in privacy behind closed doors. Diplomacy avoids the sense of direct challenge, and privacy allows the leader an opportunity to adapt the perspective as his or her own. The same conversation in public would be the equivalent of a frontal challenge to power.
In this way, there will always be a link between power, knowledge and values, in any given culture: Power is about making rules that reflect and benefit a particular perspective, and propagating that perspective, and such knowledge and rules help shape the values and ethics of the culture.
In an upcoming entry, we will talk about the emergence of the modern bureaucratic organization, including how it drew on the military/feudal model, and how it both fit and shaped the industrial age of the 20th century…
(The correct answer is 2. Bureaucratic Organization)