These short videos are intended to complement workshops that we deliver either in person or online. They cover generic topics such as leadership, culture, strategy, planning and other phenomena we encounter in organisational life. Making them available ‘on demand’ frees up more time in-session for us to make sense of how they apply to us in our particular contexts.
Well, there is some truth in that. The degree to which organisations have been developed by people with heterogametic chromosomes is very substantial. The church, the state, financial services, universities, technology sectors, engineering. The rules (especially the unwritten ones) of these organisations have been developed to make sure that the people in them (mostly men) can feel they fit in and understand one another. The context in which these organisations operate requires collective relational behaviours (competition, lobbying, patronage) that are also likely to be those that appeal to men. What organisation has not, at some stage, devoted its wealth to erecting a huge phallus of a tower in amongst those of its neighbours? Why choose to express yourself like that?
Of course, these organisations do not (any more) exclude women from membership. But at their heart, they remain fundamentally male in their basic assumptions. This, it is held, makes the process of integration and progression in such organisations much more of a compromise to women than it is to men. Hardly surprising, therefore, that so relatively few women inhabit the positions of power in our organisations, despite legislation, goodwill, social engineering and protest.
Addressing this issue is a substantial challenge for organisational developers; not least because it requires a journey to the very basic assumptions of the organisation, the glue that holds it together. If you succeed in changing one part of the organisation in this way, it begins to clash with the other parts; if you change the whole organisation, it grates against its wider context; you end up feeling you have to change the world. Not an easy thing to do if you’ve only got a couple of strategic away-days as your opportunity.
This is not a reason not to do the work, however. Helping organisations to see for themselves how their shared assumptions might be laden with unconscious bias is an important contribution to their development. Encouraging leaders and managers to look beyond their “common sense” view that this is just the way the world is and to embrace their responsibility for making it different is both a moral challenge and a practical task. It is not right that women, or indeed any group of people, are under-represented in the distribution of organisational power on the basis of their characteristics rather than their competence; neither is it efficient to underuse 50 percent of the talent available to your organisation.
A fellow pilgrim in the world of learning and development has reminded me how much we depend on models to try to render comprehensible the challenges of leadership and organisations.
She is quite right to point out that the model itself is not the place where meaning is stored. It is the reflection prompted by the model, the interaction of hope and experience with the model, that may bring to the surface important learning, useful insight or just a sparky idea.
Some clients are keen to discredit the model, to find flaws in it, to challenge it. That is all good fun. Others might try to force a whole world view into its little boxes and circles and arrows. That can lead to narrow outcomes.
I am a diagramatic thinker; I can see shapes and colours in sentences and words. For me, models can usefully capture the ephemeral understanding of things, can grasp and fix a concept. But like a holiday snap, whilst they might freeze the memory of a rich experience, in the end they don’t fully convey the real depth and variety of what was going on.
A challenge for those of us engaged in Leadership, Management and Organisational Development, especially when working with academics, clinicians and other highly educated people, is that clients are sometimes disappointed that the subject matter is not more intellectually novel and challenging.
“It’s all just Plato!”, barked an exasperated Senior Lecturer in Humanities. This put me on the back foot, because I wasn’t consciously aware of having read any Plato. So I read The Republic to see if he was right, and, for the most part, he was. It seems possible, indeed, that there is nothing new under the sun.
Of course there have been advances in our understanding of human behaviour over the centuries and these continue. We have shifted our conceptions of leadership from a fixation with the innate personality traits of (masculine) heroes to a more social/relational framework; through neuroscience we are discovering evidence of things that we could only previously hypothesise through behavioural psychology; we are opening our minds to the organisational implications of complexity theories. Indeed, it may be possible to find applications of almost every academic discipline to our understanding of leadership, management and organisations.
Maybe the primary task, like that of a good story teller, is to find fresh metaphors for old wisdoms; new language to set out “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” Maybe, as illustrated in Gareth Morgan’s wonderful book Images of Organization, new metaphors can help us to learn new and important things about our working environments.
Or maybe it isn’t really about the intellect at all. Surely, the purpose of Leadership, Management and Organisational Development is to stimulate changes in behaviour, away from what inhibits people and towards what releases their energy and skill. Just as knowing the molecular structure of sea-water will not prevent us from drowning in it, merely understanding organisations does not necessarily make us any more competent at participating in them.
So we invite our clients to an experiential learning process, whereby they not only think and talk about leadership, management and organisations but they are stimulated to an emotional response and thereby to a behavioural response. We try to find ways of experiencing the subject matter that resonate with them, that energise them, that stimulate in them a desire to do things differently.
