informal coalitions

The unwrapped sandwiches

I run a bimonthly network meeting for senior OD practitioners in central London. At a recent session, we were each invited to write a brief narrative on an experience that had struck us in some way and which had left some residual feelings and/or recollections that might merit further exploration. We were then asked to reflect on this personal narrative, both ourselves (as we were reading it out loud to a couple of other participants) and those others who were listening to our recollection of the event from an ‘external’ perspective. In this sort of mini learning set, we then talked about what we had heard during the retelling of our story, as part of a process that session leaders Douglas Board and Rob Warwick call "immersed reflexivity"¹.

My ‘striking moment' concerned a meeting that I had attended some weeks earlier in support of another independent consultant.  Our aim had been to secure a contract with a major organization in the UK. Although the meeting itself was an awkward affair, with the client director exhibiting some behaviour which suggested that any resulting work would be somewhat of a challenge, the initial response was positive. By that I mean that we were asked to design and deliver the first event of a number that we had proposed for the project team, line managers and the Board.  As we left, though, we shared our concerns about what, despite the outcome, had been a very unsatisfactory affair. I felt in particular that the main client didn’t ‘get’ what it was that we were proposing – and that he didn’t appear particularly interested in exploring anything beyond the mechanics (timing, attendees, reporting back, etc) of the initial workshop. These were issues that we agreed needed to be confronted sooner rather than later.

From talking in terms of systems to talking instead of systems

Much of the current writing on organizations adopts the language of systems thinking - although what this means in an organizational context differs considerably from writer to writer.  And management theorists and practitioners are not alone in viewing organizations in this way. Journalists, politicians, inquiry chairmen, and other commentators regularly refer to "the system", or "systemic failure" when pronouncing on events that hit the headlines. So seeing organizations as systems, which have the capacity to act in some way separately from the actions of ordinary people, appears natural and straightforward. But is it?

The issue

From an informal coalitions/complex social process perspective, what people think of as an organization comprises people interacting together for a purpose - or, more accurately, for a diverse range of purposes. Some of these are explicit, seen as organizationally legitimate and openly acknowledged. Others are implicit and/or covert. Some are mutually supportive. Others are in conflict. As people interact from moment to moment, both in conscious pursuit of these several purposes and habitually, various formal artefacts (such as policies, strategies, structures, processes, procedures, and the like) are constructed, named, and announced, before being interpreted, drawn upon, adapted, or ignored by others. The characteristic patterning of people’s thinking and acting (often reified as "the culture") similarly emerges from this same conversational process.

Organization (or rather the ongoing process of organiz-ing) is therefore an act of co-creation between human beings in the normal course of their everyday interactions. And this process is in constant flux. In other words, the reality of organization is being continuously (re-) constructed in the currency of people’s present-day interactions: A dynamic network of self-organizing conversations, which does not respect boundaries – whether those implicit in the notion of a formal organization or others which define the supposed limits of this or that "system".

Judging by comments made in many on-line and real-world exchanges, though, this conversational construction of organization seems to present two fundamental difficulties for those who see, think and talk of organizations in "systems" terms.