Some years ago, whilst working with a client in Germany, I thought it would be interesting to learn a little of the language. I opted to use a CD-based course on German, by the linguist Michel Thomas. Throughout this, he spends very little time on vocabulary; emphasising instead the process of sentence formation and how this is affected, in particular, by verb usage. At the end of the introductory module, he argues that if you understand the verbs, you understand the language. “The rest,” he says, “is just vocabulary”. As we all learnt way back at junior school, verbs are ‘doing’ words. They relate to process. The ways in which these are used define the pattern of the language. Other aspects of vocabulary add in the ‘content’ – the who, what, when, where, how and why, etc. of the doing.
Whenever we talk about organization in terms of strategy, structure, systems, and so on - or its informal, shadow-side aspects - these are all examples of the ‘vocabulary’ that we use to describe particular aspects of the underlying, self-organizing and emergent dynamics of organization (i.e., the ongoing process of organiz-ing). It is out of this complex social process of everyday human interaction between interdependent people that organization happens. And so, if we want to make sense of, and participate skilfully in, organization - in all of its manifestations - we need to begin by understanding this process.
As a final point, we are all “walking case studies” of these dynamics in action. That is to say, whilst management orthodoxy continues to exert a suffocating grip on the ways in which organization and management are spoken about in formal arenas, we all know that this is far removed from our everyday lived reality. We therefore need to take seriously our own, in-the-moment, experiences of organization (and life more generally). We will then be better placed, both individually and collectively, to find our way through the hidden, messy and informal aspects of real-world organization that account for much of what we find ourselves doing day to day. That is, imaginatively making do with the resources at our disposal, to deal with the situations we find ourselves in, as we act forwards, moment to moment, into a continuously emerging and unknowable future. A future that we are perpetually creating together, through our ongoing interactions with others.
Comments