Over the past six months or so, I have been in conversation with my colleague Eitan Reich, exploring how best we might conceptualise and actively support the sort of shift in outlook and practice that is required to move into a more genuinely systemic ways of working.
Our starting point was a recognition of the fact that people often feel most confident to move from a structural and bureaucratic approach to organisation to one that is more informal and networked at times of crisis. For example, this was very apparent in health care as the pandemic hit heavily.
We wondered whether tapping into moments of crisis might create a circumstance wherein people would be retrospectively conscious of the shifts in their ways of being and doing – and thence able to derive learning from an engagement with those situations.
People in health and social care offered perspectives that quickly disabused us of a simplistic appreciation of this notion. In the NHS in particular, it was explained that there was no respite from crisis, hence no specific headroom in which to engage reflexively with experience. People are kept too busy doggy-paddling furiously to keep their heads above the waterline to be able to take the time to learn about the sorts of strokes that they could be using to glide effortlessly through the water.
Eitan and I are still persuaded by the notion that people could benefit hugely by taking a little time to observe and consider the ways of working and the particular practices that emerge when the workplace is under pressure. The belief arises to some extent from the thinking around collective intelligence and Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid.
At our most recent discussion, we considered the workplace ebb and flow that takes place between disorder and stability – and how an appreciation of the way in which those waves crash through an organisation might equip people to actively focus not on the unhelpful corporate extremes of the failure-littered past and the vision-dominated future, but instead on the specious present wherein we find ourselves trying to make sense of and navigate the world. This adjustment of thinking is important in order to allow for a more phenomenological engagement with our experience of being.
We wonder now whether there might be “avocado moments” where the situation is perfectly balanced and configured regarding crisis and stability in order that people can feel able to derive intellectual sustenance from it: the danger, of course, is that an avocado tends to be “not ready, not ready, not ready, too ripe”, so the timing of that moment needs to be carefully considered.
However, there is a need for people to be able to observe the dynamic relations and tensions that exist between crisis and stability. This is not a circular relationship, where crisis settles into stability that thereafter becomes a fresh crisis, and so on ad infinitum. Nor indeed can it be seriously considered as something understandable in terms of wavelengths, where crisis crests before crashing down into calm, with the two states rippling on together in perpetuity, convenient though such a visualisation might be.
We are of the view that these ideas need to be tested in the environment of practice. Only by stepping into the workplace alongside those already therein will we be able to explore collectively how crisis and stability interreact with one another – and how people might be able to move themselves away from the harsh terrain of the past and the absurd buoyancy of the future in order to do observational, reflexive and thoughtful work in the ebb and flow of the present and the situations that are being faced.
We presently have little sense of what that work might look like, other than accepting the principle that crisis often generates systemic working – and so there is a need to host a contained space wherein people can appreciate their experiences of working in that way and, at the same time, bridge that learning into their ways of being, thinking and doing at work.
If you fancy joining us on that journey and giving us licence to come and work with your people to explore this complex set of notions, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
Radical OD 