3. April 2025
A trend or a return to the old hierarchical world?
There are already the first posts on social media positioning themselves against »wokeness«. Sometimes with an attack on the »soft« fashions in the people departments and the so-called soft consultancies. There is a noticeable trend towards more top-down and a new »strength« and »decisiveness«. In addition, all programs that support diversity are under considerable pressure. For us, this is an important moment to reflect on our strengths, attitudes and proven skills and knowledge in transformations. In the following text, we confirm what is important and necessary to give the productivity and performance of people in organisations room to develop. How do you reflect on the significance and influence of this new trend from the political arena that is now reaching companies?
A beginning
We have a lot to say. A lot about: New Organisation, New Work, New Mindset. Five years ago, we could have summarised what we have to say in one lecture – we can no longer do that today. It is too multifaced, it is too differentiated. So we pick out the aspects that we are dealing with in our internal discussions and in conversations with customers. We are experiencing upheavals, experiments, outbreaks and new things alongside a great deal of stability – at all levels, in the organisations as new forms of organisation, in groups as new dynamics of social communitisation, individual people with new life plans that do not follow career mainstream.
What is actually driving this?
On the surface, companies are perhaps driven by fear, of losing touch with the Chinese dynamic – perhaps – perhaps – or maybe the loss of confidence in the European success story: the systematic planning, the management of projects, the once so successful waterfall planning, perhaps doubts about the predictive power of strategic departments? Perhaps the confrontation with the doubts of many about the quality of leadership? Perhaps the widespread loss of trust in the »elites«? But perhaps also because it is obvious that we are now more and more confronted with non-linear, dynamically deterministic systems: in the markets, in competition, in society, in the community of our own company, and yet we have worked so hard to make the world linear dynamic deterministic. No matter how often we ask »why«, we will not find the cause – but we will find conditions, contingencies, relations.
For NEW WORK, one condition stands out, a social, a global tendency that has been stable for a very long time: The gain of more and more individual freedom. We see this clearly in the metropolitan regions – where social control is minimised and there is room for many niches, for a lot of otherness, an otherness that can organise itself as a group and group affiliation. It is about self-determination, about one’s own individuality and its social recognition, it is about utilising an old concept, it is about self-realisation. In the current motivation theories, it is labelled with the terms autonomy and learning (growth) and with the idea of self-realisation, that we are purpose-ied. Today, this is an elementary aspect of a corporate culture. With the orientation towards purpose, which replaces the processes of vision or mission, the strenuous, the challenging – how can we balance the individual with the common into a balance that is characterised by a certain consistency. How can our own purpose become a common one and how consistent can this be? In the background is the question of the relationship between solidarity and individual selfhood. Individuality and the quality of communitisation belong together and they make the new forms of work so interesting, so exciting and at the same time so challenging. Because we are in the process of doing without our big, caring brother.
And of course the freedom of the many, the diversity of the many is a driver of complexity, and in allowing this diversity, the idiosyncrasies, we also experience the loss of the one binding moral institution that provides security. This is not only being demanded politically, but also in companies – unfortunately not looking forward, but with a growing longing for the old authority, to use a psychoanalytical image, for the all-judging father. New Work goes the other way – New Work wants to shape freedom so that co-operation and so that collaboration and community are still possible. They allow us to trace aspects that we encounter in our work and for which there are no simple recipes.
The agile organisation – in essence, the search for an organisation that is able to adapt quickly, in which internal orientation is reduced and in which it becomes possible to make an external perspective effective internally in smaller units. Zygmund Bauman called this a fluid organisation decades ago. The blueprints are available – however, the social and psychological dynamics of such organisations still leave many issues unresolved. What can we observe – apart from the trivial issues that not everyone is in favour of such changes, that scepticism is spreading, that the masters of consistency (they are mostly men) fear a loss of power:
Escape into the method
Methods are helpful and necessary – but at best they are only half of the journey. We are somewhat astonished the thoroughness with which the methodological set is increasingly more and more formulated and increasingly resembles the small-scale process landscape that the new organisation was intended to at least reduce. Described methods provide security, they relieve the individual of the burden of personal organisation and are often an escape from freedom. But that’s what it’s all about if you want to achieve flexibility, the richness of polyphony. They are too often an escape from the opportunity of self-efficacy and the responsibility.
The lack of group dynamic competence
What happens when we level out hierarchy and describe the role in such a way that it becomes more of an enabler for personal responsibility. In fact, we lack an understanding of group dynamics and social dynamic processes. The concept of empathy is waved around, but that, difficult in itself, falls short if we want to support people in the informal, i.e. emotionally unrelieving, social leadership processes. It is time to practise group dynamic competence again. Informal leadership opens up a wide field for egomaniacs and narcissists and we know the devastating consequences of bullying in the school context. Group dynamics as experiential learning is needed.
We want your soul, your heart
This becomes all the more important the more we begin to no longer separate our work and private lives. We are merging two previously separate identities. And we are doing it, because we have understood that in the new organisations we need the whole person and not just the time that they make available to us. The old deal was clear: you get money and security (the famous gold watch later) and you give us your agreed limited time, your obedience and your loyalty. If we believe in the motivating power of a purpose, i.e. the fact that a person commits their whole existence to something, because their own deep sense of purpose and that of the work increasingly coincide, then the old deal no longer works. I can’t buy the heart, the soul of a person – the company has to offer more – places, rooms, spaces, relationships, social structures, meaningful concepts that enable people to make a full contribution. And also the freedom to accept what is on offer, for a time, the freedom to leave them again – in the longer term, company boundaries will become fluid. And so the attractiveness as a »place to live« will become increasingly important.
The finite nature of purpose
Purpose often comes across as very gravitational – with such a hint of eternity. But that is a constriction. We do not follow the one purpose in our lives that we must somehow have to discover on this journey through life. Our energy, commitment find many »senses« and they seek out social contexts in which they can be lived. They are guiding for a time, then we leave them for something that is now in this phase of life, in this social context touches us more. This is where we find the second meaning level of Zygmund Bauman’s concept of the fluid organisation – we also flow within our organisation, but also increasingly between organisations and more and more also between different concepts of life. Organisations are faced with the task of repeatedly and to create inviting places and structures that offer meaning and are thus able to attract those seeking meaning. We will have to learn to experience the flowing itself as stable.
The psychological focus
For us, in our working tradition, the psychological focus, i.e. the constitution of people in these changes, is of great importance. How do people learn recognise their roles, their possibilities in the new forms, how do we give them a chance to realise themselves in the new to reinvent themselves in previously closed possibilities? This requires, for example, deep interventions in the rarely thematised normative basic assumptions of coaching or leadership training. If we work laterally and explore more lateral possibilities, then we leave behind the previously dominant vertical aspect that organisations today primarily offer as a career. Career, previously linked to advancement as hope and as pain, is defined differently – more and more as the ability to repeatedly find places of attractiveness, to see oneself as fluid. However, companies quickly come up against the limits of society, which still celebrates the hero of advancement.
How do we learn?
Ultimately, the question arises as to which concepts of life we train people for. More than ever, Gregory Bateson’s distinction between first-order learning and second-order learning. We will make little progress with a PISA-orientated approach, because that which has trains and teaches what has been tried and tested, in an old and stable world. Learning for the new, that which we have not yet practised, that requires an opening to the part of our part of our society that we like to marginalise with the words art and describe as a place of bliss. But it is precisely there that we can learn more about the future than in any strategy or marketing department of large corporations and consultancies. Long before companies could call what they call VUCA today, art has showed us with a performative twist what event means, what ruptures mean and what it means to be able to act fluidly. But our current management elites have become quite art-averse.
The happiness of otherness
For us, the focus is also shifting to what is dealt with under the keyword diversity. This is about more than statistics showing that we have diversity… quotas for women, quotas for Indians, LGBTIQ* quotas and so on. How do we actually learn to respect each other, how do we learn to talk and act about differences in such a way that they mean wealth rather than exclusion. There will be no real agility without addressing diversity. And that starts with the smaller differences that were not talked about in the old world of work (separation of private and work) and which hold back considerable energy in the form of silence or the lack of a platform for expression. In my work in the diverse Asian cultures, I know that we have really achieved something when people say »you have touched my heart« and when they have touched my heart. Then we start to have respect for each other and thus for each other.
The magic word – mindset change
Sounds simple enough. But what is it all about? There are many descriptions. For example, from inside-outside thinking and acting to outside-inside thinking and acting. Or from being trapped in the inbox to opening up to the outbox, or in the word game play on words, your goal is to come forward or to come along. Whatever it’s called, it’s about getting out of the perspective of self-centredness, of the ego. Not really new, but important, because in business and economics the egomaximiser has been at the forefront of business and economics for too long. was at the centre. The egomaximisers in their competition for ever diminishing resources were seen as the guarantor of dynamism – the co-operating members of the community as the somewhat stupid members of the herd. A very truncated Darwinism, in which it was clear early on that the real egoist is not one, but rather someone who co-operates and is successful as a result. In the Christian world, there used to be the saying it is more blessed to give than to receive. Co-operation here is not just another method or, according to Buddhist concepts of self-optimisation a new trick of egoism, but the self-awareness that the joy, fulfilment and happiness of cooperation can be found in a self-enclosed ego. So what cooperation or today often also called collaboration, can reveal the deep structure of our own thinking and feeling in which we encounter the world. And this makes it possible to create common ground across differences, boundaries and affiliations.
Mutuality
I like to remember conversations with Helm Stierlin, one of the founding fathers of systemic therapy, who understood co-operation as mutuality. Not in the sense of a deal, but rather as a gift that establishes a relationship that allows the other person freedom. This seems to contradiction to the thesis of individualism – because in the new forms of work, the collective is the hero. Now we live our individualism in collectives, in groups in which we feel that we are in good hands and which we change depending on the course of our identity. In mutuality of co-operation, I maintain my individuality and at the same time I am part of a collective that is responsible for the whole. This is the point at which the discussion about the mindset, which sounds so abstract and neutral a spiritual note penetrates. It is the idea of all-connectedness, which in turn corresponds to the experience that we live in a non-linear, dynamically deterministic world.
Organisations or finally thinking politically?
And with all that we are already doing today, we are falling short, if we do not intervene more deeply in the way in which the future is negotiated in companies today (the future here means market, product, process, strategy, etc.). If we only anchor the basic idea of agility, the ability to react quickly and flexibly to changes or to act iteratively and with foresight, in the operational units, then we will not be able to realise our full potential, then we will continue to remain slow and do what has been successful in the past. If we continue with the oligarchic structure of companies, where a more or less homogeneous group that has been organized long time in large programmes, and which has been south, west and east to determine the topics of the organisation, then New Work will not find a place in the organisation. This raises the question for organisational development: who is allowed to speak, who is heard, who has places to speak and to be heard? It is about a genuine discourse process in which the many different people participate in the decisions that determine what should happen in the company and what should happen in the markets. Socially, there will be hardly be a participation in the ownership structure, but a genuine participation in shaping the community with dedicated commitment. With our through-route concepts, we have shown easily practicable ways to break up the oligarchic nature of companies oligarchy and thus created space for voices that are much more likely than long-serving managers to understand what the future will mean and where the place can be that place the company can occupy in this future.
And finally, looking a little further ahead – how do we change our inner attitude towards what is coming as new concepts of life? How do we understand them? An excursion into the pop world of a generation that doesn’t yet has no letter.
Demography – how radical are the changes in life plans?
BTS – a Korean boy band (No. 1 in the US Billboard charts as the first Korean band with »Idol«): A fully staged boy group – every piece of information, every utterance, every movement is choreographed or curated. At the same time the only K-pop band that sends political messages – strongly core message strongly related to individualism: Be yourself, whatever you are or want to be. The videos send, in addition to the offer of identification – the groups always consist of a mix of people (would significantly change the recruitment strategies for management boards) an inclusive message – you are part of us – we are diverse and you belong to us. The videos are also described as representing a hyper-inclusive aesthetic. In the performances, there is no longer a difference between the surface (the performance) and the actual identities – the surface is the whole. Thus Beuys has arrived in youth culture.
Our deep thinking – there is the foreground and the background, there is the appearance and behind it the real thing, the deep-seated Platonism is cancelled out here. The question behind it becomes obsolete because the surface is already the real thing. What does this mean for the world of work? Dissolution of the difference of private and work? The end of role-playing and with it a new kind of authenticity? Places of work as places where identity is formed and lived. Places of work as event spaces – which are passed through quicker – the weakening of continuities in favour of fault lines and lines of rupture and leaps in life? These are also aspects of New Work.
A look at recent coaching experiences. On what background of life plans do I formulate my questions? How much is the whole setting characterised by the old expectations of the companies’ expectations? In her autobiography, Michelle Obama writes about her grandfather, in whom she saw the bitterness of shattered dreams. A bitterness that I encounter again and again in middle management of large companies. While this bitterness can be felt in the background of organisations, the young world is moved by the power of dreams.Let us follow hope and not bitterness.
Appendix: Stories about the lecture
I.
The group was silent, silent for more than an hour. It was traumatised. It was such a good start – working without hierarchy, working in small groups with a common interest, being able to do what you always wanted to do. Then came the setbacks – first the cancellation of projects that were still seen as very promising in the group, but now had no longer had a budget for strategic reasons. How to say goodbye? And how to deal with the fact that you were now also redirected yourself and found themselves in projects and groups that they would not have chosen without need. Then the group dynamics took their course – informal leaders emerged who had good social manipulation skills but were not really suited to the task of exercising a steering function and then the organisation’s desire to make it truly hierarchy-free and the introduction of peer evaluation. The last one was definitely too much – so the group fell silent and had lost all the energy and commitment of the beginning.
II.
From a conversation with a works council member. He was really worried. He looked into the room and saw that all the ergonomic achievements of organised labour had been lost. Employees were sitting on wooden pallets, the tables that were occasionally available were completely unsuitable – and he said, what will their backs look like when they have been working for twenty years? The young people have no longer understand that the company and the works council are fighting against each other to find a better solution for them. They are completely at the mercy of the upper echelons.
III.
From a coaching session. I met this very talented person, when he was still a team leader and had learnt from the CEO that he had been appointed across all hierarchical levels to the board of the the most important division for the future. In that first meeting, we talked a lot about theatre and literature in particular – we compared our reading experiences and it was a tender and very energetic conversation. A year later, I spoke to him, who was still fiery and energetic, about his reading experiences over the last few months. And he blanched because he realised that he had only read management guides and in his reflection he understood, that his deepest source for »leadership« did not come from the guidebooks, but from the deep layers of literary experience. He is now reading again.
IV.
A completely clueless manager. In his management area he has a very talented woman who does much more, does it successfully, than she should and what would be appropriate for her position. So he struggled in his care and his sense of justice, he fought for a promotion and could then proudly offer it to the young woman. He expected joy and gratitude, but received a friendly but firm no – she didn’t want it. And he asked why: And she said, what I’m doing now, I’m doing voluntarily and I enjoy it, if I accept your offer, then I have to do it and I don’t want to.
V.
Another conversation with a messenger who brings you the food you have chosen on the Internet from a restaurant. I said, you know you’re being taken advantage of? You get little money, you only get good shifts if you are fully committed to the needs of your company, which has no duty of care towards you, and you even paid for the box on your back yourself, the bike is your own – why are you doing this? But I am free he said and that was all.
VI.
One last one: An expat manager in Thailand. She mocks about the Thais’ belief in magic, laughs at their offerings in the temples and this daily worship of a shrine. shrine. He is enlightened, hypermodern, rational. The evening is long and after the ritual intoxication process has come to an end (it was mainly cocktails) he talked about his great experiences with positive affirmations. He had found a service provider (they used to be called priest) who, for a small fee, would send him a positive affirming sentence every morning and he then to himself. It was very effective, he said, not realising the irony of the situation.
VII.
It is now 30 years ago. I was talking to a Franciscan woman in a hospital, pushing trolleys of books around the rooms and talking to the sick – talking was probably the most important thing. We talked and that’s how I learnt that this woman, who was now in the lowest rung of the Franciscan hierarchy Franciscans, had been in Rome just a year ago and was the abbess of the entire order of women. And there was no bitterness in her. She was happy and cheerful. It has been around for a long time, the other occupation of the hierarchical posts.
Rüdiger Müngersdorff
16. January 2019
A Beginning
There’s so much to say.
A lot about: New Organization, New Work, New Mindset.
Five years ago, a brief speech would have sufficed. Now, there’s so much more to talk about: there are too many facets, too much variance. Let us highlight only a few of the aspects that we have encountered in our internal discussions and client conversations.
We see much that is steady, but also encounter change, experiments, transgressions, innovative approaches. This is happening on all levels: companies establish new forms of organization, groups experience new dynamics of social cohesion, individuals have new life designs that do not follow the career mainstream.
What’s driving it all?
At first glance, companies might be driven by the fear of losing touch: losing touch with Chinese dynamism, maybe. They may also be driven by a loss of trust in the European success story: systematic planning, project management and cascade plans used to be so successful. Maybe they are driven by a reluctance to believe the prophecies made by strategic departments? Maybe it’s the need to confront the fact that people are doubting management quality? Might it be the very wide-spread loss of trust in the »elites«? And maybe, because that much is clear as daylight, it is the fact that we are ever more frequently confronted by non-linear, dynamic, non-deterministic systems: on the markets, in competition, in society, in the communities of our own companies. All of that after we had worked so hard to design our world in a linear, dynamic and deterministic way. All the whys and wherefores will not give us a single cause. We can however, find out about conditions, conditionalities, relativity and relations.
One condition for NEW WORK is immediately apparent. There is a trend that has long been on a steady rise, both globally and in our society: more and more individual freedom. This is particularly apparent in urban realms with their minimum of social control and many pockets of difference within which groups and belonging are free to grow.
Self-determination is the name of the game: a person’s own individuality and its recognition by society; what used to be known as self-realization. Fashionable motivation theories call it autonomy and learning (growing) now, and link it to the notion of being purpose-guided. It has become an elemental aspect of business culture. Purpose has replaced the notion of creating vision and mission. This underlines the challenge at the very core of the situation: how do we strike a balance between individual and joint needs, and how do we give that balance some stability? How is it possible for an individual’s purpose to be shared, and how much stability can this have? Lurking behind these questions is the link between solidarity and individual identity. Individuality and the quality of communitization are interlinked, and together they make the new forms of working so interesting, so exciting and at the same time so challenging. We are in the process of abandoning big brother and his shelter.
This freedom of the many, the vivid diversity of multitude obviously pushes complexity. In permitting this diversity and these individualities, we become aware of the loss of a binding moral institution that gives us shelter. The yearning for such an institution is apparent on the political level as well as inside companies. Unfortunately, it is a quest that is not forward-looking but instead linked to a growing yearning for the old style of authority; psycho-analysis speaks of father figures who will fix everything. New Work is taking another path; New Work wants to design a form of freedom that also permits collaboration and community.
Let us highlight some aspects that we encounter in our work; there are no simple recipes.
Agile organizations essentially constitute the quest for an organization that is able to adapt fast, reduce its inwards gaze and enable effective outside perspectives within small units. Decades ago, Zygmunt Bauman already referred to this notion as a fluid organization. We have the blueprints, but the social and psychological dynamics of such organizations bring out many unresolved issues.
Not everyone likes such a change, there are sceptics, there are defendants of durability (they are usually men) who are worried about their loss of power. Let us move beyond those trivial aspects of our work in order to discover more:
Escaping into method
Methods are useful and necessary, but they are at best half the ticket. We are somewhat amazed at how reliably the available set of methods is expanded more and more, in order to eventually lead back to the very landscape of tiny processes that was supposed to be reduced or even abolished by way of the new organizations. Method descriptions provide safety, they relieve individuals from the burden of design and they are often an escape from freedom. We need freedom, however, if we want to achieve flexibility and the wealth of diversity. Methods are too often an escape from the opportunity to be effective and the responsibility that comes with it.
Lacking group dynamics skills
What happens when we even out hierarchies and script each person’s role in such a way as to enable individual responsibility? We lack a grasp of group dynamics and socio-dynamic processes. We are enticed by empathy, but that is difficult in itself and moreover does not suffice when people are left alone to design informal social leadership processes that per definition do not offer emotional support. It’s time to learn group dynamics skills. Informal leadership opens the floodgates for egotists and narcissists; we are all aware of the damage bullying can do from schools. We need to learn group dynamics by experience.
We want your soul, your heart
This becomes more important as the division between work and private life is increasingly blurred. We are joining two identities that used to be separate. We are doing so because we have learned that new organizations need the whole person and not only the time that they are willing to give up. The old deal was easy: a person gets money and security (the famous golden watch at the end) and in return the company gets an agreed amount of time, obedience and loyalty. We cannot maintain that approach as soon as we start to believe in the motivational force of a purpose, that a human being will become wholly involved because their own sense of self and that of work are ever more congruous. It is not possible to buy a person’s heart and soul. In order to enable people to fully commit themselves, a company needs to offer more: places, rooms, spaces, relationships, social structures, concepts that provide meaning. This includes the freedom to take up an offer for a limited period of time as well as the freedom to leave again. In the long-term, company boundaries will become more fluid. Their pull as a »place of life« will gain significance.
Purpose is finite
Purpose often arrives with some gravitas. It likes to have a never-ending touch. That is limiting. We’re not here on a journey of life to find one single purpose that we have to follow. Our energy and our commitment finds many meanings and purposes, as well as social groups in which to live these. They will guide us for some time before we leave them behind for something else that carries more meaning in a new phase of life. This relates to the second meaning of Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of a fluid organization. As persons, we are fluid within our organizations, and at the same time increasingly also between organizations and even between different life concepts. Companies are tasked with constantly creating and recreating new places and structures that are inviting and that offer a range of meanings and purposes so that they can attract people looking for meaning and purpose. We need to learn to understand that fluidity itself is a stable state.
Psychological focus
In our tradition of work, we consider the psychological focus of a person and their constitution highly significant within moments of change. How do people learn their part, find their potential within new environments, how do we give them the opportunity to re-invent themselves even in ways that were hitherto inconceivable? We need, for example, to cut deep down into the coaching and leadership training systems and their rarely challenged normative basic assumptions. By working laterally and looking into lateral possibilities, we abandon the previously dominant vertical outlook, which still shapes the career usually offered by organizations. Career was until now coupled with the hope and pain of ascent. It will receive a new definition: career is ever more about the ability to keep finding attractive places, to consider oneself fluid. However, this is where companies soon reach the boundaries of their society: it is still the as-cending heroes who are the heroes.
How do we learn?
We have reached a question: what are the concepts of life that we are forming people for? Gregory Bateson’s differentiation between the first and second order of learning is gaining relevance. The PISA-guided approach is hardly going to bring us forward, because it does no more than train and teach what is tried and tested – in an old and stable world. We need to learn for a new world, for that which we have not yet practised. That means that we need to open up towards a sector of our society that we like to put into a category of itself, an isolated place of the lucky few: the arts. The arts can teach us more about the future than any strategy and marketing department of large companies and consultancies can. Long before companies were able to name what they now call VUCA, a performative turn showed us the significance of an event, a disruption, and what it means to be able to act in flow. Modern-day managers have become rather hostile towards the arts, however.
The Joy of Difference
Another increasingly apparent issue is diversity and what it entails. This key word is about more than sheer statistics – quotas for women, Indian employees, LGBTIQ*s, etc. We are learning to respect each other, we are learning to address difference and to act in such a way that we are more likely to find wealth than exclusion. Agility is not truly possible where diversity has not been addressed. It begins with those little differences that used to be ignored in the old world of work (separation of work and private life). Significant energies are stifled by silence and the absence of a platform for expression. Working with so many different Asian cultures, I have learnt that we have not really achieved anything until people say »you have touched my heart« and until they have touched my heart. That is the point where we begin to have respect for each other and are therefore with each other.
Mindset Change, that Magic Formula
Sounds simple. What is it about? There are many ways to describe it. It includes shifting from inside–to-outside thinking and acting to outside–to-inside thinking and acting. It includes moving from being a prisoner of the inbox to opening the outbox. Are you aiming to come forward or to come along? Whichever way it’s phrased, it is always about moving away from a self-centred perspective. It’s hardly a world-shattering innovation, but it is nevertheless important because the ego-maximisers have been at the centre of the economy and of economic science for too long. Ego-maximisers have been engaged in a battle for dwindling resources, and have been considered the guarantors of dynamism, while the cooperative members of a community were the dull members of a herd. This is Darwinism at its simplest; many realized early on that a true egotist must abandon egotism in order to cooperate and base their success on cooperation. The Christian world used to follow the adage that it is better to give than to receive. Cooperation is not another method or a new trick of egotism following Buddhist self-optimization concepts. It is the experience that joy, fulfilment and happiness can be found in collaboration, in the very reduction of the self. That which we now know as cooperation or collaboration can change the underlying structure of our own thinking and emotion by bringing us out into the world. This enables us to overcome difference, boundaries and belonging in order to create something new.
Reciprocity
I enjoy thinking back upon my conversations with Helm Stierlin, one of the founding fathers of systemic therapy, who understood cooperation to be an act of reciprocity. Cooperation was not a deal, but a struggle based in a relationship that gives the other person freedom. This appears to juxtapose the thesis of individualism, because the new forms of work hero-worship the collective. We act out our individualism within collectives, joining groups that allow us to feel accepted as we are and switching them according to the evolution of our identity.
In doing so, I retain my individuality in reciprocal cooperation and am at the same time part of a collective the carries responsibility for the whole. There is a spiritual aspect to be found here in the apparently abstract discussion of mindset: the notion of interconnectedness resonates strongly with the realization that the world we live in does not follow a linear and deterministic dynamic.
Can we think companies politically (after all)?
Everything we do these days is too little. We need to delve deeper into the way in which the future is addressed in companies (future means market, product, process, strategy, etc.) Agility is the ability to react fast and flexibly to change and to be able to act in forward-looking steps. If we take this concept and anchor it only in the operative units, then we will still be slow and remain likely to chose the paths that used to be successful in the past. The oligarchic structure of the company, where a more or less homogeneous group of people have long been separated into large programs (and have forgotten south, west and east in the process) and are the only ones to define the topics of an organization, leaves no room for New Work.
Organizational development needs to ask who is allowed to speak, who is heard, who has places to speak and to be listened to? This is a genuine process of discourse. It includes many different people in decisions that guide what will happen in the company and on the markets. It is hardly going to mean participation in ownership, but it will mean real participation in the design of the community that defines the company by way of active commitment. Our concepts of cutting out paths have demonstrated easy-to-follow ways that disrupt the oligarchic nature of companies and thereby give room to voices that are more likely than those of the long-serving managers to understand what the future will mean and where the company can find room for itself and its services within that future.
Last but not least, how do we change our own inner attitude to that which is new to us in these concepts of life? How do we understand what we are about to face? Let’s take a detour into the world of popular music to meet the heroes of a generation that doesn’t even have a letter yet.
Demographics – how radical are the changes to our life designs?
BTS is a Korean boy band (the first Korean band to reach number 1 in the US Billboard Charts with their song Idol). They are an utterly designed boy group. Every piece of information about them, their every utterance and movement is choreographed or curated. At the same time, they are the only K-Pop band who send political messages. Those messages are all about individualism at their core: be yourself, whoever you are or want to be. Their videos offer a range of models for identification (These groups always offer a range of types; imagine what it would do if we began appointing board members by that logic!) as well as a message of inclusion: you are a part of us, we are diverse and you belong. Their videos entail representations of a hyper-inclusive aesthetic. Their performances no longer differentiate between the surface (the performance) and real identities: the surfaces is all there is. Beuys has entered youth culture.
It simply disables profound thought – that which has foreground and background, appearance and essence, deep-seated platonic structure. There is no point to asking what’s behind it all if the surface is all there is.
What does that mean for the world of work? Is it the dissolution of a difference between a private and a work sphere? Is it the end of role play and therefore a new kind of authenticity? Are we seeing places of work that have become places of living where identity is formed and lived? Places of work as experience spaces that are accomplished in faster steps? Is it the weakening of continuities in favour of breaches and leaps? All of these are also aspects of New Work.
Let’s look at recent coaching experiences. Which life design blueprint do I use for my questions? How much is the whole setting still shaped by old company expectations? In her autobiography, Michelle Obama wrote about her grandfather, in whom she witnessed the bitterness of shattered dreams. I often encounter this bitterness among the middle management of large companies. While this bitterness can be sensed in the background of organizations, the world of the young is propelled forwards by the force of dreams. Let us follow the hope and not the bitterness.
Appendix: Accompanying Stories
I.
Silence in the group. The silence lasted for over an hour. They were traumatised. It had started so well: working without hierarchies, working in small groups with joint interests, being able to do what they always wanted. Then came the blows: projects that were considered promising by the group were terminated for a strategic lack of budget. How does one part? How does one deal with being redirected, suddenly placed in projects and groups that are not the first and free choice? Group dynamics developed; informal leaders emerged. The latter had good social skills of manipulation, but were not really fit to meet the task of steering a group. There followed the organization’s desire to create real freedom from hierarchy and therefore the introduction of peer evaluation. That was the last straw: the group fell silent and had lost all their energy and initial commitment.
II.
I talked to a works council member who was deeply concerned. Looking into the room, he saw that all the organized workers’ achievements for ergonomic improvement had been lost. Staff were sitting on wooden pallets, the scattering of available tables were completely unsuitable. He wondered what their backs will feel like after twenty years of working like this? The young people are removed from us, they no longer understand that works councils oppose the company in order to fight for a better solution for them. They deliver their fate to the masters at the very top.
III.
During a coaching session, I met a very talented team leader who had just been notified by the CEO that he would be called up to the board governing a department that was set to be crucial in the future, skipping all steps of the hierarchy. At our first meeting, we spoke a lot about theatre and even more about literature. We compared our reading experiences in a delicate and extremely lively conversation. A year later, I found the same man still full of fire and energy, and I talked to him about what he had read in the last few months. He paled when he noticed that he had only been reading management guides. On reflection, he realized that his truest sense of ‘leadership’ came not from the guides but from the deeper layers of literature. He is reading again.
IV.
A manager is utterly perplexed. There is a highly talented woman under his leadership who does much more than is her due or within the scope of her position, and does so successfully. Being a caring person who champions fairness, he fought for her promotion and was proud to offer the young lady a better position. He expected her joy and gratitude, but received instead a friendly but decided rejection: she did not want her promotion. He asked her why. She answered, »As things are, I do what I do out of choice and enjoy doing it; if I take up your offer I will be obliged to do it. I don’t want that.«
V.
Another conversation I had was with a courier who delivers internet order food from restaurants. I asked him if he knew he was being exploited. His salary is low; in order to get better shifts he is required to relinquish all his time to the needs of a company that has no duty to care for him; he even had to buy the carrier bag on his back himself and he uses his own bike. Why? Because I am free, he said, and that was all there was to say.
VI.
Last but not least: I met an ex-pat manager in Thailand making fun of the Thai belief in magic and laughing at gifts left in temples and the daily adoration of a shrine. An enlightened, hyper-modern, rational individual. It is the end of a long evening, as the ritual process of intoxication (cocktails largely today) draws to the close, when he tells me about his fantastic experiences with positive affirmation. He had found a service (they used to be called priests) who in return for a small charge sends him a positive affirmative sentence every morning to repeat to himself. It’s extremely effective, he said. He did not see the irony of the situation.
VII.
Thirty years ago, I met a Franciscan nun in a hospital. She was pushing a cart with books from room to room and spoke to the patients. Her speaking to people was probably the most important part of what she did. We struck up a conversation and I found out that this woman was at the bottom rung of the hierarchical ladder of the Franciscans. Only a year ago, she had been positioned in Rome as the abbess of the entire women’s order. There was no bitterness to her. She was happy and cheerful. Other approaches to hierarchies are not a new thing.
Rüdiger Müngersdorff
