Issue 21: Who are you?

Welcome back to my newsletter where I am currently exploring big organisational topics drawing upon excerpts from my book 'Zen and the Art of Organising Work' to explore big ideas.

I hope you enjoyed the Christmas break. But if you are like me, after a couple of weeks of intellectual downtime you will be ready for some stimulating and challenging ideas to help get your brain working again.

In the last few newsletters I have been exploring the role of the metasystem. A metasystem comprises all those activities which make a collection of semi autonomous operational units more than the sum of their parts.

It is tempting to call the metasystem 'senior management', but this lazy labelling reinforces the conventional model of how organisations work that turns so many people off.

The activities of its constituent parts need to be channelled and constrained in order for an organisation to function as one. But clarity about the purpose and role of the metasystem is required to avoid the risk of it collapsing into narrow authoritarianism or, at the other extreme, ineffectually floundering about in an attempt to seek consensus on every kind of decision.

The activities of its constituent parts need to be channelled and constrained in order for an organisation to function as one.

But clarity about the purpose and role of the metasystem is required to avoid the risk of it collapsing into narrow authoritarianism or, at the other extreme, ineffectually floundering about in an attempt to seek consensus on everything.

First, there are activities to do with extracting synergies. And then there are those that are responsible for strategy - the art of seeking out positions that will maintain the viability of the organisation in the face of environmental changes. These have been the subject of previous newsletters.

Today I want to talk about the third and final component of the metasystem; that which is concerned with 'selfhood'.

'Selfhood' might seems like a strange word to use. And at a practical level most people would use a term like 'governance' to describe these activities. I'm thinking here of activities like setting and disseminating policies, making key decisions and representing the organisation to the outside world.

But it is important to look beyond the tasks that are performed by this part of the metasystem to understand what organisational purpose they serve.

We are accustomed to make judgements about the character of people based on what they say and do, or refrain from doing. From this evidence we infer their motives and their values. Collectively they comprise their identity - who they are, in our eyes.

It is the same for organisations.

We are accustomed to make judgements about the character of people based on what they say and do, or refrain from doing. From this evidence we infer their motives and their values. Collectively they comprise their identity - who they are, in our eyes.

It is the same for organisations.

How people collectively behave and the decision that they choose to make is sometimes labelled 'corporate culture' and discussed as if it is some unintended and unavoidable by-product of organisational life. But is is so much more, and so much more important, than this.

Which brings me back to the question on which I finished my last newsletter.

Given the practically infinite amount of things that an organisation could do, how do we decide what it will do - and will not do? This cannot be answered using a rational process, I argued, since they pose the question 'what is the right thing to do?', to which there is no right answer.

The answer is I hope now a little clearer.

Identity is the thing that informs and which is informed by these decisions and decisions like them. And it shapes how things are done, and what is not done

We should not be confuse value laden choices with those that are a product of economic calculation. They send a signal about 'who we are' which percolate through into collective behaviour and decision making throughout the organisation.

We should not be confuse value laden choices with those that are a product of economic calculation. They send a signal about 'who we are' which percolate through into collective behaviour and decsion making throughout the organisation.

The sum of these choices act as a soft social 'control' system that can complement, displace but also sometimes subvert the more explicit procedural controls. These include practices, rituals and the stories retell each other. If you need an example of how powerful this can be, read 'No Rules Rules', the story of Netflix's ways of working.

'Identity' is fundamentally a question of where and how boundaries are drawn and maintained - how 'self' and 'not self' is defined. For this reason it has been suggested that this makes organisations autopoietic systems.

'Autopoiesis' literally means 'self-making'. And Humberto Maturana, the Chilean biologist who coined the term, suggested that this ability is what characterises living systems, in contrast to allopoietic systems that are made by someone else.

Stafford Beer, in the forward to Maturana's original book claimed that this explained a common organisational dysfunctionality whereby a part of an organisation (like a function or a business unit) behaves in a way that benefits itself at the expense of the whole.

Beer characterised this as 'pathological autopoiesis' and suggested that this made them analogous to cancer in biological organisations.

Many people, including Maturana himself, think this is a step too far, and that organisations cannot be regarded as being 'alive'.

Maybe so. But it makes you think, doesn't it?

Was this helpful?

In this case I doubt it!

But I hope it was interesting and stimulating.. If you like this sort of stuff stay tuned for more insights from 'Zen and the Art of Organising Work'. I'm also hoping that along the way that you will come to share my passion for these ideas and use them to create healthier, more productive workplaces.