Ethos, logos, pathos … sure, but let’s not forget phatuous

As communicators, someone once pointed out, it’s our professional business to act as a kind of ‘general practitioner’ or therapist to the organisation, taking its face value objectives and requirements seriously, but bringing to them a deeper appreciation of the kinds of things that can wrongfoot the patient presenting about their own ailments and the kinds of remedies they presume themselves to need.

It’s a privilege and a burden.

We are very easily swept along with the prevailing view that the leader must put a case to the workforce, or must attack the social distance between them by revealing something of their personality, or tap into more powerful emotional connections, etc – all the good old Aristotelian rhetorical tactics.

But a good communicator ought also to carry the curse of the insight that Jakobson offers us – that in the corporate life, new content, new argument, new initiative may fundamentally be driven by the phatic imperative – the unstated need of any human relationship for intercourse, simply for the vital semi-conscious work of affirming the nature of the relationships between the organisation’s participants.

The classic illustration is two distant neighbours passing on a city street. ‘Good morning’ says one. ‘Morning’ smiles the other. They could as easily say ‘blue’ and ‘green’ to one another – the purpose of the communicaton is the mutual acknowledgement of each other as entities of more significance than a lampost or parked car.

The tokens of content exchanged are tokens – in organisations, they must conform at least to logos, to carry their freight, but we misunderstand their rhetorical purpose if we assume the logos is the whole of the freight.

It can sometimes seem fatuous (or perhaps a case of ‘failure demand‘) but without that discourse in organisations, Mintzberg’s tendency to ‘Balkanise’ (see, eg, p12 here) will gain the upper hand. It’s why courts have their fashions and corporates have their flavours of the month. These are not necessarily bad things – they have their uses – we ought simply to approach them with a right sense of balance.

The information tsunami … is bunk

Alvin Toffler coined the term ‘Information overload‘ in his seminal Future Shock in 1970, defining it as the condition: “When the individual is plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation, or a novelty-loaded context … his predictive accuracy plummets. He can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on which rational behavior is dependent.”

Clay Shirky replied that ‘it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure‘. But he agrees in principle with Toffler that new technologies are breaking those filters – and has some compelling stories to evidence his take.

I don’t find this convincing. As Shirky points out, information overload (in terms of too much information, not enough time) has been with us since at least Gutenberg, if we only count manufactured information and exclude the social or the natural. Social information overload must have been experienced since at least the first city of more than a few hundred souls. Natural information overload has been with us around the clock, since we first saw the stars.

What has changed significantly since Toffler is something much more fundamental and subjective than technological advance – a wider loss of belief in human agency and in our ability to influence or control our own destiny. As the modernist project failed, and the alternatives to it became increasingly contested and delegitimised, we lost our beliefs, leaving us open to anything. Our critical faculties – the final filter – have been significantly impaired, leaving us susceptible both to the idea that we need more data to form our judgements, and that there’s too much data around to make rational decisions.

This is not a simple technical type of filter failure. It’s a failure of discernment, a sense of defeat in the face of events and relationships running out of our influence or ability to control – a desire to stop the world. It’s a reflection of that loss of agency that’s bigger than all individual judgement and agency, a historical and cultural sense of inadequacy that grips the West, but which we dare not name.

So if we do truly experience a tsunami of information, it’s not that the towering wave grew taller. It’s that we – in some senses – grew shorter.

Grief for lost colleagues

I find myself caught on the horns of the basic dilemma of organisational life, between the instrumental necessities of performance in a competitive world, and the basic ethical needs of the human beings who must carry out the demands of that world.

How this presents itself to me is a genuine doubt over whether our leaders are, in fact, entirely innocent of the wounds their decisions inflict, the emotional scar tissue the survivors of their decisions must accept and carry with them, or whether they are instead self-conscious and tender to the entire grotesquerie, going home and literally vomiting at the ugliness of their own actions, but somehow morally more courageous than the rest of us – able to take responsibility for the horrors they enact, willing to let the nightmare haunt their dreams, as a sin for which the ultimate common good is a prize, a duty, worthy of their own private despair?

Further, if they are indeed as innocent as they appear to be, somehow oblivious to the monumental suffering around them, is it our moral duty to rub their noses in this shit as if house-training a moral puppy, to try to confront them with it and encourage them to mend their ways – or is their autistic ability to ignore the humane in fact a rare and precious gift for humanity, one which those of us who surround them have a duty to shield them from, to enable them to take the horrendous decisions the rest of us lack the moral capacity to take?

Would an ethical life be a life doomed to passivity, to acquiescense and decline? Do we need monsters?

Changing the frame

If you had complete freedom to alter the reporting requirements of the world’s publicly listed companies (like GAAP or IFRS), how would you make employees feature there in the most constructive way?

There’s a certain trend towards narrative reporting for ‘ESG’ elements of annual reports (environmental, social, governance). Could there be a company-defined narrative that wasn’t all spin? How would we set terms to go some way towards comparability? One avenue might be to talk in rough terms of risk. Fruitful?

Another line of possible value to pursue would be to mandate the use of existing (heavily audited) metrics to deliver a profitability per employee metric, or suchlike, as a proxy for productivity and hence (fingers crossed) a proxy for employee engagement. Some obvious pitfalls, there.

What about climate survey metrics? Can these be made sufficiently robust and comparable across companies, sectors and cultures to make a cynical analyst think twice?

The more I think about this, the more I wonder if, rather, the way to get both substance and context across would be to consider some means to log the size of short term boosts to the balance sheet that were deliberately foregone by management, with a view to preserving the company’s intangible, social capital. That would give both a sense of the scale of the organisation’s commitment to its employees, and would prompt executives to explain carefully what the intangible costs of such short term corporate actions might have been in each case.

On Gurus: a first stab at freedom and authority

Thesis: The big (like, epochal) issue that organisations and societies are both grappling with is the problem of authority. What’s dawning on me is that this presents itself as an apparent contradiction between freedom and authority. In our organisational leadership context, this plays out somewhat as follows:

1/ authority (based on lost stuff like being the trusted experts, providing a psychological contract, etc) is broken.

2/ the ‘freedom’ solution – engaging and implicating a wider section of the org in decision processes – is obviously appealing, but (or because) it ducks the challenge of justifying authority.

3/ Leading without authority is challenging, if not impossible, particularly if you’re going with (2) which promises freedom to others, apparently at the expense of control.

4/ Gurus offer an independent (ersatz) source of authority to reassure leaders that they can retain control while offering freedom (while discreetly concealing the fact that this kind of freedom is therefore, similarly, ersatz).

5/ A good guru may therefore be helping your organisation’s leadership duck the challenge of working out their own, new grounds for authority.

I think I understand why people hire gurus, if that’s all that’s to hand. They can help you get through some tricky leadership issues. But it’s synthetic. What would be organic would be to get over the apparent contradiction … to drive towards reestablishing authority through expanding freedom.

Next question: so what would *that* look like?!

(With thanks to Karen Drury @ fe3 for planting the seed of this line of thought)

Mediation is organisation

The terrain on the masthead for this blog is “the problem of organisation” – a gentle tip of the hat to the now almost unreadable 1923 essay (given the highly-charged, specific context to which it was addressed) by the Hungarian activist philosopher Georg Lukacs, Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation. I don’t recommend it here (or anywhere, for that matter), but I do find myself repeatedly drawn back to a stunningly rich yet simple statement at the heart of that essay:

Organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice

“Form” in Lukacs’ philosophy is related to our commonplace definition, with special qualities I needn’t bore you with. The point of interest for me is that it is highly plausible to conceive of the task facing all human organisations as that of mediating between thought and practice. By ‘plausible’ here I don’t mean “not obviously nonsense” but rather “demonstrably founded on some extremely deep and robust philosophical roots”.

By this light, the better we arrange the organisation (its form) to act as a clear, precise, swift instrument of mediation, in both directions, the more capable this form will become of delivering our objectives.

One of the reasons ‘internal communication’ is such a fiddly function to do right, then, is that its domain of reference (mediation) in one sense *is* the organisation. Quite often folk in my walk of life experience frustration when the piece of mediation work that we deliver – ‘the talk’ – is contradicted by the organisation’s non-verbal vehicles of mediation (leader behaviours, benefits and incentives, decision-making processes, etc – the ‘walk’). We’re tempted by the siren call of cynicism at these moments.

Georg’s insight offers us a more constructive response: rearrange the form of piece of mediation we’re paid to manage, and in demonstrating the benefits that must accrue, educate our peers to deliver similar changes to the piece of mediation that’s up to them.

Running up the Down escalator?

At an ei event hosted at the FT last year, I was scrabbling around for a pungent image to make the point, as simply as I could, that the ‘promised land’ in organisational theory might not have quite the function its proponents hope and believe.

The basic contours of this ‘promised land’ are unchanged from at least 1918, when Peter Drucker’s patron saint, Mary Parker Follet, defined the need for synthesis in The New State. I’ve just been reading a box fresh example of the same thing at Omobono – enterprise relationship folks who truly know their onions, but somehow come back to the same recipe as ever: greater synthesis, more trust and commitment, breaking down barriers, more inclusivity, more knowledge sharing.

What I came up with (in a garbled point which the panel struggled gamely to follow before giving up and moving on) was the image of running up the down escalator. If you’re on a down escalator, and you want to go up, you better be running. But if the best you’ve got to hope for is that you will manage to stay stationary, many of us might tire of running. What’s needed to make this activity bearable is the vision of a world just out of reach (the top of the escalator), and the belief that we’ll get there if we run hard enough.

What I’ve learned in 2010 is that, while running is certainly necessary, it might be more sustainable to figure out where the Up escalator is located (if there is one).

On courtoisie

Something Kevin Keohane mentioned in passing over the weekend reminded me of the following passage from Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process. For me, it says something important about why the motives of people at the heart of an organisation can be so hard to understand for outsiders, for whom the issues often appear so clear cut …

“As social functions and interests become increasingly complex and contradictory, we find more and more frequently in the behaviour and feeling of people a peculiar split, a co-existence of positive and negative elements, a mixture of muted affection and muted dislike in varying proportions and nuances. The possibilities of pure, unambiguous enmity grow fewer; and, more and more perceptibly, every action taken against an opponent also threatens the social existence of the perpetrator; it disturbs the whole mechanism of chains of action of which each is a part.“

There is no such thing as a status quo in organisations (since everyone with any life in them is always busily working to advance their interests, self-directed or otherwise). But there is a kind of stasis suggested in the above, a set of established relationships within which everyone knows approximately where they stand, and within which they are therefore capable of directed (but very limited) action. I think it rings as true of the 21st century corporation as it does for the French court life Elias was dissecting.

Meaning is not free

Many of us in web or communication-related disciplines come from a basic presumption that ‘information wants to be free’ – either on political grounds, or on the basis that the horse has already bolted, thanks to web technology (or both). From these perspectives, any attempt to restrict access to information looks politically suspect, or technically self-defeating. Those rejecting the best disinfectant (sunlight) might as well stick their hands up and declare ‘we love our filth’.

Wikileaks’ actions bring this into sharp relief. The UK Government’s reminders to editors of the UK’s standing D-Notices were instantly lampooned by bloggers from Westminster insiders like Guido Fawkes to fringier commentators like @philrandal, who tweets “So, what evil deeds are our govt trying to cover up now?”

In private, there’s no necessary separation between our ethical and instrumental needs. Information and meaning, at home, map onto each other to the degree that our relationships are open and engaged. Parents are increasingly open with their children, who they would previously have ‘sheltered’ from the uglier facts of life. In public, though, our ethical bonds simply don’t stretch to include all those we enter into relationships with, in the pursuit of our instrumental ends.

While we might yearn for some kind of unifying ethical bond, in practice we know that it’s a game of you v. me: a contest of interests from which commonwealth emerges. It’s by no means zero-sum, but there’s an element of that mindset that’s inescapable, because the outputs are carved up not according to some kind of Platonic form of justice, but by negotiation, and the relative strengths of our negotiating positions.

This means that information, when it relates to social power relationships, carries certain meanings embedding a particular self-interest. It ceases to be free, but becomes partisan.

Where there’s a necessary tension in the relationship underlying communication, communication itself will be ‘torn’ between two poles, whatever the level or issue. Information may be free, but meaning is relational – embedded in the particular. Ripping it out of its context and ‘freeing’ it may have some quite far-reaching effects on our social fabric. If that’s just how it is, we need to think quickly about how to handle the damage.

Problem as in puzzle, not as in frowny-face.

If to manage is to feel guilt (plausible, I think) and to engage with someone is to lay ourselves open to moral accountability to them, it seems like we can have management, or engagement, but not both at once.

Instead, the tug-of-war between these irreconcilable and opposing life worlds will be unending, as long as there’s work to do: a semblance of community and ethical connection prevails at work, rudely punctuated by the inhuman discipline of the market, and then we work to re-connect those severed ethical threads, to make sure we arrive at our next guillotining in the best possible health.

Is this an endless cycle, a fact of life that all grown-ups must stomach and learn to navigate? Or is there a synthesis to be had, out there, beyond the snake oil of business gurus and the wishful thinking of frustrated idealists?

That’s my problem, and I think it’s worth pursuing.