Heart of the Art

Since Descartes we have tried to understand the world by dividing it into its constituent parts. By breaking things down into their basic building blocks we have sought to gain a deeper understanding of how things work. This can be really helpful.

Having raced bicycles I have an appreciation for fine engineering and how, beautifully machined parts, can be taken apart, cleaned and fitted back together to build something that functions in even the foulest of conditions. But if you try doing that to the rider not the bike you come up with a bit of a problem. Living things don't respond well to being cut into bits. The relationships between parts are as important as the parts themselves.

But this Cartesian logic has been applied to the way we run our organisations. We segregate them through our organograms, thinking we can understand them and even control them through the power structures they represent. The reality is that human beings (and other living things) don't behave that way. They make relationships based on what is necessary to do the things they decide they need to. The knowledge needed for that is not held in the structure, it is held in the relationships and the relationships are a function of who we are, what we need to do, what we consider important.

For a while, a carefully crafted organisational structure matches this sufficiently closely that it suffices for those at its pinnacle to consider it functional. Over time, changes in the external environment and changes within the internal relationships render it obsolete and dysfunctional. Now one of two things usually happens.

The first is that at great expense the organisation hires consultants, internal or external, to redesign the organogram (the picture it chooses to make of itself) so that it fits better.

The second is that the business declines and eventually goes bust. Just check which businesses were the largest a decade ago and which are now. Go back a little further and by now many will have disappeared altogether. Living things that are out of tune with their environment die out. It is that simple.

But it doesn't have to be this hard or this expensive. The trick is in seeing the way you view organisations as just that, 'a' way of viewing organisations. What would happen if you viewed them another way? What would happen if you saw them as living things, capable of adapting to their environment as they learned about the changes in it?

All it takes is a change in perspective and this can be done. There are many organisations that work this way. But to evoke this kind of new understanding requires leadership of a high order. It requires leaders who see the potential in living things and are prepared to relinquish the false certainty and control of more mechanistic viewpoints. Leaders who are able to unleash the energy that we have for creating things and being successful are not developed in the plethora of programmes based on competencies designed to satisfy an insufficient Cartesian model.

Public, commercial and community organisations need leaders who will step across the threshold and challenge a failing mindset. Their start point is 'who are we and what do we stand for?'. Not what makes my organisational machine work?