“You don’t take part of your arm off when you go to work”
- a conversation about adult development, ethics, empathy and Nature of Work’s process.
Dara Blumenthal is one of the co-founders of Nature of Work, a work design and development studio in New York. She also has a PhD in Sociology with a focus on sociology of everyday life, process-oriented sociology, embodiment, identity, social theory, and cultural studies.
Hi Dara! So, tell me a bit more about your background.
I have a background in cultural studies and ethics, and those are very broad subjects which means my work is really interdisciplinary. I’m particularly interested in the human and that human in society, especially how people relate to each other and how that relationship impacts the experience of themselves and what they can do in the world. And I think working in organizations is a great space to explore that impact and those dynamics.
Could you expand a bit on what those dynamics are?
I think organizations need to become less like production lines and more like living systems. So there’s the socio-emotional, cognitive, and psycho-dynamic aspects of the human that aren’t really present in organizations today. We have this mechanistic understanding of who we are and what we do and how we do it, which are all based on outdated notions of the self and that we don’t change when we reach adulthood. But adults change! There’s this really damaging myth that we don’t and it’s hindering growth.
Why do you think it’s so hard for people to recognize that adults change?
Well, when growing up we see the change happening from a physical and biological perspective. We hit puberty and our bodies change and develop. It’s much more visible and when we reach adulthood we just don’t see that change on the same scale. We have a much more difficult time understanding development that we can’t see. So even if we change as adults we’re just not socialized to see or understand and engage in that change. Adult development is discontinuous and contextual so we need to create that context for our growth to continue.
How can you create that context?
I think organization design has to co-evolve the structural and human components. Because right now there’s a tension between the social and business aspects that needs to get brought in to closer conversation. What I believe is that that work has to be led from the human element, from the developmental opportunity and not the structural imperative. I don’t think we can continue to do organization design and development in that order where we create structures in the hope of then impacting people in a certain ways.
Rather we have to understand the developmental opportunity of the culture as it exists in relation to the work that needs to get done and then design roles and organizational systems that allow those things to be in constant evolution.
Isn’t it hard though to be in constant evolution?
I remember one day in grad school where we were in a seminar with a visiting professor who said, to a room full of sociologists and criminologists “There are no social structures, all there are are practices.”. And I really got that. I’m interested in the micro and how all those practices we do in the daily coalesce into what people think are structures. But essentially it’s just practices, habits, and behaviors that we repeat over time. We’re already doing it so we just need to give it some attention — this idea that these are practices we’re engaged in and that we can change them.
How can we start changing behaviors when it comes to organization design?
I mean, if you want behavioral change you need to change the actual person from the inside out. Just changing the behavior and introducing new practices can be ideological and dogmatic, which is not empowering at all to that person. We need to get into a reflective feedback loop instead where feedback isn’t a monologue, because then you get stuck in a cycle, but a dialogue. Because that involves other people and opens up more possibilities in changing who you are, what you think of yourself, and how you interact with others. And that’s much more empowering and goes back to this idea of the organization is in constant evolution. But it’s also reflecting humans because we’re open and evolving systems already where any feeling of the self is happening in the moment of interacting with and relating to another person.
It reminds me of the concept of bringing the whole self to work.
Yeah, it’s related and, this might sound obtuse, but this idea that people need to bring their whole self to work is great. But the thing is that it implies that people don’t already do that, which they do. It’s just that some parts aren’t invited, welcomed, engaged, or related to at work. It’s like — you don’t take part of your arm off when you go to work, it’s still there. Worst case scenario you’re hiding these parts of yourself so you can function in a way that you believe your culture has dictated to you.
So what do you think of the concept of psychological safety that Google popularized a couple of months ago?
Everyone is like “Yay!” and that’s great. But we’ve known this for a long time in terms of academic research. It’s just that we haven’t enacted it. My perspective is that people are talking a lot about the end thing, but in order to have psychological safety you need to have empathy and in order for that you need vulnerability and that requires self-awareness. You need all of those pieces to make it happen.
Yeah, I think ‘empathy’ is also one thing that people are talking about and it’s becoming a buzzword.
Totally. A lot of people confuse sympathy with empathy, which means you’re just responding in a certain way. But you need to relate to others. So, what’s the quality of the conversation? How do you know that you’re being empathetic? These are questions people are not asking and reflecting on which is very fundamental to what it means to have empathy. I think opening up one’s self and think about one’s self in relation to others is the process of building all of these parts that lead to psychological safety in a culture.
Switching focus a bit to Nature of Work — it says on your website that you only work with organizations that are ready to change. How do you determine that?
If someone’s interested in the work that we’re offering we have a meeting with them and hear about their challenges they’re facing and in addition to telling them about our intervention techniques and beliefs, we try to understand in as much depth and breadth as possible, the thinking the person is using to discuss their challenges. This is an example of not taking the micro for granted, but rather using the concepts as opportunities to invite new ways of thinking about the challenge. But one of the fundamental things is if we can have a deep dialogue, a real conversation, and that they’re ready to open up to show us some of their thinking. Because that is crucial to our process and shows us that they’re ready.
What happens when a client doesn’t open up?
We had a client that had problems with getting their team to be collaborative and in their work with us they ended up replicating the same challenge they identified in their teams, which meant we got treated as a siloed partner. We tried a couple of exercises to get them to open up and show us their thinking, which was done with somewhat gritted teeth from their side. The next day the feedback we got was that they did not like that process, but they started to give us a lot of the information we needed to have to proceed.
What’s your process with clients?
We want to create opportunities for learning, so instead of standardized tests that means you’re only regurgitating knowledge we’re deeply engaging people in their own processes of thinking about their thinking. The way we do that falls into two buckets.
The first bucket is through dialogue where we do a lot of listening. Both me and my partner Nathan Snyder are trained in a method of listening to certain forms of thinking. We listen to what kinds of areas people are focusing on and through different sorts of questions we try to get people to connect that area of thinking to the next hierarchical form of thinking. It’s a cognitive complexity exercise made in conversation.
And the second bucket is writing. We ask people to think about scenarios and write about what’s important in that scenario and how they would make a decision about it. So it’s a conversation with yourself and we pair that with the dialogue so together we can form a pretty comprehensive understanding of someone’s socio-emotional and cognitive complexity and understand how that relates to their team, works tasks, organizations, and how they structure the organization.
That sounds really interesting and relates to the feedback loop you were talking about earlier.
Yeah, these are both low pressure tasks because you’re not getting graded. It just enables you to learn about yourself. We generally start here and have some general steps but we don’t know what we’re dealing with until we do this kind of assessment and diagnosis. And we’re also trying to get them ready and see the value in this process because that means they’re going to perform better which is better for all parties.
To me it seems like you’re pretty different from a traditional consultant agency since you don’t have a specific step by step program that you follow.
There’s a big difference between being an expert consultant that tries to influence you, that tries to be the smartest person in the room, and that wants to have the best ideas and a process consultant that’s trying to stimulate you to think differently and especially think differently about your own process. It’s about telling someone how to change versus supporting someone in their own process of change. The outcome from that process and the value is for the client, not for us, to determine.
I’ve been looking into facilitation and it’s value in this type of process. What your take on it?
I think facilitation can be an incredible way of doing process consultancy. There’s something really valuable in having that outside perspective because people get so ingrained in the narratives they tell themselves about all of the things that concern work, like who they are at work, what work is, and who their team mates are.
An outside consultant is someone who’s listening differently and can begin to interfere safely and productively in those narratives so they can help people change these stories they tell themselves about how things are.
So, when it comes to culture. What does it mean to you?
Culture is one of the most difficult words in the English language to define. It has a science background, an agricultural one, and the list goes on. But for me culture is an expression of other things, it’s not the thing in and of itself. So trying to design the culture, that isn’t the thing, but rather the expression, the outgrowth and the dialectical to that other thing doesn’t make sense.
What are your thoughts on culture design agencies then?
It scares me. At least the term. I know it doesn’t mean “You’re going to act like this and you’re going to do your work like this”, I know it’s more nuanced. But one of the first things I always taught my students when I was teaching in the UK was to question everything. So for me culture design is a dictation and not a system of questioning, just in terminology.
What more do you think we should question when it comes to these agencies?
I think there’s a huge question surrounding ethics as soon you start talking about culture design and systems in which people participate. Especially as an outsider, do you have the right to dictate how people should work? Is it even ethically capable and what are the ethical implications of deciding for someone how they should work? For me ethics is fundamentally about how people interact with each other and ethics needs to be a big part of this. Think about questions like:
- Are you treating the person you’re talking to as a person?
- Is this humane?
- Are you listening to them?
- Are you doing the work to be present?
All of these micro things are small ethical building blocks of how we conduct ourselves in the world.
Why do you think people are attracted to these culture design agencies?
People want solutions. And I think that’s part of why we’re in the problem we’re in socially. People believe there are solutions that they can adopt, or even answers, when actually they need to learn how to ask questions differently.
Thank you so much for your time and insights Dara! If people want to know more about the work you do — where should they go?
Sure, no problem. I recommend checking out our Medium publication and get in touch with us via our website.
I’m researching culture building in startups for my MA in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island. For more info: http://bit.ly/building-startup-culture
