Introducing the Healing Organisation

“F*** off with your hippy shit!”

My client’s response in front of the team to a suggestion I made to introduce a “Kudo Wall” to our team area. I’d been working on my idea for a few months. A “Kudo Wall” is a place where people can put up their “kudo card” for another — a small ticket of public acknowledgement for your colleague’s efforts.

I thought this was a great idea and had the potential to raise the self-esteem of our team members; something my client had raised as an issue. My client disagreed.

After getting told to go ‘f’ myself, what had me return the next day with renewed enthusiasm to effect change and make things happen? My ability to heal.

If there’s one thing that has had me become a better change agent over the years, it’s not been the books I’ve read or the techniques that I’ve picked up, it’s been the work that I’ve done on myself. Getting your ideas knocked back and seeing experiments fail is a necessary element of affecting change in organisations. By ongoingly processing the unresolved pain in my psyche, I’ve become more resilient — those knocks have become a little less painful each time. I’ve become more willing to face rejection, humiliation and failure in the name of transforming my clients’ organisations. For every modicum of healing, I become a little stronger.

Professor Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto articulates this link between learning and healing powerfully in the following quote:

“When you learn something, it’s usually painful. It usually means that you have to recognise that you’re wrong in some important way. You have to let that part of you that’s wrong die.”

So for the individual, so for the organisation. My manifesto is for an organisation in which leader-managers (a term borrowed from complexity thinker Ralph Stacey) embrace the need to heal as an imperative in building resilient, responsive organisations.

Below, I outline the six principles of the Healing Organisation. I will write a further six posts in this series: one to cover each of these principles.

SIX PRINCIPLES OF THE HEALING ORGANISATION

• Principle #1: Take the truth. Denial is the psychological strategy we employ to block the inevitable pain involved in truly grieving a business failure or personal loss. Leader-managers in Healing Organisations must actively encourage internal agents with the courage to break their denial. Unadulterated feedback is key. At the organisational level, the ongoing ‘organisational body scan’ is a core idea. Breaking denial is the first, crucial step in a broader healing cycle.
• Principle #2: Embrace pain. Business failures result in collective and individual emotional wounds that must be healed to facilitate sustainable recovery. People in healthy, expanding businesses accept that failure is part of business life and that failure is often painful. Leader-managers in Healing Organisations enable people to openly process and integrate pain as a part of their growth. As people heal, they grow wiser, conversations are less likely to get stuck, and history is less likely to repeat itself.
• Principle #3: Express emotions. Healing necessitates emotional expression. Leader-managers in Healing Organisations create opportunities for people to express fully their human emotions in order to heal and grow.
• Principle #4: Ask for help. When needed, healing organisations and their members request external assistance to help them face reality, engage in healing and find inspiration for the next challenge.
• Principle #5: Embrace the quiet. Leader-managers in Healing Organisations allow for quietness to part of people’s daily lives. Time for silent reflection is seen as productive time.
• Principle #6: Grow the whole human. The healthier the individual, the healthier the organisation as a whole. Leader-managers in Healing Organisations encourage and assist individuals to engage in ongoing work on themselves to grow emotionally, develop their authenticity and collaborate honestly and creatively with colleagues.

The next six posts in this series will explore each of the principles in turn.

I should note that The Healing Organisation is a purely speculative concept. I intend this series to be a hypothetical provocation.

This first piece is an adaptation of an earlier post of the same title, which I co-wrote with Dr Amina Aitsi-Selmi. I am grateful to her for her support and guidance in this effort.

Read the next post in the series, “Principle #1: Take the truth”, here.