Taking back control
A key move in living your own life is grasping what is true for you. We have been schooled and sanctioned to believe that truth is external, out there, and the same for everybody. But the most important things in our lives are what we truly understand because we live them; they are an integral part of our bodies and the way our bodies experience the world. In fact, we can only understand our environment as our environment and in that sense the world is the world we see.
What phenomenology and the enactive turn in philosophy tell us is that our freedom and autonomy is to direct our attention. When we do so, we act differently and notice different things. We cannot step outside our environment to decide what to pay attention to. We can, to some degree, empathically understand that other people are directing their attention differently and seeing and experiencing different things as a result.
We have looked before that von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt. We can understand to some degree that for animals, with their different ways of being and different senses, the world they experience is completely, utterly different to the world we experience. The cat who repeatedly looks out different doors is perceiving different possibilities in a world that we think of as “the same”.
But we need to make this key step in taking back control. We need to recognise that what we live is ours and we need to recognise the sense in which we have chosen it. We need to know absolutely that there is no way of telling von Uexküll’s ticks about the world they are missing, and there is no way for anyone to tell us what our lives can or must be. To take back control is to recognise the uniqueness of what we live and both the difficulty and huge value of sharing what we experience.
Trying to live other people’s lives, trying to tell other people what to do, trying to promulgate universal truths, trying to protect our supposed freedoms, is usually simply to deny our own lives and the only chance of real freedom we have. The Johnsons and the Cummings of our world simply build a hell for us all with no hope of any sort of control: they have given it away in their first, blaming, moves.
It is not for nothing that bullies do lots of shouting, declaiming, gesticulating and, well, bullying. They want us to see their world, and their failure is to understand that it is only their world, that their psychopathic desire to impose their “control” is some polar opposite of growing effective control and coming to understand what control is available.
Structural coupling
Adopting an autonomy perspective of autonomy also brings with it a certain way of thinking about semantic information or meaning. For enactive theorists, information is context-dependent and agent-relative; it belongs to the coupling of the system and its environment. What counts as information is determined by the history, structure and needs of the system acting in its environment. — Evan Thompson, Mind in Life
Patrick Hoverstadt and I once ran a day’s experiment in the structural coupling of organisations. We got some high-powered HR types to role-play the exploration of how the structural coupling of organisations means that certain strategies and tactics are possible and certain others are impossible until the coupling changes.[1] The result of the experiment was that the professionals were allergic, scared witless, by the implications and couldn’t do the role play even in fun.[2]
It is obvious to me, but not always clear to people I speak with, that accepting the nature of the relationships that make us who we are is the foundation of freedom and taking back control. Trying to be someone we are not is never a good recipe. This is the importance of Evan Thompson’s insight that meanings are the creature of how we are coupled into our world. We can see here as well that Johnson’s pathological lying, deceit, and lack of loyalty to others tells us he is not prepared to accept his world. A world with no reliable coupling is not free but in free-fall. With no structure to give meaning to a world, there is nothing meaningful to be seen or experienced. And Johnson and Cummings project that meaninglessness onto their world.
Taking back control
In a recent email exchange with John Raven, we are discussing the technologies we know of that might help regain some control. Three technologies stand out:
· Team syntegrity from Stafford Beer
· Warm data labs from Nora Bateson
· Dialogue from David Bohm
Syntegrity is explicitly technocratic and cybernetic. It is designed to give a rapid-fire rotation of overlapping small meetings, over a period of three days, to allow a series of propositions to be considered, absolutely in parallel, without any initial prioritisation. It is a great antidote to might is right. It also allows us to see that all our normal thinking implicitly prioritises some issues over others.
Warm data labs use a very relaxed and serendipity-powered version of the same structure: overlapping small meetings, with free rather than tightly structured movement between them. It is not looking for an outcome in the space of the issues considered, more a direct experience of Evan Thompson’s statement above. It looks for liberating insights, that overturn the sanctioned views of how the world works. It can come close to understanding how people around us see the world differently, but in real time.
Bohmian Dialogue searches for buried assumptions that introduce structural flaws into thinking as a system. Because thought is a system, a flaw can manifest as logical mistakes anywhere though goes, not limited to the locality of the assumption itself. Dialogue is the longest timescale of these methods with trust between a set of dialoguers being built up over weeks and months.
An organisational excursion
Many of my colleagues believe that people in an organisation need to sing from the same hymn sheet, to share values. They often also think that they have a key role in bringing this about. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is the liberal version of Johnson and Cummings: we all need to think like me, but we will arrive at that position gently and sweetly.[3]
As we have been discussing, people see the meanings they see from the way they are coupled into their environment. If they see something different, or make different meanings, from others in their organisation, then they do, and any attempt to “correct” this is both violent and counterproductive. People need to do the work of the organisation from where they are.[4]
Work groups are made from people, and larger parts of organisations are made from these groups. Far from needing to be aligned, the work of the larger units and the meaning of that work is the result of being coupled into an environment of smaller units that do what they do. “Compliance” narrows what counts as work until it simply becomes bullshit.
Looking at the work of enclosing larger organisational units and the work of smaller groups defines the system and the environment in which anyone must find their meaning and their work. The “vale-sharing” mob hate this insight and by denying it, lose control. They take that loss of control to be a reason for imposing “solutions” that make the situation worse. This is the systemic root of the prevalence of bullshit jobs. People are forced to pretend things are otherwise than they perceive them.
The route to taking back control is to recognise that it is only the diverse experience and work of people doing what they need to do that makes it possible for an organisation to do a job in the world that can be comprehended by customers and other stakeholders. This is the only route to taming the vast complexity and confusion that any organisation is embedded in. This is a hugely important insight that management almost never understands: someone, some real concrete person, has to deal with the realities that are not part of the organisation’s core reality. All that weirdness only gets amplified if you deny that it exists.[5]
Love and respect
Returning to our list of three technologies, they all have an in-built sense of respect for what the people carry in the process. The second two have more of a sense of love for the others in the process: more of a sense that deep communication is necessary for common humanity to find a way. If people in these processes feel defensive about their own experience and whether that experience is acceptable to others, then none of these technologies can work.
Trust is being eroded so fast in our world. A transactional and contractual culture is at the root of that. The bullies who lie and deceive capitalise on the degradation. “Natural disasters” like coronavirus hugely accelerate our distrust of other. Floods make us realise we are dependent on others (literally upstream!) in ways we failed to imagine. What forces in our world are able to bear these wounds and still understand we need each other? I saw a short tweet saying that a difficult person was simply one we did not have the skills and empathy to welcome open-heartedly.[6]
Technology is never ever neutral. The discussion currently about the inherent racism of AI surveillance is a good example here. We can use technologies that we know are divisive and damaging to human relationships or we can choose technologies that have at least the possibility of healing. This echoes our understanding of the enactive turn: our freedom is precisely freedom to choose how we look at the world and what we pay attention to.
We are able quite easily to assess whether people feel respected by an organisational process: we can ask them openly and we can deal with complaints. I have heard of high-powered stakeholder meetings where a facilitator simply timed who had the floor for how long. Powerful people are usually surprised by how much they hog the floor. I suffer myself from this problem and am aware of it when having conversations.
Of course, these issues are sides of the same coin. If we don’t understand that difficult people are seeing things that we don’t then we won’t respect them or their use of time. My experience of this is trying to hear what people are actually saying, as distinct from the narratives in the public sphere that are false or otherwise a waste of time. I don’t need to hear someone who says that the EU have stopped dredging our rivers, but I may need to hear what is behind their delusions. Bohmian dialogue is a big stretch here but it is at least focussed on the presenting issue.
External reality
What we speak of as external and objective reality can only be patterns in our experience stable enough for other to have similar experiences.[7] We tend to shortcut these patterned processes and call them external facts. That is a problem quite often because we forget that unless the process continues to run itself and organise itself then the fact is no longer true.
We probably need another technology that allows us to remind ourselves that patterns of experience are process patterns and that many things can affect those processes even if they are normally very stable.
[1] In Philip’s work as an Enterprise Business Architect (whatever that means), the important bit is in the structural choices that make certain things easier (or possible!) and other things harder.
[2] Shades of Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games: “whoever must play, cannot play”
[3] and seriously, of course.
[4] People need to do the work of themselves from where they are, too. Meet yourself there, and be kind.
[5] Just think of any out-sourcing effort you’ve been involved in or experienced the result of, and of how the diversity of response has been chopped away as the processes were formalized and transferred to a contractually-bound party that might actually follow them.
[6] An apt and apocryphal quote from Abraham Lincoln: “I do not like that man; I must get to know him better”
[7] Similar but not identical; in Shifting Contexts, Wilk & O’Hanlon warn that we should not expect any objective reality to be coherent and consistent; if it seems to be, we’re still in the midst of a fable.
