The CLOM — Colleague Letter of Misunderstanding
While I found it a struggle to actually put much into production for the past two week and under the giving due dates, I find reflecting on how I’m challenged by the class to be far more interesting than indulging in the self critiques for my incomplete projects. Pointing out the indulgence of self critique is an important piece of what I’d like to write about for my assignment. While I expand the notion of self-critique looking at “self as work” or “human as labor unit”, I likely am motivated for a few reasons to generally avoid the topic.
Disclaimer — I will be using pseudo-psychical notions to defend the incompleteness of my projects which could be seen as a defense for my own guilt and embarrassment for letting others in the class down. Thus, writing in this manner likely serves to rationalize my own feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness which are likely a byproduct of my underwhelming performance last week.
So why would I share this with you?
1. In order to provide a path to reconstruct notions of value, performance, and expectations.
2. Providing a disclaimer allows me to skip a thorugh exploration into self-critique.
When I read things like social contract theory which backs the premise of this weeks assignment within the Leadwise/Espiral notions of self-organization I am struck by a few notion through which I hope to leverage for alternative interpretations of “self at work”.
Let’s get it out on the table, the stance I’m writing from is as underdog. It’s as though I’m scrambling against an opponent whom is overtaking me, as I’ll elucidate this stance of disadvantage I gives myself the upper hand against some fictitious opponent my psyche is painting of the other side.
I will contend with this mental image and project it onto some of the underlying assumptions of the class in order to help me to recover what I’ve lost in the incompleteness of my work. Again, I do this as a byproduct of some of the self-defeating tactics I shared above and if you give me the chance I should shed a unique vantage point onto social-contract theory as it applies to self-organization. The villain I will attempt to paint is not meant as a personal attack to those upholding the learning constructs of the class but my learning involves the deconstruction and reconstruction of the class constructs without which learning would be difficult for me. You know what they say the enemy of my enemy is a is friend.
I’ll take on three aspects of this weeks assignment from the deuce court;
Point One — We can only align to what is seen of the other.
We often times we think what we observe in the other person is what they are. If they are being genuine they are being true, which they may be however, we must also create the other in our minds to be something or someone. I think in the real world we can only know what someone is not and by knowing what they are not attempt to approximate what they are. This approximation process is what I think the notion of “aligning to one another” actually means. As one of the basic premises which backed class last week was “in self-organization we align with one another” I would argue we can only align to what we know of the other. The other is hidden to us, and what is hidden is modulated through our own constructions. Our own personality and psychodynamics are limited points of view on the “self at work” or the “other at work” each of which, being the trained pseudo psychologist I am here, is hidden objectively from our own subjectivity. As Kegan likes to say we are embedded in our subjective interpretations of the world and only until we project those on to the world can we get some objectivity from them, from ourselves. We unknowingly do this all the time, we project our realities onto others in the attempt to align with them. This is of course an impossible task to do precisely and in ways self fulfilling because what is learned in one moment is causative to the next moment that is shared with someone. We all get by with a little help from our friends. By recapitulating moment on moment with those around us we continuously, feverishly, attempt to construct those close to us. I’m not trying to cheapen intimacy here but attempting to open our minds to the notion that our projections of someone are not who they are. The hidden dimensions of human to human contact has as many unknowns as the glimpses we get of our own eyes. The subjective-mirrors we use to interpret one another and ourselves are the essence of what I think notions of aligning to one another to be based on. Social contract theories and the CLOU are the mirrors or tools we use to understand one another.
Point Two — We agree how we ‘want to be’ with each other.
In this new world of work we’re often playing with the notion of choice. Choice however within self-organizing system is also based on constraints. Without constraints we can’t organize. To agree how we want to be with each other irregardless of constraints would be to fail in the work of self-organizing. We are infrequently skilled at understanding one another’s constraints. While using the notion of constraints to talk about people is irritating, in order to agree how we want to be with each other means to make ourselves and others we work with aware of our own limitations— even the limitations we have in exposing our own limitations to one another. To think of limitation in this way compromises the notion of the choice. For example, how I want to show up in this class isn’t actually how I’m doing so. If I had full control of my choice I would be able to live up to my expectations of myself in this course. How we want to be is a product of who we are currently not a future self of who we are becoming. By agreeing how we want to be creates a false narrative and sets us up to have mismatched expectations of one another because no one is in control of who they will become. It is impossible to be in control of who one will become because ones current version of the “future making self project” is a product of the current self processes of production. Again, these are ugly, mechanistic metaphors unfortunately.
Point three — We can be better by agreeing with each other though a social contract.
I don’t have much more to say other than the idea of writing a social contract in order to better align with others and therefore to cause better arrangements with those whom I work is based upon the pervious two assumptions I contended with. I don’t know if writing a social contract does more harm than good because of these assertions I’m making. Maybe what is emerging here is a theory of colleague letters of misunderstanding, that might be more apt than an letter of agreements because of not ever being able to know one another and because limitations of choice. I think probably building a social contract theory for conflict would be where I’d take this line of thinking. It would be fun to do so through introduces some the inter-developmental constraints we face in working with others. We’d really be digging into some new ontologies for that project. Even the idea adults have the same basic ontologies of reality is arguable because of constructivist developmental psychology. If social contract theory doesn’t address the ontological differences between adults I think it runs the risk of perpetuating the inverse of what dominator hierarchies produce in organizational cultures.
In Summary
One of the things I’m struggling with in the class is the basic notion of the “self at work”. I think we must reconceive the “self at work” in order to replace dominator hierarchies with self-organization. Social contract theory as I’ve come to understand it this week still orients around a behavioral notion of the “self at work” which undermines some of the basic principles of self-organization like dependent co-arising and emergences. Reconceiving the “self at work” requires looking at the self from a behavioral, developmental, and psychodynamic/personality perspective each of which is orthogonal to the other. If the basic practice beneath self-organizing practices don’t account for these dimensions of self, I don’t know how work will never become truly new.
