_____________________________________________________________
CONSULTANCY
WORKS
MASTERCLASS
IN PSYCHODYNAMIC CONSULTING
_____________________________________________________________
Larry Hirschhorn, a leading exponent and
practitioner of psychodynamic consulting, will offer a masterclass
where he will
* present his current thinking on organisational work
* discuss his consulting approaches
* consult to participants' consulting
assignments
The day is designed to be of
practical value to consultants, change agents, HR practitioners and managers of
organisational change projects.
Larry Hirschhorn is a principal consultant
with the Centre for Applied Research in
The masterclass
will be held
_____________________________________________________________
Notes on LARRY HIRSCHHORN masterclass,
There were around 25
participants seated in a circle in the basement of the Tavistock
building in
Larry struck me as a quiet,
patient and kind man who gently throughout the day coached us using his own
stories, case examples and examples from us.
He began giving us one slide
that summarised all his thinking. It contained both his Tavistock
derived thoughts and more recent thinking.
See below:
First the Tavistock thinking is
·
every organisation and team has a PRIMARY TASK
= a reason for existence, an answer to the "what are we here for"
question
·
with this task comes a set of RISKs which ...
·
....if properly managed and spread through
LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY and appropriate STRUCTURE, then people in the organisation
get on with their WORK and experience FLOW and fulfilment and follow the RULEs.
The
LEADERSHIP challenge is to manage and spread the risk using appropriate
structure, enabling people to get on with the work to achieve the primary task.
If
the RISK is NOT properly managed, that is through INADEQUATE AUTHORITY, people
experience inside them an overwhelming ANXIETY which they are only able to
contain through SOCIAL DEFENCES, (such as dysfunctional procedures, rigidities,
meeting processes, happy hour clubs and social supports...) which keep them
from doing the work, reinforces itself, further undermines authority but
contains the anxiety.
Ineffective
leadership asks people to take up risks not within their domain of judgement,
influence, competence eg. over empowerment and leads to social defences.
Example:
chewing gum salespeople, not selling enough, leader revises the commission
structure to strengthen incentive. This just loads more risk onto them. They
have little influence and need product enhancements, advertising etc.
So
the core Tavistock idea is that what you experience
inside (anxiety or flow) is a representation of the structure outside and when
ANXIETY is chronic, over time there develops a SOCIAL DEFENCE of which people
may not be aware.
Example:
ask people about the meetings they have. They often say there is a ritual, an
agenda which addresses the easy issues, but the hard issues are never
discussed. Over time the hard issues become undiscussable,
and the meeting ritual of agenda etc has become a social defence preventing
their discussion. A Social Defence is equivalent to a symptom in
psychoanalysis: it is unsatisfying, persistent, a
source of unhappiness which is there for the reason that it does some work on
your behalf.
That's
about all that Tavistock thinking traditionally covers.
Larry has more recently moved his thinking into some new areas. He finds the Tavistock thinking most appropriate to a stable world,
where there is a stable total risk and you spread it by dividing it up into
jobs.
We
are now in a POST INDUSTRIAL/KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY, of turbulent environments and
instability. In today's world organisations are encountering strategic
inflection points where the primary task is no longer self-evident and there
are questions of "What business are we in?".
This leads to 2 big new concepts on Larry's one slide: PRIMARY RISK and
PASSION.
PRIMARY
RISK is the risk associated with changing from one PRIMARY TASK to ANOTHER. (Eg. US Police force changing from
Law Enforcement to Crime Prevention/Community Policing). It involves a whole
new attitude, a new set of core competencies and performance measures etc.
Actually when these inflection points occur, you usually find that both the old
and the new primary task have always existed and the change actually represents
an inversion of foreground and background: police have always been interested
in crime prevention, but just more interested in law enforcement. Now the
priorities are reversed and crime enforcement becomes foreground.
Larry
refers in a paper on Primary Risk to Freud's model of mourning in which a
person does not complete their mourning until they acknowledge their hateful
feelings towards the other person who has died, thus relinquishing the person
or object that we loved. Until this happens the hate is introjected
and held inside and the person berates themself. (Eg. the widow who loved her husband continues to mourn
until she is able to acknowledge what an obstinate cantankerous old so and so
he was!).
Consulting
to the Primary Risk involves:
·
interpreting figure/ground relationship
·
interpreting how ambivalent feelings about task
in background are undermining performance of task now in foreground
·
helping the client let go of the hate/antipathy
they feel toward background task
·
constructing a
vital figure/ground relationship that makes business sense and enables client
to attend to both tasks appropriately.
Primary Risk carries into
the strategy formulation and change management arena all the Tavistock thinking. We find the same questions of anxiety,
structure, leadership, social defence. We also find the notion of TRANSITIONAL
OBJECT, the teddy bear to hold, (Winnicott?) which
helps to contain the anxiety (examples of Transitional Objects include the
Gantt Chart, the Change Programme, or the Consultancy team).
The choice of Primary Task
needs to be connected to people's PASSION.
PASSION is increasingly a
question for organisations in the post-industrial economy. It is energy, power,
limitless. It provides also pain and a capacity to endure difficulty. It is
linked to impossible tasks. It is what you experience when you step up to the
boundary. It involves feeling the risk and the excitement of the whole
enterprise. Just as with the question of risk, there is the question of how is
passion distributed - is it confined to a few who qualify by virtue of age and
grade eg. the board? Leaders
tend to be afraid of passion because it can subvert their authority eg. leader frightened by power of
the skunkworks. Leaders themselves can be bored and
can cut themselves off from passion. Passion can through contesting authority,
lead to the truly developmental culture that many of us yearn for and feel to
be sustainable.
Passion is bound up with the
questions of "What gives you energy?", "What takes it
away?" Passion is about everyone experiencing the edge, the fine line
between success and failure. Over-empowerment experiments may be attempting to
release passion but fail and create crippling anxiety and social defences.
Passion, like anxiety can be channelled into work or into social defence.
We explored a case example
of a firm which wanted to be entrepreneurial and needed to tap into its talent.
There was an old boys' network which inhibited men and women working together.
There were few women at the top. The old boys' network was leaned on to deliver
passion, leaving women out.
This generated some passion
in our group through which we learned that CHAOS is linked to PASSION. Passion
is the lighting of individual fires, taking the risks of breaking rules and
seeing where it goes. This in Larry's view is very bound up with questions of
sexuality, men and women in his words "working up against one
another", and, in psychoanalytic terms, the equivalent is the breaking of
the incest taboo in the family.
Fiona spoke about gender questions
in organisations often adding up to an older, dominant person who is male
working with a younger less dominant person who is female, which produces a
slipping into predictable previously known gender roles and behaviours that may
not be the most appropriate for the work...or something like that...anyway it
made me think about how we are working together in the Home Office, and the
risk of falling into unequal and inhibiting roles.
The morning was largely
spent on how as consultants we do DIAGNOSIS: you start from the outside in,
drawing the widest possible circle, looking at the whole organisation in its
environment and how risk and passion is being managed and distributed. You then
work inwards to the centre of the circle to find the social defence - the
behaviour that is probably both bizarre and obvious, keeping people away from
the primary task. You write up a WORKING NOTE to capture your thinking and circulate
this in the management team as the kicking off point for discussion at a
retreat.
The afternoon was spent on
HOW WE CONSULT with our clients. People took turns to sit at the front in a
pair playing out consultant/client discussion. There was a long silence and a reluctance each time for anyone to come forward. In the
end we had time for 3 mini-consultations. Fiona volunteered to be client, Angela was her consultant, with Home Office as the
topic. Then we had Meg as client with Richard as consultant, with a culture
change as topic and finally Claire and Tessa with NHS trust.
In each case we were
learning both about the case, using diagnostic concepts from the morning and
about the consulting. The consulting lessons seemed to be:
1. What is the client's
central question? (Eg. Why
am I feeling disabled?)
2. Join the client to find
the "task in their central question".(Eg. How do I find my authority?)
3. When you have completed 1
& 2, move the discussion towards practical action
At the end of the day I was
struck by the centrality of ANXIETY and PASSION in all that we had discussed. I
was also struck by the undiscussability of these
words, these inner experiences in everyday organisational life. I found it
easier to talk about risk, and risk management, than anxiety for example.
Someone mentioned that EQ is becoming useful as making some of this inner stuff
more easily discussable. Kamil invited me to think
about SHAME and how this links with my questions about undiscussability.
I still haven't figured this one out.
Finally reading Larry's book
(The Workplace Within) but not much touched on during the day is the important
idea of REPARATION or healing. In a nutshell this says that when anxiety has
become unbearable we all do something called SPLITTING, in which we take in, identify with or
INTROJECT the GOOD elements, and PROJECT the BAD elements onto others (this
comes from Melanie Klein I think). Larry describes this as the source of evil
in the world. Splitting represents the anger and blame part of the Kubler Ross bereavement curve and it cuts us off from the
other person onto whom we project. The healing or reparation process involves a
movement through shame and depression leading to taking initiative to restore
contact with, valuing and including once again the other person.
In the today's
post-industrial era, the great hope is that as we step towards the boundary of
our organisations, we re-contact others outside. This represents reparation,
healing and the source of passion, energy and renewal.
I'm now interested in how
these ideas apply particularly in the Home Office to people's over the wall
field visits (reparation?) and to the changing role of the civil servant from
"wiping ministers noses" to "delivering aims" (primary
risk). Holding to the old world seems to be bound up with anxiety, chronic
disconnection from passion (social defence), inability to grieve and the
leadership challenge is somehow to do with containing the anxiety attached to
the changing primary task. This week's top team workshop in the Home Office
should be interesting.
I'm also re-evaluating my
Relationship Management work in
Tony Page