Rectifications (10) – Bonding…

Rectifications (10) – Bonding…

Torrey Orton – June 8, 2009

Just about anything can be bonded in a few hours these days, and I’m not referring to super glue. You could think from the commercial promotions (900,000 web hits for ‘team bonding’) and the everyday journalistic mentions of bonding that we were in a new age of emotional embrasures. “Fun” plays a prominent role in promotional materials, guaranteed to bring every participant into the events. The resulting outcome claims and expectations are bizarre (from a mother-child bonding point of view).

For example, imagine the key players in Zimbabwe’s current government bonding their way to trust for 3 days in a 5 star hotel on the Zambezi in April ‘09? What were they thinking? Not long after, Morgan Tsvangirai acknowledged the government was going nowhere fast in addressing the disastrous situation of the country’s decline.

There are lots of ways and whys to bond. Among the common ways: running together (mini-marathon preps), hanging together (rock climbing, abseiling, ropes coursing), drinking together (group binges, bar flying), and singing together (karaoke?) with varying degrees of time and freedom to participate. Among the common whys to bond: improved team work, consequent improved ‘outcomes’, stakeholder retention and such.

But these are all playtime compared to the bonding that mother and child do. It takes months of night and day application to achieve, and it’s usually off a bit in one way or another. What would a perfect mother-child bond look like? It’s not to be found because the purpose of the bond is to provide a foundation for separation, for individuation. You can’t be a real person if you haven’t been bonded to someone else for a while before it was your choice to do so.

From a mother-child viewpoint again, if corporate events don’t include extensive (hours a day for many days) and intensive (physically close activities about life critical functions - eating, sleeping defecating, cleaning, cooing, etc.) components the ‘results’ can only be ephemeral, with memories mostly composed of fun and not-fun bits. Barely a basis for trust and confidence, except in the diminished forms these have now. Mentioning them in serious conversation is taken as doing or being them, a practice which leads immediately to doubt and distrust as we know from our expectations with politicians and car salesmen.

The mimicking of military or professional sports team regimens and atmospherics in some ‘bonding’ events is just having the real thing on. The team work which is aspired is often totally inappropriate. Either the group being bonded isn’t a functional team (has no substantive shared tasks or outcomes) or it already is a bonded group by dint of long-term internal social structures of shared purpose, perceptions and passions – the kind typical of professional organisations.

The prevalence of managerialist activities in places like universities is indicative of the extent to which they have lost their intrinsic purposes, perceptions and passions – characteristics which always made professors unlikely management leaders, and their colleagues resistant staffers. Bonding will not help and team building will confuse the misplaced expectations even more.

In this view, bonding is just HR and leadership cosmetics sold as anti-ageing applications for organisations without urgency or imagination. The saving grace is that like many products, there is always a market for a wide range of them in different market segments. The trouble is, many of those should never have been markets. The bonders in those various worlds and ways above are starting at the wrong end of the stick, hoping to bond something that was never together in the mother-child sort of way in the first place.

‘So, what?’, you say. So, our culture no longer understands what a culture is, unless it’s a reality show or high culture stuff – neither of which is formative for the everyday, though they aspire to represent it. A culture, a flowing entity of activities, values, feelings and artifacts sustained by generations of humanity cannot be created in a day, week or year. Decades are probably the minimum quanta for such enterprise. Therein lies another story, much longer, and perhaps more helpless, than simple rectifications pretend to be. It is the story of moral decline, among others.

We can’t have bonding in a ‘moving on’ culture, just bindings. This is done with practical obligations and material enticements…with local culture value / behavioural routines (see footy club end of season events) and money, access to special opportunities and prizes (see executive pay packages). Whatever these are, they are not intrinsic rewards of long term belonging and mutual commitment. The relationships in question don’t last that long, and many now are intended explicitly not to do so (what’s a job that it didn’t used to be: an item in a portfolio life ). If we are held together at work only for short periods of time (less than decade-long segments), life bonds cannot be sustained across groups, though a few individual relationships may survive the changes.