Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…
Torrey Orton – June 29, 2009
“It’s about trying to find out what it’s all about – life that is – without sounding like a generation-X navel gazer. Is this possible?” This is Sarah Wilson, THE AGE Sunday Life‘s new A Better Life columnist, (June 28, 2009 pg. 6) blurb for her new column. I suspect that she may succeed in finding something life is about but not what it is. Her initial steps in the first column provide a skate around a variety of ‘about’ sources - pop-cultural with handles of deep culture (Asian religious terms, get-a-life coaching mantras and such). That’s her method for finding out I guess.
There’s a market for everything, and everything relentlessly is found by a marketer and transformed into product. I’m sounding bitchy to myself and I want to be clear it doesn’t derive so much from this example. It’s just the one which punched the following button. In the discourse of our public figures “it’s all about…’ is among the commonest sound bites to be had. In those cases, particularly the political speakers, the territory covered by ‘about’ is exactly what saying ‘it’s all about…’ cannot cover.
For example, our Premier, John Brumby, on the latest effort to deflect accountability for public transport by changing the guard without changing the task: it’s about serving the public, the community, which is just not what we the public think they are doing. We do not think so because the government traipses these platitudes (see organisational values below) around with decreasing public accountability, responsiveness or effectiveness in the performance the platitude addresses – transport in this case. Try planning for another.
What is it?
By linguistic nature, what something is about is not what it is. If it really is about something, then what that is is the matter of interest. The ‘about’ part is speculative, aspirational, at best, hopeful. It’s nice to know that the speaker has an aspiration, a hope, but not to know that that’s all they have.
In common usage, for example, we are asked ‘what was the film about?’ We answer it’s about crime, or love, or destinies… And our questioner, if interested in the leading line will ask something about what happens, the story. That’s what it is.
For pollies and CEO’s to ‘about’ things is to attempt a dog-whistle appropriate to their intended listeners – the public or shareholders or bankers. The result of effective aiming is the listeners don’t ask for more because they know what the story is supposed to be. They are playing a historical tune in peoples’ minds.
About values
Our leaders, for instance, say of their organisational values ‘we are about inclusion, transparency’, etc. (they all use a selection from a list of 10 or 12 I guess, for which they’ve originally paid Mckinsey and would-be’s $5K/day for top level consulting inputs, and now everyone can borrow them at the price reduction which comes from market penetration and copycat consulting). This can be found across the full organisational spectrum now.
To the extent such terms are proposed as a leader’s aspiration, they are already twice debased. Once by being potted priorities, and twice by being repeatedly proven (within the science accepted by such leaders – business effectiveness) to be unimplementable, or badly implemented, faultily understood, non-transerable and so on.
Take action
So, what to do? Try this: suppress your next use of ‘it’s all about’. Do it in normal conversation where the habit lies entrenched in standard usage. When you’ve done that 4 or 5 times you may discover that you have developed a capacity for saying what things are or are not. Often the missing material can be supplied be telling someone what struck you, what effect the performance, discussion, activity had on you. This will be the beginning of a short story which others can join through their stories of similar things. It’s for making the world closer to us and us to each other as a result. What it’s about is relationship.
Showing posts with label organisations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organisations. Show all posts
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
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.
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.
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