Relational Organisational Gestalt

An Emergent Approach to Organisational Development

Marie-Anne Chidiac

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429840883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a comprehensive view of the application of Relational Gestalt theory to Organisation Development and change interventions in organisations.

Uncertainty and frequent change are the hallmark of our times. In the field of Organisational Development and Change, fixed methodologies no longer adequately address the uncertainty and uniqueness of today's more complex change situations and more adaptive approaches to change are needed.

Gestalt is a relational, dialogic, and emergent approach which means that it views individuals and organisations as embedded in their context, dependent on, and emerging from within a web of relationships and interactions. As such, Gestalt offers a transformative, integral and bespoke methodology for working with this complexity. This approach supports practitioners to attend to their presence, seek out the most pressing issues and mobilise for sustainable change. Gestalt has at its heart the notion of use-of-self as instrument which allows practitioners to be responsive to emergent issues and situations.

Relational Organisational Gestalt is at the leading-edge of Gestalt theory and application in organisational settings.

PART I

UNDERSTANDING EMERGENT AND RELATIONAL APPROACHES

This first part introduces gestalt as an emergent, relational, and dialogic approach to change and situates gestalt within the evolving and expanding OD field of practice. As a change approach based on a humanistic orientation, gestalt views organisations as relational living systems with the capacity to self-organise, evolve, and emerge in response to changes in their environment. This position is in contrast to many OD and change approaches which still view organisations as machines whose cogs (individuals and groups) can be made to predictably slot into place for effective performance. This first part will therefore start by outlining the key differences in beliefs between organisations as machines and living systems, before providing an overview of gestalt, its history and assumptions as an emergent, relational and dialogic approach to change. Part I will then conclude with a view of organisations based on the gestalt theory of self.

CHAPTER ONE

From organisations as machines to living systems

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, “Seek simplicity and distrust it”.

—Whitehead, 1920

Whatever their orientation, change practitioners hold beliefs, values, and assumptions about how change takes place. This specific attitude is influenced by the practitioner’s experiences and ‘earnings but also by the predominant paradigms of the time. For many today, this is still the modernistic culture influenced by a century of scientific thinking; a culture which invites us to perceive our physical world as an aggregate of separate entities that come together as cogs in a machine. This attitude endures despite the realisation that all entities in this world, including humans, are thoroughly relational and are both composed of, and nested within, complex networks of creative dynamic interrelationships (Spretnak, 2011). This latter post-modern perspective calls instead for us to view organisations as relational living systems and bring this thinking to bear in the way we understand organisational processes and behaviours.

We witness still the predominance of modernistic thinking in the areas of OD and change management. Although ideas around complexity theories and emergence have, since the 1980s, had some impact on OD literature, these seem to be rarely applied still to change programmes. HR and/or OD functions within organisations are still pushing against cultures that view organisations as machines, people as cogs and business management systems as a control process. The greatest challenge lies in letting go of planned approaches to change, where the movement is assumed to be towards a known, often predetermined, future state. Many OD and change approaches struggle with embracing emergence and sit with the uncertainty of exploring true novelty in change and a movement towards an unknowable future.

Understanding therefore the modernistic lens—with its scientific and interlocking mechanistic assumptions—is also key to understanding the transition that is occurring slowly but surely towards an interconnected and relational view of organisations as relational living systems. This chapter will therefore contrast these two conceptualisations of organisations as machines and living systems and how they hold important and very differing beliefs about management systems, processes and leadership behaviours and especially how best change can be achieved and sustained. The chapter will conclude with situating gestalt as a needed relational and emergent OD approach, aligned to post-modern change practices and bringing experience and know-how to facilitate this in the personal and inter-subjective domain.

Organisations as machines

The influence of modernistic thinking

Fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality in western culture can be traced back to the classical Greek philosophers’ emphasis on rational thought and notions of atomism (that the physical world is composed of small, indivisible atoms which are invisible and collide and combine to form our world). The basis for a reductionist approach was set where rationality demanded we categorise our world according to differing forms and functions and in so doing lost the more comprehensive view of reality.

This view was then revived during the Renaissance and embraced by the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and later applied to social theory as well. In the eighteenth century a new mechanistic way of looking at the world (called the “new mechanical philosophy”) was embraced and was applied to every life perspective—even faith. Belief in God, Voltaire argued, did not require faith, since reasoning from observation could be used to infer the existence of a supreme being. A rational man, Voltaire claimed, only had to rely on the evidence of his senses to see how the “clockwork of the universe cannot exist without a clockmaker”.

And so today, three hundred years later, we are still influenced by these images of the world as a great clock and hold the belief in predictable and controlled processes in organisations. There is something ultimately reassuring in this simple belief of cause and effect and that organisations and people can also be engineered into efficient solutions. Frederick Taylor, an engineer and the originator of Taylorism (which is a term for the principles or practice of scientific management and work efficiency), was one of the early management gurus as he legitimised the right of managers to run their business in the most productive and profitable way irrespective of the views of the employees. For Taylor, the power of science and the authority of logic and reason led him to “scientific management” and the view of organisations as machines. This metaphor is still very present in much of the beliefs and widely accepted truisms about how change happens in organisations. Some of these myths of management life will be discussed next as they influence our perception of how organisations operate and change. Before that, you might want to reflect on your own assumptions about how change happens.

Suggestion

Ask yourself about your own assumptions and beliefs about how change takes place. What are the most effective ways to bring about change in yourself and others? How does this apply to your workplace? What trends do you observe in your work in organisations? How do these principles or ideas about change guide your work?

The myth of planning and top-down management as the only way of managing change

Planning itself can be a helpful and useful coordinating activity and yet the belief that creating an action plan itself leads to change is still widely held. Underlying this belief is the supposition that the only obstacle to change is a cognitive knowing of what needs to be changed. And so, organisations often spend inordinate amount of time in trying to “understand the problem” and then break it down to its smallest component to resolve it.

Chasing the “problem” and breaking it down to manageable chunks fits with a perspective of an organisation as a machine and doesn’t support managers to embrace change that may result from creativity, opportunity or improvement. This is after all, the relationship we have with machines and tools in our lives. Would we for example, think of improving the effectiveness of a washing machine unless it looked broken? Or, get a new coffee machine unless the current one wasn’t performing as anticipated?

This top-down approach to change through deconstructing and planning also brings about the issue of “motivating the troops” who have not been involved in most decision making and yet are expected nonetheless to carry out instructions or implement change plans decided upon by senior executives. In most organisations, the issue of motivation is managed through performance management and a carrot and stick approach. The assumption here is that the lure of an attractive salary or that the power of criticism and fear will motivate change. This disregards the need of human beings for positive and growthful connections in their workplace and speaks more to the mechanistic worldview. A view where people in organisations are perceived as discrete, fundamentally separate, mostly self-contained entities, and workplace relationships are seen as extraneous to the capabilities of a person.

The myth of the leader-hero at the helm

Another widespread truism around change is that it will be successful only if led by the top. As a result, leadership has come under scrutiny ever since the foundations of organisational development theory and the metaphor of the leader as a “lone hero” is imbued in our popular folklore. A good example of this is the praise for Rudy Guliani, the former mayor of New York who was recognised as the epitome of what a leader should be following the terrorist attack on New-York in September 2001.

The expectation is still for leaders to act as captains of their organisations and pull “change levers” and “drive” the organisation out of the chaotic seas to new and more exciting horizons. He or she is the one who courageously takes charge in a moment of crisis and independently makes decisions that save the world. This leadership model implies that for change to happen, the leader needs to be a larger-than-life individual who sets the “right” direction, empowers and motivates co-workers and changes behaviours all in one go. And do this alone because admitting vulnerability means you are not the man or woman for the job. This expectation often places leaders in an untenable and isolated position.

The myth that emotions are problematic and have no place in organisations

The topic of emotions within organisations is still viewed as inappropriate and as having no place in a mechanistic context. Emotions don’t make sense or support the worker-cogs to be more efficient or predictable. Emotional display rules exist in every workplace and include for instance expectations of being pleasant, expressing a minimum of hostility and negative emotions (Cropanzano, et al., 1993). Emotional displays at work are often perceived as problematic and must not intrude for example on the rationally built incentives that motivate people in organisations to perform and stick to common goals. In a change project too, negative reactions to the proposed change are often termed “resistance” and as such a problem to be resolved or removed.

Organisations as living systems

What do we mean by living systems

A new understanding of organisations has emerged from the sciences (systems theory, chaos theory, and especially complexity) as well as from postmodern thinking arising in a variety of fields such as sociology, literature, psychology, physics, biology, cybernetics, and linguistics. These areas of studies have significantly influenced the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of OD approaches. Some would like to view these influences on OD as separate and distinct theoretical bases as they arose from different fields of work and study. The cross-pollination across disciplines doesn’t however support such a purist approach and it is exactly this inter-breeding that best underpins a new understanding of organisations in the post-modernity era.

This new understanding is best captured by the metaphor of organisations as living systems and stands in stark contrast to the mechanistic view that arose from a century of modernity.

But what is meant by living systems?

First, it acknowledges the interconnected nature of organisations. Such a view invites us away from a causal perspective, to embrace and appreciate the complex dynamics within human phenomenon and structures. We can no longer rely on mechanistic predictability and control. This view was shaped from many ideas such as general systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1968) as well as field theory (Lewin, 1951).

Second, a living system is an organisation that is itself alive. This is not to describe organisations as “biological” systems, but rather to say that they are infused with consciousness and seem to have properties we attribute to living systems. Not only are organisations populated by living human beings but viewing an organisation as alive reminds us that living systems are located within, and are responsive to, their environment. To be alive is also to be dynamic in our behaviour and hold the potential for growth and renewal. Rather than static, organisations are therefore seen as complex and emergent systems with their own life force and some would say, purpose.

Suggestion

How do the organisations you know behave more as living beings than machines? What feels familiar and what is your reaction to it? Where would you place yourself as an organisational practitioner/manager on the continuum of organisations as machines and living systems? What feels more or less comfortable?

The remainder of this section will summarise the key beliefs and assumptions underlying the metaphor of organisations as living systems and how these impact the work of change practitioners.

A postmodern perspective

Modernity is viewed as a period in which reason dominates and so modernist knowledge such as science is therefore seen as resting on solid and irrefutable foundations. In Postmodernity, we find a weakening of reason, a breaking down of homogeneous, unifying models of knowledge (Montuori, 1998). In other words, knowledge becomes relative and contextual, and any pretence at linear progressive development is removed.

The postmodern condition appears as we find a succession of failures in our “modernist” thoughts and practices. Old and established business practices seem unsuccessful, as the economy and organisations appears more confusing, chaotic, and complex. In other words, more human! Organisations contain all aspects of human life which can often be messy, irrational as well as emotional and confusing. There is nothing orderly or predictable about human beings and viewing them as cogs or machines just does not fit.

Postmodern thinking is found in various philosophies or theories ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding Emergent and Relational Approaches
• Part II: Gestalt Concepts and Practices
• Part III: Applying Gestalt to Organisational Settings
• References
• Index