I jotted down these thoughts after the sexual abuse allegations in Canberra, in Australia’s parliament house, in 2021.
My own experience in organisational systems grappling with power is varied. I’ve worked in large hierarchical organisations like the military, as well as in government agencies. I’ve also worked in NGOs that are less focused on formal roles, reporting and accountability and in which the guiding hand of organisational power is less visible. I have worked alongside leaders, practitioners and people reliant on care in public institutions, in agencies providing disability assistance and in elder care organisations, particularly residential agencies and group homes, and often during volatile change processes. While the need for change may be framed as mismanagement or abuse, I see these as symptoms of a deeper root connected to the mystery of power.
I noticed a common pattern across the variety of work places and fields I traversed. Some people seemed to rise to the occasion and blossom through difficulties, while others stayed trapped like a caged bear or wounded pup. These characteristics were present across the board – in leaders, helpers and the people they serve.
I wanted to know what gave some people the capacities to regain their ground when knocked off centre, and to bounce back from difficulties with optimism. Internally-sourced capabilities are self-generative, so actions that arise from them have the potential to be self-sustaining, or so my logic went. Pulling people uphill on a change program against their will is a hard slog, no fun, and frankly, I have witnessed how counter-productive that often turns out to be. Studies show that about 75% of organisational change efforts fail. I wondered if nurturing these human capacities in everyone involved could be a key to designing transformational change. While sometimes change isn’t really wanted and the strategy may be more of a tick the boxes exercise, I have experienced various avenues that leaders use to navigate change.
One avenue is a surgical victim/perpetrator approach. Remove the problem and get on with business as usual. By that I mean those suffering take the blame, or those accused take the blame. Don’t open a can of worms. Make the problem go away and everything will be all right. But history reminds us that even if you can fire the rider, you can’t fire the horse[i].
Another avenue is the reactive approach; sweeping changes to policy and procedures, to prevent a problem recurring. Make sincere promises and give motivational presentations to explain why the change is important, how things will improve and what it can achieve. Create a big campaign to inform people how to do things differently. I recall the first democratic elections in South Africa, in 1994. Every household was promised a tap. A promise that took far too long to roll out for those waiting for running water at home. Emotions escalated and trust corroded.
Structural and leadership change is another avenue, with an entire rethink of the purpose, direction and strategy. The leadership team that develops the plan may be fired up and rearing to go. For those who are expected to follow from outside the ops room, if it doesn’t feel right, if the Why, the What and support for the How don’t synch well, and if the revolving door of leaders and consultants keeps on turning, change fatigue can sap enthusiasm and people switch off, get cynical or push back.
Training can be an avenue for change but is often weakened if those in guiding and support roles outsource vital interactions because they feel emotionally ill-equipped. And then there’s the Monday morning effect. The breakthroughs in Friday’s training room don’t stand a chance on Monday, when up against fixed patterns of thinking and doing things.
Learning labs across the network are another avenue for change. These collaborations can encourage pockets of experimentation across the organisational matrix. People get together and examine a problem in specialist or mixed-interest groups, and enthusiastically try a whole bunch of things. Here, the thrill is co-learning, and catching spontaneous, unpredictable signals of a tiny movement – a potential super spreader that sparks enthusiasm and strengthens the entire system’s vibrancy and effectiveness. The paradox here is the tendency for competitive silos and leadership drift, away from the scene of action.
These avenues are navigation strategies. Any one of them can be a starting point, and they may all be used in some way. Typically, there is a dominant thrust that mirrors the tendency of the leader. Early results might show promise. However, I haven’t yet seen a strategy that of itself creates trust and sustenance for the long haul, if bad behaviour persists in ordinary interactions and tensions as well as in suppressed or overt conflicts. For this, it is necessary to understand what is happening inside the person to trigger reactive reflexes. Common tendencies include fight, flight, freeze or appease. These strategies are temporary, and besides, they usually require an external agent to inforce them. Only reprimanding and suppressing unwanted behaviour simply isn’t pragmatic or sustainable. These psychological patterns are useful to know about, because they often block our best efforts to stay centred in difficult moments, and to loosen from the hypnosis of a disturbance to take a breath and get a wider view.
So what might be going on inside the experience? While a person’s role may have high rank, the person inside the role may not feel very powerful, and proceed to automatically compensate for that rather than address their feelings directly. Someone who doesn’t feel powerful may not look like they don’t feel powerful. They may act with force, and feel temporarily powerful.
The feeling of being less than, may come across as ego driven behaviour, entitlement and territorialism. A person may have good ideas, but feel emotionally impoverished and lack the generosity to act in service to something bigger than themself. The compulsion is to fill their own nest first. Taking up more than their fair share of the air space in talking time. Tantrums, bullying, and self-serving behaviours. Feeling like an imposter, that you don’t belong or fit in, is a common experience and can trigger reactive behaviours. Being starved for recognition and not having the generosity to help others shine and get the credit. Difficulties self-regulating. Sexual harassment and abuse. Playing favourites. Posturing and lecturing, not listening. Not getting that just because you didn’t mean it, or don’t get it, doesn’t make the impact of your behaviour any less your responsibility. The vibe and messages we put out, are more apparent to those on the receiving end than to ourselves.
Root causes and drivers of these instinctive and well-worn reaction habits, derive from patterns set in childhood, and from structural patterns of discrimination that are baked into our pain body often without the mind’s conscious knowing. These are the painful isms, such as sexism, non-binary gender discrimination and homophobia, racism, ableism, classism, lookism, health and socio-economic inequities, and communication style differences. As a leader, to bypass or ignore the warning signs and knowledge of poor use of personal power is a recipe for mistrust to skyrocket.
The avenues of change are important, but it’s the targeted depth work with leaders, their teams and champions on their own use of power that in my experience is the game changer. Shaming, rules and punishment may work temporarily to stop or deter bad things from happening, but on their own they lack the vitality to feed the creative source of self-sustaining change. This applies equally to small organisations, as to international relations. Much good can come of creative arts exchanges between countries that in the public eye are strongly opposed to each other’s policies. This is why budget cuts to the arts are so short-sighted. Art is a universal language. Any creative collaboration across borders of mistrust and stereotyping involves sharing stories, and makes it harder to hate the person on the other side. A human being just like you and me. In Australia, Bangarra Dance Theatre, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander company, is a moving example of how the very people who’ve been robbed of power and survived are the ones we cannot do without, as they hold up a mirror and lay pathways for moving together through the mess.
Getting into the mess as the key to finding entry points for the way forward, may not be everybody’s cup of tea. If it grabs you to try, and if you have the patience and endurance to learn to harness your innate tendencies and to live with contradictions, you may discover an innate sense of happiness even in hardship. This also may be more fruitful in bringing about systemic change, than feeling a victim of the status quo.
Your thoughts?
[i] The rider and horse metaphor is from Arnold and Amy Mindell’s book Riding the Horse Backwards