John Bryan
There was a time when organizational psychologists, OD practitioners, et cetera, were convinced that the keys to organization effectiveness, if not the only keys, at least the most important ones, were group dynamics or team building, interpersonal communication effectiveness, conflict management skills, personal development, and mental health and hygiene. Management style was a very important subject.
Elliot Jaques came along, and his response was to conclude that psychological analysis, human relations, and psychotherapy, whether they were individual or group, were not the keys to organization effectiveness. He hypothesized that the organization was the key to organization effectiveness. Then he set about to find ways to identify the processes and structures of organizations and how they related one to another.
His foundational proposition is just that: It is the organization itself that is key to organization effectiveness, its structures and its processes.
In rejecting the traditional mental health paradigm for understanding organizations, Elliot did at times appear to neglect, to ignore, or even to disparage the human dimension of organizations. However, in my conversations with him, we did agree that no matter what else you might say about any organization, they were all staffed with people, every last one of them. Now, some people thought that Elliot had a negative view of people because of his emphasis on the organization itself and its assistance. But I found to the contrary, Elliot actually had a very, very high view of people. He thought that all people were capable, though variably so when it came to conceptual abilities, skill sets, et cetera. But he believed that if you would put people in a supportive environment, they were all well intended. Given a supportive environment, all people would function as well as they were able, if you will. It's a little bit like your golf handicap. Elliot didn't believe that people would ordinarily just perform up to their average. He thought they could and would perform up to their best.
Now, at this point, I'd like to bring into the conversation the philosopher Emmanuel Kant. He wrote a little book called A Critique of Practical Reason. Don't confuse it with A Critique of Pure Reason (That is a much different book). In The Critique of Practical Reason, he asked this question: "What makes human beings unique?" "How do we differ from all other species?" Now, Kant's answer to that question was that what makes us unique as a species is that we have a conscience. What he meant by that was that all human beings seem to have within themselves an insatiable desire to feel good about themselves and to have the other people around them also feel good about them.
Now, I'm a reformed theologian. I like being a theologian in this crowd because there are not many of us. I get to be unique just by practicing my profession. As a reformed theologian, I add to Kant's definition a third quality that is unique about human beings. In addition to feel good about myself and have other people feel good about me, I think it is also true that all human beings have an insatiable desire to believe that they are achieving a purpose in life that they deem worthy, doing something that they think matters.
Now, where Elliot and I disagreed is in the recognition of the presence of evil, evil. As regards organizations, I'm concerned about two expressions of evil that I believe lie at the heart of capitalism. One of those is greed, and the other is selfishness or self centeredness. In legal parlance, selfishness or self centeredness is called self interest. Theologically, we call it idolatry, idolatry. The problem with all self made men (and all self made women) is that they have this tendency to worship their maker.
When I was first introduced to Elliot Jaques and to his organizational theories. I had met Elliot's work 20 years earlier when I wrote my first master's thesis, which was on defining middle age. Elliot had just finished his seminal research on middle age, and he had produced this sentence: "Middle age is not an age, but a stage in life." That one sentence got me my first master's degree. And I've always been thankful to him for the help, but I didn't know that he had gone into organizational work. My wife was an HR manager at Imperial Oil, and she invited me to come to a staff training day. The presenter was George Harding, whom some of you know, George is dead now. George was presenting Elliot's work, and he started by asking the question, "What is work?" Now, there were 25, 30 people in the room, right? And, they are all people who work for Imperial Oil. They're pretty bright people. And I figured that they would know the answer to that question because I don't care which catechism you study it's in the first ten questions. So I knew, everybody knew the answer to that question. Nobody was answering the question, they were all quiet. I decided, well what the heck, they must just be shy. So I said I'll answer that question: "Work the curse of Adam." Everybody knows that answer to that question. George didn't write anything on the newsprint, so I thought, well, maybe he's a Lutheran. I'll try another answer to that question: "What is work? Work is the gift of God, the ability to co-create." George still didn't write anything on the newsprint. I thought something is amiss here. He then wrote up Elliot's definition of work and I found it tremendously helpful. In fact, all through the time that I knew Elliot and worked with him, I found his definitional work amongst the most helpful things he did, bringing definition and clarity to our language, to what we were talking about. I always valued it.
Elliot, however, was not a theologian, and he was not seeking to deal with this question, so he didn't address it much. He was trying to direct the thinking of organization studies away from psychology and psychoanalysis as such to systems analysis of organization itself.
Now, if it is true, as I believe it is, that evil does exist and tempts us human beings to accumulate wealth beyond our needs and to think of our own selves to the exclusion of others, then certain human factors, that is, human attitudes and human abilities become essential for organization effectiveness. There would be three of these: self awareness, awareness of and sensitivity to the needs of other human beings, and the ability to interact with other human beings and relate with them. These three human abilities and ways of thinking are not natural. We are not born with them. In fact, Elliot said to me once, "You know, people are not born little bundles of pure innocence. They are born selfish, self centerd and destructive. Thank God they are small and helpless." Our survival as a species requires that we teach people how to behave differently before they grow up. Our urges require that we learn restraint, and our desires for organization effectiveness require that we learn these three skills and attitudes: self awareness, sensitivity to the needs of others, and the ability to relate and interact with other human beings.
My disagreement with Elliot was not that either of us felt the human factor was not important. It was Elliot's belief that getting the structures and processes requisite was sufficient. I believe that organization effectiveness requires that we attend to human beings, to the complex human dilemma, to our urges to behave in destructive ways. I have a colleague who works with one of the major consultancies. His area of practice is corporate ethics. One of his favourite sayings is, "You cannot have an ethical dilemma unless you first have an ethic." Kant said we all have a conscience. And assuming that he was right about the uniqueness of the human species, that we do indeed have this conscience, then our ethics themselves are not innate. That is, they are not born within us, but they grow out of our self awareness, our awareness of the needs of others, and our ability to relate across that boundary that separates you from me.
It is here that Kant and Freud meet - around the human being's ability to negotiate the tension between our desires for autonomy, to stand as a human being alone and recognized, and, secondly, to belong to a community. Kant and Freud agree. Both would say that a basic human need and dilemma is to reconcile the tension between needing and wanting to be a unique and authentic individual, and at the same time, to be accepted by and belong to a community of other human beings - to feel good about myself and to be thought well of by others, and all the while earning a living and doing something that I believe to be worthwhile. This is what it means to be a whole human being, to live with this dilemma. Therefore, this is one of the things that organization effectiveness requires: that we attend to the human beings who staff these organizations, to their complex dilemma, and to their human relating, attitudes and abilities.