Deep Time: Narrative and Immanence in Organizational Consulting

I. Introduction

The pace of change and the resulting busyness flattens peoples experience of time. As they look to an increasingly uncertain future, predictions disappoint and surprises abound. The result is a shortening of time horizon. We often tell ourselves that we do not think about the future because we are too busy to mask a deeper explanation that we keep ourselves busy as a defense against thinking about the future. As we turn our gaze in the other direction, we increasingly dismiss history as irrelevant or even possibly harmful. Recently, a series of business anti-narratives with titles like, Control Your Destiny Or Someone Else Will (Tichy and Sherman, 1993) and Reengineering the Corporation (Hammer and Champy, 1993) offer up normative recipes for triumph over cutthroat competitors by exorcising all traces of times cycle. Forget what you know about how business should work--most of it is wrong! declares the book jacket of Reengineering.

Most contemporary product and service organizations demonstrate an interest in speed that boarders on fetish. Consider this paragraph from GEs 1994 Annual Report:

Speed . Todays global environment, with its virtually real-time information exchanges, demands that an institution embrace speed. Faster , in almost every case, is better . From decision-making to deal-making to communications to product introduction, speed, more often than not, ends up being the competitive differentiator. (GE, 1995, emphases in original)

The lexicon of contemporary business is filled with references to the art of squeezing more activities into less time: cycle-time, up-time, down-time, lead-time, response-time are familiar concepts across industries and firms. Indeed, competing against time itself has become a much heralded form of business strategy (Stalk and Hout, 1990).

No field has been left untouched by this obsession with how quickly things can be done. Both eyeglasses and home mortgages can now be procured in one hour. Discharge planning begins at the point of the hospitals pre-admission interview. Nor is the home immune from this lionization of speed. The New York Times (1996) recently declared that a new milestone had been reached in American demographics: for the first time in history, Americans bought more gas than charcoal grills. While the Times article flirted with a pop-anthropology explanation (while men historically have been societys hunters and fire-setters, barbecuing is becoming an androgynous activity), survey research, parsimony and common sense all point to a different explanation. Gas is faster. And fast, nearly ubiquitously, is defined as better.

As Stan Davis (19) has suggested the ideal becomes any place, any time, no matter. Time, context, and place all become points rather than dimensionalized. We believe that this has serious consequences for leaders of our institutions and constitutes a challenge for those who consult to organizations. How do we create the space and place from which to help organizations reflect and work through their confusion? How do we reestablish the importance of history and its vitality and relevance to the present and future in organizational consultation which too often is a-historical (if not anti-historical)?

In this paper, we describe a technique for establishing a working space in the course of an organizational consultation that facilitates the working through of collective transference phenomena thereby enabling a more sophisticated rational adaptation to the challenges posed by the organizations environment. This technique is a form of time travel which Gilmore and Shea (1996) recently described as a critical skill for effective leadership. It involves the ability to link past and future in present actions...(to) powerfully harness...journeys forward or back in time.[1]

We first discuss alternative concepts of time -- times arrow and times cycle (Gould, 1987) and argue that we have paid too little attention to historical dimensions of organizational work. When we do, we have been biased towards times arrow, linear, irreversible, unfolding sequences of events rather than times cycle which searches for deep, enduring patterns. When we are working within the paradigm of times arrow, we have been too content to stick with simple chronicles rather than thick narratives, which offer opportunities for organizations to retell their histories in ways that contribute significantly to their adaptiveness to face future challenges. Finally, we have come to regard working deeply within narratives as the beginning of a synthesis between the two frameworks for time when the stories reveal unchanging patterns across time that can serve as sources of continued organizational identity and strength.

II. Conceptions of time

By the end of the nineteenth century the discipline of scientific management, with its methods for studying time-and-motion, was well established (Nelson, 1975) and, as Bolter (1984) points out, the clock has been at the center of Western technology since its invention in the Middle Ages (p. 101). The contemporary focus on speed is part of a long tradition of a particularly salient form of temporal consciousness--time as what Stephen Jay Gould (1987, p. 10) calls, times arrow. This is time as history, the irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events, a vast linear ribbon of experience that we customarily partition into past, present and future. Within this conception of time are the issues of windows of opportunity, the road not taken, regret, fate making choices.

Times arrow is similar to parole, a classic concept in linguistics (Sausser, 1966) in which events are described as unfolding diachronically or through time. From the framework of times arrow, culture, practice and language conspire to focus the attention of an organization on that compartment of time that it presumably can most control, what William James called the specious present.

While the diachronic view of time is so ingrained in our consciousness that an alternative hardly seems imaginable, we must remember that for most of human history times arrow was viewed as equally incomprehensible , not to mention a source of profound fear (Eliade, 1954). All traditional cosmologies (and most contemporary religions) claim the existence of immanent things that are not subject to the vicissitudes of chronological time and they offer a rich panoply of ritual performances to celebrate and reenact this timeless stability. Various branches of science also have validated the existence of non-historical, timeless phenomena that belie the linearity of times arrow. Goulds case for a polar opposite of times arrow rests on data from geology demonstrating unconformities.[2] In juxtaposition to parole, Sausser analyzed the langue of linguistic structures in which experience is portrayed as reversible or synchronic. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss drew heavily on this distinction to demonstrate the deep structure of myths and other narrative forms (Levi-Strauss, 1965). And then there are Freuds numerous contributions to ways in which the past is continuously recreated in the present through the mechanisms of transference.

Gould uses the phase times cycle to describe this counterpoint to our everyday experience of times flow:

...events have no meaning as distinct episodes with causal impact upon a contingent history. Fundamental states are immanent in time, always present and never changing. Apparent motions are parts of repeating cycles, and differences of the past will be realities of the future. Time has no direction. (Gould, 1987, p. 11)

Times cycle, the proposition that there are fundamental states immanent in time, is quite congenial to a psychoanalytic perspective on organizations. However, bringing this insight to bear on psychoanalytically-informed organizational consultation is problematic for several reasons. First, as we have already noted, the contemporary business Zeitgeist is infused with the times arrow perspective. Second, for various reasons, most corporate leaders are disinclined to want to address the significance of past experience on current events. They prefer to see the past as irrelevant to the challenges they face in the here-and-now.[3] Third, there are no well-developed and widely accepted techniques for facilitating the analysis and working through of transference-like phenomena in the workplace. Not only is there no equivalent to the analytic dyad in organizations, but the actual mechanisms of the organizational analogue of transference have yet to be elucidated (Armstrong, 1995) While individuals surely project emotions routed in past experiences onto their workplace contemporaries,[4] the psychoanalytically-oriented consultant also will have encountered numerous examples of collective transference-- as in the well-known example of Bions dependence basic assumption group.

III. Fusing Sjuzet and Fabula or Making a Story

Our technique is based on facilitating the interplay between two kinds of discourse: narrative and immanence. The etymological root of the word narrative is the Latin narrare, to tell the particulars of an event or an act. But across all cultures, narrative is more than simple telling (Colby and Peacock, 1973). In order to appreciate the power of narrative as part of a technique for working through organizational transference, we need to first understand how it differs from other times arrow-style genres. Hayden White (1973, p. 5) calls attention to the distinction between chronicle and narrative, the former being simply an arrangement of the events to be dealt with in the temporal order of their occurrence. A chronicle becomes a narrative by the further arrangement of the events into components of a spectacle or process of happening, which is thought to possess a discernible beginning, middle, and end. White goes on to describe how a narrative employs various themes or motifs , including inaugural, transitional and terminal motifs.

Jerome Bruner (1986) described narrative as one of two possible modes of cognitive functioning or ways of knowing, each capable of making sense of experience by framing what is real. Each of these ways of knowing has a different logic, and each has profoundly different consequences for what is ultimately known and the implications of that knowing for action. While they both can be used for influencing the minds and behaviors of others, they employ different principles of causality to do so. One mode operates on the basis of arguments designed to establish truth; the other - the narrative mode- , on stories formulated for their lifelikeness.

the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily true) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. (pp. 12-13, emphasis added)

Bruner draws on the work of Kermode (1981) who developed the distinction between sjuzet, the sequence of events that make up a plot, and fabula, the timeless underlying theme of the narrative. The power of great stories, Burner adds, is in the dialectical interaction they establish between the two: the fusion of scandal and miracle.

At the beginning of this section we referred to narrative as a kind of discourse, literally, a running to and fro. A good story, like transference itself, is an interpersonal event. The fact that someone tells (or writes) a story is only meaningful to the extent that there is someone to hear (or read) it. And listening, like reading, is never a passive act. Elements of the story trigger associations in the listener/reader which result in interpretations that often differ from what the story maker had in mind. The receivers interpretation, in turn, creates what Iser (1978) has called a virtual text, a new story made by projections on a set of narrative guideposts. In this regard, a good narrative is a story twice-told.

While narrative resembles the linear movement of times arrow in some respects, it clearly goes beyond a pure historical and diachronic treatment of events. With the aid of Whites motifs and Bruners fabula, we can appreciate how narrative incorporates the unchanging, synchronic qualities of times cycle into the flow of otherwise idiosyncratic events. To the extent that narrative succeeds in placing timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, it begins the work of synthesizing the times arrow/times cycle polarization. However, that synthesis, by necessity, is idiographic, it bears the signature of one (sometimes several) story makers. 5 Although reflected in the virtual texts of its receivers, narratives typically are not produced by a group.

How can consultants work with a group of organizational participants to retell the story of their history together? The phenomenon of collective transference in organizations requires both a set of historical particulars and a set of enduring themes that are unique to the members of the organization in question. Just as the analyst-analysand dyad must be the source of the transference material that becomes the object of the working through in psychoanalysis, the client organization must provide material about the ways it invokes past themes in the course of its current work. This material must be as palpable and accessible for members of the organization as its therapeutic analogue is for patient and analyst. For this we need more than disconnected snippets of evidence of individual acts of transference to workplace objects. We need a genuinely collective narrative--a story made by those whose interpersonal emotional world holds grip over the possibilities of the present. We need a story firmly set in place. For this we turn to the second type of discourse on which our technique is based: immanence.

IV. Placing a Story in Deep Time

Once again, taking guidance from etymology,[6] we find that the word immanence derives from the Latin, immanere, to remain in its own place. Its own place. In an open letter that an eighty-one year-old Freud (1936) wrote to a friend, he recalled an experience he had thirty-three years earlier when he stood with his brother on the Acropolis in Athens.

When, finally, on the afternoon after our arrival, I stood upon the Acropolis and cast my eyes around upon the landscape, a remarkable thought suddenly entered my mind: So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school! To describe the situation more accurately, the person who gave expression to the remark was divided...from (the) person who took cognizance of the remark...The first behaved as though he were obliged...to believe in something the reality of which had hitherto seemed doubtful...The second person, on the other hand, was justifiably astonished, because he had been unaware that the real existence of Athens, the Acropolis, and the landscape around it had ever been objects of doubt. (Strachey, 1959, p. 304)

Freuds account of his divided mind nicely illustrates the interdependencies among memory, feeling and place. Common expressions like, I cant place it, and I feel homesick, illustrate how place can be a powerful container for emotionally charged memories. Place and emotion interact to galvanize experience and render it retrievable. Recall the magical moment in Remembrance of Things Past (Proust, 1981) in which Marcel discovers that his neurotic fear that time (times arrow) will steal away those things he loves most, is overcome by the experience of eating a piece of cake dipped in a cup of tea. He suddenly is transported back to his childhood when he often ate similar cakes and his memory erupts:

all the flowers in our garden...and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

If feeling deeply is the, catalyst that converts any physical location--and environment if you will--into a place, ( Gussaw,?) how is it possible to facilitate a consulting space in which people can recreate a place that is never as physically enduring as Freuds Acropolis? When working with organizations, what kinds of props can possibly serve a function similar to Prousts petite madeleine and tea? Where might the psycholanalytically-oriented consultant look for aids to help corral the narrative flow of past events into a holding place where the immanence of recurring transference-like patterns can be brought to light and worked upon?

In skillful hands, the theatrical device of a prop, provides some important clues for our purposes. Donald Freed ( ), a director and acting teacher trained in both the Stanislavsky method and psychoanalysis, offers the following experiment in an acting workshop. Two young women, Alexa and Melanie, are asked to improvise a scene in which they play an eager young actress and an efficient secretary to a producer, respectively. The setting was to be a screening for a forthcoming production conducted by Melanie, the secretary, for her employer, who would make the final decision. Alexas motivation to get the part was exacerbated by the fact that she and her ailing mother were dependent on Alexas uncle for support. The uncle has made it increasingly clear that his continued generosity would be contingent on obtaining sexual favors from Alexa. Alexa is in a bind: if she goes to her mother with her charge, the uncle will surely deny it and likely cut off support. Freed plants this thought in the minds of his student actresses as they prepare to enact the scene, Her thoughts must have run roughly, If I dont get the job and earn the large salary, I shall be forced to submit to my uncle or have my mother die in the poorhouse. Melanie also had a special reason for conducting the screening exceptionally well: She felt she was on the verge of an affair with very young and energetic employer, who, although married, had shown a definite interest of an unequivocal nature in his attractive amanuensis.

Freed complicates the experiment by placing on the floor of the producers waiting room a light-blue case containing a contraceptive diaphragm and instructs his actresses to ignore this prop and to refer to it neither by glance nor word unless in the grip of an irresistible impulse they should draw it into the action.

The improvisation begins and, after a bit, Freed signals for a male student to emerge in the role of the hotly contested producer. Next, he has two more students enter the scene as cleaning ladies. Laughing and patomiming buckets and mops, they come at last to the diaphragm.

With a snicker, one woman turned to the now deathly quiet Alexa and inquired, Is this yours dearie? A moment of pregnant silence followed, and then the shriek, Yes! as the girl snatched the terrible thing and fled to her destiny!

In his interpretation of the improvisation, Freed emphasizes the importance of the diaphragm as a tangible symbol of the hidden intent in the scene. Like hidden intent, the device is present, but undiscussible. While the actor is aware of the hidden intent, the character is not, or, as Freed puts it, The character rides his open intent; he is ridden by his secret intent (p. 37). In Stanislavskys method the actors absorb their characters passively, over a period of months. They take in the disparate elements of their characters with a kind of free-floating attentiveness not unlike that of the psychoanalyst. Both the actor and the psychoanalyst are trained to pay attention to details for they can never be certain in advance what piece of apparent trivia may produce a flash of insight that makes clear so many other pieces. In theater, the prop represents in a material way that which is hidden, and so it becomes a particularly potent piece[7] of the enacted narrative. It serves as a kind of place marker, that can harken the character back to a forgotten earlier situation.

In the section that follows, we describe some portions of a consultation in which we combine elements of narrative and immanence, as discussed above, to facilitate working through of collective transference dynamics. The technique makes use of character-generated props as will be discussed below.

V. A Case

1. The Client. One of us was approached by vice president for a large, publicly held utility on the basis of a referral from a source who held a similar position in a large corporation. We had worked with the referring individual on some difficult leadership transition issues (Gilmore, 1988; Gilmore and Ronchi, 1995) which our future client found to be an intriguing way to think about his situation. While he had been in his position for nine months at the time of the referral, and had been employed by the company for over twenty years, he was having difficulty finding a way to take on his new role. His difficulty was driven in part by the fact that the company was entering a period of unprecedented instability. Throughout its long existence, the company had enjoyed a virtual monopoly for its products over a large geographic expanse. However, at about the time the VP was appointed, the state which contained the vast portion of the companys captive market had passed legislation clearing the way for deregulation of the industry. Almost simultaneously, federal regulatory agencies and U.S. Congressional committees began to explore deregulation of the industry on a national level.

With the nature of their business about to be radically changed in ways that were unpredictable, the companys top team began to focus on developing a strategy for both positioning itself for the kinds of changes it anticipated as well as influencing the shape of those changes. Since the primary targets of this influence would be elected officials and members of regulatory bodies at federal, state, regional and municipal levels, the government relations department was expected to play a pivotal role. The department consisted of 25 professionals divided among three subunits: a federal lobbying office in Washington, D.C., a state lobbying office in the state capitol, and a policy analysis office at corporate headquarters.

2. The Presenting Problem. In the initial interview, the VP spoke candidly about his struggle to lead government relations in this new day. He described four factors that were contributing to this difficulty. First, while he had been a long-term employee of the department, he had not worked at headquarters for many years.[8] In that time, many of the companys highest-level executives had turned over. Second, his predecessor, who had run the department for sixteen years before succumbing to cancer, had a very different style than the new VP. The predecessor was very close to the old CEO[9] who was himself very interested in the political process. As a pair, the former VP and CEO set government relations policy for the company. The former VP gave each of his three offices near limitless autonomy. The only mechanisms for inter-unit communication were between each of the lobbying offices and the analysis group at headquarters. There were no staff meetings that included the entire department, no explicit goals or metrics for measuring the departments effectiveness and the new VP could not remember ever having received a performance appraisal in the seventeen years he had worked for his predecessor.

Third, the government relations departments reputation within the company was not what it used to be. We have no good will left, said the VP as he talked about how several recent legislative and regulatory decisions had gone against positions the company had advocated. Finally, his immediate boss, the executive vice president for corporate services, had become increasingly critical about the department. The EVPs criticisms centered on what he believed to be irreparable shortcomings of most of the departments staff.[10] In his judgment most of them lack the personal credibility necessary to influence external stakeholders or to be taken seriously by the companys executives. As evidence of the latter, the EVP cited numerous complaints that he had received from other corporate officers about not being kept informed about the inside workings of the various committees and councils which were making decisions that could shape the companys future environment.

3. Framing the work. Through the course of several discussions following the initial interview, we developed a definition of the work that came to be called reframing government relations. This was to be a process that would achieve several explicit criteria, including:

a. articulate an explicit and practical philosophy for doing the work of government relations, a philosophy appropriate for the new deregulated environment

b. evaluate current practices in light of the new philosophy and identify what should change

c. select a few of the practices that need to change and design a "high impact" plan to focus attention on the actions needed to make those changes in the short-term

d. actively engage everyone in the department in the "high impact" plan

e. actively engage key company stakeholders in developing and implementing the "high impact" actions

The first step in the process involved two sets of interviews with many of the company's executives, one set conducted by the VP and the other by the consultant. The VP asked his colleagues to share their candid observations of the department, so that he could calibrate them against those that he had formed during his first nine months. The consultant began his interviews with this request: "As you know, (the client) has asked me to assist him with his project to reframe the government relations department. From your perspective, what should I know in order to be most helpful." [11]