|
The Primary Risk Larry Hirschhorn |
||
| Introduction
Organizations increasingly face significant strategic dilemmas; yet thinkers and practitioners in the psychoanalytic theory of organizations, particularly those like myself who have been deeply influenced by the Tavistock tradition, have not kept apace. The Tavistock tradition, of organizational diagnosis and consulting particularly as it was articulated by A. Kenneth Rice and Eric Miller, was developed in response to problems of organizational design, functioning and relationships of authority, rather than to issues of strategy. The consultant working within this tradition would typically ask the following set of questions.
However, these questions may not help us answer the following questions:
In this paper I outline a framework of analysis that helps answer these second questions. It is based on the concept of the "primary risk." In the first section I explicate the meaning of the "primary task;" in the second I contrast this concept with the notion of the "primary risk;" in the third I provide a case of study of the psychodynamics of the primary risk; and in the fourth I provide some guidelines for consulting with the primary risk in mind. The Primary Task The concept of the primary task plays a central role in the Tavistock theory: It helps posit an arena in which nonpsychological forces, deriving from the characteristics of the work itself, create a demand for action or responsiveness on the part of the enterprise. This concept has proven important to organizational diagnosis for two reasons. First, by focusing our attention on the organization’s work, it simplifies the difficulty we face in describing the organization’s environment. We start our diagnosis not by looking at all features of the environment, e.g., the structure of competition, the sources of revenue, but rather on what the enterprise is called primarily to do. Second, the Tavistock tradition, rooted in psychoanalysis, may lead us to overfocus on people’s fantasies or subjective assessment of the enterprise and its purposes. In doing so, we would fail to take account of the enterprise as a system with characteristics that transcend the subjective experiences of its members. After all, the enterprise must satisfy customers, generate revenue, pay employees, etc. If we focus primarily, as psychoanalysis does, on the fantasies people use to construct their view of the world, we are at risk of ignoring the actual pressures organizations face. In this sense, the primary task represents realities over which the enterprise has influence but only limited control. Each of us shapes our own fantasies, but the primary task creates a demand for work that we do not control. As such, the primary task is analogous to what Freud called the reality principle. As Gordon Lawrence argued, in a seminal paper, by contrasting the primary task with people’s fantasies we are then in a position to assess if, how and why the two diverge. For example, a college administrator may imagine that the institution’s primary task is to develop the student as the whole person, while day to day students and faculty act as if the primary task were to enable students to compete for good spots in professional schools. The college in reality trains students, it does not develop them. We can then explore how and why this disjunction between fantasy and reality has emerged. What does it say about the administrator, but more importantly about his role and the psycho-social process of the enterprise as a whole? Third, as the example of the college suggests, the primary task makes concrete the institution’s actual or operating goals. It uncovers people’s practices, rather than their beliefs. The college president may state or believe that the goal of the college is to preserve western civilization or create the well-rounded student, but by looking at what the college staff and students do the actual goals become manifest. Indeed, it is useful to define the primary task as the ensemble of its primary practices, that is those practices which make manifest its actual goals. The Limits to the Primary Task Concept Though fundamental, the concept of the primary task may limit our thinking and understanding. It fails to explicate the process through which people and organizations make choices about which primary task to focus on and why. It helps us understand the organization’s operations but not the process through which it shapes a strategy. Consider the following example. I was consulting to two architects, Jack and Phil, who had formed but had to yet to activate a partnership with a third architect, Henry, well known throughout the country for his design talent. Henry had a small practice of his own, but spent the bulk of his time teaching architecture at a prestigious university. In my initial conversations with Jack, the partner most eager to push the partnership forward, he emphasized the dispute he and Phil were having with Henry around marketing. Henry wanted to invest little, suggesting that clients would come to him because of his reputation, while Jack and Phil felt that they had to mount a significant marketing effort. They felt that while Henry was indeed a famous designer, he had no track record for landing big projects. I initially thought and suggested to Jack that perhaps they were interpreting Henry’s stance as one sign that he wished to limit his financial exposure to the vicissitudes of the new enterprise. He did not, I suggested, want to put much "skin in the game." Jack replied forcefully that indeed, he believed that in a true partnership every partner had to feel financially at risk. He agreed that Henry’s anxiety about marketing expenses was actually a sign that he did not want to invest much money at all. Unless they could resolve this, Jack thought, they could not really make this partnership come alive. As we spoke further, Jack revealed a more fundamental concern. Because Jack and Phil wished to capitalize on Henry’s reputation they had decided to make Henry the named partner of the firm. What if Henry then withdrew from the partnership? Jack and Phil would have invested substantial time and money in building up Henry’s reputation in the market, only to lose his name. I revised my hypothesis. I suggested to Jack that the issue he and Phil faced was not Henry’s willingness to take a risk, but rather their willingness to take a risk. Was Henry’s design talent good enough for them to risk marketing his name, knowing there was always a chance they could lose him? Jack, sounding more tentative than usual, replied that he thought Phil was less willing to take this risk than he was. I then suggested that he and Phil had described their task incorrectly. It was less to build a partnership of equals than to build a firm where one partner was a star and, therefore, could demand special treatment. Let us look at this vignette in light of the argument we have developed thus far. Jack and Phil could construct or envision the task they faced in two different ways: to "build a partnership of equals" or "to rope in a star performer." These tasks pulled them both in opposite directions: to either treat Henry the same as themselves or to treat him differently. Jack and Phil had consciously chosen the former, but the latter, though suppressed, continued to exert its pull. It created a subtle divide between Jack and Phil. This suggests in turn that Jack’s early forcefulness, "all partners should put up equal stakes," but his later tentativeness, meant that in choosing the first task he was defending against the anxiety associated with the second. Moreover as Jack suggests, by choosing the first, he and Phil were less likely to create a conflict amongst themselves—better to fight Henry than each other. This vignette highlights the limitations of the concept of the primary task. Jack was caught in the ambiguous space between two alternative conceptions of his task, "rope in star" or "build a partnership." These two tasks were in fact mutually exclusive since in taking up the former, Henry would have to be treated differently, while in taking up the latter, Henry would have to be treated the same. Attempts to do both at the same time could only undermine each. Jack faced difficulty in deciding because each posed a risk that he found unpalatable. If he and Phil insisted that Henry be an equal, they risked losing the partnership; if they let him be a star, they risked losing a lot of marketing money. Jack’s dilemma points to the psychodynamics of this "zone of task ambiguity." The ambiguity itself creates anxiety and, consequently, the person fails to grasp the choice and risks he must take. Instead, to manage the anxiety he develops a defensive fantasy of the situation such as, "Henry is arrogant. He thinks clients will come to him just by sitting there." The fantasy precludes Jack from understanding his own situation and therefore emerging from the zone of task ambiguity. In this case he and Phil could not acknowledge the risk they felt, what I call the primary risk. They could not make the bet they felt most comfortable with, and then manage themselves according to the primary task they selected. They were stuck insofar as they could not choose. The Primary Risk The primary risk is the risk of choosing the wrong primary task, that is, a task that ultimately cannot be managed. This risk, however, is not based on some arbitrary conception of the organization’s environment. I do not argue here that if a group of senior executives decides in a moment of brainstorming that their enterprise could choose among one of eight different tasks, ranging from its current one to one that implies a whole scale reinvention of the organization, it is assessing its primary risk. Instead, the risk is an emergent property of the enterprise’s existing relationship to its environment. In the above example Jack did not "invent" the risk he faced; it was embedded in the situation he was grappling with. The task not chosen—bringing a prima donna on board—was nonetheless part of the force field shaping his immediate environment. The Case of Apple Consider for example the case of the Apple Computer company. It has continually faced the tension between producing for a mass market and producing a stream of innovative products. When a company aims for a mass market it makes profits by standardizing its product line, limiting innovation so that new products do not compete with old ones and achieving operating efficiencies. When a company plans to make profits by introducing a stream of innovative products, it eschews standardization, it risks "cannibalizing" its old products, and it focuses management’s attention less on operational efficiency and more on organizational creativity. In its early years, Apple chose the latter, completely displacing, for example, its old Apple II system with the Macintosh. In turn, because the Mac was unique, Apple could produce for a relatively small share of the total PC market and yet fund new product innovation (e.g., the Newton, the Powerbook series of laptops) by charging high prices. It could run a "creative shop" rather than a "tight ship." However, beginning in about 1990 Microsoft began introducing Mac-like features, called "windows," to its DOS-based interface. By 1995 only Mac aficionados were unduly sensitive to the difference between the two. The balance of power in the marketplace consequently changed. When the Mac interface was unique, suppliers of hardware and software willingly supported the Mac even though its share of the personal computer market was small relative to the IBM clone market because of its apparently secure customer base. Though suppliers will always prefer to build software and hardware for the larger rather than smaller markets, the Mac’s superiority suggested that Apple’s share of the market would certainly not fall and indeed could rise. When Microsoft created its own Mac-like interface, Apple’s hold on its customers fell, and suppliers now saw its relatively small scale as a sign of its market weakness so they were less willing to support the Mac. Without such support Apple customers would have less software to choose from, and Apple itself faced the risk of periodically running out of hardware supplies. Indeed, Apple is now very dependent on IBM for the production of the Power PC chips. This is one reason why at the high point of the 1995 Christmas season it actually ran out of laptop computers. Apple then faced an unpalatable choice: license the Mac operating system to clones and risk falling margins or hold on to the Mac operating system and risk a declining market. Why should this be? We might imagine that the tradeoff between margins and market share could be rationally calculated. Indeed Apple executives have been very conscious of this choice, but this seemingly simple business risk masked what we are calling a primary risk. Was Apple in the business of producing personal computers or operating systems? Apple’s greatest accomplishment and its most daring move was to chuck its earlier Apple II operating system, ask customers to switch to the Macintosh and to then sell customers a PC that at the point of first introduction had no hard disk! Their evangelical belief in the Mac interface gave them the courage to take such an enormous risk. If Apple could continue to introduce operating system innovations, it would not have to struggle for market share by lowering prices. Instead, it could win customers by creating new standards and new expectations. As the Mac was institutionalized, Apple’s capacity to innovate seemed attenuated. They spent, for example, an enormous amount of money on developing "Copeland," their hoped-for new operating system, only to reject it early in 1997. Similarly, they have spent large sums on developing the Newton, their personal digital assistant, which has yet to prove profitable. It was their failure to sustain the primary task that led them to face the unpalatable alternative of cloning and losing margins or not cloning and losing market share. Analysts have berated them for not making this choice quickly and decisively; however, their failure to choose derives from the fact that this was not the decision they had to make first; instead it was a shadow of the deeper decision of which primary task they should pursue, what primary risk they should take. The chronic turmoil at Apple, with the frequent resignations of many top executives and its falling share price, signifies that the company still struggles with dilemma, that its leaders are ambivalent about any choice they might make. Mike Spindler, the CEO after John Sculley resigned, was supposed to restore profits by improving operations. After he failed, Gil Amelio was brought in, to oversee downsizing and improve Apple’s relationships to its community of software developers and suppliers. The re-entry of Steve Jobs, a company founder, combined with the reassignment of Ellen Hancock the person Amelio hired to work with software developers, may signify yet another turn. Upon leaving Apple, Jobs formed his own computer company that produced a new operating system called "Next." By hiring Jobs, Apple has decided to re-stage its business on the basis of this software, signifying perhaps that Apple executives now believe that the company can survive only if it produces the next decisive innovation in computing. Indeed what is distinctive about Next is less the novelty of its appeal to users, and more the enormous efficiency it affords to software developers creating new applications. Indeed, reflecting on the Apple’s dilemma, Jobs, while still at arm’s length from Apple, said, "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it’s worth—and get busy onto next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago." As this example suggests, the choice between two tasks—run a tight ship or a creative shop, produce lost cost products or innovative products—was a intrinsic property of Apple’s marketplace environment. It emerged in the relationship between Apple and its setting. Apple executives did not simply invent it. Instead, while it was theirs to interpret, it was also given to them. These example highlight four properties of a primary risk.
Is There Just One Primary Risk? In the day-to-day life of an enterprise its members manage a large number of risks. For example, many factory maintenance divisions face the basic choice between the tasks of preventing breakdowns or repairing them. The maintenance manager may decide her task is prevention, in which case workers are asked to spend part of their time telling machine users what went wrong, why and how it was fixed. Day to day the manager will face the strategic tradeoff between meeting requests for help as fast as possible versus ensuring that workers spend time educating each user. Biased toward the latter, she may in turn develop some compensatory strategies, e.g., develop self-help manuals for simple breakdowns or prioritize requests based on the economic impact of a breakdown. At the same that she makes this choice, senior executives will face a different choice. Thus, for example, imagine she is a maintenance manager for a Xerox manufacturing plant. When Xerox first launched its copier in the seventies, most customers could see no need for them in the context of their current office practice. Nobody was asking for copiers. Xerox hit upon a novel definition of its task. It decided that instead of being in the business of selling copiers, it was in the business of leasing them, charging customers only for the copies they made. This created a strategic tradeoff. The more copiers they leased, the greater the cost of the machines that they had to carry on their own books—yet, if customers loved making copies the greater would be their potential future revenue. Clearly they managed this risk well until Canon built and sold much cheaper copiers. In other words, the primary risk is not fixed, it is relative to the time horizon of the actor. There are two factors that help us judge clinically the appropriate time horizon. First, we know from Elliot Jacques’s work that executives at lower levels of authority have shorter time horizons for planning. Second, we can assess the stakes implicit in a set of choices an executive faces. Is this a "make or break" situation from the point of view of the executive we are helping, or are we just dealing with tactics? However, we can only make these judgments clinically, there is no formula. The Psychodynamics of the Primary Risk Ambivalence In each of our cases executives have been unable to clearly choose to take a primary risk, that is to choose between two conceptions of the primary task. Instead, they apparently drifted. Psychodynamic thinking suggests that people cannot choose when they feel ambivalent. Ambivalence in turn is linked to a lack of conviction, an inability to link a conscious choice to a compelling feeling of what is right, true or important, Freud suggests, in turn, that doubt, the opposite of conviction, is shaped by an admixture of love and hate. (V10, p. 241) Feelings of revulsion toward those whom we love is common. "Familiarity breeds contempt." However, to protect these loving feelings, particularly when they sustain self-esteem (and therefore reflect self-love), some people suppress their feelings of revulsion. Disconnected from the traffic of day-to-day communication and expression, these feelings cannot be metabolized and may therefore give rise to feelings of chronic doubt and ambivalence. We feel ambivalent because we cannot metabolize hate. Moral Condemnation as a Defense By 1990 the Macintosh operating system took on totemic qualities within Apple’s culture. As one industry analyst noted, "It got to the point at Apple where anybody proposing to change the famous Macintosh user interface and improve it, even in small ways, was regarded as a heretic. There became a term "Maclike," as in "it isn’t Maclike." Yet as our conception of ambivalence suggests, this overvaluation of the Mac interface reflected some distaste for it. It is easy to see the root of this distaste. The interface symbolized the company’s capacity to innovate, but insofar as the Mac had succeeded, it undermined further innovation. Because it blocked people from pursuing the primary task—creating innovative operating systems—that had once made Apple an exciting, if not exhilarating company, it could be hated as well as loved. As our argument suggests, this hate, however, was managed not by metabolizing it, for example, by coming to terms with the loss of excitement, but instead by projected into "non Mac-like" features. This stimulated a process of moral condemnation. Moral condemnation is thus paradoxically a sign of ambivalence and a defense against the dislike we feel toward what we also value. Moreover, because this dislike is diverted rather than quashed, executives are left with a residue of doubt. These feelings of doubt reinforce strategic drift. The Case of Brad Consider for example the case of Brad, a government executive who directed the human resources division for large multi-agency system. Responding to a mandate to reduce expenditures, Brad had envisioned a human resources function in which his division personnel acted as consultants to the executives and human resources staff of the different agencies. Instead of simply monitoring the human resources policies in the agencies and providing them with some direct services, e.g., the management of some of the benefits programs, his division personnel would help agencies customize their own HR system to fir the needs of the agency’s core professional group (e.g., engineering, health care workers etc.) This was a grand vision and a challenging one. Division personnel would have to be more insightful and creative than they had been in the past if agency executives were to seek their advice. Brad developed what he called a multi-stage "transition plan" for helping his employees change the focus of their activities and acquire new skills. It sounded thoughtful, replete with new committees, task forces, temporary teams, etc., but upon reading his strategy document I was struck by its seemingly abstract quality. It hovered above any concrete description of the new tasks. Instead, he spoke loosely of a new culture of work and the new empowered employee. Reading the document you could not tell what work employees would relinquish and what work they would take up. What products and services would they in fact offer? As I and my colleague worked with Brad, it became apparent that Brad relished open-ended discussion and resisted making decisions. In working with this top team he seemed to relish taking the role of the provocateur, opening up a question or issue just as it seemed the group was coming to a consensus. Yet, in a manner that was puzzling, he did so in what appeared to be a gentle way, as if he were being an honest executive open to new ideas and thoughts. We also knew, based on individual interviews with the members of his top team, that his style made them uncomfortable and anxious. After one meeting he told me something that helped me understand these dynamics. Reflecting on his superiors, the president and vice president of the agency, he noted with some contempt how "they had implemented the system reorganization but have given no thought to a transition plan." They did not understand, he noted, how you needed the latter if you were going to achieve any objective. As sensible as his statement sounded, his expressed contempt was a tip off. After all, his strategy document and his own method of deliberation revealed the opposite bias: he paid a great deal of attention to transitions but failed to define his objectives or destination. Interpreting this case, we can say that Brad was faced with the risk of choosing between the work his division once did and the new work he hoped it would take up. He was unable or unwilling to make this choice explicitly, to take, so to speak, a primary risk. Instead, focusing on the transition between the two, he created a vague strategic plan. In turn, by morally condemning his superiors he displaced his unease onto them, therefore protecting his own self-esteem. I suggest moreover, that what Brad loved and hated was neither an old nor new primary task, since both seemed to be so vaguely articulated, but rather the fantasy of his own leadership. Ambivalent about leading, he appeared open minded and process oriented, while condemning the seemingly one-sided goal orientation of his superiors. I often felt uneasy working with Brad, worrying that directness on my part would somehow upset his self-esteem. This was confirmed when my co-consultant told me that Brad was afraid of me. During meetings and retreats he and his assistant Joe whispered frequently to each other, seemingly evaluating what was being said. They seemed to form a tight pair. My fantasy was that they were reassuring themselves, that they helped quell one another’s puzzlement over what had been said or noted, but as Brad’s fragility suggests, they could not completely quash their doubts. The Case of the Poverty Research Institute While an organization drifts strategically it does not operate in a vacuum. Responding incrementally to threats and opportunities it changes its strategy without acknowledging that it has done so. As a result, a gap opens between what is consciously stated to be the purposes and strategies of the enterprise and what in fact the enterprise actually does. At some point this gap interferes with organizational functioning. Consider the following case. A policy research institute (PRI) committed to funding and disseminating research on poverty had over the years been successful in attracting funds and producing well-regarded research reports. I was a shadow consultant to a team of consultants who were asked to help the institute plan for its future. The senior staff had produced a strategic plan a few years before the consultation, but major difficulties remained. Most important, fundraising was falling off, while other institutes around the country were competing successfully for the money and visibility the PRI had once garnered. The executive director, Charles, a man in his late fifties, with considerable charisma and connections to the rich and powerful, could still command attention and raise money from his personal network, but he was working harder and recently had had a heart attack. Additionally, there was a chronic conflict between the fundraising and research divisions. The latter felt that the former tried to dictate research priorities based on their reading of donor interests. They complained that the integrity of the research process was being compromised. The fundraising department felt in turn that the research division was unreliable, did not meet promised deadlines, and sometimes embarrassed the institute with incomplete work. There are many ways of viewing this presenting situation. We could take a life-cycle perspective and infer that people were aware of their dependency on Charles as well his age and his health; they worried that the Institute would fail if he were not its director. We could interpret the presenting issues as a dilemma of organizational design. We might inquire as to the nature of the boundary between the research and fundraising divisions: How did they collaborate in planning the portfolio of research? Perhaps it would be better to have the fundraising group raise unrestricted funds while the research group would be responsible for raising money in its own domain? Finally, we could interpret the situation as reflecting problems in implementation. The senior group had produced a reasonable strategic plan, but they neither trusted one another sufficiently nor were very skilled to steer this process of organizational change. These frames of reference are sensible, but when revenue is falling, competition is growing and worries about the future surface, it is more useful to interpret the problem as a strategic one. Taking a rational view we might work with the client to develop a marketing plan, to create new research products, to create a web site, etc. However, such an approach fails to take account the psychodynamics of the primary risk. We should presume instead that the client is quite capable of devising such practical plans. Indeed, the strategic plan displayed considerable technical virtuosity in using modern management concepts such as market share, audience segments and distribution channels. Rather they cannot begin this work because the unacknowledged experiences and fantasies, related to the primary risk, obstruct their ability to think together. To explore hypotheses about the primary risk of an enterprise we first examine its institutional history. PRI was founded in the early seventies when a strong liberal consensus existed and felt that the richest society on the earth should not tolerate poverty among its citizens. There was considerable faith that government programs could help poor people, and that cities could develop and renew their communities. In addition, scholars were creating a new "policy science" based on methods of evaluating social programs and assessing how social programs were and could be implemented. PRI was a creature of its time. Under these conditions, its research program emerged from its setting. PRI leaders did not have to invent it nor convince donors of its legitimacy. How could we characterize its primary risk at that point of time? A organization dependent on donors faces a fundamental choice: Do they raise money by doing what potential donors are interested in, or do they decide what they want to do and then find potential donors? In the first option, the primary task is to satisfy donors, in the second, to satisfy themselves or, in this case, to follow their own values. Organizations with deep roots in a donor community, such as a religious organization or a hospital, often face no risk here since the values that link the organization and the donors are held sacred by both. Organizations like PRI, however, which must compete with other institutions for funds and whose history is linked to a particular constellation of social forces, confront this risk more directly. Because of the liberal consensus, in its earlier years PRI could decide what research to do and then find money to support the research. It managed the small risk this choice imposed by relying on Charles to raise money from his own network of contacts when gaps in funding emerged. I need not repeat the oft-told tale of the decline in the liberal consensus. PRI responded to this decline incrementally and its member imperceptibly by refashioning its strategy. Instead of establishing research and raising funds, it found increasingly that it had to create research categories that would stimulate contributions and grants. This development evoked a new primary task. Instead of doing research, its first primary task could be the business of providing services to donors. Potential donors became customers and without violating basic values (e.g., PRI would not get funding from the NRA), PRI began to express donor values rather than simply expressing their own. However, this shift was not acknowledged. Instead, at a major planning retreat, Charles, assuring his staff that the institution faced no crisis, that it faced no remaking, noted that "its role was as a research institution." This equanimity stimulated certain consequences. Since in fact PRI had begun to act like a service institution, it could only back into its new primary task. Thus, for example, PRI sought funds to pay for staff members’ uncovered time, and it fell into some consulting work. Increasingly, the fundraising division appeared to be in charge, so that completing a research project seemed less important than securing its funding. Tensions between the research and fundraising departments grew and some talented researchers left. By drifting from one primary task to the other, by not taking a primary risk, PRI appeared to losing its vitality. Indeed, interviews with the staff conveyed a sense of malaise. We argued that when facing strategic shifts people might invest the old primary task with even greater value and sentience as a way of protecting their self-esteem. At PRI executives developed a discourse to protect their pride. Their strategic planning document is revealing in this way. First, their budget was constructed around research programs or areas, with each area costed out to the penny. Yet the plans showed that many of these programs lacked funding. With no dollars to spend the budget numbers appeared to be too precise. In other words, like the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, it appeared as if the precision masked the unreality of the plans themselves, the fact they were more hopes than program. Second, in a forceful statement the plan asserted the Institute’s uniqueness, noting that unlike other institutions it did not focus narrowly on this or that economic issue but took into account the whole community. Indeed, one consultant on the team noted that when first encountering Charles, he was struck by Charles’ insistence that the Institute would not specialize in particular areas. This statement in the document can be usefully interpreted in two ways: In stressing the Institute’s uniqueness it helps deny its growing dependence on donor tastes and preferences; and in resisting specialization it masks the inevitable opportunism associated with chasing money by cloaking it in principles. Third, as I have already noted, in discussing marketing, the tone of the document becomes resolutely technical, referring to audiences and segments. The terms convey a sense of mastery, of efficacy, which is belied by acknowledgment of the growing difficulty the Institute faced in raising money for its activity. Moral Condemnation The process of moral condemnation emerged with a twist. Many people believed that chronic conflicts between fundraising and research explained the institution’s difficulty. Increasingly, fundraising shaped what research was funded, yet the head of research noted she did not require her professionals to write proposals. Fundraising was in charge of this "lower" function. Indeed, some researchers saw themselves as academics, people who generated ideas that were valuable in their own right. Fundraisers in turn worried about the researcher’s detachment from the politics of financing research. Research projects remained unfinished, they thought, because researchers themselves did not feel accountable to donors. Each represented a potential moral compass, the integrity of ideas on the one hand and the accountability to donors on the other. However, insofar as these two groups were experienced to be in conflict, people could use these moral ideas as tools for condemning one or the other group. Fundraising was opportunistic and money oriented, and research was irresponsible and out of touch. In effect, in contrast to the case of Apple computer or Brad, moral condemnation was internalized. Not others, but parts of themselves were sinners. This may account for the malaise staff projected as well as PRI’s protracted stalemate. I do not make these observations critically as if Institute leadership had somehow failed. While holding leaders accountable it is also sensible to see the Institute’s history as part of calamity that befell the liberal community in the eighties. Very few liberal institutions have known how to respond. Rather, what I mean to emphasize here is the rationalization organizational leaders develop to protect them from their own experience. The institute’s enacted strategy had changed, yet it was so difficult to acknowledge this since it did not conform with their conscious self-understanding with their self-image. It is no wonder then that despite the strategic plan’s technical solidity, Institute executives still felt anxious about its future and ineffective in steering it. We often speak of the problem of "implementing strategies," but the real obstacle may lie in the fact that the consciously articulated strategy contradicts the enacted strategy and thus real experience. Consulting to the Primary Risk This analysis of the primary risk provides us with some guidance on consulting to organizations facing strategic questions. Strategic ambivalence and the resulting strategic drift signals that the organization cannot take a primary risk. Instead it is caught on the horns of a dilemma between two mutually exclusive definitions of the primary task. As our cases suggest, at the behavioral level this produces indecision, and at the psychodynamic dilemma this is experienced as ambivalence, as the executive’s inability to articulate a desire. It is useful in this regard to explore ambivalence in more detail. Psychoanalytic theory suggests two complementary perspectives on ambivalence. First, we feel ambivalent when we cannot acknowledge or contain the experience of feeling repelled by the elements or features of that which also attracts us. Second, we feel ambivalent when we cannot mourn the loss of what we must relinquish, what we cannot have, when we affirm another. These two perspectives are mutually consistent. For example, in the case of Apple, we suggested that while the Mac operating system could be "worshipped," it also spelled the death knell of innovation and excitement. To choose the Mac meant losing the climate of creativity, but to relinquish this climate "in the mind" meant to acknowledge its limitations, its downsides, that made it "hateful" as well as lovable. After all this climate created stress, exhausted its executives, induced much conflict between divisions and inevitably, turned every victory into the experience of having once more to start from scratch, to once again do something new and different. Similarly if Apple chose the path of innovation, it meant losing its position as a "big player" in the computer industry that was an economically viable alternative to IBM clones in the mass market. To relinquish this position the executives must acknowledge that which they hate about it, namely, the way in which it would turn Apple into a bureaucracy. Indeed, as we have seen, to cope with ambivalence executives suppress the hate or antipathy they feel by developing a moral discourse. The antipathy is projected onto something else: Microsoft, one’s superiors, Henry the design architect or, in the case of PRI, the fundraising or research departments. This suggests that the central aim of any consultation is to help executives mourn the path not taken by reclaiming their antipathy for it. While this sounds paradoxical, we are deeply familiar with this as central to the psychological process of mourning. In his classic essay on Mourning and Melancholia, Freud notes that the melancholic fails to mourn because he cloaks his feelings of hatred toward the deceased in feelings of self-reproach. Rather than acknowledge the ambivalence he feels toward a person who has died (after all the deceased person has inflicted those living with his own death), he turns around and hates himself. By reclaiming antipathy, the mourner no longer holds on to his pronounced loyalty and love for the person who died, and through ordinary sadness can now let go. In consulting to executive teams around issues of strategy, we may find that we have to facilitate the same process. For example, imagine we were consulting to the top team at Apple and believed that they felt trapped by the Mac, that their business instincts told them to abandon it and resume their historic program of creating new operating systems. We might ask or more sensibly create a process in which they can ask: "What was bad about the Mac operating system, what did it stop us from doing, how has it hurt us?" Correspondingly, if we felt that the executives now felt that the Mac operating system should secure the company’s future, they might ask instead: "What was bad about the ‘exciting times’ when we took great risks by discarding one operating system and introducing another?" Note that in both these cases, as in all mourning processes, we are helping executives "let go" of one primary task, by reclaiming its dark side. This allows them to more fully embrace the other. Consulting to the problem of the primary risk must thus engage the consultant at the business, organizational and psychodynamic levels. At the business level our task is to help the client understand the business process that leads them to be caught between two primary tasks. What historic and economic conditions gave rise to the first; what forces have made the second a potentially profitable point of departure? At the organizational level our task is to help the client understand the dynamics of strategic drift to assess how the two tasks affect the organization differentially, what interdivisional conflicts they create and what inefficiencies they impose. At the psychodynamic level our task is to help the client re-experience and reclaim his antipathy toward one or the other of the primary tasks, to go beyond moral condemnation as a social defense. In doing so we help the client acknowledge the loved and hated features of a primary task and stimulate the process of letting go. In this way we help the client transform ambivalence into normal sadness. This sets the stage for taking the primary risk.
|
||