Staying focused in a mad world

For MBA students who want to fulfil their roles as responsible and committed leaders, learning about, the dynamics of threats, competition, envy, denial, and resistance will be invaluable, says Mannie Sher

Looking around at what is going on in the world, one could be forgiven for thinking that the world is going mad.

We are not immune from the madness. We can take measures to protect ourselves, but we cannot deny that our sanity is affected by the breakdown in global economic systems, the rise of populist governments, by ignoring the perils of climate change and unrestricted consumption; and by warring aggression of an invasion by one country of another country because of a national phantasy of holy grandeur. In 2022 David Armstrong, a psychologist and associate of mine at the Tavistock Institute, described the world as having ‘an increasingly psychotic turn in socio-political relations and behaviour’.

Interconnectedness

At the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, we engage with organisations locally and internationally, and we cannot avoid seeing the interconnectedness of our institutions, organisations and of our lives.

Truly, the flapping of butterfly’s wings in China affects the weather in England. But as our understanding of this interconnectedness and complexity grows, so there is a movement in the opposite direction – towards greater egotism, individualism, narrow nationalism, destructive competition of winners and losers, religious fanaticism, and ideological murderousness.

For decades, since the First World War, the Tavistock Institute has worked with these deadly human drives through its Group Relations Programme that peels away the layers of superficial, inauthentic, and fraudulent feelings to reveal the baser instincts of primaeval animalistic, self-serving, and ignoble motivations of hatred, jealousy, murderousness, betrayal and destruction.

These sit alongside our very human drives for culture, civilised cooperation, and containment so that human relations can be expressed through love, kindness and compassion for ourselves and others and for the planet, which, like us, is a living, breathing entity and demands our care.

Aggression

Sigmund Freud’s 1929 thesis is that aggression is not only humanity’s natural instinct, but that this inclination towards aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization. This is why the Institute is sceptical of positivist thinking, that implies organisations are ‘static objects that will respond to simple step-by-step change management methods’. And, at the same time, the Tavistock Institute acknowledges ‘the incompleteness of its knowledge and why it is better to confine ourselves to the role of useful facilitators rather than the assured champions of beneficial change with assured outcomes’ (David Shaw, 2022).

By the time MBA students graduate, they will have had work placements in many enterprises and learned from watching and observing. Post-graduate experience in different organisations, perhaps will extend for longer periods than they had as students. I would guess that they often come across challenges, conflicts, and dead ends for which they may feel they are not really prepared. They may even have found the methods they were taught to solve problems made no difference, or even made things worse or were ignored altogether.

The Tavistock Institute has a view about why this is so that has been at the core of its work for over a century and that is: while individuals and their personalities and characters, their anxieties and their defences, are very important, (as are the influences on their behaviour, on their ambitions and on their problem-solving abilities), the general training approach has focused on individual development and behaviour, at the expense of more understanding of group dynamics.

Dynamics

Without immersion in courses of study on group dynamics, intergroup dynamics, organisational dynamics, and societal dynamics, and in the very powerful area of the group unconscious, their efforts at management and leadership are bound to fail.

Group, organisational, societal, and environmental dynamics are hugely complex, and they exert enormous influence on organisations and their leaders. They are notoriously difficult to control, no matter how much resource is brought to bear. The one erroneous concept that western organisations subscribed to in the C20 is that leadership resides in the individual and that what we need is more research and knowledge of how individuals become leaders.

Ideas of participative democratic selection of leaders who listen to the voices of the people, who are sensitive to the group’s needs and aspirations, have weakened over the past 30 years and have been replaced with the idea of the heroic leader who will navigate and secure a predictable future for the rest of the organisation. If they do not, and they never can, they will be replaced, and the process starts all over again.

Psychoanalytic thinking has had a big influence on the approaches of the Tavistock Institute. Psychoanalytic thinking is a meta-level thinking that connects to other work and organisational theories and practises.

For instance, have you ever wondered what lies behind the ubiquitous tension between the board, or executive committee, and the heads of departments, units, and functions?

What happens between these two levels in organisations that prevents honest communication of clear strategies with reasonable timelines, what impedimenta exist between them that delays decision-making, prevents implementation and review meetings turn into battles of will?

Leadership development

In one company, the board wanted the Tavistock Institute to run a leadership development programme for its top 100 senior managers. The company was facing significant changes in its future, bringing its new product to market and these leaders were required to oversee this change process.

We suggested an approach that would result in the 100 managers selecting the key organisational issues they believed were necessary to work on to improve production, customer relations and productivity.

The board objected to this approach because it said: ‘We have already determined the strategic areas that the company needs to focus on. What if the managers select other less important strategies and ignore the ones we have identified?’

For nine months, the Tavistock team battled with the board and its resistance to allowing new strategic thinking to arise from the rank below it; rather, the board thought the managers should work on the issues that the board had selected.

The team realised that it would not make progress with the managers until the board had worked through its own resistance, its ideas about itself and its role in the company.

The board was insecure, lacked agreement on priorities, and was concerned about succession. It reluctantly admitted that it did not trust the senior managers who they labelled as puerile, insufficiently experienced, narrow in their business perspectives, and lacking scientific knowledge, were reckless, and on and on it went.

It was no wonder the board wanted to control the design of the training intervention; it worried that the managers would come up with something different or irrelevant. We said to the board that if it wanted their managers to face their anxieties about changing, the board too had to face their own anxieties, which were about their upcoming retirement after long and successful careers.

The board – 90% male – were in their late 50s or early 60s and they were uncomfortable at having to make room for younger top managers in their 40s. The board had built-in reservations about the capabilities, the maturity and competence about their younger proteges, who were seen as threats who would replace them.

The ‘young bucks’, in turn, were restless for promotion, had great ideas for improvements in production, growth, and to be sure, perhaps even thought that their ‘elders’ were past it, of a previous age and less capable of steering the changes the company needed.

Freud’s ideas on oedipal conflicts between father and son can be applied to many organisational situations involving authority – having it, exercising it wisely or delegating it. In the case of the board, it had many anxieties about investments in a new product and about failing to meet promised deadlines. These anxieties were being projected into the rank below, which in turn projected their fears and anxieties into the board. The managers were regarded by the board as not fit for senior leadership, while the managers regarded the board as stuffy, controlling and immovable.

Interconnected parts of one system

This interconnected oedipal dynamic between the two layers of the organisation led the Tavistock team to consider focusing not on the top managers alone, but the board and the top managers as two interconnected parts of one system, wracked with issues of rivalry, competition and unspoken resentments that led to unconscious sabotage of the goals of the organisation, long delays in completing the new product development and new technologies.

Once we recognised the ‘whole system’ dynamic and found ways to articulate this to both board and managers, our work could proceed, and to everyone’s relief, the tension which had taken the form of a breakdown in relationships with a major subsidiary company and a major supplier, could be repaired, relationships were improved, friendly conversations could take place and the development of the complex product was completed a few months later. Production began and within two years sales had reached unprecedented levels. Without the intervention of the Tavistock Institute, the delay could have extended for years.

For MBA students who want to fulfil their roles as responsible and committed leaders of business enterprises, learning about, and understanding, in the moment, the dynamics of threats, competition, envy, denial and resistance will be invaluable, in the first instance.