The Emergence of Leadership

Linking Self-Organization and Ethics

Douglas Griffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134535255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the most complex global organizations ever known. Taking a complexity theory perspective, this book explores the key factor that sustains them: leadership.

The book examines how leadership is currently understood primarily from a systems based perspective, as an attribute of the individual, the leadership role being to articulate values, missions and visions and then persuade others to adhere to them. It argues for a new view of ethics as co-created through identity and difference, representing the end of 'business ethics' as we know it today. Areas considered include:

• risk and conflict
• spontaneity and motivation.

In the past we have focused on the choices of individual leaders. In today's highly complex organizations we are now coming to understand the nature of leadership as self-organizing and, as such, closely linked to ethics. This means that we can no longer understand ethics simply as centered rational choice in planning and action.

1 Introduction: how we have come to think of ourselves as victims of systems

• Systemic self-organization: the elimination of paradox
• Participative self-organization: the reappearance of paradox
• Complex responsive processes and the question of ethics
• Outline of the book

A widely prevalent way of thinking about leadership and ethics in relation to today’s corporations is epitomized by a popular film genre. These films narrate the struggle of some heroic individual against a large organization. For example, there is the story of a large utility on the West Coast of the USA. Over a number of years, acids from one of the utility’s plants leaked into the ground water used by adjacent residential communities. Many of the residents developed multiple forms of cancer and some of them claimed that this was due to drinking the polluted water. However, they were completely unsuccessful in their attempts to connect the cancer with the operations of the neighbouring plant. Then, by chance, a young assistant in a law office noticed that there were a number of cancer cases that seemed to be related to the plant, a pattern no one had so far noticed. She took up the cause and in her heroic struggle, as the leader, she united the residents in taking a joint action suit against the corporation. When a former employee supplied her with relevant documents from his basement, they were able to win the case, which turned out to be the largest settlement against an American corporation up to that time. Some of the top executives were found guilty of negligence and the young woman, the heroic leader, received a bonus of two million dollars from her law firm. Typically, after such a film, there is an air of excited triumph in the crowd as people leave the cinema. Someone finally took revenge on one of those big corporations, triumphing against “the system”!

Throughout the film, the characters talk about the corporation as an “it”, which has intentionally leaked the acid, allowed the pollution of ground water and caused the cancer. This is typical of the everyday way in which we speak of large organizations, consisting of thousands of employees, as acting with culpable intention and being ethically responsible. When we talk in this way, we are talking “as if ” an inanimate, nebulous entity called a corporation, or a “system”, can have intention but in doing this we tend to forget the “as if ”. We slide automatically into talking about the “system” as having intention and being ethically responsible. However, in law, the corporation can only be found guilty of criminal intent if it can be proved that individuals in it acted intentionally to cover up the facts concerning the on-going leakage. In other words, it must be proved that individuals acted wilfully against the good of the community. Here, ethical responsibility is ascribed to the autonomous individual. It is both the corporation as “the system” and the autonomous individual, each in their own way, who are ethically responsible. We derive satisfaction from finding both the corporation and the individual guilty. The basis for thinking about ethics these days, therefore, has a “both … and” structure. We take it for granted that ethical responsibility is located separately in both the corporation and the autonomous individual and, in doing so, we forget the “as if ” conjecture applied to the corporation. We tend not to sense anything contradictory, that is, paradoxical, about this way of thinking.

In automatically obscuring any paradox and forgetting the “as if ” intention ascribed to the organization as a “system”, we slip into thinking about the corporation as having a mind of its own, as setting its own purposes and acting with the freedom that only human beings in fact have. This way of thinking affirms an ethically passive stance in which most of us, as victims of the system, feel that the cause of unethical behaviour, such as the on-going leakage and the subsequent cancers of the residents, has been found, guilt allocated and justice served. It is the “system” and a few powerful individuals who are to blame, and the heroic individual leader has delivered us.

But has the cause of the unethical action really been found? Certainly, in the film described, key elements of a cover-up are identified. However, there is an important question about causality that is not even being asked. Indeed, the question is completely obscured by the way of thinking about ethical responsibility described above. The important question is: how could on-going damage to the environment of such a serious nature, over such a long period, happen in the complex daily interaction of thousands of employees working in the corporation and living in the surrounding community? Presumably, all of these people were acting with purpose as autonomous human beings and no one intended the result because, after all, they all lived in the community they were polluting. Presumably, they were all ethically responsible as human beings. However, the only causes of, and ethical responsibility for, the pollution are identified as both the corporation with its “as if ” intention and senior individual managers. The rest are simply passive victims with no ethical responsibility for what happened, despite the fact that they were working daily with the leaky processes. Surely they had something to do with what happened? But we do not usually take this as a matter for examination and explanation.

Richard Sennett, in his book The Corrosion of Character (1998), explores how corporations, both large and small, have been affecting the surrounding communities in which their employees live. His book eloquently and persuasively argues that the qualities of community and of individual identity in the workplace have been deteriorating in the USA for decades. He presents evidence for the corrosion of individual character in: the gradual loss of community; the transition to more flexible concepts of working time; a different work ethos; and the superficial nature of role relationships among members of teams. He holds that the new capitalism and the indifference of corporations to their employees are responsible for this. The passion of his argument gives the book the urgency of an ethical “j’accuse!”. However, I would argue that the ethical basis of his argument is the same as the film plot described above. The “system” of new capitalism and indifferent corporations carries out its intentions and is implicitly taken to be morally responsible for “its” actions, which destroy communities and corrode character. In the film, there are both the few criminal individuals and the criminal “system”, and Sennett points to both the many individual victims and the morally culpable “system”. Notice how this “both … and” way of thinking focuses ethical responsibility on a few managers and the corporation as perpetrators, while relegating most people to the passivity of helpless victims of the “system” without ethical responsibility for what they do.

To emphasize the point, I am arguing that nowadays we locate ethical responsibility in both the “system”, simply taking it for granted that a “system” can be ethically responsible, and in a few individuals. In doing this, we adopt a particular view of leadership in which it is individual leaders who are blamed and punished when things go wrong, or praised and rewarded when things go right. The rest of us are allocated to passive roles as victims of “the system”, and of manipulative leaders, and our salvation lies in the actions of heroic leaders. In thinking in this way, we are obscuring how we are all together involved in the dangerous situations that arise. Perhaps this is why we find ourselves repeatedly exposed to these dangerous situations. It then becomes a matter of great importance to understand just how we have come to think in this “both … and” way in which we ascribe an “as if ” intention to the “system”.

Systemic self-organization: the elimination of paradox

In the first volume of this series, Complexity and Emergence in Organizations (Stacey, Griffin and Shaw, 2000), my co-authors and I examined the origins of “both … and” thinking, over two centuries ago, in the work of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The collapse of the metaphysical systems of thought of the Middle Ages left thinkers facing an enormous paradox. In the emerging scientific approach of that time, humans were thought of as a part of nature and, therefore, subject to its deterministic, “if–then” causality. But in philosophy and theology, humans were thought of as exercising freedom of choice in the use of their rational powers and, therefore, not subject to the notions of causality and time to be found in thinking about nature. Kant found a way to eliminate this paradox of humans being part of nature, on the one hand, and superior to it, on the other. He introduced, for the first time in the history of thought, what has become the “both … and” way of thinking about causes and time, now so taken for granted by us. In three volumes over a number of years, Kant laid the basis for a way of thinking that avoids settling for either the extreme of scientific empiricism, which denies rational choice, or dogmatic rationalism, which focuses entirely upon it. He argued that humans are both subject to the laws of nature and free to set their own goals. However, he did not see this view as being at all paradoxical because of the separate theories of causality he proposed for nature, on the one hand, and human action, on the other. Since rational humans can understand the causality of nature, they are free to rationally choose goals in relation to it.

Systems thinking

To support this contention, Kant developed the basis for what I will be referring to in this volume as systemic self-organization. Kant held that we are truly human in setting on-going goals for our actions, but that we can also think about nature using a particular understanding of the causality of on-going goal setting. That particular understanding amounts to an “as if ” way of thinking. Kant suggested that we could hypothesize goals in nature as “regulative ideas”. He adopted a dynamic way of looking at nature as a system. The system dynamically unfolds a form, a goal of its own, namely, to realize a mature form of itself. But that is not to say that the dynamic is setting the goal. It is the human scientist observing and hypothesizing who is thinking and testing “as if ” the system were setting and unfolding such a goal itself. In arguing for this way of thinking, Kant was motivated by his admiration for the scientific method as initially developed by Newton, but he thought that basing it solely on causality of the “if–then” kind was not enough. Hence he developed the notion of nature as system in which internal interactions between its parts display a self-generating, self-organizing dynamic in which the whole emerges as the realization of the “as if ” goals hypothesized for it. Organisms are thought of as developing from simple initial forms, such as a fertilized egg, into a mature adult form, all as part of an inner coherence expressed in the dynamic unity of the parts. An organism thus expresses a nature with no purpose other than its own form and Kant described this as “purposive”, that is, displaying a unified form in itself. The parts of an organism exist because of, and in order to sustain, the whole as an emergent property. Nature, then, is to be understood as a system dynamically unfolding a goal ascribed to it by a human. Human freedom is thus retained when nature is understood as systemic self-organization because it is the human who is postulating the “as if ” goal of the system and because, within that understanding of nature, humans can rationally choose goals for their own actions.

It would be hard to underestimate the importance of Kant’s move in eliminating paradox through the introduction of “both … and” thinking with its notion of nature as system moving dynamically “as if ” having purpose. It is especially difficult for us to understand this because Kant thought not only in terms of “if–then” causality, as we do today, but also in terms of three other kinds of causality, in the tradition going back to Aristotle. The other three kinds of causality are: material cause, meaning that a thing is what it is because of matter; formal causality, meaning that a thing is what it is because it has the form it has; and on-going goal striving causality which moves to achieve ends in which the end motivates the striving. The latter is referred to as teleological cause from “telos”, the Greek word for goal, or as final cause, from “finis”, the Latin word for end state. For Kant, it was important to retain the notion of teleological causality, hence the idea of nature as dynamic systems with formal cause incorporating subordinated, “as if ” on-going goal striving causality. This view of nature moving in an “as if ” goal-striving way, was consistent with human goal striving, so enabling Kant to eliminate the paradox of humans being subject to nature and free of nature at the same time. Instead of a paradox, there was the view of humans both subject to nature and free of it through their rational ability to understand it from an objective, observing position. This way of looking at nature is of the essence of our world today. It is, therefore, important to try understand some of the advantages and disadvantages of the move to “both … and” thinking and why it can lead to developing the habit of not even noticing the potential for paradox.

There is no denying that thinking in terms of systemic self-organization is far superior to taking only the perspective of simple “if–then” cause and effect. For example, consider the way we speak with medical personnel about our bodies and healing. If am having a growth removed, especially from a sensitive area like my face, I am concerned with how it will heal and what it will look like. A physician might reassure me as follows: “The body will begin to develop scar tissue in about 7 days. This process will continue for about 6 months, at which point the body will sense that it has developed too much tissue and it will then begin to dissolve this tissue over the following 6 months.” I experience relief at hearing this story. I now know something that reduces anxiety. The scientist/physician here is, as observer, presenting the hypothesis of the healing process as a story of the body’s intent and recognition of when to start and stop phases of the process of systemic self-organization.

Ethics

From this viewpoint of systemic self-organization, it would not be possible to blame the body, tissue or even the physician if the process went wrong in some way. This is because, in describing nature as a system in this way, the physician is doing so from the “as if ” perspective, that is, as a hypothesis. If the system does not unfold in the expected way, it would mean only that the hypothesis failed the test and this failure would trigger the formulation of a new hypothesis. In effect the failure of the hypothesis arouses interest in moving on the search for a better hypothesis. Truth here has the pragmatic sense that is found in the long run among the community of scientists. There is no ethical implication in the system’s movement. Instead, medical ethics would concentrate on the actions of individuals, for example, the physician’s negligence due to insufficient sleep, excessive alcohol consumption or drug abuse. The “both … and” way of thinking can be seen in the way the physician thinks about both the human body “as if ” it were following its own intention and himself as exercising freedom in choosing rational human actions “as if ” they expressed moral universals for which he will be held accountable. Kant thus extends the regulative idea, the “as if ”, to his ethical basis of man’s freedom, making it the pivotal concept in his thought.

There is no doubt that forming hypotheses and presenting descriptions in this way, using the language of systemic self-organization, is a valuable tool for the natural scientist. However, it is important to remember that Kant maintained an “as if ” perspective and did not want to say that nature had a “mind” of its own. The final states which the system arrives at are not set by the system but by the observing scientist, who puts this language of intention, recognition, decision, and so on, “into” the system in the “as if ” mode of hypotheses. The scientist is then both a free, autonomous individual and an observer discovering the laws of nature, understood as self-organizing systems.

Human action

One can immediately sense how easy it would be to adopt this approach when thinking about human groups, organizations and societies. One might describe them as self-organizing systems, which unfold pattern according to some intention of their own that we ascribe to them. However, Kant was unequivocal in stating that human action could never be thought of in this “as if ” approach because that would involve ascribing to the human system the exercise of freedom in choosing a goal, which is really a matter for the human individual only (see Stacey, Griffin and Shaw, 2000). Kant defined a self-organizing system as one that unfolds an “as if ” idea, or hypothesis, about the natural world. For Kant, humans are autonomous individuals, not systems. They are free and are guided by universal principles in judging the ethics of their actions. These universal principles are another use of the “as if ” mode of making judgments: we come to know the ethical universals in our acting “as if ” our actions could be so done universally, by everyone.

My argument then is as follows. We have come to think about human action in terms of a Kantian framework, although in an important way we do so contrary to Kant himself. We think of the autonomous individual choosing goals and actions as expressions of ethical universals, just as Kant proposed. For instance, senior management of large organizations know before taking action that what they propose is or is not in accordance with laws. We do not know ethical universals directly; we act as if, in view of their foreseen results, our actions could be made into universal laws for everyone. The laws we have at any given time are the expressions of such universals. And we also think of an autonomous individual taking up the objective observer position of the scientist in relation to humans collectively. Human collectives are then thought of, contrary to Kant, as self-organizing systems with their own goals and intentions. For instance, Sennett describes the action of senior management as directing the actions of thousands of people in large companies. They observe results and make changes in order to attain their goals.

The result is the “both … and” thinking about humans as sometimes being autonomous individuals whose actions express ethical universals and at other times being parts of a system and so subjected to its formative process containing goals and intentions. In doing so we lose sight of the “as if ” nature of these goals and intentions, and we also lose sight of anything paradoxical about human action. The example of the struggle against the large corporation, with which I began this chapter, clearly expresses this way of thinking. And the consequence of this “both … and” resolution of paradox is that human rational autonomy is always split off from the self-organizing system applied to human joint action (see Stacey, Griffin and Shaw (2000) for an elaboration of this point).

But why is it that the “both … and” way of thinking has become so pervasive and taken-for-granted? One key reason is, of course, that it is the basis for the dominant way of thinking about the modern notion of the scientific method. The advances in science, and especially in medicine, led easily to attempting to use this way of thinking beyond the bounds of the natural sciences, so that we have come today to use it in a taken-for-granted way in reference to the world we live in and the organizations we are part of. We speak in varying ways of the organization, or parts of the organization, as systems acting with intention, and we also think of management as individuals outside the system who freely choose goals, which are then enacted as the implementation of systems. Perhaps this way of thinking has now become a victim of its own success.

In the rest of this book I want to draw attention to another way of thinking about causality and the ethical basis of what emerges in organizations as self-organization. I will argue that the taken-for-granted elimination of paradox has developed into a habit of thinking that reduces ethics to the justification of individual thought apart from action. Ethics then becomes judging an action in terms of the thought or intention that went before it. This has distracted attention away from the meaning that self-organization might have for human interaction, namely, one that no longer has the sense of an “as if ” application by an external observer. The alternative way of thinking I am talking about draws attention to what is really going on in organizations, namely, the self-organization of those participating in the organization as the basis for identity and change. This will mean recovering a way of thinking based on living in the movement of paradox rather than eliminating it. It is a way of thinking that no longer involves the simple observation of organizations as systems. I will be arguing that when we think in the way we currently do, we ignore the very nature of ethics. The price we pay is pointed to in the film plot and the points made by Sennett, described earlier in this chapter: the destruction of the environment as the basis for life and the gradual loss of the human communities in which all our organizations are embedded. This alternative way of thinking does not eliminate paradox but places it at the very core of understanding. I provide a brief indication of this way of thinking in the next section and take it up in Part II of this volume in Chapters 5 and 6.

Participative self-organization: the reappearance of paradox

The resolution of paradox in thought as both individuals with freedom and self-organizing natural systems has led us to think, in a taken-for-granted way, of human individuals in two ways, which we do not experience as contradictory. We think of individuals collectively as self-organizing systems and so subject to the “system’s” unfolding of intention, forgetting the “as if ” assumption about that intention. We also think of individuals as being outside such systems so that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Complexity and Emergence in Organizations
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Series preface: Complexity and Emergence in Organizations
• 1 Introduction: how we have come to think of ourselves as victims of systems
• Part I: Leadership and systemic self-organization: participation in systems
• Part II: Leadership and participative self-organization: participation in local interaction
• Bibliography