1
An Introduction⊠in seven uneasy pieces
DOI: 10.4324/9781003035015-1
The worlds of organisations and management are full of clichĂ© and glibness. The mental disciplines that feed considered thinking and action have been rotted by bubble-gum habits of mind, trotted out as if they were the wisdom of the ages, something that looks good in a slide-deck. Meanwhile peopleâs lives get turned upside down by a frenzy of pop-prescriptions that justify endless upheaval, given big-word titles such as âtransformationâ and âgame changingâ and âworld classâ this or that. Nothing is allowed to be ordinary or human scaled. There is a lot of pain and little gain â except for the snake-oil salespeople and Quack Doctors who peddle the latest nostrums, dealers to corporate junkies too strung out to see who benefits from the exchange. There is a lot to despair at when looking at what has come to pass as good management and leadership, where its citadel of learning â[t]he business school⊠has tended to become somewhere that produces knowledge for management rather that knowledge about management⊠It is knowledge⊠that relies on flattering those in powerâ (Parker, 2018, pp. 36â37).
In this book we draw on years of working in and studying organisations of all sorts to explore what got us into this state of affairs, so that it becomes possible for something different, something better to emerge in due time â free we hope of the false promises and soft-soap weâve already staked out as part of our current organisational malaise.
We have written it for everybody who works for a living and has to be part of, or engage with, taken for granted institutional patterns, which leave them bemused as to how such strange behaviours have passed unquestioned, madness hiding in plain sight. For those of a literary bent we would say this is for anyone who has thought that âthere is something rotten in the state of Denmarkâ, where Hamletâs Denmark stands for the common nonsense of accepted practices of organisational life.
In this introduction weâll sketch out how we came to this downbeat, but realistic, conclusion and outline how our analysis will unfold through the book and how we will cautiously outline what a better way might look like in terms of management and leadership. Its seven uneasy pieces are:
-
Uneasy Piece 1 â The common sense we live by
-
Uneasy Piece 2 â A superficial connection with reality
-
Uneasy Piece 3 â What gets in the way of us stopping and wondering about our world
-
Uneasy Piece 4 â The disappearance of collective sense and sense making
-
Uneasy Piece 5 â The fragmentation of time, busyness, and the disconnected future
-
Uneasy Piece 6 â Paying attention to the headwaters of our thinking
-
Uneasy Piece 7 â What happens next
While wary of over-condensed conclusions, we will frame these introductory sections with our take on what might be seen as punctuating conclusions, while suggesting we all stay on our guard against potted knowledge that is easily swallowed and just as easily passed.
1.1 The common sense we live by
Here is a tale of the modern world â and insight perhaps into the way in which so many people experience it, which is crucial to the critique that we advance in this book. In May 2020, a story appeared in the virtual edition of the Daily Mirror newspaper in the UK, headlined âNursery teacher red-faced after discovering why newly purchased candle âdisappearedââ (Cripps, 2020). A woman of 21 gave her 18-year-old sister a scented candle as a gift. When physics took its course and the candle burnt down, the recipient began a charged correspondence with her sister via text.
According to the story, she demanded to know âwhere has the wax in my candle goneâ and claimed it had âdisappearedâ. It was explained that this is what happens with candles, which led the younger sister to complain in a disgruntled fashion that no one had told her that this might happen â and that, when she had seen her generous sibling replacing candles in the past, she had assumed that she had some sort of OCD about it or was some sort of candle expert.
Drawing attention to this story is not meant to denigrate in any sneering way the people in it. Instead, it seems to us to show the way in which so many of us experience our day-to-day lives, as something in which we are not fully invested but which we expect to endlessly meet our daily needs. In this instance, there are several noteworthy themes. Firstly, the report suggests that the first reaction was not to try to make sense of what had happened, but to argue that there was something wrong with the candle.
The lack of inquiry in the world is very apparent; it has been supplanted by emotional reaction. Things make us angry, sad, and happy these daysâŠbut very rarely do they make us feel curious. The clumsy and uncommunicative shorthand of social media leads us to push buttons, not sense makeâŠand allows us to go from 0 to 60 in terms of emotional response, without any pause at thinking. When Scorseseâs film The King of Comedy (IMDB, 1982) appeared in the UK in 1983, there's a scene where the entertainer Jerry Langford is approached on the street by an initially gushing and adoring fan, who then turns on a sixpence when Jerry makes his apologies about not speaking to her nephew Morris on the payphone that sheâs using. She bellows after him the vicious instruction that he contracts cancer, (YouTube, 2013) a curse that shocked at the time â but is now familiar behaviour on Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
Secondly, there is a failure of agency, with a sense that an infantilised perspective is at work here and across the wider social world. The response that no one said aloud that this might happen seems to allow an individual to abrogate their responsibility for making sense of the world â and instead sets up an insistent demand that the world should constantly be explained by others. We are nudging here towards a view of the world seen merely as a commodity that we are licensed to experience, rather than a place where we have an intrinsic and reflexive presence.
Lastly, there is a pathologisation of others based on oneâs own limitations, in terms of understanding a candle. Changing candles is explained away as part of some psychological condition. Interestingly, there is a flip side to this notion, which is to hide away behind ignorance and merely assert that those who have a reasonable grasp of key elements of the world can be dismissed as an âexpertâ of some sort. In this case, it is to talk of the older sister as some sort of candle expert. One might reasonably suggest that this schema sees illness and expertise as pretty much part of the same âweirdâ continuum, problems that need to be owned and fixed by another rather than an exposĂ© of a lack of understanding on the part of the person who denigrates the other.
Letâs leave those two sisters in their wax-and-wick based confusion. In the spirit of full disclosure, the following story is very similar and involves Mark. H...