Barry Oshry of Power + Systems
Yesterday evening Barry Oshry of Power + Systems treated us to quite a show. Funny thing is that we were the ones performing, in our roles as tops, middles, bottoms, and customers. I would say our performance was unrehearsed, but actually one of Barry's main points was that our real-life organizational behavior is all too rehearsed. We act out the same stories again and again. "I'm responsible here, so I better suck it up"; or "I'm oppressed by my bosses, so screw them"; etc.
Most people I know (including me) got very wrapped up in their roles for the evening. Then after our last 10-minute "workday" was done, we collected ourselves and posed some questions for further thought:
- How do we empower others in our organizations to take responsibility? What benefits can we sell, and how can we minimize fear, even while our colleagues are being battered?
- Is there a "tipping point" where an organization collectively lets go of victim story and chooses responsibility?
- Does this kind of exercise work in cultures with different attitudes about independent thought? How much of our victim reaction is learned culturally?
- How can we create good organizational simulations? Especially simulations like this one where participants really own their reactions?
- When we do this exercise for a real-life organization, who is the client: just tops? Or tops, middles, bottoms?
posted by Bruce Hoppe at 8:31 AM
2 Comments:
I'm dealing with the question: "How we empower others in our organization...make them aware of the costs" etc. You need to understand the framework I operate from: education. I never begin with an organization's actual condition, the specific issues it is facing, and so forth. I want to take them away from that specific world to first explore "organization" as it exists EVERYWHERE. For that reason, I always want to start with an exercise like the one we experienced (only at least a day long) or, if a workshop isn't possible, then a presentation on some facet of general (universal) organization life such as "Life in the Middle" or "Why are there no Top Teams?" The point being that there is power in people seeing that the issues they are experiencing are not specific to their organization and are not tied to the personalities of the players. This creates a very different emotional, intellectual, and strategic base for looking at, understanding, and working with their specifics.
With regard to the system pain: systemically-focused workshops and presentations deal with the costs of system blindness - personally, in term os relationships, as well as costs to the system.
12:05 PM
I'm dealing with the question: "Is victimization something that is culturally learned?" To understand victimization, we need to go back a step. To feel like a victim, we need to believe that there is some powerful person or group who could solve our problems if they chose to. All you have to do is go back to childhood to see how early and powerfully this belief in a "powerful other" is embedded. All we needed to do was whine, and they took care of us. And we also learned that if they didn't come after the first whine, all we had to do was whine louder and more frequently. So it is understandable that our first reflexive reaction to pain is to blame that non-responsive "powerful other." The problem is: Some of us, or all of us some of the time, never get past that first response even though that "powerful other" is no longer around.
12:18 PM
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