Riding On Dragons

How Human Organizations Become Inhuman

To be human is to be imperfect. To be human is to be vulnerable. Humanity is denied when organizations encourage norms requiring that we relinquish our imperfection and our vulnerability, and require instead that we bring only our competitive nature, our striving, and the pretense of perfection and invulnerability within their doors. They then become inhuman. They become not “human organizations” but “organizations of humans.”

A friend told a Native American shaman that he was in the business of “bringing spirit into the workplace.” The shaman shook his head, “That is impossible,” he said. “You cannot bring spirit into a workplace because it is always there. It may be suffering, but it is always there.”

Leaders sometimes try to alleviate the suffering of the spirit by introducing new visions, new missions, new approaches to challenges. These may be valuable aspects of a business strategy, but are merely palliative to the suffering spirit. They may relieve the suffering for a time, distracting it with super-charged striving, but they cannot cure it. The suffering is caused by inhumanity, by denial of human imperfection and vulnerability.

Can human imperfection and vulnerability exist side-by-side with competitiveness and striving? Can that be encouraged? Can it even be allowed?
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 4:24 pm by Dick Richards and is filed under Artful Work, Leadership, Shifting Energy, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Comments

zak zaklad says:

August 6, 2009 at 8:36 am

Dick, your miniessay reminds me of the wonderful book you turned me onto, “Spirituality of Imperfection”. the questions about spirit and competition are provocative. i’ve always thought that spirit is about being connected to others in community. being in competition turns others into rivals, even enemies. it’s hard to be in community with enemies. I recall my days in college where there was a TON of competition – everything was graded on a curve. i grew to hate my classmates, to hope they screwed up. whew!
Zak
Dick R says:

August 6, 2009 at 9:00 am

Zak — thanks for dropping by. One of my favorite takes on competition came from Timothy Gallway in a classic book, The Inner Game of Tennis. He wrote of competition as “a high form of collaboration” in which the players agree to provide one another with challenges. The goal was not to “beat” the other player, but to offer tests. Seems intuitively attractive to me but hard to put into practice because it requires a certain egolessness. I think we do see evidence of this at the end of some sporting events, when opposing players meet to shake hands, winners and losers in some way offering “thanks” to one another.
Terrence Seamon says:

August 6, 2009 at 12:41 pm

Dick,
Great posting, brief yet evocative. Reminds me of a favorite theme: our brokenness.
http://learningvoyager.blogspot.com/2005/02/gifted-and-broken-when-people-are-born.html
Taking this to the corporate world, I’d say that organizations are inherently (and wonderfully) broken…and gifted…because they are collections of people.
Terry
Dan says:

August 6, 2009 at 3:19 pm

First, I like the new template. Very rich, easy to read, great graphics. Nice work!

As to your post, I know I can count on you to reveal an essence, and you’ve done it well with this contrast of human imperfection and vulnerability with our supposed invulnerability and competitiveness at work. A consulting friend of mine, very interested in releasing passion and “the work of the heart” in organizations, said to me yesterday: “When I go through the [corporate] doors, I find myself entering an alien world.” That says it pretty well, for me anyway.

In some way, these inhuman systems seem geared to hook us precisely because of our humanness and our sense of vulnerability. It happens as we learn from events and other people what we can show and not show, what we must be in order to be considered “successful.” Because we live in a self-reinforcing culture of individualism, the mechanism used for control is the internalization of such messages deeply and personally. It doesn’t actually happen through some kind of organizational culture as an external factor. It doesn’t come from the “outside.” That’s just the agency of the thing. Rather, it is experienced as self-determined. It becomes something built into “me” that tells me what I must do and be for me to consider me successful. It works off our self-judgments. That is the real programming. It’s no surprise that the word, “cult” and “culture” share four letters and exactly the same Latin root — to worship, inhabit, cultivate.

The good news is that we have power to notice the messages we send ourselves. We have the power to question and halt these messages and in so doing challenge our own conditioning. We have the power to choose community, and also to stand up where others have learned to keep their heads down. There is a price for this kind of awareness and freedom, but it’s better than living in the fears and self-judgments that are symptoms of servitude. This is exactly the shadow of our so-called individualism. At its base is an internalized dream of deep conformity to fundamentally conservative values, and increasingly with an authoritarian tilt. What I think, in essence, you are highlighting, Dick, is the dark side of the American dream. If you want that dream, then you learn to go along with the BS about invulnerability and competition, the stuff that keeps us so perfectly fragmented, contained rather than open, and “alien” from our true selves.
Nicholas Head says:

August 7, 2009 at 1:42 pm

Love the look of the blog Dick
The question evoked an image of a tribal dance for me and the questions that
came with that image are
When is it time to put on the mask and dance?
When is it time to take the mask off and sit together in our shared humanity?
And like the yin and yang, how might one seed the other?
Maybe an answer to these questions begins with more attention to how we bring ritual into our work and life lived otherwise.
Can I recognize and give my self reminders to keep the wheel spinning and the spreader seeding?
Yes. Let’s see. Oh yeah, time for a little BLT. Breath, Listen, Talk.
Nick
Dick R says:

August 8, 2009 at 6:11 pm

“…the dark side of the American dream.’

Nicely put Dan, and thanks for the thoughtful reply. Nick also implies this when he talks of the “yin and yang of it.”

The suffering spirit in organizational is an old story. The denial has me stirred up right now.
Dan says:

August 10, 2009 at 11:15 am

It’s a worthy thing to be stirred up about, Dick. Thanks again for writing this post.
Terrence Seamon says:

September 9, 2009 at 9:24 am

Dick,
You might like this:
http://learningvoyager.blogspot.com/2009/09/suffering-dreaming-organization.html
Terry
The Suffering & Dreaming Organization » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. says:

September 12, 2009 at 3:20 am

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