LIVING ON THE EDGE
My Invitation was to participate in an organisational visioning event as an ‘embedded psychological observer’. My invitation had been courtesy of the organisation's Group Human Resources Director, following a ‘suggestion’, i.e. a direct command, from the organisation’s chairman and CEO, a man often described in the organisation’s press releases as ‘wildly charismatic’. The event had been inspired by some recent wilderness experiences of the organisation's wildly charismatic chairman and CEO and would take place in the form of a four day ‘wilderness experience’, if you can describe four days of glamping in the wilds of Buckinghamshire as a wilderness experience.
My role as the embedded psychological observer would be to perform a ‘cultural health check’ on the organisation to ensure that the organisational culture permeated to every part of the organisation. One of the challenges in doing this was that no one seemed quite sure what the organisational culture actually was, beyond some vacuous PowerPoint decks and excited arm-waving by Mr Charisma himself. It can be tempting to think of organisational culture as a thing, some sort of object external to the actual workings of the organisation, but in reality, culture is a complex set of intertwined dynamic human cognitive processes.
And like human cognitive processes, 98% of cultural processes are happening unconsciously, requiring a deeper understanding of collective human psychology to actually engage with those processes. Anyway, the chairman’s invitation had promised that our wilderness retreat would be a once-in-a-lifetime liberating life-changing experience, free from all the constraints and limitations of everyday life. This seemed to be in stark contrast to the reality of the retreat timetable, which was being run with military precision by a small cadre of what were euphemistically described as ‘native guides’ but were in fact a well-drilled battalion of timekeepers, uniformly clad in black puffer jackets and carrying clipboards with carefully guarded lists of activities.
This is a situation that I have observed in many self-proclaimed hip-and-happening organisations. The visions and values typically sound idealised and idyllic but the reality of working in those organisations is often far from ideal. On arrival at the visioning retreat, the native guides had ‘politely requested’ us – that is told us in no uncertain terms - to surrender our phones and any electronic equipment, so that we could have the purest wilderness experience possible and feel like we were really living on the edge. In this case, living on the edge of Milton Keynes.
The accommodation provided for this faux wilderness event was the first indicator of the state of the organisational culture. We would be spending our days and nights in a variety of wigwams, teepees and yurts. From a psychological perspective, the interesting thing was the distribution of how members of the organisation were being accommodated. The campsite (or ‘wilderness edge’ as it was being described in the ‘wilderness guide’) was located in a sloping field, with an appreciable altitude difference between the top of the field and at the bottom. There was an obvious correlation that the more senior you were in the organisation, the higher up the field your tent was.
On arrival at the glampsite, a stern-faced native guide allocated me to what he described as a VeePee teepee, close to the top of the field, among the teepees of the high-ranking organisational executives. I then caused him some consternation by declining this allocation of accommodation, asking instead if I could stay in one of the wigwams at the bottom of the field. His initial response was a firm no but it was accompanied by a puzzled frown, so after a bit of psychological persuasion and some walkie-talkie traffic: I was allocated a wigwam at the bottom of the field. I also still had my allocation of a VeePee and this was causing even more consternation for my native guide and his supervisors. Although it seemed that the native guides had been instructed not to disclose any personal information or emotions, my native guide exclaimed ‘This is messing with the accommodation organisation and really winding me up. You're two tents now.’
There is a time and a place for bad psychology jokes and perhaps this wasn't either. but I couldn’t let an opportunity to use the old two tents joke to go by so I responded by saying ‘I am actually quite relaxed, maybe you're too tents’. Another puzzled frown and then a peal of laughter. ‘Ha! Two tents, you're two tents!’
At that point my host joined us, perhaps attracted by the unusual sound of someone laughing out loud. She tried to persuade me that I could have a much nicer VeePee Teepee very near the top of the field but when I insisted, she laughed and said ‘That’s great! You will be down with the kids, keeping it real!’.
Although there were quite a lot of younger staff at the bottom of the field to be down with the kids with, there were also an appreciable number of older technical staff and developers who I had worked with previously and had formed a mutual bond of trust with during previous coaching sessions and workshops. It would have been nice to exercise my temporary privileges and stay in the VeePee’s teepees but I know from experience that if you want to understand an organisation’s culture then you work from the bottom as well as the top, and in this wilderness experience, that meant working from the bottom of that field gradient. Anyway, I was warmly welcomed into the wigwam encampment at the bottom of the field, into what one of Glaswegian devs was already describing as the tribe of the Wig Wam Bams. A tribal subculture was emerging that was quite different from the idealised cultural vision that was being unsuccessfully imposed.
The gradient of the field wasn’t just topological; it was also psychological. There was a fundamental status gradient between the top of the field and the bottom of the field, and this wasn’t just accidental. Cognitively, we always tend to associate physical height with higher status and it is natural for those with perceived higher status to assume that they should occupy the high ground, whether it is physical or moral. Status gradients are rarely continuous. As the ethnologist Pierre Maranda, and the psychologist Juergen Kriz have observed, cultural subgroups act like Lorenz attractors. Boundaries emerge between attractors. Lines will form across gradients. And these cultural boundaries are often only visible when you view them from psychological and anthropological perspectives.
Trying to ensure that organisational culture permeates to every part of the organisation is an overly idealistic approach because the reality is that every organisational culture will naturally divide into subcultures, particularly in large organisations. That’s why cultural change initiatives are usually doomed to failure. They try to impose an idealised monoculture on to the reality of collective human psychology. Healthy organisations have a healthy heterogeneity of subcultures, cross-pollinating across their boundary possibilities. The edges between subcultures are often where most action, value and potential is to be found in an organisation.
My role as the embedded psychological observer gave me the freedom of movement to move up and down the hill, up and down that status gradient from high ideals to firmly grounded reality. But no-one else seemed to be voluntarily crossing that invisible line on the hill. Although Mr Charisma continually extolled the flat nature of his organisation with no hierarchies, describing it as a level playing field bursting with opportunities, it was quite obvious that it was anything but. And this wasn’t just a perspective of some itinerant embedded psychological observer, it was also apparent in the casual language of the Teepee VeePees at the top of the field, describing themselves as ‘kings of the hill’, while the Wig Wam Bams at the bottom were derisively referred to as ‘bottom fielders’. In his video invitation to the ‘wilderness event’, Mr Charisma had exhorted his ‘friends and colleagues’ to use the event to ‘envision a new way of working by rising above petty politics’. He, however, took the idea of rising above it all a bit too literally by frequently flying in and out of the wilderness event in his Agusta 109 helicopter. He wasn’t living on the edge, just visiting it now and again.
For the Wig Wam Bams who were actually living on the edge, each day began with a compulsory practice of Tibetan yoga, followed by a group mindfulness session, where most participants seemed to be mindful of the fact that what was coming next was a communal clean-eating breakfast to purify and detoxify our systems. The intention may have been to inspire us with a regime of clean eating but the outcome was the depressing experience of having to reluctantly tuck in to high-fibre, high gloop, low interest food. This depression would continue through the rest of the day’s activities, which inevitably included chanting, shamanic drummers, firewalking, wacky performance poets, inspirational speakers, happiness consultants, crystal healers, feng shui experts, Instagram influencers and social media gurus, all closely monitored and guarded by the native guides in a kind of North Korean New Age 2.0.
At regular intervals, the sound of chanting and shamanic drumming would be drowned out by the arrival of Mr Charisma in his Agusta Bell 109 helicopter. This would be the informal cue for our native guides to tell us to get ready for a surprise event and instruct us to all march up to the Vision Yurt. Once we had all filed into the yurt and were uncomfortably sitting cross-legged on its carpeted floor, our glorious leader would wander in, feigning apparent surprise at the conscripted throng. He would then stand on top of a pile of wooden pallets and charismatically ramble on about his idealised vision for the organisation, wilderness experiences, world hunger and apparently anything else that wandered into his mind, all the while emphasising how ‘we were all in this together’ before continuing to spout endless platitudes and euphemisms about how he would lead us into utopia and wasn’t this a utopian idyll we were all experiencing?
In a word, no. From a distance, or to anyone flying over the wilderness experience in a helicopter, the campsite would appear to be a veritable oasis of happiness and purity. The view from the top of the hill, like the view from many corporate boardrooms, seemed just fine. The problem with utopias, is that they can never actually exist, because that’s what the word utopia literally means, ‘no place'. The word utopia was originated by Sir Thomas More in 1516 as the title of his book that described an imaginary island representing the perfect society’. On closer inspection, anyone actually living the experience would just be going through the motions and trying to give the impression that they were finding the experience fulfilling in order to make sure that they weren't accumulating any cultural deviation black marks against their names on the clipboards of the native guides.
For the chairman, there was no difference between his idealised vision and the reality being lived by his employees, between the theory and the practice but as we all know or find out, in theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there are lots of differences between theory and practice. For the chairman, everything was ideal and his reality was quite different from everyone else’s reality as he lifted off in his helicopter and the departed, leaving a trail of airborne tentage, like a scene from a latter-day wizard of Oz as the chairman sped off to pull some more levers behind some more curtains to maintain his utopia and hopefully convince us that we had collectively arrived in some promised land.
Although the event had been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, guaranteed to change your whole mindset and reboot your ways of thinking, it was pretty much like any other idealistic event that I have had the fortune or misfortune to be involved in. Even though the promise was four days in an Eden-esque idyll, free from the constraints and toxins of modern life, the reality was quite different. Like most idealistic approaches, a narrow-minded idealism was being prescriptively forced onto participants and although this was intended as being ‘for their own good’, the reality of the participants' experiences varied markedly from the chairman’s idealised intentions.
As their embedded psychological observer living with the Wig Wam Bams, what was most intriguing for me was not the idealised visioning being spouted out by the chairman and his disciples. What was far more interesting were the responses to the idealised vision from the hundred or so wigwam dwellers on the edge of Milton Keynes.
By lunchtime on the first day, an escape committee had been clandestinely formed by the participants, who were now referring to themselves as internees and were actively developing code names, passwords and increasingly subtle and elaborate hand gestures. In contrast to the idealised vision of the chairman, where everything was abundant and could be made manifest by just thinking about it, the escape committee were focused on more practical issues, like how to obtain some decent food and find out how their friends and families were getting on.
Those who have to apply an idealised vision in reality are often pushed to another boundary, another edge, as they try to transform the impossible into the possible. The edge of the glamping site, where the wigwams were located, was also the edge of the forest that formed the lower perimeter of the camp. Which actually made it easier to escape from the camp without being seen. Any cultural guilt being felt about bending the rules of the wilderness experience soon vanished as the Wig Wam Bams could see the faces of senior VPs being illuminated by the screens of phones and tablets as darkness fell. And often a faint aroma of much more appetising food would drift down from the central utopia higher up the slope.
After night had fallen on the first day and we were supposed to be enjoying some time-boxed meditative reflection, well-organised scouting parties managed to evade the native guides and began exploring beyond the perimeter of the camp into the forests that surrounded us. Quite soon, one of the scouting parties returned with some real and actionable information. They had located a 24-hour hypermarket and within a short while, a series of self-organised and well-disciplined patrols had clandestinely made their way into civilisation, returning with pies, beer and wine, and pay-as-you-go burner phones.
And that was how the days in the utopian wilderness retreat progressed. Within less than a day, two very different organisational cultures had emerged. These cultures had been emerging from the moment of our arrival at the promised utopian retreat. Exactly the same dynamic emerges in most large organisations when the executive leadership becomes increasingly distanced from the employees who are actually creating value for the business. It doesn't really matter if the organisation is in a rented field on the edge of Milton Keynes or in a towering office block in the financial centre of a large city. The organisation will stratify into different cultural layers, which will become increasingly disconnected from each other, unless cultural boundaries are identified and actively engaged with.
Inhabitants of the higher levels will tend to pursue the ideal and those denizens of the lower levels will be tasked with making it real. This stratification also results in those working at the lower levels tending to to look out for each other and their own tribal needs rather than the greater organisational needs. Which was exactly what was happening in our wilderness experience. Different postcode, different dress code, same behavioural codes.
At least once every day, I would meet with my sponsor and share my observations. As always, I was honest and candid and shared the reality of the subculture formations. Her response was to shrug her shoulders and admit that’s the way it always was, the way it would always be. Trying to impose an ideal rather than keeping it real. Her report to Mr Charisma would describe the organisation’s culture as vibrant and multifaceted. Which always sounds better than disconnected and alienated.
During the four days of my role as embedded cultural observer, I only saw one instance of any of the Teepee VeePees venturing down the slope and across the invisible cultural boundary. As we were making yet another unauthorised journey through the dark forest that formed the natural edge of the faux wilderness experience to the real experience of a 24-hour shopping destination , we observed, in the arboreal half-light, what seemed to be Mr Charisma himself having quite an intimate exploration of personal boundaries with one of the Senior Marketing Managers. Rather than gawping, we all pressed fingers to lips and taking care to avoid stepping on any dry sticks, like the true wigwam-dwellers we had become, we glided through the forest like ghosts, lured by the promise of hypermarket beer and pies.