Thank you, Bee Mayhew, for editing this transcript!

Transcript:

Emma: Welcome to Positive Disintegration podcast, a path to authenticity. In this episode, we're talking to guest Kate Arms for a second time around. This time we're going to be talking about positive disintegration in organizations. Now you may not think that disintegration can happen in a workplace or organization, but it can, and we're going to explore that today.

We'll talk about what disintegration does look like in an organization, and we'll talk about how it relates to disintegration as Dabrowski described it for individuals. So whether you're an employee or an employer or thinking about creating an organization or startup, this is going to be a really interesting episode for you.

So hold onto your hats because this one is a complete mind melter.

Hello, dearest listeners and welcome back to Positive Disintegration Framework for Becoming Your Authentic Self. I'm your host, Emma Nicholson, and with me is co-host, Dr. Chris Wells. Hi, Chris.

Chris: Hello, Emma. Nice to see you again.

Emma: You too. We've got something a little bit different today.

Chris: We do, but we have a familiar guest.

Emma: That's right. So we've got Kate Arms back talking about positive disintegration in organizations. And it's something I'm quite interested in because I work one of those horrible nine-to-five jobs.

Chris: Yeah, I'm interested too, to see how this goes. It's definitely something new for us to tackle.

Emma: Yeah, we've mostly been talking about the theory in relation to the individual. So this is going to be a mind blower, I think.

Chris: I think so too.

Emma: Well, without further ado, let's bring on our guest. So for our listeners, today's guest is Kate Arms, and you may remember her from a previous episode that we did on autopsychotherapy. Kate is a warrior for the human spirit, a writer, teacher, and speaker. She makes a living primarily as a leadership development and agility coach in tech and as an individual coach for people with high levels of overexcitability and writes about creating self-coaching organizations on the online newsletter Psychological Safety at Scale. Welcome back to the podcast, Kate.

Kate: Thank you. It's nice to be back. Thanks for the invitation.

Chris: We're so glad to have you back. Your previous episode on auto-psychotherapy has been so popular.

Kate: It's so nice to hear that. You know, we do these recordings and I hope I have something useful to say that's going to have something that people can take away. And so it's really gratifying to hear that.

Chris: Yeah, it's been super interesting for me to see which episodes resonate with people more than others. And clearly auto-psychotherapy and self-leadership struck a chord. So thanks so much for sharing your expertise with us again. So the first question that we wanted to ask you for this episode was: Tell us what positive disintegration looks like in an organization.

Kate: Okay, so the short answer is a mess—but that isn't really useful. But if you think about positive disintegration as an individual goes through it, where there are all these inner dynamisms and all of this sort of internal struggle and challenges, in an organization, every single sort of part of an individual that is wrestling with itself is actually a person, or a bunch of people, or a bunch of departments that sort of speak with that voice of the organization.

So what it actually looks like is just sort of organizational, interpersonal dynamics and shifts. So I was thinking about the full trajectory of positive disintegration in an individual and the levels and how does that parallel to an organization, and it struck me that a useful analogy is—so I work in tech—if you think about a tech startup, a tech startup starts with an individual person or a small group of people having an idea about a problem to solve and a way of solving it.

And there's this inner drive from these individuals, which is really sort of the first factor. And then there's a customer or a funder that they need to actually sort of build an organization. And that becomes the second factor, the outside social forces. And there's this sort of struggle at the beginning to find product-market fit and to try and build a company that actually got something of value that they're selling.

And this is sort of basic, you know, level one kind of stuff. And then at some point it gets big enough that the people who founded it aren't enough to deliver. And then there becomes this extra complexity of, okay, now we've got employees and we've got customers and we've got funders and all of a sudden the challenges get much more complex.

And quite often there comes to be a point where the things that helped just get a product delivered aren't enough to make the organization sustainable. And the organization has to actually get reflective and self-reflective about how it does things and what kind of organization it wants to be. And then you get these internal conversations where employees want a bunch of things and legal situations want a bunch of things, and there starts to be this internal dynamic about what kind of company do we want to be, and this is what I think of as the sort of multilevel aspect of the disintegration, and this can be really, really tricky.

If the organization was successful early on because what got them to how they're functioning successfully isn't going to make them sustainable at scale. And it's often very, very difficult. You often have real egos with founders where they have a hard time letting go, where if you were founded by an engineer who then becomes a leader responsible for hundreds of people and doesn't get to play with the toys that they were building before, it gets very complicated because they're underskilled in the things that the company needs them to do, but they enjoy it less.

And if they survive sort of that transition, then they end up as an organization that's bigger than the original goals of the founders that has this multiplicity of stakeholders that they are trying to serve, that they're trying to create. This organization is trying to actually sort of be sustainable as an entity itself, taking care of its employees, taking care of its funders and taking care of its customers. And at some point, there also becomes the relationship to the external geopolitical forces, and there are quite a lot of companies now that are even trying to figure out how to keep all of those people happy and be good for the planet.

It's this enormous mess is what it looks like in the disintegration part of just people who have different interests within the organization and the whole system is trying to figure out how to satisfy all those needs.

Emma: So if I was just to play that back to you—I hate going into work terminology. I feel like I'm bringing it up from the fact that we're talking about workplaces, but if you start with a vision for every person or entity that you add into that, it's going to make that vision shift. So you start with the initial idea, you put it out there and then your customers have input into that. Every employee you bring on board has input into that, you get market forces. So as you travel and as you grow and as more individuals or entities get involved, that's what is really the catalyst for that sort of shift.

Kate: Yeah. And you get the kind of thing that you get in an individual where some of them, you can solve the challenges that are posed by the new thing by basically doing what you did before, just a little bit differently. And that doesn't require sort of any of the self-reflection or values hierarchy or that sort of thing. But at some point, you don't actually have the capacity to do what you were doing before without changing and then you have to have that inner wrestling as an organization.

Emma: And I think that's a similar problem for people that work on collaborative projects within workplaces that, you know, someone might come up with an idea for a solution or a product. But then when they need to collaborate, because the project is too big for them to handle on their own, everybody else has got their own ideas and comes into it, and people can get disheartened if that idea comes out looking different to what their initial vision was.

Kate: Right. And that's hard enough as an individual creator. You know, as an individual creator, like an artist, you have this vision of what you want. And you never have the craftsmanship to do exactly what it was that you envisioned. And that's hard enough to deal with. But when somebody else takes your idea and makes it something different, it doesn't even matter whether it's better in some big sort of grand scheme of things. It's a shock to the ego if you're not used to collaborating in that egoless way.

Emma: That's a big thing that comes up. So if people aren't familiar with big organizations and that's not what they do, but this debate also goes on with people taking books and making them into films. So you had one author that had a vision and they wrote something, but then when you get it into the filmmaking process and you change the medium and it's got to become something else, sometimes the fans are like, why isn't this exactly like it was in the book? And that's because everybody's come on board and the filmmakers have got their own ideas and have taken the idea in another direction.

Kate: Yeah, and the reader hasn't read exactly the same book that the author wrote anyway, because anything that the author didn't describe in a way that actually matched sort of the image that popped into the reader's head, there's something different there already. So even if the filmmaker goes back to the literal text, they're making a different movie. It's a good point. Yeah. And in big organizations, you get, if you get separated into functional departments, which most organizations do, the perspective of the people who are worried about legal liability and the people who are worried about getting market share and the people who are worried about delivering a product that doesn't break—their perspectives are so different that coming to understand what is success for the organization is really complicated.

Chris: I have a few things on my mind. I want to go back first because you talked about factors, Kate, and we haven't talked about the three factors on this podcast yet. I don't think I feel like we need to do it. Well, I just, well, actually it's interesting to me because I never really talk about the three factors in my work, but Dabrowski did talk about three factors of development. The first factor was constitutional aspects of an individual, which could include the overexcitabilities but also things that happened during pregnancy, genetic stuff, heredity. All of that is a part of it. Then the second factor is the social environment. Then the third factor of the autonomous forces and that is the dynamisms. So, you know, when it comes to organizations, what did you say was the first factor? Did you say it was an inner drive of the organization?

Kate: No, the first factor is sort of the, what is it that the founders come together to build? It's like somebody has an idea of a problem to solve with an organization.

Chris: Oh, so it was their idea. Okay. Right. Yes. Right. So, okay.

Kate: It's that genesis moment.

Chris: The genesis moment. Okay. Yeah. That's interesting. The other thing that's on my mind is, I mean, what does unilevel disintegration look like in an organization compared to multilevel disintegration? And you already touched on it a bit. I mean, of course we know that the multilevel difference is that there's a hierarchy of values. So that means in an organization that's going through a unilevel disintegration, there's not a hierarchy of values, which seems very problematic.

Kate: Yeah. I mean, the thing that happens in organizations that I think of as sort of level one is that if you think of the genesis moment as whoever the founders are, whether it's one person or two or three people, they have a vision and as long as their vision is really transmitted to the people that they're working with and what the organization is doing is developing their vision, there are all sorts of things you can do to get better at doing that and to be able to make more of the product or deliver more of the services. What everybody is doing is implementing the founder's vision. The value there is deliver what the boss says—like that's the value.

And when you get to multilevel you actually end up being like: are we delivering what the boss wants? Are we delivering what the client wants? Are we delivering what the employees want to be working on? Is it that we're delivering what's good for the planet? Like you're sort of shifting into this much more complex and you can't actually solve for all of that. You can't actually have an organization that does what the boss wants and the client wants because they never want exactly the same thing.

Chris: I can't help but see things through like the lens that I've had when it comes to work, which is so different than what you're describing, you know, just because I have experience working for nonprofits or government. I mean, I worked in child protection for a while. And so I think the challenges are a little different. And when I think of like, for me, when I was coming into this, I was thinking, well, what do I think of when it comes to what I've observed in organizations that I've been a part of? And I think, you know, for me, like just what came to mind was being in organizations where the mission seems clear.

And I'm thinking actually of the government job right now, you know like when you're working in child protection, of course, there's a very clear mandate to protect children and families, you know, and it seems obvious, but the problem is that the employees doing that work are given kind of the untenable situation of having enormous caseloads and just, you know, it's the kind of work that burns you out in no time. And so, you know, my experience of that was that, like, I wasn't supported in my role. I wasn't able to actually do the job that I thought that I was going to be able to do.

Kate: I mean, and you get to this really interesting place where you should be asking the question: Is it actually in the best interest of the child to have the social workers burn out and be replaced?

Chris: Exactly. No, no, it's not.

Kate: Right. So it actually, you actually need to have a much more sort of wide-range understanding of what the best interest of the child is. It's a much more complex piece when you start looking at the whole system is trying to deliver this service sustainably.

Chris: Right, right. And yeah, I mean, my experience of it was definitely that yeah, it was a mess. I would definitely say that that was a unilevel experience of work.

Kate: Yeah, because it's just that piece of that short-term thinking: what's in the best interest of all the children that are on the caseload now, give them all to the caseworkers and make sure that they've all been assigned to a caseworker and make the caseworker do all the things, right? And you actually have to have this wider sort of hierarchy of values that is like, the value shift is actually, the hierarchy starts to shift more towards long-term thinking and sustainability than to short-term fixes and more to sustaining the system rather than delivering a single goal.

Emma: I do see some similarities though to my experience with big corporates, because, you know, at first, everybody's got a vision, we've got an idea, we're all on board with it, we're going ahead, and that's almost like your primary integration. But those first grumblings that either it's coming from the staff or from the customers of “this isn't working” seems to be where the unilevel disintegration starts before—as you said, when you move into multilevel, it's like, right, we recognize that there's problems. What are we going to do about this? Like, how do we solve this? But those initial grumblings of “this shit is not sustainable and I'm burning out” or, you know, “we're not delivering what we're supposed to,” or “the customer's complaining.” That seems to be where that sort of process kicks off.

Kate: Yeah. And sometimes you can have a unilevel solution. You can raise taxes, allocate more funds to the agency and go about business as usual. If you can't do that and you choose not to do that, then you have this, “we have to rethink the way that we deliver services” question, or you live in the grumbling. Right. And we talk about it with individuals—you can get stuck being disintegrated. And I think a lot of organizations stumble along for a long time in a negative disintegrated state, just sort of keeping the lights on.

Emma: And we know that either for an organization or for an individual, if you just carry on with the pain, eventually something's going to break.

Kate: Yeah. And in organizations, what breaks is often the individuals within them. That was my experience. I mean, I think that's what we're seeing in the world right now when we are having, in the world that I live in, conversations around quiet quitting, and we had not very long ago the sort of great resignation. I mean, actually, I think that is exactly what breaking because we've been functioning in this negative disintegration space for a while looks like.

Emma: I was just thinking of quiet quitting. And I saw someone saying, rather than quiet quitting, we should be calling it acting your wage.

Kate: Right.

Emma: Yeah. I don't get paid enough to do this.

Kate: Right. And you know, the words that I used to hear in organizations is, you know, “that's above my pay grade.” Like, I'm just not going to deal with that problem because that's like, it's above my pay grade.

Chris: So how does positive disintegration look different compared to the individual? I mean, we've already addressed it a little, but I can't help but think that there have to be dynamisms involved at the organizational level too. And I wonder how, yeah, I mean, what are your thoughts on that, Kate?

Kate: Yeah. So my thought is absolutely that there are dynamisms and I actually think it would be interesting to sort of step back a little bit and look and see whether there are new dynamisms that don't show up in the individual because of the complexity of the number of people that organizations tend to be made up of. But there's a coaching school that I'm trained in called Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching. And one of the very first lessons that you get, if you get training from them is to see the system as the coaching client, and the system, the organization is this emergent property that is made up of not just the individuals in the organization, but the interactions between them. Dynamisms show up in the interactions between them as much as in the individuals.

So for instance, when I think about the feelings of guilt and feelings of shame dynamisms, and I think about how do those manifest in organizations, they manifest in organizations where the leadership says “we want to be inclusive.” And so they have a diversity recruiting campaign. And then they get some people who are not like the people who are already there. And then they don't expand the culture to make them feel welcome. And then the people who have come in as a result of this recruiting start complaining about the way they're being treated. And if the organization is alive, as a learning organization, the leadership actually experiences guilt and shame about, “Oh, we're not who we thought we would be. We're not who we wanted to be. We wanted to be this diverse thing. And actually people are coming in saying we're not welcome when we're leaving. So we're not being it.” So that there's that dynamism, that sort of dynamic that shows up. And sometimes it gets felt in the bodies of the people in the system who are in the relevant place.

The other thing I used to get individual coaching clients who were highly sensitive people in organizations that were under stress that weren't facing problems and the individuals weren't being supported in their organizations and they'd come to me and what I'd see is that actually the organization was sort of scapegoating them. Their highly sensitive body was starting to manifest the symptoms of all of the dysfunction of the organization through their body. You get sort of grumblings from one person who is always the person who has to say, “hey, wait a minute. Have you thought about the risks involved in that?” Or the person who says, “hey, wait a minute. There's a privacy issue there” or “That's not really respecting the clients”—and those were great examples. Yeah. And so they show up in individual bodies.

Chris: Those, I love these examples that you've given us. Oh my gosh. And I'm now in my mind, I'm thinking about like, yes, they should feel guilt and shame about these problems. It's so…

Kate: Yeah. I mean, there's a really interesting thing that happens when I coach teams sometimes and sometimes I'll be brought in by someone who's not on the team. And so I'll talk to the person who's bringing me in and I'll say, “so what are you seeing? And what do you want me to work on it? And what do you see as the problem?” And quite often, they'll say something on the line of, “well, the team's not collaborating very well. And I think the real problem is this one person who just won't get with the program.” And I'll say, “okay.” And I'll go into the team setting and I'll observe the team and I'll notice that the behavior that this one person who's been identified as the problem is doing is asking all of the hard questions, the ones that really are going to take effort to solve, the elephant in the room kinds of questions and that the rest of the team actually wants to avoid the hard questions and do the easy work.

And that actually the solution is not to have this one person get with the program. It's actually to get the whole team with their program and distribute the willingness to look at the hard problem. It's fascinating.

Emma: So I don't, we had—what were the catalysts for organizations to disintegrate, but I think you've covered that pretty well already. And you were making me think, because you said something, Kate, about sensitive people within an organization. And when the Dabrowski Congress was on, Eric Vorm did a talk where he was talking about, you get these gifted and creative people within organizations. And on one hand, they're told, “bring your whole self to work and innovate.” But on the other hand, it's also “get in the conformity box and toe the line.”

And I'm thinking that, you know, particularly with individuals like that within an organization, they're almost like a presence of, like, overexcitabilities or something themselves, because they do think differently. So, not just from the position of, you know, maybe the risk person is always seeing risk, but you've potentially got these gifted or creative individuals within a workplace. I'm wondering what sort of impact that they can have and also, you know, what sort of problems they might experience existing in that sort of “get in the box” environment.

Kate: Yeah, so a couple of great questions there. The problems, I'll start with the problems of the “get in the box” culture, because those are sort of easy. That kind of culture is very, very difficult for highly sensitive people, for creative people, for people with, in particular, intellectual and emotional overexcitabilities, though often if you've got psychomotor overexcitabilities, the pace of organizational behavior is excruciating. Decision making in large organizations can take forever. And so if you've got this bias to action and the body wants to be in motion it can be excruciating. And so there's definitely a challenge in that kind of environment, learning to manage your sensitivities in a way that you don't just explode or get constantly attacked for being who you are.

From the organizational perspective, it's really interesting because those people are who you need when the problems you're solving are complicated. If you are trying to do, if you're trying to solve a problem like climate change or the electric grid or water in the American West or in Pakistan—if you're trying to solve these problems, you actually need these highly sensitive, creative bodies running the show. Like you need that energy to actually look at the situation and come up with new ideas and new thoughts and finding a way to harness that creativity and that innovation and that energy in a way that can then be taken by people who are less overexcitable to maintain a system that has been invented is really challenging because the kind of person who really is good at solving the new problem is going to be really bored at maintaining the system that solves the problem.

And so as an organization, you actually need to find a way to say, “okay, here's our innovation portion of the organization, and here's our run the systems portion of the organization.” And you might actually have to have different management systems and incentive systems and sort of career path systems for the two different parts of the organization, or you might need to have a more complicated set of policies that feels fair because the organization actually needs both of that.

Emma: I think part of that is awareness in the culture. We had a situation at work where they were doing one of those workplace health and safety packs, and they were kind of like, you know, “get more movement in today,” which is a big problem with office workers because we sit at a desk for so long. And one of the things was, you know, “if you're in a long meeting, you know, get up and move around and stretch.” And I'm like, “that's fine. And I'm on board with that idea because that's what I'm dying to do in every long meeting or workshop, like I cannot sit still.”

But it makes me look like I'm not paying attention. And I said, “the plain fact of the matter is that if you do that, and particularly for neurodiverse people, it's got to be a real problem because if you've got that tendency, you want to get up and move around or you're tapping or you're doing something else while the meeting's going on. You just look rude.” Like it's not acceptable. The acceptable behavior in a meeting is to sit still and pay attention, which is so hard.

Kate: Yeah. And it's really interesting. One of the places that I see this in conversation is in conversations in teams. So one of the cool things about the agile approach to working is that it really does say to people, to organizations, “build small teams and let those teams of just a few people figure out how they want to work together,” rather than trying to have a very large group of people. You know, if you've got 10,000 people in an organization and you set one set of rules about the norms of how business is going to be conducted, 8,000 of those people are going to be unhappy.

And if you have teams of six or eight people and you have conversations about “what brings out the best in me and what brings out the best in you and how can we work together as a team,” it's much easier to find something that works for everybody. So you might have a team that has people with psychomotor overexcitabilities where it's like, “you know what? We don't have our cameras on during meetings so that you can crochet and you can be on your walking desk and you can pace.” And we can just have a conversation and you might have the team working on the product like next door that has cameras on because they feel disconnected if they can't see each other's faces, or you might have the other team that is like, “you know what, for these kinds of meetings, we have our cameras off because we don't need that overstimulation of the visual and for these kinds of meetings it really helps to read body language. So we have cameras on” or “for most of the meetings, everybody gets to decide what they want and it doesn't matter.”

And those details make such a difference for people with overexcitabilities. And so that an organizational system that actually has baseline—these are sort of fireable offenses of things that are not acceptable and the rest you can work out yourself as long as you get your job done. It's so much more effective than “everybody works this way.”

Emma: And I'd really encourage people if they are in that situation to just tell your team that's how you are. So we had the similar thing of “it'd be nice if everybody could turn their camera on.” And I just said to my manager, “I can't for a lot of those meetings because I'm up, I'm standing, I'm fidgeting and, you know, scratching my nose and looking around and not looking at the screen. And it's not that I'm not paying attention, I just can't sit still and I'm thinking it's going to be distracting for people. So just excuse me if I've got my camera off, unless I'm actually presenting or doing something.” And people are surprisingly accepting of that sort of stuff, but it takes that space to be able to welcome that kind of conversation. But also a little bit of bravery to just put your hand up and say, “Hey, this is me. I'm just a little bit different and this is how I prefer to operate.”

Kate: Yeah, I love that you mentioned the bravery and the generosity of spirit for everybody else, because it really does take both and the less generosity there is explicitly from other team members or from leadership, the more bravery it takes.

Chris: Do we think that there are some organizations that are just at like a unilevel integration, like bureaucracies? I'm still thinking about Emma bringing up Eric's presentation at the Congress. And so he's in the Navy. And so, you know, that's the organization that he was talking about. I mean, are some organizations so unwieldy in their size and in their bureaucratic ways that they're just, we would consider them at like a state of unilevel integration that doesn't disintegrate?

Kate: So I would say that there are organizations absolutely that are functioning at a level one way. To say that they don't disintegrate, I think it's probably going a little far, but the military is really, really interesting to me because there is a very clear hierarchy and a chain of command. Very clear rules about when you challenge the chain of command and when you don't, and at the same time, modern warfare functions by training teams to make judgments on the ground. And actually has an enormous amount of in practice delegation of responsibility and not coming back up the chain of the command for decision making.

And so it's a really, really interesting organization or set of organizations across the globe to me, because because of the formal change of command, and it's important to do this way for safety element of it. It often gets used like military gets used as the image of these really strict command and control hierarchies. And there's some truth to that, but it's not the whole truth. And I actually think it's a really, really interesting model because in most organizations, the risk factors are not so great. You know, most of us aren't facing the kind of national security, life and death kinds of situations and so the catastrophic failure modes are much fewer and so there's much less need for these are the things that we need to do to avoid catastrophic failure.

And a lot of organizations are actually so fear based that everything is treated as “you must follow this procedure or the whole system falls apart,” but delegation of the places where the flexibility needs to happen in most organizations is a lot more available than the organization makes space for.

Chris: If there are people who don't go through disintegration and we're trying to draw comparisons between individuals and groups and organizations, then what does it look like to not disintegrate as an organization?

Kate: Okay. So this is super, super interesting to me. The thing that just sort of popped into my head is there are people who haven't done their, who haven't disintegrated. There are people who are still very sort of second factor driven who are very much “I will do what the world around me tells me I should.” The conflict when the first factor, that inner nature and that constitution of who I am at the beginning conflicts with the social norms. That's when the conflicts happen that sort of trigger the disintegration. If I'm comfortable being told what to do and the organization wants to tell me what to do and just wants to tell people what to do, there's no conflict so there's going to be no disintegration and there may be a level of human maturity and personality development that I'm not going to go through because I'm quite happy being told what to do, but that's fine. Like that's totally functional.

Actually, one of the things that's a real problem in some of the organizations that I work in is the organization wants people who are comfortable being told what to do to think for themselves and is actually saying “you need to figure out for yourself what you're going to do” and is actually prompting disintegration because the organization wants to change into an organization that isn't “we tell you what to do.”

Chris: I love that actually, you know, I mean, I love the idea of the organization being, having like the self-awareness and ability to drive that change from within and now I'm thinking about the other end. So if we have the possibility, like you just described for organizations at unilevel integration, what does it look like to be in an organization at the other end of that, where you're at a different kind of integration where the people in the organization are living their values, working their values. And it's, I mean, say that that's a parallel to like level four even. Like we don't have to shoot for the stars for like a secondary integrated organization. Like, even if they're organized in their development, I think that's amazing.

Kate: Yeah. I mean, so there are a couple of organizations that get touted in all of the case studies that people write about this kind of thing, because they seem to have taken it so much further than other organizations have and the one that gets mentioned the most is an organization in the Netherlands that provides nursing care in the community and the organization functions with a very small headquarters. What the headquarters does is provide training and a very small amount of sort of operational resourcing, but very small amount, mostly what they provide is training and vision for how this functions and then in all of the local communities, all of the nurses who provide the community care work together to figure out how to build the local community delivery of services in a way that works for the people who are in that community.

And so every pocket, like every community, that group of nurses gets support and vision from headquarters, but otherwise functions independently and it's so it's a very distributed model of organization and they're lovely because they're giving this very prosocial work into the world. The other kinds of organizations that do this really well—there's a lot of sort of underworld criminal organizations that have these pockets where you have the cells that don't talk to each other so that one of them can get revealed and get into trouble without the big leaders being found out. So they're not all positive in terms of what they do with that organizational structure. And so that's another place where sort of the hierarchy of values and what are the bigger picture gets a little more complicated, but in terms of organizational structure, the respect for the individuals and the autonomy of the individuals piece gets solved in that way.

It's the Unitarian Universalist church functions that way as well in terms of, which is interesting because we think so often about religious organizations as being dogmatic and sort of having a leader of the church that says, “this is what you believe.” And then there's this other church that says “we have seen some fundamental values that we think are really good values and self organize and find ways to support living those values in the world.”

Chris: Yeah, now I'm thinking about authenticity in the workplace.

Kate: Right? Yep.

Chris: Yeah, totally. Like what does it look like to have an authentic organization? That's…

Kate: Right? It's authenticity. It's autonomy. It's autonomy of the bits and pieces of the organization, and it takes a lot of self-awareness, right? If you think about this, Buurtzorg is the nursing company—the people in that headquarters have to resist any impulse to say, “okay, we want power” in order to say “we want impact,” which is by supporting these other offices in doing what they know works.

Emma: Transparency has got to be up there too, right?

Kate: Oh, absolutely.

Emma: Should we move on to some tips? Because I think that might be a very fertile ground for Kate.

Chris: Yeah.

Emma: So, Kate, what are your thoughts? What tips do you have for organizations that are kind of navigating this, like maybe they're hearing their first grumblings or they're trying to sort out their values and also for people working for organizations that might be going through that disintegration?

Kate: You brought up transparency and transparency is huge. And so finding ways for the organization to become self-aware as an organization. So finding ways for all of the people to see what's actually going on is very important because quite often learning and growth disintegration happens when somebody sees something that's not quite in their role, but has an impact and has—and so it's those sort of tangential things that we miss so much when we're working from home. Actually, where some of that being able to see the organization as a whole comes in.

As an organization, I would say, one of the most powerful things you can do is bring somebody in to reflect back to you what the organization as a system looks like, not someone to tell you what to do. But someone who can just help you see the system. So typically a coach rather than a consultant. Consultants like to tell you what to do generally. But someone who can sort of talk to all the people and say, “here's the picture that I gather from the outside.” So this is a way of becoming self-aware. Look at the grumblings. Like that is the most important thing is to take the grumblings as messages.

Don't take the grumblings necessarily literally—see the patterns of discontent and look at where stressors might be coming from that are maybe this person is feeling the brunt of something that is actually being caused somewhere else in the system. So that curiosity and it's an organizational form of self-inquiry.

For people in organizations that are going through this, I think the most valuable thing is to be part of making the system aware. So rather than grumbling to your friend in a back channel, to say it in meetings as much as you have the courage to, is really valuable. If the organization does self-assessment employee engagement kinds of surveys, and there's opportunity for written feedback actually take some time to say some things because the system needs to hear all the voices. Those are pretty abstract.

Emma: I don't think that's abstract at all, particularly the employee survey thing, because most organizations have those surveys and sometimes the inclination is, “well, you know, I've got too much work, I'm just going to click through this real quick and get it over and done with,” or to not do it—”what's optional, I don't have to, I'm going to ignore it.” But I mean, those are the opportunities if you're not happy about something, that's the perfect opportunity.

And if there's a perception that you might get in trouble for saying these things. I can say I've come across issues in the past with past employers and stuff, and I've brought it up and never have I gotten in trouble because honestly, they're giving you an invitation to tell them what's happening and you won't get in trouble for it. They would not fire you for filling in an engagement survey, honestly.

Kate: Yeah. I mean, there's often a sense that what will happen—like nothing will happen, like I'll do this and nothing happens. And so part of what I want to sort of say to that is it often takes time for a system to know what to do with more information. And if you think about like our bodies, a human body, and you think about how big our skin is, and our consciousness is only paying attention to a small part of our skin at any time, if it's paying attention to our skin. And so organizational attention is like that, too, that there are so many challenges all the time that sometimes in order for the organization to pay attention.

The grumbling needs to be around for a while, or get a little louder. And so frequently repetition is really important. And so I'm thinking about a team that I helped get some attention organizationally recently. They needed resources that they didn't have, and they had quarterly meetings in front of the senior leadership and I saw their team representative in those meetings, ask for the resources and explain why the resources were needed for about eight months before there was one number that sort of dipped just a little bit and all of a sudden, the attention was entirely on that team and those resources, and I am sure that the six sessions before of this conversation happening had primed them to notice that number. And so organizational learning can be slow. So, don't give up. That's the other thing.

Emma: Keep scratching until they feel the itch.

Kate: Yeah. Squeaky wheels, you know, you got to squeak enough to get the grease.

Chris: I'm thinking about positive maladjustment in organizations, you know which, which of course is—I'm thinking of individuals in the organization, but maybe I mean, maybe there are whole organizations that would fit this positive maladjustment.

Kate: Yeah. I mean, I think that organizations that really are learning organizations actually internally encourage the positive maladjustment, they actually reward the people who speak up and challenge the status quo. And in many ways, in fact, as a coach, that's my job because my job is to actually shake things up so that learning and change can happen because nobody brings in a coach when things are going well. And when things are going well, nobody bothers and quite often the solution to these kinds of transitions is to shake up the places where things feel comfortable in order to be able to have a different solution. So there are organizations that provide ways for that kind of positive maladjustment.

And there are organizations that are a hundred percent in the space of positive maladjustment. I'm thinking about organizations that do political advocacy and social justice work. Quite often what they are doing is being a voice of positive maladjustment based on a values hierarchy that they see not being manifested in the world.

Emma: That was a good answer. So, Kate, what's the upshot of all this? If you're in an organization that's going through disintegration, what's the benefit in it or the sunny side for both the employer and the employees?

Kate: So I think the benefits are hardest to see for the employer, so I think that I'll start with the employees. The benefits for the employees is that if you stay in an organization that's going through this, you can actually be part of transforming something that's bigger than you are. So when you think about the things that people talk about in terms of personal life satisfaction, you can actually be part of something that transforms where you have a meaningful impact through transforming culture. So that's part of it. The other thing is that it becomes a nicer place to work at the other end of this. There's something really powerful of an organization that's going through this kind of inquiry where the people talking to each other about how to solve these problems become more open to each other, where you can build deeper connections with the people that you work with, it takes a little bit of taking off your work face a little bit and talking about the, “okay, this is hard,” but it can build community and it can reduce isolation and loneliness and that can be really powerful.

For employers, this can feel like a really, really, really difficult thing, and it can really challenge the ego of someone who's in a leadership position who feels accountable for the success of the whole organization and responsible for what's going on and out of control. What you can find is this temptation to go back to a sort of command and control model. “I can just make this actually come together and if people would just do as I say, it will stop feeling chaotic.” The negative side effect of that is you don't tap the creativity of the employees, so the company benefits from going through this kind of transition by tapping into an opening up and creating possibility for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts in terms of being able to tap into the creativity and synergies between the various forms of creativity of the employees.

It does require letting go of some control. It does require stepping into a more sort of visionary space. It does require trusting your people and trusting that by seeing the system and nudging the system rather than giving it instructions. You can provide value. I actually think that it makes leadership much easier, much less stressful. And I think that the legacy that it leaves is often more satisfying for leaders that you managed to lead an organization that is good for the customers, good for the investors and good for the employees much more often if you can get to an organization that's functioning much more from this place of authenticity and autonomy distributed. And I think it's more fun.

Emma: And I guess, personally, if you are a leader, being able to step into that mindset of letting go and collaborating, you think about what it's going to do for you personally and in shifting your mindset in that way and like personally letting go of the need to control.

Kate: Yeah, but I think it opens up the possibility of an easier way of being in relationship with everybody that you are in contact with in the world. That the old adage “it's lonely at the top”—it's lonely at the top if you're expecting yourself and other people are expecting you to make all the decisions and have all the answers and be the one who's got it and it's not lonely at the top if you are person to person with the people who are on your team saying “okay so we as an organization want to solve this problem, I can't do it alone. How can we do this together?” All of a sudden, it's not lonely because you actually have the whole company in your peer group, essentially.

Emma: I've seen that personally. I had a leader once for 12 months and he was completely of the, “this is not my area of expertise. This is your expertise.” And I was working in a team that did a lot of change and to be honest, I'd never felt so productive as I had in that 12 months because all this guy did was let go of the control and help facilitate the team to get their ideas out and to get their work done and was encouraging and supportive and was just a great human being to work with, but the productivity and the experience was fantastic. And I'll always remember that.

Kate: The thing that I always come back to is that if an organization is like a living system, it's creative and it's resourceful as a system. And you can make it a learning system by helping it see itself and by helping the sort of sense of optimism, inclusion, belonging, and the autonomy and fulfillment of the individual members of it—it's emotional self-regulation of an organizational system that opens up the creativity when it happens. It's amazing. And it's much easier for everybody and much more productive.

Emma: And you may be surprised at how much the individuals in that environment, when the conditions are right, kind of like a plant, how much they flourish and grow when the conditions are good.

Kate: Yeah. The number of times that someone who micromanages too much says, “but they can't do it. So I have to, I have to make them.” And then I say, “Why don't you give them three weeks and see what happens if you back off for three weeks.” And the first week they flail. And the second week they're starting to get themselves together. And the third week, all of a sudden they're working together and delivering things. And the leader's like “what happened?” And I'm like, “you got out of their way.”

Chris: You know, I'm trying to think if I have thoughts that tie things together and I just—you know, I don't know if I do, because my mind is kind of like, [mind-blown].

Kate: Well, when Emma introduced this at the beginning, she did sort of say it might be mind blowing. And I think that it really—it's a very different way of thinking of groups of people working together and when I was first thinking of organizations as living systems, my mind was blown. And then when I started realizing that, “Oh, the theory of positive disintegration and theories of change are kind of talking about the same thing.” It was like, “Oh, wow.”

Emma: Yeah, my brain's gone too.

Kate: Yeah. Well, I'm really glad that I had an opportunity to sort of narrow this down in terms of my thinking in terms of thinking about these specific questions, because I've been thinking very sort of vaguely about how can I use this to influence my work in a practical sort of “I go into a meeting and let this philosophy and these thinkings influence how I sit in a meeting and what I'm looking for and what I'm listening for.” And I haven't really spoken abstractly about it. And so this has been an absolute delight to actually sort of talk about it from a much more theoretical perspective. So thank you so much for the invitation.

Emma: Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah.

Chris: Yes. Thanks so much for joining us and coming back and, you know, maybe you'll come back and join us again someday, and there's plenty of other topics for us to talk about.

Kate: Well, I certainly enjoy getting together and speaking with the two of you on these kinds of things for an hour or so. There's no question about that.

Emma: And we enjoy having you come in and melt our heads. It's great.

Kate: Yeah, well, hopefully they'll reintegrate.

Chris: Hopefully.

Emma: And thank you too, Chris. It's always great to have a chat with you and do another episode.

Chris: Well, thank you, Emma. It's my pleasure to be here.

Emma: And thank you, listeners. We really appreciate you too, and we hope you got as much out of this episode as we did. Positive Disintegration Podcast is funded by the Dabrowski Center. If you like what you've heard, please consider donating through the link in the show notes. And if you're listening to us on Apple or Spotify, give us a rating or leave a review. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email positivedisintegration.pod at gmail.com or find us on Twitter or Instagram. And until next time, keep walking the path to your authentic self.