The need for a new relationship seems paramount because the old one isnt working any more. As another recessionary wave begins to lap at our toes, redundancies and cutbacks are rolling out once again. A traditional cyclical downturn is attracting a traditional response. It wasnt supposed to be like this. The re-engineered workplace was designed to be so lean and mean that everyone who worked there was an essential part of the operation its greatest asset and all that.
I remember the last cutbacks in the early 1990s and the stress it heaped on HR departments which often had to dispense the bad news. Some of them were on the receiving end themselves. No one was immune. I think it was about this time I began plotting my escape.
The plan was cooked up with the help of a few psychologists working for outplacement companies. You need to find yourself, they said. You need to identify what you do best and what you like doing, then work out a way to apply your skills and enthusiasms in paid work. It seemed simple.
I liked travelling and writing so began to write travel pieces. I went sailing in the southern ocean. I negotiated a year out of my job and wrote a book. Work had never been so much fun.
Life was good on the outside but it was also a bit scary. Where would it all lead? A couple of months before the end of my year out I was caught like a hare in a well-directed spotlight. With hands raised above my head I came back to my old cell. Ve have vays of making you work for us, they said: a new job, some responsibility, an exciting project, share options, regular pay, not to mention the final salary pension. I dusted down the old suit, knotted the old tie, filled the old briefcase and caught the old train.
Now Im inside looking out again. Life is not so bad but I cant help feeling like Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront regretting the way his brother had forced him to take a dive during his big fight. Why did Marlon do it? Why did I go back?
Weick knows why. He says that people in organisations can only look forward by looking back. When we ask people to change they tend to reference the proposition against their past experience. If there is nothing in the past the tendency is to reject the proposed change. It explains why so much change management is a flop.
Weick was well ahead on this one, anticipating the problems of large organisations with their office system, military metaphors and chains of command. The system was something of a facade, he suggests, masking the ambiguities of human interaction. He concedes that people find security in some kind of structure. But the most familiar structure that defines our work has become less secure than it was.
This is a problem for those, like me, who are wedded to the large corporation. No matter how much I believe in the joys of free agency I like to curl up at night with the thought that my pay cheque will arrive at the end of the month.
That the old structures were creaking during the 1990s became obvious to those who were presented with a lap-top computer and told that their desk had gone. It happened when the secretary disappeared, when the office went open plan, when the regional managers job was dissolved. Some, who lost their jobs, were forced into new ways of working that they would have rejected had there been any alternative.
I had a lifeline. It was nice to do something different, take some risks, but I remained roped to a large employer. Working outside was like free-climbing, evoking, occasionally, a sense of giddiness. There was learning also and some reflection to make sense of the experience. Weick calls this process enactment. We need organisations, he concedes, because they are sense making systems.
The trouble is that too many of them dont make much sense any more. Weick doesnt give us the answers but he has helped to define the problem.
*Making Sense of the Organization by Karl E Weick, Blackwell, 24.99
Richard Donkin is editor of FTCareerPoint.com
richard.donkin@haynet.com