7 In Conclusion

Think about the routines and staples of the organizations you are familiar with. What do you always do? Maybe your boss always gives out evaluations, or your professors always give out grades. Maybe you always go to work inside an office, or five days a week.

Why do you think those things are true? What beliefs, founded or unfounded, are behind them?

Note that psychic prisons can appear at any level of an organization, in organizations of any size.

• “The U.S. government must pass legislation that encourages economic growth.”
• “A fully-funded police force is the only way to keep our city safe.”
• “If we don’t stay quiet about the issues on our campus, our donors will pull their funds.”
• “We all have to lie to Grandma because her health is too fragile for shock.”
• “If I don’t do the whole project myself, we will get a bad grade.”
• “I don’t vote because I’m not the kind of person who cares about politics.”

Once you have identified some rules and beliefs, ask yourself: what would it be like to imagine the organizations in your life without them?

Critically, breaking a psychic prison requires pushing past the internal resistance that you will undoubtedly first encounter. You may find in the end that the systems you already have are great, but allow yourself to arrive at that conclusion authentically. To give your new ideas a fair chance, don’t ask “could this be done?” Ask “how could this be done?”

Politics are very present in organizations. The organizations we take part in, interact with our identities and help shape our organizational selves. In the chapter on organizations as political systems, you saw the metaphor broken down into three categories when applied to analyzing the case study example; power, interests, and systems of government. Below are questions you can ask yourself to get a better idea of how these three aspects of organizations as political systems play in your life:

Power:

• Who holds the power in your life? Are these powers tied to organizational structures?
• What powers have influenced your decisions, thought processes, belief systems?
• Which places that Morgan indicates that power comes from do you agree or disagree with? Why?

Interests:

• What are the different ways you seek to benefit from the organizations you participate in?
• Can you recognize a time where you participated in an organization where different people had different interests? How did the power that each person held affect the outcome of the different interests?
• What are actions you’ve made that you at first didn’t recognize as political choices?

Systems of Government:

• What are some bureaucratic control of boundaries that you’ve had to encounter in your own life?

• The organism metaphor allows us to look at organizations as a place of potential change. By viewing organizations as organisms we realized that organizations should adapt to both internal needs and the external environment.First let’s think about internal situations (i.e. within the organization itself).
  • Think of an organization that you are part of that you enjoy. What is it about the management of the organization that makes it so enjoyable? What is the relationship like between members of the organization, and how does it meet the needs of its members?
  • Now let’s do the opposite. Think of an organization that you are a part of that you don’t enjoy. What is it about the management of the organization that makes it not enjoyable? What is the relationship like between members of the organization, and how does this not meet the needs of its members?
  • Now let’s compare the two organizations!
    • Are there any similarities? If so, what are they and what are their effects?
    • What are the differences? Think of what is positive about the organization you enjoy, and ways you could implement those concepts of management and relationships to the organization that you don’t enjoy.

  Now let’s think about external situations (i.e. the environmental factors that affect the organization).

  • Think of an organization that you are a part of that is positively impacted by its environment. What is it about the environment that contributes to a positive impact on the organization?
  • What about an organization that is tainted or negatively impacted by its environment? What is it about the environment that causes this, and what could the organization do to better adapt to its environment?
  • How could this change occur?

Think of an organization where the norms are questioned with single-loop learning? What would it look like to question the norms with double-loop learning? Why is it important to do so—what are the benefits?

Conversely, think of an organization that operates with double-loop learning. What does double-loop learning enable the organization to do? What would happen if the organization operated with single-loop learning?

What do you notice between the organization that operates with single-loop learning and the organization that operates with double-loop learning? What does this tell you about the idea of learning to learn and the brain metaphor?

What is the importance of using double-loop learning in organizations, and how can we ensure we are using it?