Recently I was lucky enough to have the chance to speak to Gareth Morgan, author of Images of Organisation (1986) and Imaginization (1993) among others. I was hoping he could explain more about his work on organisational metaphor. When I wrote to him it was more in hope than expectation so I was delighted when he replied promptly and suggested we meet on Skype. We spoke for around an hour and articulately, patiently and with good grace he shifted my understanding of metaphor from willing but confused to clear and eager to learn more.
Work is a fascinating thing. Most of us spend more time doing it than anything else and yet we devote so little of our amazing capacity for deep thinking to it. Mostly we leave it up to business school academics. How many movies have you seen recently about going to work?
Maybe that's not a bad thing - I'm not sure a movie about day-to-day work would be my viewing choice - but nevertheless we owe it to ourselves to at least try to understand the places where we spend so much time and Morgan's ideas about metaphor are a wonderfully rich way in.
There are far better places to go for a synopsis of his ideas but essentially Morgan puts forward the idea that to properly understand organisations we need to recognise that we understand them metaphorically. This influences everything we do in them, all the plans we make for them and all the things we try to achieve through them and within them. To illustrate his point he highlights a number of common metaphorical types: the organisation as machine; the organisation as organism; the organisation as political system; the organisation as a brain; the organisation as a culture; the organisation as a 'psychic prison'; the organisation as an instrument of domination and the organisation as flux and transformation (a sort of constantly shifting but stable vortex like a whirlpool or a tornado). And that as they say, is that. So why should we care?
Well, we should care because not thinking about it means that collaboration is much harder. Which means that we run a far higher risk of failing at the common endeavours that are the day-to-day life reality of what 'work' involves. Without proper, collective reflection on what the organisation really is, it is inevitable that each individual will develop their own understanding in isolation. And with a range of different understandings, disagreement, discord and a failure to perform tend to follow. Without a common metaphor to unite them, people are atomised.
One the most visible symptoms of this atomisation is probably familiar... it's that conversation between two colleagues who don't really disagree about the facts but find themselves disagreeing anyway, seemingly over what each other's words are suggesting - a mutual sensitivity to which they are both blind. Whether they know it or not, both of them have been 'talking past each other', each one making meaning in fundamentally different ways. It's a small, everyday sort of occurrence but just think about how much time and goodwill conversations like this waste. And it goes further...
Here are some of the other problems that I think we can connect to the absence of a common metaphor:
⦁ crossed wires
⦁ anything more than simple change is hard because the required level of agreement is lacking
⦁ it's almost impossible to add subjective value to organisational life; it's only what you can measure
⦁ the organisation's written-down vision is just a piece of paper
⦁ organisational drive and purpose coalesce around the most visible aspects of organisational life because they are the least reliant on metaphorical interpretations
⦁ motivation centres on 'hygiene factors' for a similar reason
So in my mind at least, metaphor is not just a nice-to-have way of pondering where you work, it's a fundamental way of sharpening your thinking and developing common purpose with colleagues. Worth the candle... worth lots of candles.
Gareth Morgan
I first encountered the idea of organisational metaphors in a change management practitioner course in 2013. I still remember the healthy debate among our small group about which metaphor was 'best' and how, if at all, the idea was 'practical' when it came to change management. Looking back I cringe at how poorly we had understood Morgan's central idea. We were far too quick to try to make organisational metaphor 'instrumental' in ways that if implemented would probably have driven any change initiative backwards rather than forwards. What we had missed was that Morgan's ideas are not about a set list of metaphors from which we choose or for which we have set preferences, but rather a fundamental way of making meaning in the world and discovering where we work.Work is a fascinating thing. Most of us spend more time doing it than anything else and yet we devote so little of our amazing capacity for deep thinking to it. Mostly we leave it up to business school academics. How many movies have you seen recently about going to work?
Maybe that's not a bad thing - I'm not sure a movie about day-to-day work would be my viewing choice - but nevertheless we owe it to ourselves to at least try to understand the places where we spend so much time and Morgan's ideas about metaphor are a wonderfully rich way in.
There are far better places to go for a synopsis of his ideas but essentially Morgan puts forward the idea that to properly understand organisations we need to recognise that we understand them metaphorically. This influences everything we do in them, all the plans we make for them and all the things we try to achieve through them and within them. To illustrate his point he highlights a number of common metaphorical types: the organisation as machine; the organisation as organism; the organisation as political system; the organisation as a brain; the organisation as a culture; the organisation as a 'psychic prison'; the organisation as an instrument of domination and the organisation as flux and transformation (a sort of constantly shifting but stable vortex like a whirlpool or a tornado). And that as they say, is that. So why should we care?
Well, we should care because not thinking about it means that collaboration is much harder. Which means that we run a far higher risk of failing at the common endeavours that are the day-to-day life reality of what 'work' involves. Without proper, collective reflection on what the organisation really is, it is inevitable that each individual will develop their own understanding in isolation. And with a range of different understandings, disagreement, discord and a failure to perform tend to follow. Without a common metaphor to unite them, people are atomised.
One the most visible symptoms of this atomisation is probably familiar... it's that conversation between two colleagues who don't really disagree about the facts but find themselves disagreeing anyway, seemingly over what each other's words are suggesting - a mutual sensitivity to which they are both blind. Whether they know it or not, both of them have been 'talking past each other', each one making meaning in fundamentally different ways. It's a small, everyday sort of occurrence but just think about how much time and goodwill conversations like this waste. And it goes further...
Here are some of the other problems that I think we can connect to the absence of a common metaphor:
⦁ crossed wires
⦁ anything more than simple change is hard because the required level of agreement is lacking
⦁ it's almost impossible to add subjective value to organisational life; it's only what you can measure
⦁ the organisation's written-down vision is just a piece of paper
⦁ organisational drive and purpose coalesce around the most visible aspects of organisational life because they are the least reliant on metaphorical interpretations
⦁ motivation centres on 'hygiene factors' for a similar reason
So in my mind at least, metaphor is not just a nice-to-have way of pondering where you work, it's a fundamental way of sharpening your thinking and developing common purpose with colleagues. Worth the candle... worth lots of candles.