Cold Shower 21: Corporate Role vs. Accent on the Individual

Cold Shower Corporate Role versus Individual
Volume I, Article XXI

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive of Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past 30 years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. Author of seven books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relation to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace, he writes about interests of the modern worker. Dr. Fisher started out as a laborer in a chemical plant, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns are designed to provoke discussion.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, I take it reading your books that you don’t hold much stock in all this talk about worker empowerment, self-directed work teams, and a more open and collegial culture. Am I right? If so, why be so contrary?

Dr. Fisher replies:

I don’t hold much truck with these interventions. It is a problem of our blue-collar culture. We prefer to change without changing at all. We are more interested in describing a problem than taking action on it, more interested in developing processes (e.g. worker empowerment and self-directed work teams) than perceiving the problem, more inclined to external manipulation than self-organizing enabling. The individual seems the focus but this is a ruse as the intention is reify, not clarify “what is.”

We are a blue-collar culture suspect of intellectuals. Any problem, large or small, is divided into fragments and the fragments are attacked with vigor. Anyone who promotes a holistic view with a creative and conceptual approach is unlikely to be taken seriously. Why? Such an approach is likely to be subjective rather than objective, intuitive rather than cognitive, non-linear rather than linear, systemic rather than elemental, involving creative rather than critical thinking. Creative thinking reconciles contradictions as opposed to rejecting them, embraces overlapping information rather than avoiding it, and is more interested in creating a solution than in discovering one.

A blue-collar culture prides itself in critical thinking. This thinking never gets outside the box. It is the box, or what is already thought, practiced and believed -- the only things that critical thinking can evolve. Critical thinking emphasizes analysis, which invariably gets bogged down in symptoms at the expense of chronic root causes. Analysis tells us “what is,” or what we already know. Empowerment and self-directed work teams are thus little more than spin. They have absolutely nothing to do with change. The problem with analysis is that it will only allow us to select an idea from our repertoire of standard ideas but it will not allow us to find a new idea.

We are a culture of possibility thinking. As a patterning system, the brain can only “see” what it is prepared to see. The analysis of information, then, is incapable of seeing new ideas, and can only select from existing ideas. The popular lingo of thinking “outside the box” is just that, an interesting slogan. We are educated to think in the box. This instructs us to search and discover (answers), not explore and design them.

What I’m driving at is that our blue-collar culture is wrong-headed for the times. We have moved into a new era and we still cannot unshackle ourselves from the old. Blue-collar culture is judgmental and society cannot thrive on judgment alone. Judgment may be enough to resist change, but not enough to benefit from change.

Quirky programs such as empowerment and self-directed work teams sound wonderful, but still: a) the structure and function of work is as it has always been; b) the hierarchical pecking order is essentially the same; c) position power still rules over the power of knowledge; d) compensation is still skewed toward senior management and its sycophants; e) perks from preferential parking to selective bonuses still go to a privileged few; f) inside information on the company’s status is proffered to a privileged few; g) employees are still expected to behave as loyal, obedient and obsequious children; h) the most attractive career track is into management (although management is becoming increasingly redundant as a function); i) anachronistic performance appraisal is still an institutional aspect of this blue-collar culture, when it has proven ineffective at best and a waste of time and money at worse; and j) the individual remains buried in the forward inertia of corpocracy.

You cannot generate change when the vehicle for change is totally resistant to change, and that is personified in a blue-collar culture. We pride ourselves in being action oriented. But if you believe that action springs directly from “what is” or experience then you are not concerned with the design of action. If you believe “what can be” has to be designed then you apply the design process to action itself. That is not happening.

A blue-collar culture is imprisoned in the tyranny of the box. I am a trained box thinker. Psychology puts people into classes, groups, classifications, categories and, yes, boxes. Tests are devised for this purpose with little practical value. People are put in boxes and obediently stay there: employer, employee, engineer, technician, and so on. The reason for this is to make sense of the world and to make it simpler. Perhaps, then, it is not the boxes that are the problem but the arrogant, absolute certainty with which we hold a particularly boxed view of the world. In science the lumping process is an attempt to find universal laws. In life the lumping process is an attempt to simplify the world to provide conventional focus for dominant emotions – e.g., empowerment/teamwork slogans.

There is a war going on between the individual and corpocracy. A blue-collar culture is not designed to deal with a changing world. It is inadequate to deal with change, because it does not offer creative, constructive and design energy to the problem solving. It suggests dangerous judgments and cosmetic solutions will suffice which tend only to make matters worse. And its complacent arrogance prevents it from seeing the extent of its failure. What is called for? Creative thinking and a willingness to challenge, a willingness to take risks, a willingness to be provocative, and a willingness to step outside the judgments (boxes) that are a summary of past experience. It starts with you not being taken in with bromides such as empowerment and self-directed work teams.

Copyright (1996) See Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge (1998) at $40 including shipping & handling.