"Social Defenses Against Organizational Learning", by Alastair Bain

An exposition and critique

Overview

Organizations "learn" when they can as it were reflect on their own problems and take positive steps to resolve them. Because organizations are made up of people, the organization's learning depends somehow on its people learning--it is how the people in the organization coordinate their actions upon learning that determines how the organization "learns".

People can also coordinate their actions to prevent themselves and the organization from learning. This coordination is often, indeed typically, unconscious, in response to the fears and anxieties that accompany doing their jobs.

Alastair Bain, in Social Defenses Against Organizational Learning, proposes that counterproductive social defenses inhibit organizational learning. He discusses ways organizations can modify these social defenses, thereby enabling the organization to learn.

Examples of social defense systems

Nursing

Nursing operations in a hospital can be so structured as to protect nurses from the fears and anxieties aroused by close contact with patients:

• depersonalization of patients (e.g., referring to patients by their conditions instead of their names), and splitting the nurse/patient relationship so that no one nurse was responsible for any patient protected nurses from the anxiety surrounding close care of suffering human beings;
• eliminating complex decisions by ritual task performance, and delegating responsibility upwards protected nurses from the anxiety stemming from making medical mistakes.

These protections made the nurses persistently ineffective at their jobs. Turnover was high, morale was low, and the constant movement of nurses from patient to patient often caused breakdowns in the system.

Australian secondary schooling

A secondary school (high school) in Victoria had the presumptive aim of developing the intellectual, social, imaginative, and sporting capacities of its students. Pursuing such an aim will result inevitably in students developing differently in these areas--some students will greatly improve, others less so, some hardly at all. Accordingly, there was much anxiety among the teachers and administrators about to deal with these differences. The system that developed managed these anxieties by effectively denying that any differences existed:

• the de facto policy of the school was to promote all students from one year level to the next, whatever their achievements actually were;
• decisions about promotion were effectively made by the parents of the students, not the teachers and administrators;
• the school had little control over how its own staff was selected, and getting rid of an incompetent staff member was difficult-to-impossible.

In such a scenario, there is little chance that a staff member would feel the need to worry about differences in student achievement. On the other hand, it's easy to see that working at such a school would feel disempowering and demotivating, and development of student capacities would be equivalent to teaching to the lowest common denominator.

How are these examples of preventing organizational learning?

In a hospital, patients continually arrive and leave; also, it will always be true that some will get better, while others' health will deteriorate, and some will die. As we've seen, a hospital's nursing staff that systematically avoids dealing with the emotional reality of treating patients will perform poorly. To go from low-performing to high-performing, such a hospital needs to learn how to support nurses doing their jobs well in the face of these anxieties. But it first must as it were become aware that it is operating in this way, and it's easy to see that being unaware of the self-defeating system it fosters is part of what makes the system effective.

Schools will always have students of varying capacities and unique traits; their differences are a given. A school that systematically avoids dealing with the emotional reality of acknowledging and responding to these differences will perform poorly. To go from low-performing to high-performing, such a school needs to learn how to support teachers and administrators doing their jobs well in the face of these anxieties. As with the self-undermining hospital, the school keeps itself self-undermining by "refusing" to be aware that it is denying differences.

The hospital discussed in the article was part of an extensive study led by the psychologist Isabel Menzies, and it is instructive to note the nursing system's response to that study:

The study which was reviewed in The Nursing Times was said to be "a devastating criticism of the nursing service," which was then "refuted" by the reviewer. The reviewer concluded her review by saying that there was "a simple explanation," and that was that "the hospital described had been incompetently run for some time," and "my solution for the difficulties of the hospital would be to appoint a matron of known competence whom the nurses knew and trusted." (415-416)

That is, the true "problem" was the unexamined "incompetence" of the administrator, and the "solution" would be to appoint a "competent" administrator, which would somehow in itself cause the dynamics of the hospital nursing staff to change. Bain suggests, and I agree, that this is a denial of the existence of the system being described. According to the reviewer, there is simply no self-perpetuating system; rather, it is more akin to the chaos resulting from incompetent administration.

System domain defenses: a higher-level obstacle to organizational learning

So far we've been discussing ways particular organizations can systematically keep themselves from learning. But these organizations are born from and sustained by larger organizations. Hospitals are staffed by physicians and nurses, and all exist within a culture of medical practice. Schools are staffed by teachers and administrators, part of a larger educational system.

If social defense systems are sustained through unconscious coordination in response to inevitable fears and anxieties, we should expect them to be both common and difficult to dismantle. Thus, the larger system domains--the hospital and school systems as a whole--are likely to perpetuate these systems.

This means that any organizational learning that takes place within a particular organization in some domain is in danger of having those learnings eroded over time due to the continual pressures exerted upon it from being part of that domain. Replace key leaders in a nursing hospital with those who don't understand the learned environment, and the hospital will probably go back to its old ways. Likewise for replacing key administrators in a school that has learned to perform well with administrators without the experience of or willingness to adapt to the learned environment.

That is, these more systematic practices can inhibit learning by smaller organizations. To ensure that an organization can learn, we need to understand three things: - what, exactly, is organizational learning? - what needs to be in place for organizational learning to happen? - how does organizational learning actually happen?

What is organizational learning?

As remarked at the beginning of this essay, organizations "learn" when they can recognize and then solve their own problems so that the same problems don't recur. But there is a key feature characterizing organizational learning in the context of social defenses. To flesh out this feature we'll need to understand a central concept used in psychoanalysis: containment. Containment is a complex topic with a vast literature, but the following simple explanation should capture what we need to know about it.

Containment explained

When we're frustrated, we generally seek to soothe that frustration. We can soothe ourselves--say, by positive self-talk, taking a break, or binging on ice cream. But we can also seek the help of others: we may talk to a friend or trusted family member, or see a therapist. When our attempts to soothe our frustrations work, what happens, exactly?

We don't always communicate our frustrations clearly or directly; often we express our frustrations by sighing or yelling or punching a wall, and these are communications even if we don't explicitly intend them to be. A savvy listener will often figure out what we're communicating intuitively, then translate it into something we can handle. Think of scenes when someone is screaming at someone else, but is quickly soothed when that person gives them a hug. The screaming is interpreted as, "I feel unloved," and the response is a physical expression of understanding what was communicated.

When an inchoate expression of frustration is understood, translated, and responded to appropriately, psychoanalysts say that the frustration was contained, and that the person doing the understanding, translation, and responding was acting as a container for that frustration.

The role of containment in learning

We can think of learning itself as a process involving containment. A problem can be understood as a frustration; devising a way to solve the problem can be understood as containing the frustration.

Treating organizational learning as containment can illuminate the problems we face trying to modify social defense mechanisms. For example, when we see that depersonalization among nurses is a (generally poor) way for them to manage their anxieties about their ability to handle patient suffering, we can take steps to help the nurses manage those anxieties differently. We might, first, acknowledge that working with suffering patients can be emotionally taxing; we might then find ways for nurses to support one another about handling that suffering.

Often, this sort of containment in organizations happens through outside consultation: a consultant observes organizational dynamics and in this way acts as a container for expressions of the organization's social defenses. In this situation, what's most important is for the containing to be transferred from the consultant to the organization itself--that is, for the organization to be as it were self-containing.

Thus, when an organization, on its own, modifies its social defenses to better meet its goals, it has learned how to support its people manage their frustrations in a way that aids instead of inhibits its mission.

What needs to be in place for organizational learning to happen?

Organizational learning demands a learning space--a space allowing people in the organization to reflect on what they've been doing, why they've been doing it, and what its impact has been. How do we create such a space, and how do we ensure we're doing what we need to be doing within it?

Linking individual, group, and organizational learning

Cultivating a culture supportive of change

Explicitly cultivating learning spaces

How does organizational learning actually happen?

The work of organizational learning takes place in learning spaces the organization cultivates. According to Bain, these spaces have six essential features: 1. The learning agendas were mainly drawn up by the members of the organization, not imposed by leadership. 2. Leadership did not dominate learning spaces. 3. Groups in the spaces came to accept silence at appropriate times, rather than anxiously filling the silence with talk. 4. The spaces allowed for individuals in the organization to form stronger connections to it. 5.

1. Facilitators help identify the problematic social defenses in collaboration with the group, and work through the inevitable resistance to change by allowing individuals in the space to together discover better ways of managing these frustrations. (THIS IS ME)

Read Jaques, "Why the Psychoanalytic Approach to Understanding Organizations is Dysfunctional"

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