Social Defenses Against Organizational Learning
An essay by Alastair Bain.
Abstract#
It is argued that for organizational learning to occur maladaptive social defenses within the organization have to be altered. The origins of the concept of social defenses are traced through the work of Jaques and Menzies. A new concept of "system domain," and related concepts of "system domain fabric," and "system domain defenses," are proposed in order to account for the difficulties in sustaining organizational change in organizations that share a similar primary task. "Organizational learning" is defined as occurring when there is co-evolution of "organizational container" and "contained". The article distills variables from three successful consultancy/action research projects which are characteristic of organizations that are learning, and it is hypothesized that the creation of "organizational awareness" is necessary for organizational learning to occur.
From Human Relations, Vol. 51, No. 3, 1998
Notes#
What does Bain mean by "the evolution of 'organizational container' and 'contained'"?#
Let's recall Bion's concepts of container and contained: containment is the processing of a person's intolerable inchoate experiences into meaningful units that can be tolerated by that person. Social defenses act as containers for workers' anxieties in just this sense: if one has anxiety about a potentially close relationship with a patient, for example, having an institutional practice of depersonalizing patients can help one manage that anxiety. Unfortunately, such a practice both suppresses the feelings one has about the patient and makes those feelings undiscussable, which can make cause further anxieties while making performing the task of caring for the individual patient harder.
If a nursing organization is to learn from the experiences of nurses burning out and patient care deteriorating, it needs to evolve from the use of such counterproductive containers to ones that lead to better outcomes.
What does "better outcomes" mean here?#
- Primary task: the organization is better able to carry out its primary task.
- Project ownership: people responsible for the project's outcomes "own" it.
- Leadership and authority: leadership for change was taken up in varying degrees by all members of the team, instead of being wholly vested in a top-level leader.
Becoming a learning organization#
To effect this, the organizations needed to become learning organizations. Learning organizations consciously construct "space for common reflection on activities", which allows a "developing awareness of the 'whole', i.e., the organization, and its interconnected parts."
In other words: learning organizations are aware of how the organization is working as a system and is capable of making adjustments in response to that awareness.
Organizational self-preservation#
In general, organizations that share a domain tend to have personnel from the same domain, and such domains tend to have a larger organizational culture, with its own social defenses.
If the organization that has transformed itself into a learning organization is part of a system with the social defenses it used to have, there will inevitably be pressures on the organization to revert to those original practices; the current (better) practices will be eroded over time without continual reflection and maintenance. In turn, this requires the nurturers of the current culture to retain the authority to do so.
Some quotes:#
422:
Hierarchy became less significant as an organizing principle in the minds of staff in all three organizations as staff began to take up authority appropriately for task.... Taking up authority appropriately for task, without being told as in a dependency culture, was perhaps a key to this.
In all three projects, there was a strong link between individual learning, group learning, ... and organizational learning. Through this learning, work was less fragmented and became more purposefully linked to the task of the organization as a whole.
425:
The change is from unconscious social defenses permeating the organization, and to a large extent determining behavior, to the organization or project team consciously constructing and using spaces for reflection on action, learning from this experience and planning. Another level has thereby been built into organizational consciousness, a level of organizational awareness, which was not present before.
Organizations that lack learning space, or reflective space which allows for organizational awareness, are "asleep" to their own behavior.
[The goal is to] create space for developing organizational awareness.
426:
The "power" of system domain fabric, and the system domain defenses generated, to prevent localized change occurring and being sustained during an organizational change project is a function of the level of authority within the local system and the extent to which domain factors are within the authority system, or influence, of members of the organizational change project.
427:
All organizations have socially constructed defenses against the anxiety of carrying out the primary task of the organization and that these defenses prevent organizational learning.
428:
Unless the local system is extremely robust ..., it is likely that the organizational changes that have been initiated within the local system will be eroded over time due to the influence of the system domain fabric, and the system domain defenses.
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