Fallacy in Service

I caught up with an old friend from college last week. He described it as a ‘super’ meeting. 24 years separated us in time. But the charm and unadulterated camaraderie bridged us in a few moments of recall from years gone by. If at all I felt askance, (and I did for a moment), it was when my visiting card gave away a title he did not know I had earned in the interval. He stopped short of cursing mutual friends who did not connect me to him. He also brewed choicest coffee to spark off the occasion. In about two hours of our meeting, he brought on a herbal infusion from Africa. I knew that by the end of the meeting, he had met his old friend and not the one with the title on the card. Like the blends of forgiving taste from tea-shrubs, flavour and fragrance bond ties of yore.

When you meet with a professional, what binds you in the relationship? Do their titles confound you? Do their qualifications and certifications inspire you? What really does magic in the service experience?

1.       Service is an art form. You will remember the experience for what it did for you when you consumed it. The one who produces the service conjures up a rapport in which such an experience is possible. One caveat however is this – did you enable your provider to serve you with delight?

2.       Service is from the heart. Creative juices, if we might call them that, flow when the emotions are animated in the rapport. The head gets to a sense of flow, when service grows from the heart. Procedure and rules encoded in the head are no guarantee for service. Without emotional presence, service is doomed. Caveat for the customer? How many providers will you discard before you place your trust in one?

3.       Service is for the person in a profession. We often forget that the customer has a professional need that he or she considers practical to a fault. But the customer is also a person, who has a private affair with the profession or practice he or she is in. The delight of being served is in the experience of harmony between the buyer’s personal need and the needs of the organisation he or she represents. Like the need to appear as a pioneer, and the solution that allows that image. Or the need to advance in career, and the sense of organisational control the solution ensures. Caveat here? Do you treat your service provider as a means to an end, or a partner in solutioning?

4.       Remember the caveats, but ignore this fallacy at your peril. The Fallacy of Extension from the Pure Sciences.  Due to the pure sciences, weights, measures, scales and molecular consistency have reference standards. GMT for time. 1 gram (g) = 15.4323583529 grains (gr). All measurements consist of three parts: magnitude, dimensions (units) and uncertainty. 

However, not all that is observed obey laws of the pure sciences. How would you put a tag for example to a nurse that tends to a soldier’s wounds? Or that of a hospice who upholds the sense of dignity for a dying one? Or a developmental coach or Organisation Development consultants who risk their reputation on you? Caveat here? Certifications are alibis. Accreditation too. What reciprocal risk do you offer to engage and learn the essence of a service relationship from another fellow human?

The social sciences are not for the faint at heart. If your service provider draws from such knowledge, do make allowances for surprises, deviations and lack of precision, especially if you find feelings a messy space to be in.  

In the real world, none of us have it all neatly put together, it's a mirage. In the real world, we could listen and be open to change by what we tune in to. In our world, we are in service recovery mode. We're human. 

We can deny our pains and problems, to appear 'neat' and 'tidy'. But would that help us serve the reality we experience? Service is a way to be in touch with reality. It never occurs without oneself. It gets delightful with more than the self in it. 

Whom have you served today?

Gestalt Therapy – Past Pains and Current Relief

Am biased in a view that holds NLP as a phase transition from Gestalt Therapy. History records that Fritz Perls revived action pieces from a theory that may have died without practice. Martin Shepard records wilful encounters that accounted for this in interactions between Perls, Karen Horney and Wilhelm Reich.  

I particularly note the anchoring effect Dick McHugh chooses when he brings on the 'mindfulness' of contemplative practices to heighten the potential of the unused right-brain. The conjunction between 'use of self' and the 'here and now' experience is realized in the distinction that non-judgmental awareness is different from an evaluative introspection. Awareness increases chances for responsibility and ownership. Introspection can lead us to explain away things, and words fail us to 'experience' our feelings. This is the part of process for facilitators in groups to discern.

The mystical mind plunges each moment towards, Truth, God, Love,  and such depths whose mysteries are not to be 'solved' the way we address anxieties that block our awareness. In fact, approaching emotional intelligence through an empirical basis of neurology, may be an inefficient way of reaching a truth about our human essence that mystics have accessed for centuries. This is why I wished to know or learn from Masters as to how this dimension played out in the founding of Organisation Development (OD).

Dick’s delight in ‘feelings’ is in my opinion overindulged, for it does not offer the cognitive balance required to make headway in intervention. The meta-model of 'get out of your mind, and get into your senses' is possibly the reason for this. My inference comes from what I sensed as his selective neglect of the following in his approach. There have been topics that were not schematically laid out. They are to do with the levels of neurosis, as also the classification of blockages or avoidance. 

The introjection that participants are likely to have experienced would preclude their projections and their consequent transferences left unobserved and unattended during practice sessions. That boundaries get violated in ways that precipitate Confluence.  Retroflection  and even Deflection are anathema to those who would have gone solely by witnessing experiential learning, for it requires a discerning observer to be present and observe how the client holds up feelings in the moment.

In OD, Gestalt can easily be seen as co-evolution as opposed to traditional ‘diagnosis’ or the pathology of the organisational system. When reviewing the deeper purpose of 'competence' and 'commitment' that Argyris speaks about, I was fascinated that the wheel within the wheels that Gestalt’s grist for the mill grinds, is its stubborn anti-intellectualism. In Argyris’ analysis of dysfunction in organisations, reasoning about our behaviors is core.  Experiencing 'authenticity' may have been unfairly labelled as too 'touchy-feely' to be 'analysed' in learning loops. In fact, hard-nosed, result oriented expectations may have suppressed the expression of truth. I wonder often if this is what precipitated the pretence on which the pursuit of profits was made legitimate. 

Increasing our capacity to think critically about behaviors is in fact a way of reaching greater awareness. Introjection reduces awareness, evenas an overdose of curiosity may take away from the moment's splendor. Contact is an associated state of feelings that the body can signal, either as a twitch of a muscle, a tension in the calves or a vascular headache.

There are 21 books referred to us for reading beyond the Dick McHugh course experience. These include the works of Polster, Passons, Shepherd, John O Stevens, Simkin, Perls, Zinker, Nevis, Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens.

In terms of how the work is affecting me, I am currently reviewing my skills of discernment, presence and giving! Am also open to range of choices in consultative style - confrontation, elicitation, modeling and direct provocations, that may be useful in the moment, within a larger intervention process!



Am most taken on the by instrumentality of polarities for the figure and ground probabilities that they present for leadership transformations. The grey zone for me is this : The numbness of modern capitalist enterprise could easily be generalized as intellectual riff-raff of the left brain, when Gestaltists encourage losing the mind and coming to one's senses. In an age of awareness of plasticity of the brain, what categories can be easily retained as left and right brain in a working language that we can rely on?

Book Review - COVERT Processes at Work (Robert Marshak)

Covert Processes at Work – Managing the Five Hidden Dimensions of Organisational Change by Robert J Marshak (2006) Berrett-Koehler Publishers, CA.

‘Covert’ is an English word that signifies secrecy. Somehow, in common parlance, it has acquired the monstrosity of being negative, almost sinister. Hence, the motivations to read a book like “Covert Processes at Work” could be investigative intent, confrontative mission or plain exploration. The author of the book Robert J Marshak (Bob) is however a scholar from Washington at the American University and a practitioner of Organisation Development (OD), considered by many experts in the field to be a worthy successor to the legacy of the grey-beards in the profession. Ed Schein, the originator of process consultation, and a legend in OD himself, wrote the foreword to this book.

So what could then be the motives of the author? After all, this is the first book of its nature, and as co-creator of the Dealing with Covert Processes Workshop, Bob’s incisive thinking has acquired a pulpit like pedestal for those affected by and interested in organisational dynamics. Judith Katz along with Bob provide an interpretive model in their workshops that span the classical units of analyses frames – individual, group, organisational and societal. The focal system could be viewed through a prism of Lessons Learnt in Childhood, Beliefs, Assumptions and Values, Formal Theories or Explicit Systems of Thought, Paradigms and Cultures. The end of the prism that is delightfully insightful is the spectrum it addresses from the subconscious to the superconscious –

1.       Questionable, Illegitimate and unacceptable;

2.       Legitimate, proper and Acceptable; and

3.       Too good to be True

Bob unfolds a closely woven integration in a singular scheme of all hidden organisational dynamics. He asks the question “What do all types of covert processes have in common and what can you do about them?” The book reveals answers to this principal inquiry in a manner that resembles Bob’s synthetic prowess during diagnosis of complex organisational issues. These are teased through for us into repressed processes, denied processes, overt processes, unexpressed processes and untapped processes. At a certain level such elegance and simplicity may seem inconspicuous in its relatedness to a diagnostic scheme; unless the initiated mind cuts through to the inherent profundity it entails. So how is the book itself organized?

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the foundation to the scheme. The author goes on to highlight how and why paying attention to the overt alone does not yield sufficiency in outcomes. He introduces six covert dimensions in Chapter 1, namely – ‘out-of-everyday-awareness’ issues such as – Reasons, Politics, Inspirations, Emotions, Mindsets and Psychodynamics. He then presents the integration of these in a framework he calls the Covert Processes Model in Chapter 2. With this the reader could get to ‘how to go about seeing what is not there’ in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 presents and explains a formula for diagnosing covert processes. It offers a method – if you will - on developing hunches. It is principally about diagnoses of covert issues. There’s magic of cognition in that theorization that is best read than reviewed here. Chapter 4 is an extension of the diagnostic theme, although the primary treatment here is on communication, intentionally symbolic or unintentional. Here is where the reader delights in the paradox that implies that we should explore symbolic messages literally and literal messages symbolically. We’ve known from conventional change theory about private and public withdrawal of participants in organisational change. Symbolic communications serve as early indicators of these symptoms (symbols). Some may refer to such uncovering as consumptive knowledge.

Practice or action based themes commence in Chapter 5. The significance of such nuanced practice considerations stand starkly in the potential that fears, untested assumptions, unconscious reactions and under-the-table dealings of members have during organisational change. Practice is about reaching change effectiveness by using the basic 5 keys in this chapter to unleash hidden creativity, removing unspoken blocks, altering mindsets, and giving voice to ‘unspeakable’ visions of greatness as Bob terms them. Scholars may classify this section to be the mark of procedural knowledge.

Chapter 6 is an extension of Chapter 5 with special focus on engagement strategies to manage covert dynamics. Bob calls it ‘putting things on the table’ – by establishing legitimacy, creating enabling conditions, being strategic and using subtlety through astute judgment.

In fact, by the time I reached this part of the book several alternate or related theories whizzed through my mind. Prominent among them are that of Gestalt – the figure and ground aspects of sensory perception, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming  – the symbolic representations that language throws up to be opposed skillfully for their violations – whether they be universal generalizations, simple deletions, modal operators of necessity, presuppositions or lack of referential index. I would be delighted to integrate such ‘use of self’ into the diagnostic scheme that the Covert Process model holds out.

In quite organic connect Chapter 7 follows with how to recognize or rethink interventions. The significance of figure and ground come alive in the prominence Bob accords to the focal system that blocks it from seeing or sensing important issues. Hence the inferential consequence of rethinking and reframing interventions follows. In such a schema, the unity of awareness in purpose of intervention as shared between change facilitator and client system helps lay relevant ground rules that foster legitimacy and safety for change participants.

Chapter 8 is an extension of Chapter 7, in that it is about Reframing. The difference here is not so much about change in focal system beliefs, as much as it is about change in the way something would be interpreted in the system’s context. Bob quotes a giant’s intervention in such a scheme, when Edie Seashore says ‘Up until now”…i.e. if someone on behalf of the organisation says, “That is not possible here; there’s no way that can be done” Edie would say “Up until now”. This example suggests the spirit of reframing in that the dignity of the speaker is preserved, and the challenge is about the thinking process. 6 ways of addressing reframing are discussed in this chapter – primarily from a change facilitator’s point of view.

Chapter 9 is about Rethinking Organisational Politics. The seasoned reader may in fact consider this as a special case of reframing! However what is revealed is Bob’s own take from his own ‘prism’. Dealing with both political and management frames, Bob reveals another aspect of his synthetic mind. They hover around decision arenas, degree of participation, decision rounds (how many iterations), required degree of agreement, access to information, reciprocity, expected styles and types of sanctions. The dimensions he frames are as under.

1. Who decides
2. Decision Process
3. Time-frame
4. Nature of Change
5. Purpose of Change
6. How others are seen

Chapters 7, 8 and 9, are in my opinion, the author’s special contribution to the discipline of Organisation Development. It is here that his insights emerge like the nectar in the air that the nose never sniffed without being trained to do so. The savant and the processual components of behavioral sciences weaves into the book here like a stitch through an ailing body part, and quite like the integrative spirit of Eastern ‘wholeness’ in remedy despite the origin of analytical and almost partitive western diagnostic temperament. Like the good architect working to a plan, he elevates the foundation in Chapters 1 to 3, and raises the edifice deftly thereafter with structural material that houses the diagnostic and the interventionist aspects of classical Organisation Development.

Chapter 10 on Managing Covert processes is like the canopy or the rotunda to the book’s architecture. Written partly like an epilogue, or a good teacher’s summary (the OD practitioner’s Humanistic orientation); it is especially useful for the reader who takes the trouble of going through this book’s organisation. The telling punch is that premise from which the book begins – ‘remember that organisations are both rational and political systems’. The mitigation is however a phased collapsing of both these anchors through humane challenge, conscious judgment, multiple levels of diagnoses, clarity of purpose and  requisite thinking to suit the political thinking of the system when one frames reality.

Perhaps Bob’s pronouncement of psychological safety issues is a shade deeper than the consideration of ethics in such art of change management. If there were one more dimension he could have addressed deeply in the scheme – that would be it – ‘ethics’ as frames of reference in covert processes. Else, this book is compactly done, integrating complexity of theme with lucidity in explanation; elevating abstractions that are grounded in real case examples and theorizing to the extent that it holds out a qualitative promise from tireless and methodical application. It aids concrete grasp for the phenomenologically inclined reader; especially for the one in search of a product of evolved thinking in organisational dynamics. Ed Schein puts it well in the foreword when he says, that ‘in this book finally we have a coherent approach’ to all of what we hurriedly label as hidden agendas, unconscious desires, elephants-under-the-table, latent functions and shared tacit assumptions that seldom get to the table. No more as ‘covert’ as the title first suggested?