[NOTE: I wrote the following piece in 2003, and it appeared then on humansandcomputing.org]

The command-and-control approach to managing people infects many of our teaching, coaching, and managing situations. It all begins when we want to change or motivate another. By externalizing the other as separate from ourselves, and then endowing ourselves with the unique privilege of poking and prodding the other to do what we want them to do–or what we think they want to do, or what they should want to do–we employ what James Flaherty calls the Amoeba Theory of teaching and coaching.

I, as teacher or manager (or coach), can either prod you into doing or being a different way, or I can seduce you with sugar.

Or…

I can employ a different metaphor. Suppose that rather than resonating the subject/object paradigm, and the various notions of separation that paradigm generates, I were to view the world, and relations within it, as an ecosystem whose principle medium would be language. Through language, members of a given organization-be it a family, team, company, group of friends, etc.-create what Humberto Maturana calls consensual domains. Consensual domains are domains of agreements, foundational understandings, presuppositions, and shared perspectives.

Of constitutional significance to our experience within an ecosystem are the interpretive frames through which we come to understand the world and the events that transpire within it. Though for the most part we don’t notice them, interpretive frames play a major part in how we view ourselves, how we view others, our sense of what’s possible, our sense of what we want, and so on.

Interpretive frames are enacted either individually or collectively, since they are embodied in language.

Within the context of this ecosystem metaphor, we might begin to understand the role of a manager a little differently than is customary. Rather than one who effects change by manipulating others, a manager might be one who effects change by collaborating with others in the management of the interpretive frames that govern the ecosystem of concern (individual, group, team, department, entire company, conglomeration).

Managing interpretive frames means constructing situations in language such that the normal way of interpreting the world is momentarily disrupted. In disrupting the normal way of interpreting the world, we bring about, at least momentarily, an insight-an experience, that is, in which the usual presuppositions, emotions, and social constraints are suspended, allowing for the appearance of a fresh perspective.

When all who are affected by the occurrences within a social/cultural ecosystem participate in its management and its ontology, and when it is understood that our language and positions shape not only the ecosystem itself, but the occurrences within it, then the ecosystem can be said to have integrity.

Returning to the amoeba model: Rather than using needles and sugar to try to change the state of the amoeba (which usually doesn’t work for people), we change the nature of its environment so that it perceives itself, and its range of possibilities differently. In light of its differently perceiving, it can make choices that serve its own needs, while engendering an unfolding integrity in its environment.

Resources
Flaherty, Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others
Maturana & Varela, The Tree of Knowledge

Posted in: Organization, Managment, Language by admin on Friday, July 18th, 2008

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