Embracing Paradox And Absurdity

That is certainly true in regard to our relationships in business and other bureaucratic organisations. It is my hope to encourage managers and all those in positions of leadership to think beyond the conventional wisdom, in particular, to understand how the ways we think shape what we see, and how paradox and absurdity inevitably play a part in our every action.

I am inspired, of course, by that group of post-World War II playwrights - Pinter, Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, and others - who questioned the assumptions of traditional theater, criticising it for oversimplifying and overrationalising human affairs. They felt that only by recognising the mystery and absurdity of life was the dignity of the human being served. Collectively, their work became known as the Theater of the Absurd, and it turned out to be an important moment in the history of dramatic art. I believe that we need such a moment now in regard to the art of management.

 

The wrong direction

Examining the absurd is not just a playful exercise. I believe that many programs in management training today are moving us in the wrong direction because they fail to appreciate the complexity and paradoxical nature of human organisations. Thinking loses out to how-to-do-it formulas and techniques, if not to slogans and homilies, as the principal management guides. I can understand their appeal. Considering the difficulty of the tasks before them, it is not surprising that managers still find themselves prone to accept a definition of management that makes it seem as if it could be simply learned.

Indeed, what's the harm? Why not let managers believe the familiar bromides? As we will see, there is a considerable downside, leading managers to believe that their responsibilities can be discharged adequately by attending seminars or following simplistic formulas. This creates just the opposite of its intended effect. When such formulas fail them, managers become frustrated, aggressive, and sometimes verbally abusive.

Still, managers are whipsawed from one fashionable training program to the next as their organisations keep buying into new trends, new definitions of management, new motivational phrases. Years ago we talked about leadership, then the byword became morale, then it was motivation, then communication, then Culture, then quality, then excellence, then chaos, then back again to leadership. Along the way we were buffeted about by buzzwords like zero defect, management by objectives, quality circles, TQM (total quality management), paradigm shift, and re-engineering.

The confused manager, careening from trend to trend, cannot become an effective leader as long as he or she continues to believe in simplistic techniques. But a manager who can appreciate the absurdities and paradoxes of business relationships and organisations is surely going to be far less vulnerable to fashion, and therefore stronger as a leader.

...I use the terms manager and leader almost interchangeably, even though I know that one can make important distinctions between them. I personally like the one that organisation theorist Warren Bennis makes: Managers do things right, leaders do the right things.

Some definitions

Paradoxes are seeming absurdities. And our natural inclination when confronted with paradoxes is to attempt to resolve them, to create the familiar out of the strange, to rationalise them. (Here) we are going to resist that temptation and instead just let them wash over us for a while, to see if we can become comfortable using a kind of paradoxical logic to understand management and human affairs.

The paradoxes (here) are stated in a deliberately declarative manner, with the full knowledge that they require clarification and qualification. They are meant to challenge conventional ways of thinking and present alternatives to the traditional viewpoints that have been the received wisdom in management literature for many years. All have, what I regard as, an element of the absurd, and all ask us to turn our thinking upside down. Regard them as exercises for the mind.

Suppose, for example, I were to pose this question: If you were asked to predict the group in our society that is most likely to mount a liberation effort to end its oppression, would you have a greater probability of success by picking the group for which you feel most sorry, or the one for which you feel least sorry?

If you employed the unconventional, paradoxical approach, you would have picked the group for which you feel least sorry. Liberation movements usually arise from groups thought at the time to be perfectly content. That is why they so often have taken society by surprise. Earlier generations, for example, complacently saw Negroes as being happy in their place. Women, before the 1960s, were thought to be on a pedestal, adored and provided for by men. And today, in spite of the efforts of child advocates to call attention to the often oppressive conditions of childhood, children remain in the public mind as carefree, fully protected, joyful in their innocence.

Next question: From where is the leadership of those liberation movements most likely to come - from those most oppressed by the conditions or those least oppressed?

If you said least oppressed, you're beginning to get the idea. The leaders come from outside or from the margins of these groups, seldom from the most oppressed segments. African-Americans were most helped at first by white abolitionists. Gloria Steinem is hardly the most oppressed woman in America. Children are represented almost entirely by adult advocates.

As we explore the paradoxes of management, keep in mind that there is a different between absurdity and stupidity. Stupidity is behaviour that can be recognised to be mistaken, incompetent, or blind to the facts. It refers to insensibility, not having all of one's faculties available. With stupid management, it is easy for someone else to see how to do it right. Absurdity, on the other hand, arises from the essential humanness of the situation. Absurd behavior jars us. It seems unreasonable, even ridiculous. It is not what we would expect a rational person to do. It contradicts our conventional ways of thinking and it usually confronts us not with a problem, but with a dilemma. Even the best of us are not sure what to do.

Paradox and absurdity keep us off balance. In so doing, they produce the humility, vitality, and creative surprise that make life so worth living. But they cannot be controlled. They will always defy the attempt.

I find it disquieting to see the term paradox entering management literature in a way that indicates it can be managed. I suppose we should expect this because of the sense of omnipotence that plagues American management, the belief that no event or situation is too complex or too unpredictable to be brought under management control.

But as Charles Handy points out in his book The Age of Paradox, paradox can only be managed in the sense of coping with, which is what management had always meant until the term was purloined to mean planning and control. Thus, paradox is not just another organisational factor to be brought into the workshop of the management technologist. It wo-uld be misleading even to suggest that it can be coped with in any systematic or rational way. It will never be that comfortable. Therefore, as you will no doubt discern ... the phrase management of the absurd is, itself, an absurdity.

In pursuit of the paradoxical

My contrarian view of human relations and my interest in paradoxical thinking have been with me so long that I'm not sure when or where they began. Certainly, I have profited from having worked closely with the late and distinguished psychologist Carl Rogers, as his student, his research assistant, and his colleague at the University of Chicago, and eventually as president of the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, where he did some of his most important work. Over the years I watched him take positions that were in striking contrast to the mainstream thinking of the day, defend them successfully, and eventually see them incorporated so thoroughly into the mainstream that most people now don't even know where the ideas came from. He has been called America's most influential psychologist, and he certainly provided an example of how one should think for oneself, questioning the conventional wisdom.

My long friendship with the exceptionally creative social psychologist Alex Bavelas, who is a major contributor to our understanding of organisations, surely aided my pursuit of the paradoxical. I was a junior member of the human relations faculty at the Harvard Business School (he was then a professor at nearby MIT) when I first encountered him face-to face and experienced his remarkable ability to take a completely fresh look at ideas, often turning them upside down illuminating the paradoxes.

There were other influences. I worked at universities, research institutes, and as a naval officer, studying leadership and organisational behaviour. I consulted with corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit, organisations. But probably the most important contribution to my thinking has been my thirty-plus years heading organisations. Being both a psychologist and a CEO has given me a special appreciation of the paradoxes and absurdities of organisations, and how nothing works quite the way we have been taught.

I could honestly title this book What I Wish I Had Known Forty Years Ago. It is a book of ideas, observations, and lessons learned, not a book of management techniques. I have organised it first to delve into the nature of paradoxical thinking, then to examine particular paradoxes that we all encounter in human relationships and organisations. Along the way, I will call attention to those qualities of effective leadership that often go unrecognised.

These chapters need not necessarily be read in sequence, but can be read in whatever order appeals to the reader. It is my hope that they will strike familiar notes in the reader's own experience, and in so doing will lead to the development of a more realistic way of assessing situations, a more fully integrated approach to managing oneself and others, a more genuine and potent leadership style, and an improved ability to contribute to the success of organisations at whatever managerial level one works.

I know from having talked with hundreds of managers that the ideas in this book can be disturbing initially. But I also know that after managers have enough exposure to them, it is possible not only to entertain these ideas, but also to take comfort in them.

After all, the beauty of paradoxical thinking in management is its timelessness. Most ideas come and go with discouraging regularity in management literature and executive training programs. But paradox and absurdity will be with us as long as humans congregate in organisations.

Most problems that people have are not problems

One of the most valuable lessons, among many valuable lessons, I learned from philosopher Abraham Kaplan is to distinguish between a problem and a predicament. Problems can be solved; predicaments can only be coped with. Most of the affairs of life, particularly the most intimate and important ones, such as marriage and child rearing, are complicated, inescapable dilemmas - predicaments where no options look very good or better than any other. I believe that is true of management as well.

Not a simple matter

A problem is created by something going wrong, by a mistake, defect, disease, or a bad experience. When we find the cause, we can correct it. A predicament, however, paradoxical as it may seem, is more likely to be created by conditions that we highly value. That is why we can only cope with it.

Take crime, for example. We think of crime as a problem and are always looking for its root causes, such as childhood experiences that may have produced a criminal mind. We would prefer it to be a simple matter of cause and effect so we try to prove that crime comes from such sources as pornography or watching violence on television.

Instead, absurdly, crime exists mainly because of aspects of our society that we wouldn't think of giving up - affluence, urbanisation, mobility, freedom, materialism, individual liberty, progress. Social ills such as unemployment and poverty undoubtedly play a part, but there are major societies with poverty far greater than ours that have virtually no crime. In America, as paradoxical as it may sound, crime is associated with developments that we think of as advancement. It even comes from efforts to control it. Prisons, for example, tend to harden and train criminals so that they are likely to commit more serious offenses when they leave. Thus, a predicament is often made worse when we treat it as a problem.

A large frame

Most people, especially those who inhabit the lower levels of organisations, think of themselves as problem solvers, and to a great extent they are. They size up a situation, break it down into its component parts, and then addre-ss each component one at a time. As they go up the ladder and become executives, however, they deal increasingly with pre-dicaments, not problems. The best executives soon discover that purely analytic thinking is inadequate.

Predicaments require interpretive thinking. Dealing with a predicament demands the ability to put a larger frame around a situation, to understand it in its many contexts, to appreciate its deeper and often paradoxical causes and consequences. Alas, predicaments cannot be handled smoothly.

The more we communicate, the less we communicate

The notion that people need to communicate more is perhaps the most widely accepted idea in management, indeed in all human relationships. Whether its called counseling, team building, conflict resolution, or negotiating, it all boils down to one idea - that if we talk it over, things will get better.

Well, yes and no. I certainly wont say that we dont need to talk. But communication, like everything else in human affairs, seldom works the way we think it does. Most organisations, in fact, are overcommunicating meetings, conferences, memos, phone calls, and electronic mail overwhelm managers and employees alike. Increasingly, we seem to believe that everybody should be in on everything.

The classic experiment that put the lie to that belief was conducted many years ago by management consultant and organisational psychologist Alex Bavelas. This study, which came to be known as the line and circle experiment, divided participants into two groups. In one, all information was fed by the group members to a central person-topdown line management, you might say. In the other, the information was shared around a circle, more like participative management.

Both groups were given the same problem to solve; for example, each member of each group was given a box of different- coloured marbles and the groups were then asked to identify the one color that was common to all boxes. When the marbles were all of solid colors, making them easier to distinguish and to describe, the line group did much better than the group in a circle. But then the problem was changed slightly to make it more complex; the marbles were no longer solid colors but were more mottled in design. The circle group, where each person could talk to the next person, not just the leader, adjusted to the change more quickly and therefore did better than the line group.

These findings have been used to support the idea of participative management for many years. One of the lesser-known findings of the research, however, is of special interest to us. When all lines of communication were open - when participants could talk not only to the persons next to them but to all the other members of the group - then the problem-solving ability of the group diminished markedly and it became virtually paralysed. In other words, there seems always to be an optimal level of communication beyond which further or expanded communication becomes dysfunctional. Communication has its limits.

A formula for tedium

Complete communication can be quite boring. In one management training exercise often done to demonstrate both the difficulty and the importance of achieving accurate communication, participants are not allowed to speak unless they first satisfy the previous speaker that his or her remarks were fully understood. This is done by repeating the previous speaker's message - not in a parroting way, but in one's own words - and then obtaining his or her agreement that the summation is accurate. Not surprisingly, this agreement is often hard to get. Eventually, participants learn the necessity and value of careful listening.

When the experiment is continued beyond a few minutes, however, it begins to wear on the participants. Even though the heat has gone out of the discussion and people are fully understanding each other, an enormous amount of boredom sets in. Accurate communication has become both tedious and stifling. The exercise reminds us that the transfer of accurate information is only a small part of the role communication plays in our lives.

Power problems in disguise

Many supposed communication problems are actually balance of power problems. That is why it probably is unwise to introduce completely open communication into a situation in which there is a large disparity in power. The un-intended but damaging result is to increase the power of the already powerful and reduce the power of the already powerless. For example, in marriage counseling, if the person who feels rejected is asked to communicate his or her needs to the person doing the rejecting, it can actually worsen matters by making the rejected person even less attractive and more vulnerable to the other person.

The same is true in boss-employee relationships. When subordinates are asked to communicate honestly with their superiors, they run the risk of becoming more vulnerable, with potentially harmful consequences. One wonders how many people there are like one woman I know who was encouraged by her associates to go to her boss and clear the air. She did and was fired soon afterward. It is only when the balance of power is relatively equal that truly candid communication can and should take place.n

Management of The Absurd

Richard Farson

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