John Zavacki asked regarding my idea to apply Jung's approach of integrating animus:
>What was Jung's success read with liberating the animus or the anima,
>Winfried? In his own life, he kept a great "secret", the mistress which
>his wife knew about from the inception of the relationship. The yin-yang
>relationships espoused by Jungian theorists or even Hindu ascetics is not
>applicable to the work place. This group is dysfunctional and requires
>restructuring. They will never work as a team.
Hello John,
(At de Lange: I made a brief case study on wholeness out of this below.)
Thank you for writing. Your writing is always challenging and I will try
to meet your challenge.
First I have to note, that I made a specific suggestion for a specific
case. I didn't mean to generalise to apply the world of "yin-yang
relationships espoused by Jungian theorists or even Hindu ascetics" to all
"work place".
Still I have to admit that my idea was very esoteric. This is why I wraped
it in the sentence "Just an idea" at the beginning and asked at the end to
forget it if it doesn't resonate. (You didn't cite these.)
This check of resonance allowed me not to make my assumptions explicit. If
my assumptions were not valid, my idea wouldn't resonate.
I had that idea, when I read the given case but no time to write an
explaining essay, or to share my two corresponding experiences in
sufficient detail (similar settings: well established pure male team + a
new female manager, but the team expected one of them to become the new
manager + breakdown of funcionality - one lead to a desaster, the other to
a great success). At least I was sure, that I wouldn't harm anybody.
Now I get a completely unexpected resonance by you, which I understand in
short to say: "Psychological theories (even worse theories of the
unconcious) are the totally wrong category for the problem at hand - it is
not applicable to the work place."
I agree: Centering on the self by means of an exclusive focus on
psychology can be a tremendous waste of time, making things worse than
better. I definitely didn't want to support this attitude.
My question behind is however, how to associate with tacit knowledge in
order to support emergences by means of wholeness. Thus I wrote on a tacit
level. It is not necessary to explain: If it works, fine - it served as an
intermediate state. If not, don't explain, but try something else. I am
wondering whether you can accept this as a valid mode of communication?
Well, now I am not talking directly to the case, but to the LO-list, so I
will try to give some information on the path, my thinking took (probably
only understandable for those, who read the contribution about "Wholeness"
by At de Lange a few days ago):
The new female manager is facing a situation, which is unique for her. The
experiences of others, including their concepts on how to deal with such
situations cannot be transferred to her: She has to make her own
experience. In the moment it doesn't look too good for emergences that
could be digested into a new way of cooperating successfully. What could
be helpful in this situation? Under the assumption, that all necessary
knowledge is available to her, at least tacitly, she needs a way to
communicate ef fectively with this knowledge.
Another assumption is, that the essentiality "wholeness" is impaired. The
team became fragmented. It is in a state of "plasmodial" organisation,
begging for a leader. But there may be good reasons not to allow Bill to
take over the leader position. Wholeness may have been the problem already
before: Due to the good inner relationship the team may tend to become a
purpose on its own and so fragmented from the rest of the company.
To overcome fragmentation, the team and the company must re-associate. The
intermediate state required for this association is the leader. The task
of the leader is to establish wholeness in this case, thus she must have
mastered the required degree of wholeness to take over the leadership of
the plasmodial organisation and thus to form a new team. Otherwise she
will be rejected further on.
Next I assume, that her wholeness is "on birth". She has to associate with
deeper layers of her tacit knowledge in order to shape actively and
creatively the given situation. The intermediate state I offered was
"animus" - a friend within her.
I could have recommended a lot of other techniques - Silva Mind Control,
trance, hypnosis, lucid dreaming etc. - but in my view, these are often
not sufficiently sensitive with respect to "sureness". So I prefer the
thorough education of an analytical psychologist.
So far my view of the situation.
May be the clue is somewhere else.
May be we have just another case study on immergence.
> The yin-yang relationships espoused by Jungian theorists or even Hindu
> ascetics is not applicable to the work place.
I don't support any dogma. I try to understand the framework of At de
Lange. And I share my thoughts coming into my mind while doing so.
> This group is dysfunctional and requires restructuring.
The group is dysfunctional, yes, but I doubt whether restructuring will
help. Restructuring assumes "Being-Becoming" to be impaired - the group is
dead as a group. For me, restructuring is an emergency-stop + start anew.
Unfortunatly people carry their old experiences with them. They will find
another possiblity to direct the open issues until they are settled.
I am very interested in a short feedback at least to my private mail. What
do you think: Am I right to share such thoughts with the list? Did I loose
you somewhere? How far are you willing to follow? Do I have a point?
Although following this path of thinking is a great adventure for me, I
have to take care not to loose contact to reality, at least your reality.
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
--"Winfried Dressler" <winfried.dressler@voith.de>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>