I’ve been one poor correspondent – I’ve been too, too hard to find… But it doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind!
I got terribly distracted for some time there and – unfortunately – it was right in the midst of a series of thoughts on The Art of Possibility. So, just as a recap, I’ve already talked about practicing the practices and scarcity thinking. The good news is that I have personally been making great strides in practicing my new practices and avoiding scarcity thinking. Working through these two concepts has been incredibly helpful for me.
This week has me thinking about one of the other big ideas that I picked up in this book. I should explain that I am currently sitting on the 26th floor of one of the World Financial Centers in Manhattan. For me, this environment brings up a recurring area of concern – that of the calculated self.
The Art of Possibility says that there are two versions of a person called the central self and the calculated self. Everyone seems to assume that the central self is obvious to us, which is probably a discussion for another post. But the interesting theory in The Art of Possibility is that the calculated self is created as a result of childhood survival strategies. My understanding of the theory is that each child survives by figuring out ho w to get what they need to feel safe. These strategies are the foundation of personality and, particularly, for stress response behaviors. If you take a look at those last 2 sentences, they implications are fairly astounding. There are several areas of those implications that I want to discuss, but I only have time to get to one today. And, I’m sitting in what I see as “the calculated self center of the world”, I’ll talk about the effects of this theory on work.
The business world in which I work encourages and rewards very specific behaviors. Again, each individual has strategies to obtain what they need to feel safe. As adults, our definitions of “need” and “safe” have been refined over time. Do I need to keep up with the Jones’ or do I need to be in complete control of my environment? Am I safe when I’m an executive? Am I safe when I have a certain $ value in the bank? Regardless of the individual need or safety requirements, there is only one way to meet the requirements. Our survival depends on pleasing the local representatives of our corporate entities. Each corporation effectively re-creates the conditions of childhood again managers acting as parents and departments acting as tribes.
I like this theory because it is consistent with my experience. I see competing siblings and tribes. I see blatant needs couched in acceptable terms. But perhaps I’m just cynical. What do you see?
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2 comments:
Not your best written but conceptually sound. Especially since I had a nightmare last night (I swear) that my boss had my mothers head. He speaks in that degrading tone my mother uses but I see what you mean. The departments as tribes is questionable depending on the type of work in question for instance with us there are offices as tribes. Here comes the big thing though. You have the reactions to stress from childhood. You have companies as a whole acting childish and never for the greater good. I think we should take our confederation theory to the corporate level. For instance, create a bank that while part of a bigger picture has each branch controlled by the mangager keep it personal. With title companies each office its own individual unit but with access to corporate resources make this part of the condition of the companies existance. Allow stock holders no control control is handled by a board of directors with an understanding that "NO CORPORATIZATION IS ALLOWED" regardless of stocks. Each branch maintains itself so stock prices really are not relivant to the corporations continuance. Am I making sense here? I'm talking a company based on confederation principals rather than union principals.
Yes, that makes sense. To put it into our current political discussion terms, each location should have the kind of "states rights" that would allow business to focus on local needs with less concern about the federal/corporate requirements. I'm still thinking about this....
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