The Authentic Organization

Imagine this scenario: You receive an unexpected inheritance that enables you to quit the job that has eaten up so much of your time, get some well-deserved rest, and then spend the time you previously dedicated to the job (and commuting to the job and recovering from the job) on your kids and your art. (This scenario assumes you have kids and are an artist.) I have never met anyone who would sincerely say that this would be a “work-life balance” problem. But why not?

The gut level answer is because there is no longer a job overwhelming you therefore things don’t feel out of balance. Of course, that suggests that it’s not a matter of balance at all, since you would expect the scale to tip radically out of balance if you removed one side entirely! But, unless you are trying to be literal about it, never having to hold down a job for money doesn’t really feel out of balance, does it?

This gut level is very important, for it signifies the passion and pain that’s wrapped up in this issue. I’ll return to it shortly, but there is another level at which we need to look at this scenario. It turns out that how we define the word ‘work’ really matters.

Are making art and raising kids not work? Of course they are. There are people who would point at an artist and tell them to get a “real job” and there are plenty of people who are clueless about childrearing, but these activities are both work in any meaningful sense of the word. If since they are in fact work, as was the job you quit in this scenario, then aren’t you working just as much as you were before? And in that case, isn’t there just as much of a “work-life balance” problem as there was before?

Balance versus Boundaries:

I was pleased by the thoughtful feedback I received on my recent piece on Why Work-Life Balance is a Bad Idea. Most people understood quite clearly that I wasn’t critiquing the notion of “balance” altogether. Balance is a useful concept and generally a wonderful aspiration. The physical metaphor of the word is powerful enough that we can truly feel it in our bodies. Without balance, we don’t go where we want to go. Without balance, we fall down.

So, given all that, why did I say that work-life balance is a bad idea? The antagonistic relationship set up between work and life in that phrase, when of course work is a part of life, has several negative corollaries. But I’m expressing myself very precisely. I was not, as one reader suggested, saying that “wanting work-life balance is a bad thing”. I was saying that the phrase is a bad idea, a flawed concept. As I said, I support much of the work-life balance movement, but ideas have power and this one paints us into a corner.

Admittedly, the title was deliberately provocative and I deserve every challenge that was forthcoming.

Most importantly, does this critique of work-life balance as a concept leave people with little protection against their jobs taking over their lives? Several readers expressed reasonable concern about this. Michael at Inhumandecency wrote that people want to “avoid worrying about their work 24 hours a day”. L. VanDervort wrote that “given no constraints, employers (or clients) will push for more time or productivity. They care not if your life is integrated or balanced. They just want more.” Resonance wrote that “I’d like to have my work duties not expand to take up all the time I’m not eating, sleeping, or showering, but it’s not in anyone’s individual interest to lower their demands on me”.

If we take ‘work’ to mean a job or paid employment, then I agree. Although there may be sweet exceptions worth studying, we do indeed need to be vigilant wherever someone has that sort of hold over our labor.

Furthermore, as readers clearly understand, the fact that we ourselves internalize our employers’ anxious demands for our time makes this entire dynamic a sharp and double-edged sword. As a coach and counsellor, I focus a substantial portion of my work on finding the line between the real pressures the employers and the forces of our economies bring to bear on our boundaries and the pressures we ourselves bring. Together, those pressures are indeed a deadly combination.

In regard to this exploration of “work-life balance”, what’s clear in our discussion is that we have been using the word “balance” when what we really seem to mean is “boundaries”. Boundaries keep things in their place. Balance suggests the same amount of two things on either side of a scale. Boundaries keep one of those things from oozing past the edge of its platter and taking over the other side.

Such boundaries are about us shaping the relationships and roles that, in turn, shape our lives. I’ll quote my readers on this. L. Vandevort wrote: “Balance is about knowing where to establish boundaries. Life with no boundaries is at the whim of everyone else.” Resonance wrote: “When I deliberately designate time as non-work time, it allows me to do things that are priorities for me but not for my co-workers.” Michael wrote: “Some want to have more than one passion in their lives, and make sure that they can have a job they care about without having to annihilate their interests in art, athletics, or social causes.”

Work as Self Expression:

The desire for boundaries doesn’t necessarily imply an alienation from work. On the contrary, if we’re alienated sometimes the boundaries come quite easily. Even if we love our work, poor boundaries can be destructive. As many of us experience, a love of work can foster the internalization of the pressures from which we would all like refuge from time to time.

The concern about fostering alienation that I articulated in my earlier article has nothing to do with the idea of boundaries or balance. It has to do with setting ‘work’ and ‘life’ in opposition to each other. Good boundaries don’t lead to alienation, but this false opposition does.

The idea of work should be reclaimed from our employers for our own use. We can’t wait to reclaim the word only after we have fully reclaimed the work itself. We’ll never find authentic work for any but a few lucky ones if we abandon the rhetorical landscape.

As we’ve learned all too well in the world of politics, framing matters. The importance of framing is something I’ve seen reflected in many years of seeing how their language and ideas allows people to slip back into an alienated posture in regard to work, even as they are fighting to transform it. It’s for this reason I chose “LifeWork” as the name for my career related practice.

There are barriers to work as self-expression, but they are not the obvious ones. Sonia Lyris wrote: “I think you can’t help but make work one thing and not-work another as long as work has money as compensation and not-work has something else as compensation.” But that’s an association we make, not a fact of life. Since when is ‘work’ only that thing for which you get paid? Do slaves not work? Do volunteers not work? Aren’t there other forms of compensation for work as well, such as the relationships involved, the craft and the learning, or even the outcomes themselves? Aren’t there things other than work that are compensated with money, such as owning for a living?

She goes on to describe exactly what every smart employer does: Find ways to get employees to give of themselves to something they may or may not really believe in. Since people are in fact wired to give of themselves, this often works. Over and over again. And I think we’re seeing the toll it takes.

No, the barriers to self-expression in work are about much more than money. They are the result of (at least) three things:

First, we buy into the idea that work is owned by someone else, that thing we get paid for, separate from life itself. Second, we give up control over huge parts of our lives to other forces. Some of this time is to employment, because we see no other way to feed ourselves and our families. Some of this time is to family commitments, which we may or may not take ownership of or choose to see as creative. Some of this time is devoted to habits and addictions. Third, we withdraw our identity from what we produce and shift it to what we consume. Some of that is because of how we feel about what we call “work” and some of that is because we feel our culture facilitates the establishment of affiliation and identity through patterns of consumption.

Better Ideas About Our Relationship to Work:

There are many better ideas out there that could replace the notion of “work-life balance”.

I tossed out the idea of integrity or wholeness in my earlier piece, but didn’t develop it very much. Naturally, some people are very worried about that concept, because to them it implies a lack of those very boundaries that we just discussed. But I would suggest that the opposite is true. Boundaries and integration go together. Maybe it’s just the biologist in me, but it seems that good boundaries are what make integration work. Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy.

It’s true, as Patty Hill pointed out that “the opportunity for such integration is limited”, but that doesn’t make it less of a valuable aspiration. First, the more we think of work as being our productive role in the world, rather than just that particular productivity for which we currently receive a formal paycheck, the more opportunities we will find for integration. Second, even traditional employment exists on a continuum and may present small opportunities here and there, even if it’s as simple as the “Take Your Child to Work Day” that Patty also mentioned. Sometimes, especially in social entrepreneurial situations and in many parts of civil society, the opportunities are far deeper. We have to see these doors in order to open them.

In addition to the theme of boundaries, there were two other suggestions for better ideas, neither of which is really inconsistent with the idea of wholeness.

The first one returned to the notion of balance, but dispensed with the dysfunctional opposition of work to the rest of life. For example, Patty Hill suggested that there is “a real struggle with Work-Family balance”. Of course, it’s employers (who, I repeat, do not own the idea of work) who find it hard to “respect family needs and events”. But that is a very real problem, particularly in the United States, as compared to the European social democracies. And as Kivi Miller, a “self-employed, work-at-home professional with two small children”, pointed out, it’s a problem even for people who are their own boss.

This idea of work-family balance is part of the very sensible larger notion that, as Michael pointed out, people have “multiple distinct domains in their lives that are worthy” of their attention. If one of these utterly displaces another, then people don’t feel whole. It would be like the lungs crowding out the heart.

The second alternative idea was presented by Nancy Barros, who wrote, “I would just like to say the ultimate for me is not work-life balance but rather life-work process. As we all know it is not the destination but what we experience along the road called life that gives us the greatest pleasure, satisfaction and rewards.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s how we engage the tensions and connections between work and the other parts of our lives that matters most.

Which seems as good a place as any to stop, for now.

Although I am firmly allied with the mission and spirit of all the professionals and organizations who use the term “work-life balance” as something to strive for, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s fundamentally flawed, a dangerous trap, an all-around bad idea.

Superficially Sensible

The concept is enormously popular - over 10 million results for “work-life balance” on Google as of this writing - and it’s easy to understand why.

• In the United States, the average number of working hours is probably the highest it’s been in seventy five years.


• Five million workers in the UK put in almost two months worth of unpaid overtime a year.


• Ninety percent of working adults said they are concerned they do not spend “enough time” with their families.


• Seventy percent said they don’t have a healthy “balance between their personal and work lives”.

It would certainly seem, on the surface, that “work” and “life” are out of balance.

Plenty of people will come to the defense of the idea of “work-life balance”. The defense basically comes down to this: “What? You think work and life should be out of balance? If not that, what could you possibly mean?” Most people seem either shocked or a little confused when they hear the assertion that work-life balance is a bad idea.

That confusion itself derives from being blinded by the frame of reference created by the very phrase in question. Bad ideas have a way of trapping us within their own terms. Bad ideas prevent us from assessing their utility by restricting us to the wrong questions. In this case: How do I keep my work in balance with my life? But that doesn’t sound like a bad question, does it? It sounds utterly sensible, until you look at the consequences.

Five Unfortunate Consequences

The consequences of the work-life balance idea all stem directly from the inherent meanings of the phrase: First, “Work” and “Life” are two separate things. Second, “Life” is in jeopardy from “Work” and must be protected from it. Third, the way to protect “Life” is to have it in some kind of equilibrium with “Work”. Inherent in the idea of work-life balance is fundamental separateness and opposition of work and life and therein lies the problem.

The fact is that work is a part of life, not in opposition to it. The fact is that what we all seek is joyful work-life integration, not some sort of painful detente. The fact is that work-life balance is the sad refuge of those who have decided that work is not worth saving.

There exist useful ideas that don’t fit the facts, but work-life balance isn’t one of those. Instead, there are five very unfortunate consequences to it: It reduces work to a job or a paycheck. It writes off work as an arena for change. It reinforces consumer culture as the dominant source of meaning in life. It encourages the retreat from the public sphere. And it jeopardizes the very private sphere it seeks to protect.

What is work? When we stop and think about it, we know that it’s not just what we get paid for. (We have a better word for that. It’s called a “Job”.) If we volunteered to do it, it would still be work. Similarly, there are things that we do for free that are justifiably called work. And yet, we persist in using the word to describe a necessary evil, something sadly distinct from play or love, from family or community. It helps us resolve the cognitive tension that comes from doing something we, at least at times, dislike. The result is a vicious cycle of distancing and neglect.

By writing off work as a part of our lives, we write it off as an arena for change. We think only of containing work (keeping it in “balance”) so that we can get on with the rest of our lives (which we call our “Life”). But to write off something as profoundly part of life as work is like writing off our bodies. These things are so connected to everything else, that we fight a losing battle, retreating further and further until there is almost nothing else that defines us as who we are.

One of the most powerful frames of reference left to us after we write off work as a source of meaning is our role as consumers. After all, work is about our role as producers in our culture. When we give up on work, a lot of what is left to us is the choices we make about what to buy and the relationships that are mediated by what we buy. We think about how we spend our money, rather than how we spend our time. And of course, how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. It may well be that one of the great drivers of consumerism is the consent we give to have work stripped of meaning.

It gets worse. By retreating from agency in our work lives, we lead a retreat from agency in the public sphere in general. Our political thinking shifts away from systemic analysis and citizenship is reduced to expressions of culture or concern with effects on private life. Even if we are otherwise engaged citizens, so long as we willingly pay a tax of a third of our weekday hours, the bulk of our productive energies are going to fuel an economic machine that commodifies every aspect of our lives.

Thus, in the end, even our so-called private life can’t be an authentic expression of ourselves. The human spirit being what it is, there will always be elements of our best selves that sneak out, no matter how commodified our private lives have become. Nevertheless, the choices available to us in our private lives are shaped by the world of work and at best we get to draw a smaller and smaller circle around the parts of our lives that are truly ours.

The Integral Alternative

The obvious alternative to the schizophrenic concept of work-life balance is healthy work-life integration. If our productive roles in the world were integrated with the rest of our lives, then they would be as much an expression of who we are and who we’re becoming as anything else. Just as importantly, there would be synergy. Work would support and be supported by our relationships, our home life, our community, our role as citizens.

This is not a new idea. Political thinkers of many persuasions have explored both the history and the future of a holistic notion of work. It’s been discussed by anthropologists, utopians, and career coaches alike. But the forces lined up against it are substantial, far more so than the mistaken survival driven notion of balance.

It’s important to acknowledge the numerous barriers to the concept of work-life integration. There are the obvious economic and social challenges. It’s a far taller order than retreating into a smaller and smaller circle of private life. There are also psychological barriers. The notion of balance has such appeal precisely because it allows us to temporarily dodge the tension that comes from aiming for what we really want.

The cheaper concept of balance is rhetorically dominant right now, if its millions of results on Google are any indication. Right now, there are exactly 346,000 results for “work-life integration”. By the time you read this, there should be 346,001. Will you add the next one?

After a lengthy break from the book caused by calamaties not worth describing here, I am back with the first draft of a high level outline of the book. It’s full of abstractions, of course, as something with one paragraph per chapter is likely to be. But something resembling a vision for the book is beginning to take shape. 

1. The Prisoner’s Journey: Losing the Battle for Meaning in the Workplace

In the Hero’s Journey, the protagonist ventures out into the world, endures and overcomes hardship, and returns to their community forever changed. People in the typical job tell something like the opposite of this uplifting narrative. We can look at nine very different jobs - attorney, social worker, teacher, sales manager, engineer, retail clerk, factory worker, service employee, and political aid - and find that they all tell a tale of losing the heroic battle for meaning in the workplace.

2. Work is a Dirty Word: The Personal and Social Costs of Inauthentic Work

As opposed to the simple meaning of effort directed at a purpose, the word “work” has come to mean on oppressive obligation with which nobody could possibly identify, except as a means to an end. Indeed, search for meaning in church, home, and even in our shopping, because we are told to leave that search at the door, when we go to work. Although not all jobs are entirely or equally alienating, by and large the modern organization is an engine of inauthenticity. Whether measured in terms of human well being, environmental or social impacts, or simple loss of meaning in our lives, the costs of this inauthenticity are vast.

3. The Origin of Meaning: Defining the Language of Genuine Work

Words have power. The word “authenticity” derives from a Greek word pertaining to origin and authorship. It’s a much abused but powerful word that speaks to deep issues of integrity and genuineness. Along with words such as alienation, meaning, candor, work, freedom, and community, this forms the beginning of a vocabulary for exploring the authentic workplace.

4. The Economics of Fear: Barriers to Authenticity

Fear comes in many flavors. We fear disappointment, disapproval, failure, and loss in many different forms. We also experience undirected fear, in the form of what might be called generalized anxiety. Together, fear and anxiety play an enormous role in economy of work. The breakdown of communities and the structures of labor markets both reflect and reinforce that role, yielding a system in which people get stuck, both materially and psychologically. Whether it’s as tangible as health care or providing for children or as intangible as status and sense of identity, the barriers to authenticity are very real.

5. Purpose, Practice, People, and Pay. The Four Sources of Work Satisfaction

It can be useful to think of work satisfaction as flowing from an abbreviated version of Maslow’s Hierarchy: At the bottom of the hierarchy is the material reward, which in modern economies comes largely in the form of a paycheck. Next is the relationships we form with the people we work with and the people we serve. Higher still is the set of skills and abilities that we display and develop in the actual practice of our work. And highest of all is the purpose of the work itself. Deep integrity in our work comes when these four sources of satisfaction are holistically related to each other. When they are poorly related to each other, we get situations like a previously wonderful task becoming loathsome drudgery when it’s turned into a job. The most important question about sources of satisfaction is about their impact on the ability of the person to make authentic choices.

6. It’s Never Just a Job: The Destructive Power of External Rewards

The other important aspect of the relationship between sources of work satisfaction is the tension between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for the work. There are scores of studies showing how rewards that are not intrinsic to a task are ineffective and counterproductive, particularly on their effect on motivation. Furthermore, there are higher order systems impacts and feedback loops affecting work cultures, management structures, hiring and training, and leadership, all of which profoundly undermine the authenticity of the organization.

7. Outcomes Matter: Organizational Vision and Mission

The most significant way in which an organization connects authentically to its people is in regard to the common enterprise that brings them all together. The reason the ultimate purpose of an organization is often avoided or finessed in conversation is precisely because of how much that sense of ultimate purpose matters to people. The classic concepts of vision (a shared view of a better world, however modest) and mission (a shared sense of how to pursue that vision) play an important role in making room for people’s best selves.

8. Skills Matter: Taking Pride in Our Essential Character as Makers

Human beings are innately curious and innately creative. If they can’t take pride in the outcomes of their work, at least they can take pride in what they are doing and in what they are learning to do. We form genuine peers - whose respect we seek - based more on our craft than on what we have crafted. We love to be good at something and we love even more to become good at it. Most games wouldn’t be so popular if this wasn’t a fundamental human motivation.

9. Relationships Matter: How the Same Task Can be Either Chore or Service

We do things for others. We make things for others. If we can’t relate to the people we’re supposedly serving, then we start to act as though we’re doing what we’re doing for the people who serve along side of us. (This is what happens in the military, among many other places where the scale of service is challenging to comprehend.) We work hard when we are allowed to express our passion for others and we work best when that passion is in alignment with our genuine affinities.

10. True to Whom: Authenticity and the Common Good

Promoting authenticity doesn’t magically dissolve any of the classic conflicts between individuals and the common good, but it does suggest a different sort of container for them. The authentic organization has room for conflict, so that it can be resolved. The authentic organization has room for experimentation, at every level, so that innovation can thrive. Finally, greater effective mobility between organizations, designed so that it serves the organizations themselves, can be an important facilitator of alignment between individuals and organizations. Is it possible to work within an organization, but for a community?

11. Money, Money, Money: The Economic Consequences of Authenticity

The relationship between money (or material resources) and authenticity is a question of integrity. But this question is not answered with a simple yes or no, but rather with rich qualitative assessments of alignment. Gathering fruit to feed yourself and your family might be highly aligned. Gathering fruit as a migrant laborer is less likely to be so. Authenticity, with this consistent emphasis on integrity, clashes with industrial models of social organization and control. At the same time, there is no question that as both consumers and producers, people yearn for authenticity. The economic consequences of authenticity can therefore best be examined at several levels: a personal commitment to authenticity in the context of the modern labor markets, team commitments to authenticity in the context of traditional organizational structures, organizational commitments to authenticity in the context of modern economies, and broader social and economic initiatives, with a goal of authenticity.

12. Toward Human Shaped Containers: Organizational Structures and Practices

The human race’s gift for learning is also its curse. We can adapt to the most appalling of situations and, if they persist, we can develop cultures to perpetuate that adaptation. And in so doing, of course, we often perpetuate the very situations to which we have adapted. These cycles mean that our social forms - including our organizational structures and practices - are well matched to our psyches, and vice versa. But neither are well adapted to our hearts. Some particular business functions seem more and less shaped to authentic human participation

13. Inspiration and Priorities: The Role of Leadership

Although structural elements are informed by and in turn inform the practice of leadership in organizations, leaders have a unique role in supporting or undermining authenticity. Structural elements are often somehow invisible, whereas the actions of leaders become the plot elements of the stories that we tell - in our heads, in our homes, and in our organizations. Leaders set examples. Leaders set priorities. Leaders shape the space available for people in an organization.

14. Idealism and Realism: The Role of the Individual

This is not black and white. Organizations are not just authentic or inauthentic and neither are individuals. Instead there is a continuing dialectical process that unfolds in both the inner and outer contexts of work. Ultimately, therefore, we’re more interested here in the process of becoming than in simply being. That is to say, we’re interested in choice. That then is the role of the individual in the process of creating authentic organizations: to synthesize and integrate both our idealism and our realism as we work to open up ourselves and our organizations.

15. Personal and Social Change: The Promise of the Authentic Organization

Ultimately, there is nothing new about the notion of an authentic organization. Oppressive and alienating institutions have been the subject of philosophical, economic, and political analysis for generations. The power of concept derives from its ability to merge two arenas of change that, in our culture, often remain very separate: the arena of personal change, dominated by self-help books, gurus, therapists, and productivity blogs; and the arena of social change, dominated by activist organizations and movements. Often, they are in conflict with each other and devolve into their own patterns of powerlessness. Their key point of overlap between these two forms of change is in regard to genuine meaning in the work of our lives. That work takes place in organizations.

Maybe I shouldn’t read Fast Company, but I do. I also read sites that reduce complex ideas into a series of bulleted “hacks” and mainstream news sites that can’t seem to step even a millimeter outside the guiding tropes of our very painful times.

If it’s just an occasional craving for outrage, then I can say with confidence that, with his recent article on the “appeals and risks of authenticity” entitled Who Do You Love, Bill Breen of Fast Company has thoroughly satisfied it. It’s not that everything he says is wrong. On the contrary, in the particulars most of what he says is right. It’s the way things are framed and contextualized that makes it all wrong.

Let’s pull a few quotes, shall we?

Overloaded by sales pitches, consumers are gravitating toward brands that they sense are true and genuine. Hunger for the authentic is all around us. You can see it in the way millions are drawn to mission-driven products like organic foods. It’s there in the sex-without-guilt way people respond to the footloose joy of BMW’s Mini.

People choose some car for the same reason that people choose organic food? Now, I know there is plenty of fake organic food and that plenty of people eat it because it’s fashionable, but come on! “Sex without guilt” is something that advertising has caused this car to appear to be. People eat organic food because of what it actually is.

Brinn does seem to get this distinction between appearance and reality at some points, but then totally loses it in his ultra-hip quest to frame authenticity as a brand experience.

Playing the authenticity game in a sophisticated way has become a requirement for every marketer, because the opposite of real isn’t fake–it’s cynicism.

He puts his cards on the table here, I think, by calling this the “authenticity game”. I can see it now, the CEO directive to the advertising company: “You know boys, this authenticity thing is kind of in right now. Why don’t we see if we can get ourselves a little of that. You’ll do that for us? Great!”

Consumers quite rightly believe, until they’re shown otherwise, that every brand is governed by an ulterior motive: to sell something. But if a brand can convincingly argue that its profit-making is only a by-product of a larger purpose, authenticity sets in.

Well now, he touches on an interesting issue here, doesn’t he? For-profit corporations are required by law in the US to put profit first. There have been shareholder lawsuits that have made that the corporate law of the land. People are understandably cynical. Do I think there are alternative models for supporting double and triple bottom lines? Yes, I certainly do and I’ve been involved with some of them. But there is a fundamental tension here that goes far deeper than appearance. If an organization cannot honestly reconcile its deepest roots, then authenticity will indeed be just a brand game.

As I said earlier, Brinn gets lots of things about authenticity right. He identifies four factors related to authenticity and each of them has merit: a sense of place (or origin), a strong point of view, serving a larger purpose, and integrity.

Authenticity isn’t some paint you apply to a product or an organization. Therein lies the heart of the problem with this piece. Branding is about appearance or, at best, the consumer experience. Authenticity is about being true to yourself. This, of course, requires a self to which to be true. Unfortunately, you can be authentic without appearing so. But branding says that appearing so is more important, while integrity says otherwise.

Reading this article about putting authenticity into your brand reminds me of those nonprofits that are looking for advice on how to craft sincere email to their constituents. Have they so lost touch with their own sincerity that this has now become a craft, to be learned and then bolted on to the machinery of the organization?

As individuals, people mostly remember what it means to be sincere. But as members of an organization, they often forget. My quest here is to discover the organizational qualities that preserve and deepen our innate sincerity. Maybe then we won’t end up playing the “authenticity game”.

It is sometimes said that a narrow self-image prevented the wealthy American railroad companies from investing in automobiles and airplanes in the first half of the twentieth century. They saw themselves as being in the railway business, rather than in the transportation business. Thus, by the middle of the century, the modes of transportation that might previously have been business opportunities for them, led to their decline.

Of course, the real story is far more complicated than that. The decline of the railroads in the US is due in part to massive public subsidies to the automobile, the political phenomenon of cheap oil, and economic repercussions of World War Two. But the fact remains that the railroad companies could have taken advantage of all those factors, had they, in essence, been willing to put themselves out of business.

There are important implications in this for civil society organizations and for authentic organizations in general. Organizational self-image plays an important role in sustainability, innovation, and effectiveness at all levels, by providing a frame for every aspect of organizational life.

Although the contemporary conversation about frames has focused on their role in the rhetoric of politics and media, it has its origins in Erving Goffman’s work on the presentation of the self and on the organizing of experience. Most crucially, the frames shaped by self-image determine the categories and the questions we use to understand our experiences and to make our choices.

The biggest of the choices framed by organizational self-image are the choices concerning strategy. Is an advocate for the fate of an endangered species just in the business of saving that animal? If that were true, then there might be nothing wrong with simply putting them all in zoos, or even making pets of them. A systems perspective, which might come more easily to environmental groups than others, has led many wildlife organizations to adopt a strategy of protecting habitat. That broader self-image has prevented those organizations from making the same mistake the railroad executives made and saved a lot of species from extinction.

Is there a best self-image for civil society organizations or for any particular organization? I doubt it. Organizational self-image should not be so large as to become meaningless, but it should be large enough to allow for thinking outside the box, or at least, outside the frame.

Imagine you receive a conventionally formatted memo at work, the contents of which read “Please return this memo immediately” along with instructions on where to do so. Because you are right this moment reading a post about mindless behavior in organizations, you probably think that you would see the memo as some sort of joke.

But if you had been one of the subjects in a study done in 1978 by Langer, Blank, and Chanowitz, there is a 90% chance that you would have actually returned it. Even if the memo deviated from standard formats, there is a 60% chance that you would have returned it.

If you work in civil society, whether it’s social change, social service, or even social enterprise, you are almost by definition working in an environment that seeks change. You and your organization want the world to be different than it is, often in some very important ways. And yet, despite that ostensible focus on change, in the context of day to day work, how much of your time do you spend in a state of relative mindlessness?

Indeed, to what extent does organizational life serve, often by design, to create exactly such a state? There is a synthesis to be achieved somehow. The authentic organization has two goals that are very much in tension. On the one hand, there is the need to fully leverage the creative powers of its people, so as to face the challenges of making change in the world. On the other hand, there is the need to function predictably and perpetuate itself as an organization. Sadly, research and experience suggests that the balance may often be sharply skewed toward mindlessness.

In the global north and in many parts of the developing world, there is a fondness these days for the tropes of entrepreneurship. We talk about agility, innovation, initiative, and so on, but has anything really changed? Or are we like the mob in the movie Life of Brian who, in response to being told that they are all individuals, chant in unison, “we are all individuals”?

Tell me: What’s your organization’s equivalents for “return this memo immediately”?

As I see it, social and personal change comes about through an honest and transparent commitment to two sides of an endless contradiction: The world as it is and the world as we wish it were. We can’t trade one for the other. We have to embrace both in order to make change.

That is why I believe one of the great enemies of authenticity is something that we might call Faux Realism. You are very likely familiar with it. It’s the so-called realism that gets brought up when someone doesn’t support a course of action suggested by your ideals. That’s not realistic, they say. Face reality. Be pragmatic.

Well, yes, by all means. But our desires for a better world - for ourselves, for the people we love, and for all the world - are just as real as the conditions that make it hard to achieve those desires. Again, it’s bridging the contradiction that matters.

I came across an example of this faux realism today in an article on myths of personal finance, written by an online marketer named Andy Hagans. (I have no doubt that his work is very popular. People want money, after all.) I’ve already written to him about this, so I’m not talking out of school, however, I won’t link to his piece because that ends up just driving traffic to him.

The piece is pretty mainstream. It’s no more poisonous than most of the stuff people watch on television every day. That, unfortunately, is part of the problem. I’ll quote one part that is particularly illustrative, entitled Myth #2 “Rich people are scum.”

Or greedy, selfish, uncaring, or whatever. It’s just that the scummy rich are more played up in the media because it sells newspapers. Of course, the rich didn’t get that way by giving away their money. At least not until they are ultra-rich like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and others who have donated to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One principle you could live by is this: you can’t help the poor if you are yourself poor. Idealism is romantic, but reality is more sobering. This is a variation of the belief that “money is the root of all evil.” What the Bible really says is that “the love of money is the root of all evil” (Timothy 6:10). These are two wholly different things, but the misinterpretation causes some people, even whole societies, to shun money. Become wealthy, then start your own prosperity project and give away wealth to good causes of your choosing.

The statement “It’s just that the scummy rich are more played up in the media because it sells newspapers.”? is certainly not consistent with my experience. Most of the stories about awful events are generally crimes of violence committed largely by people who are not rich. (Reporting on such violence has increased dramatically, even as the actual rates of violent crime have decreased.) And in regard to those who are rich, papers and magazines seem generally pretty fawning to me.

He asserts “One principle you could live by is this: you can’t help the poor if you are yourself poor.” I really dislike this one. I doubt if the author has ever done poverty advocacy work. Aside from the notion that you help people by giving money away, he ignores all the other ways in which people help each other. (As far as I’m concerned, the greatest gift we have to give each other is time. It’s also the most precious and it’s inherently leveling.) The author ignores the success of early labor organizers, civil rights organizers, ACORN, and countless others. Most of the great work on behalf of the poor has not, in fact, been done by the rich.

The author perpetuates the notion that good works have to wait until we’re rich. Since most people are never rich, that means most people will simply grasp at it all their lives and put off making a difference in the world, if they were to follow his advice. That’s life-wasting poison.

Ironically, later on he promotes the book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow. For years, I taught a workshop called Making a Living, Making a Difference so I have some experience with this subject. What’s more is that I facilitated support groups and counseled people over time (I still do), so I saw what happened when people actually followed different advice. My conclusion is that only the “do what you love part” is correct. Yes, it will make you happier, all other things being equal. But money and virtuous work have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The great challenge is to find a way to get paid for doing what we love, not just to do what we love and hope we get paid.

This brings us back to bridging contradictions. Instead of dismissive, poisonous, so-called realism, bridging contradictions is what authentic work is all about.

I learned how to behave properly at an adult dinner table at a pretty young age. But when I moved to the United States at the age of 13, I discovered that some American families have very different rules of conversation than those I had become familiar with in Europe. All the topics that I had come to know as the core of intelligent conversation were off limits: religion, politics, intimate relations, and money — especially money.

Some organizations are like this. Even if they are open about one or more of the first three of these, they often have cultures of discomfort about money (even in donor relations, as I’ve explored a bit before). Indeed, with policies restricting information about salaries, it can go much further than culture.

There are a few factors that limit the ability of some organizations to be secretive about salaries. In many countries, larger nonprofits have to report certain salaries to regulatory authorities. Other channels exist to reveal the salaries of executives in major corporations. But mostly, it’s up to the organizations to decide.

Management sets the tone when it comes to transparency about salaries. Because salaries tend to be negotiated up rather than down, management will often seek to keep salaries secret in order to strengthen their negotiating position. It’s tough to balance a rational salary policy against fluctuating labor markets and the vagaries of individual hiring decisions.

And yet, I think this sort of secrecy is fundamentally corrosive. Salaries are important to people, very important. If people can’t talk about something that important, then what other important things can’t they talk about?

This points out a key implication about authenticity in organizations: Authenticity demands that we abandon many deeply entrenched habits of using the control of information to gain power. It’s not possible to step onto the road toward authenticity without also accepting that the destination will involve new power relations.

From my perspective, that’s a wonderful thing. Let’s start with salaries.

I recently read (and reread) a short book by Jerr Boschee called From Innovation to Entrepreneurship. Despite some misgivings about some early assumptions, I rather liked this book and I consider it an important contribution to the future of civil society. The book presents a number of “critical success factors” for entrepreneurship and one of the first (if not the very first) of these factors is candor.

In 1998, Boschee writes:

The first raw material for social entrepreneurs is candor, and it’s probably the toughest thing for any entrepreneur. Starting a new venture, or even an earned income strategy, is difficult enough therefore you must be honest about your product or service, your market, your competition, your resources, and numerous other factors that help determine success or failure. The mantra here is very simple: “Beware of yourself!”

Self delusion is the antithesis of authenticity and candor is indeed a cure. I like Boschee’s choice of the word ‘candor’. There is kindness and wisdom in the word. It especially suggest self-awareness, especially as Boschee uses it.

As organizations and their leaders mature, I believe they can settle into one of two paths. The conventional one involves safe routines and can sometimes devolve into an almost hypnotic but stable state of (sometimes just mild) anxiety. The other path is the one that we might associate with people who have deepened as a response to the hardships of life. As Boschee points out, this is a highly creative path, suited to entrepreneurial endeavors. That is the path of candor.

Over the years, I often get asked questions about how to communicate something with a donor. For example: We have all these email addresses, but we haven’t sent anything to them for many months or more. We finally want to start a newsletter, which we had only previously hinted at. What do we say to all these people?

My answers to such quandaries always derive from the same process of answering these three questions: What is the truth? What do you want? What would you want if you were them? And then communicating those things with humility and candor, possibly even some humor.

Maybe like this:

You gave us your email address last year, at one of our events. At the time, we had the intent of launching an email newsletter. I’m embarrassed to tell you that we’re only just now getting around to it.

The last thing we want is for you to get our newsletter and wonder why in the world we are spamming you. So, before we have a chance to mess up, would you follow the link below and let us know if we made a mistake and you don’t want the newsletter? You can also leave us feedback on the same form or just reply to this email.

Most of the time the clients asking this question want a hard and fast ethical standard, a line in the sand about opting into email or opting out, or how to assess a stale donor relationship. But we always come back to sending a candid message and everyone in the room relaxes.

It’s just another reminder to me how deep the opportunity for authenticity with our stakeholders goes.