The Authentic Organization

If you’re familiar with my work, you will know how I feel about resistance to change. I believe that resistance should neither be dismissed nor rolled over, rather it should be respected and understood. The primary area in which I have applied this approach in recent years is in the context of organizations adopting new communication techniques and related technologies. The evidence is fairly compelling that change is deeper, more sustainable, and less costly when resistance is approach with spacious integrity.

I want to open up the topic of resistance in the context of pursuing authenticity. Possibly even more than with technological change, it is easy for people who are considering the adoption of the practices and principles of the authentic organization to not hear each other very well. It’s easy to paint advocates as fuzzy thinking idealists and it’s easy to paint those who resist as lacking integrity. Neither of these are necessarily true and they are most certainly not useful.

What would be the most accurate and respectful ways to describe the various reasons people might have to resist efforts to ground an organization in deeper authenticity? No doubt some reasons are really part of a larger dynamic and others are just different ways of looking at the same concerns. I will explore a few here and I invite you to suggest some as well.

People will be punished for speaking the truth. We all know that this happens. Most of us live and work in environments that nominally support honesty and candor already, at least in word if not in deed. People want to believe that changes toward greater authenticity mean that they will be safe diving in.

Important objectives of the organization will be jeopardized. As I wrote about in Do Be Do Be Do, one reader gave voice to this concern when they asked if an agency should focus more on their state of being than on accomplishing their goals.

Authenticity is unrealistic. The world is more complicated than that. Or as the famous Emerson quotation would put it: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

This will be just another superficial management fad. There are certainly plenty of such fads. It is always easier to pay more attention to the form of a new practice, and most management initiatives do indeed fail to change the fundamental patterns of an organization.

It will be unevenly applied. Authenticity demands a certain kind of vulnerability. Although it’s perfectly possible for there to be successful oases of authenticity in an organization, uneven application of its demands can be alarming.

Authenticity invites bad behavior. This harkens back to the ethical arguments that arose in opposition to the existentialists who put their indelible stamp on the word we’re using here. The essential concern is that, if authenticity is all the integrity of people’s inner nature and their outer actions, what place is there for ethics?

My goal here has been to articulate the objectives, not to respond to them. As the material for this book continues to develop, I want to deepen our understanding of the resistance people will have, so that we can see how they are rooted in legitimate concerns.