The Authentic Organization

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.