[Neurons] 2014 "Neurons" Meta Reflections #9

[L. Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections 2014 #9

March 3, 2014

Creating a Self-Actualizing Company #3

 

 

CHALLENGES IN CREATING

A SELF-ACTUALIZING COMPANY 

 

 


>From extensive reading and thinking about the changes that the 20th century

was bringing to business, Dee Hock set out to create an entirely new kind of
organization.  By de-nominalizing ("peeling the onion") of many words such
as "organization," "money," "value," "information," etc. he came to
understand the underlying processes that actually defined what "banking" was
about, what "organizations" were designed to do, etc.  And apparently
without any influence from Humanistic Psychology (Self-Actualization
Psychology) or Maslow's and McGregor's work, he set out to create an
organization that would be much more human, humane, responsive to change,
adaptable, effective, etc.- what in Neuro-Semantics we call a
Self-Actualization Company.  

 

His lifelong dream was to pioneer "a new concept of organization."  And
that's exactly what he did.  Yet while it began well, it did not continue
well.  Even before he left as CEO, the vision by which he launched VISA was
not being transmitted to the new people coming into the company.

"In spite of its successes, VISA was badly flawed.  So was its leader.  It
is painful to think and write about failure and weakness, but it is an
essential part of the story.  As an archetype of chaordic organizations, we
never got VISA more than a third right." (p. 274)

 

Now it was not that Dee Hock expected perfection.  He did not.  For him the
question was not "whether either institute or individuals reach their
ultimate potential, but whether they are constantly rising in the scale."
Yet there were problems.  Power was one of them.   In seeing the hunger for
power in his executive team, he sadly commented: "Power may be the ultimate
addiction."

"Perhaps the greatest mistake was to completely under-estimate the degree of
individual cultural change such an organization required, both in self and
others.  Nor did I anticipate how pervasively and persistently old concepts
would reassert themselves, or the covert, tenacious resistance new methods
would evoke." (p. 276, italics added)

"Consciously and unconsciously they brought their old mental baggage and
installed it in the new organization.  I did not realize the immense
cultural change required of each person if they were to fully understand,
develop, and implement the concept." (p. 193)

 

VISA's growth was explosive, so many of the newly hired people came in "full
of the techniques, culture, and habits of the world from which they
emerged."  They came in with the same old command-and-control practices and
Hock later discovered departments where people were subjected to
"intolerable rules and regulations."  And new members on the board "brought
to the table all the old assumptions about management."

"Without deep cultural change, they would naturally see my efforts to
restrain their conduct as command and control. ... And I used
command-and-control techniques to prevent command and control.  Plain
stupid!" (277)

 

In times of stress, impatience led him and others to fall back on using
"power" to plow through difficulties.  "Each such act put the lie to what I
believed and tried to persuade others to accept.  All too often, I was
simply unable to be the change I wanted to see."

"On the whole, we had poor methods and techniques and far too little of them
to bring about the cultural change that a chaordic organization requires,
nor did we have a leader who was fully alert to the need for it." (p. 277,
italics added)

 

Cultural change is what was required, yet they lacked the methods and
techniques to achieve that.  Hock noted that in the beginning, there were no
titles or even job descriptions.  But then "bit by bit, the old patterns
reasserted themselves until a host of 'vices' arose." (278).

"It was not then apparent how difficult it was to sustain new beliefs and
concepts or how long it would take for them to sink to the bone and become
habitual conduct.  Although VISA arose from thinking about organizations as
living, biological systems, I missed completely the need for an
institutional immune system to thwart the viruses of old ways." (p. 281,
italics added)

"I do not believe that VISA is a model to emulate.  It is no more than an
archetype to study, learn from, and improve upon." (p. 282)

 

"An institutional immune system to thwart the viruses of old ways." Ah!
Hindsight is so insightful!  In the beginning, there were open staff
meetings.  Every decision of the board was fully disclosed.  Every employee
was free to ask any question about the decisions (p. 282).  The promise of
open meetings and candor was often put to the test by skeptical employees.
But that also did not last.  Part of the problem-the old attitudes and the
lack of personal development:

"I never ceased to try but failed to keep properly at bay the Four Beasts
that inevitably devour their keeper: Ego, Envy, Avarice, and Ambition." (p.
193)

 

That was actually just the beginning.  What undermined the effectiveness of
the new kind of organization, a self-actualizing company, were
deficiency-needs that were out of control: "archaic notions of scarcity,
ownership, and finite physical quantity" (p. 200), assumptions from the
mechanized, Industrial Age of magazine crafting, managing things, etc.
(201), "wealth, fame, and power become deities to worship.  It is a
desperately sick society that does so" (289).

"If we were to set out to design an efficient system for the methodical
destruction of community, we could do no better than our present efforts to
monetize all value and reduce life to the tyranny of measurement." (p. 43)

 

Ah yes, he needs "an institutional immune system" against the viruses of old
ways!  What surprised him ought to warn us- the challenge of change that
will last and be sustainable has to be "deep cultural change."  The change
has to go so deep that it changes the very culture of the organization.  It
has to transform the values, beliefs, identities, intentions, and attitudes
that are embedded in the very framework of "how we do things around here."
Nor can the change initiatives be a one-time event.  It must be a continuous
program that works on the deep attitudes of people.  And that kind of
ongoing systemic change doesn't happen quickly, not without sustained
effort, and not without intentional leadership.

 

Today we are much more aware of the need for deep pervasive cultural change
than CEO Dee Hock was in the 1970s and 1980s.  Today we know all the more
about the power of old habits to undermine going development.  Today we know
that we have to initiate a coaching culture (or a self-actualization
culture) as an essential part of a corporate change.  And today we have many
of those "methods and techniques."

 

 

 

ACMC in Colorado

          Module II of Meta-Coaching, July 1-3

          Module III, Coaching Mastery, July 4-11

          Write for a brochure, meta at acsol.net 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

                Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

                Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

                1 970-523-7877 

                Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net


     

    

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