What’s My Metaphor?

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

I recently attended a colleague’s PhD dissertation defense in the field of organizational behavior. It occurred to me during his discussion that one’s take on the nature of organizational culture is influenced by the metaphor one uses to define and conceptualize something as intangible as culture.

As I listened to his presentation and the questions his academic committee members asked of him, the picture of an organization as a machine emerged. The talk had a certain mechanistic quality to it, along the lines of “this isolated intervention had this type of response.” Very “cause and effect.” The more I reflected on this metaphor, the more I thought about how viewing an organization in these terms would influence how you approach “fixing” an organization’s culture. Because if someone views an organization as a machine, that would imply that someone or something has built this culture, has constructed it. Something constructed has inter-connecting pieces so if an organization’s culture is in need of fixing, some pieces or their connections must be broken and in need of repair.

With this type of metaphor, the change agent takes on the role of social engineer – tinkering until the right interventions cause the desired effects. And because we know humans are not machines, we can subconsciously separate ourselves from the machinations of an organization’s culture. We end up having an externalized relationship with the culture and the nature of any relationship can be captured on a scale that has “what we do to it” on one end and “what it does to us” on the other. And once something is external to us, it is that much easier to blame, judge, or question the other.

But if one’s metaphor for an organization’s culture is an organism, then one looks at an organization’s culture through different lens. An organism implies an intricacy and inter-dependency that challenges the notion of isolating particular cause-and-effects. An organism is in intimate contact with its external and internal environments and its dynamic is more ebb-and-flow than action-reaction. It operates on many different levels – chemical, emotional, psychological, biological. With this metaphor, an undesirable state of affairs is less about something being broken and more about something being out of balance. Since we as individuals are organisms, the culture-as-organism metaphor would imply that an organization’s culture is an extension of us, a reflection or perhaps even a magnification of the collective individuals, warts and all.

In this case, the change agent’s role is one of physician, and specifically, general practitioner -- someone who takes a holistic approach to understanding and addressing the issues that have caused an imbalance in the “body corporate.” It involves listening to where the ailments are located and exploring until they surface the imbalances. A change agent who sees through this frame of reference would most likely be aware of the existence and significance of iatrogenic ailments -- those induced in a patient by a physician’s words or actions. Such a change agent would appreciate how any intervention by them would have repercussions in the organization, sometimes far beyond their sight or reach. There is no divide between the change agent and the culture – at most it is a step back to gain perspective.

I’ll leave you with some simple questions to ponder: machine or organism, engineer or physician, broken or imbalanced? How do you “see” an organization?