sociometric analysis

[James Sacks]

(About 7 paragraphs about systems analysis):
         Hi, All. Happy New Year.
               I thought I'd throw out something 
that interests some of you. A friend was talking 
about the ASGPP and said that she or he was 
bothered by "the political rivalries,cliques and 
all that" --- and I found this analysis 
inadequate.
        I've heard this analysis before, and maybe 
it's so, but it occurs to me that maybe this is a 
culturally conserved perception of a group whose 
dynamics are unsatisfying and obscure. What I 
mean, and why I'm motivated to share this with 
you, is that I suspect there may be all sorts of 
other reasons groups or organizations can have 
problems without there being any clear political 
rivalries or much in the way of the power or 
negative power of cliques.
          First, I don't perceive clear political 
rivalries or cliques of any significant power. I 
don't think that's what is going on. Instead, 
here are some further comments (if you wish to 
read further):

              Would grouptalk be considered a 
clique? How do we know when we're "in" or not?
     I confess my possible naiveté---and I'm 
getting a bit better as I think about all this, 
but still am not entirely sure--- in thinking 
that so far I have a different analysis of the 
ASGPP group dynamics. (Also, I suspect from many 
different conversations that what I will say may 
apply equally to the national societies for 
different countries, for the drama therapists, 
and for many if not most organizations in 
general!)
     Second, the key point is to recognize that 
there may be many sources of disorganization, 
dysfunction, or perceived dysfunction. Here are 
some thoughts:

1. A discrepancy between conscious or unconscious 
expectation and what is then experienced. One 
category for this is the desire for feeling 
recognized and included. They're keeping me out 
because they're a clique. Very age 14 or so. What 
about the possibility that I might be able to 
gain entry rather easily just by participating, 
by daring to participate?  Oh, no, they'd exclude 
me. Cop out  I suspect this happens far more than 
folks realize. As I say, some of this may be 
unconscious.

2. Similarly, what is desired and what can be 
reasonably delivered: "They should..." assumes 
that they could, that the job can be done. Just 
because someone runs for office in situations 
when most folks are thinking "Whoa, I wouldn't 
want that job!" doesn't mean that they (Obama?) 
knows how ahead of time to guarantee fix it! 
Sometimes taking more responsibility means simply 
"I'm willing to step up to the plate and do what 
I can."  Well, there's a lot of parental 
transference here: We all know (or believed at 
one point) that mum and dad could make it all 
better. If things were not all better, well, that 
proves that they don't love us, because if they 
did, well, they'd make it all better now, 
wouldn't they?  There's a heartbreaking event 
that someone once told me. They were wandering in 
some hospital corridor and they heard  child's 
voice calling out "Ow, Ow. I'll be good. I'll be 
good." To believe that your nasty parents (or 
doctor or therapist) is refusing to help you is 
emotionally easier than thinking that they can't. 
The people withholding the help may finally come 
around if you appeal to them or threaten or 
something, but if you realize they can't and 
maybe there's nobody who can, it could be 
devastating. Humans all start off totally 
dependent on human intervention, almost always 
parents who motivated by a mysterious force 
called love, that we take for granted and they 
usually can help. In adult vary in the extent to 
which they can be self-reliant and able to and 
able to accept  inevitable adversity like death. 
The awareness that they can not, they don't know 
how, they don't have the resources, or that it's 
bigger than any single person---well that's 
inconceivable. And bad things , present and 
looming in the future that no parent, parent 
figure, one's own efforts nor any god can help. 
Therapists do not help their patients' ability to 
face such things in life when they offer 
unrealistic hopes in some form of regression to 
the omnipotent parent fantasy as the only way to 
elude depression. I admire most in Obama is that 
he presents the image of the rational man who 
will try to figure out what he can but perhaps 
he'll be wrong or perhaps the dismal situation he 
inherits cannot be repaired no matter what anyone 
does. In fact those who are most able to face 
this possibility are often those who are able to 
do the most to accomplish the most good.  At what 
age does it get to be not only conceivable, but 
the default way to think? For some, never, alas. 
I suggest that this also applies to the way folks 
think about group, organizational, and national 
politics.

3. Marginal competence. I think that many roles 
are complex, consisting of a goodly number of 
sub-roles and sometimes sub-sub-roles. In 
marriage, parenting, managing, and even as a 
student taking many different subjects, there is 
a range of competence: We're good at some things, 
medium at many, poor at some, and everyone has a 
different profile. We're often unaware of what 
we're not so good at, or at least some of the 
things, and so pretend to be good at everything. 
Sometimes we can coast along doing what we're 
good at and it works, but then a situation comes 
up where we're not good and we don't know it and 
we fail to delegate or get help or consultation 
and mess it up. Whose fault is that? Obviously, 
the other guy's fault, or "them"---because since 
we meant well, that should cover our own 
incompetence (or in cases where high competence 
was needed, our merely okay-ness, or marginal 
competence). In addition to these grandiose ones 
who see culpability always others, there are the 
self-blamers who unreasonably take the rap for 
accidents that are not their fault. They may have 
been raised to believe " I'm sorry" was the only 
effective tranquilizer to angry blame-projecting 
parent.
      (I wonder how many therapists ever had the 
courage to say to a client, "Maybe the reason 
you're suffering in this role is that you don't 
really have the skills, talent, stamina or other 
what-it-takes to fulfill this role.")

4. Applied to organizations, what if our leaders 
have this same (really quite normal) distribution 
of role skills. What do we do when we find our 
leader, our pioneer, our elder, our ideal, has 
faults? Do we see Moreno, for example, as having 
feet of clay? That metaphor implies the entire 
edifice of his good ideas is based on his 
weaknesses, and as they are exposed, so falls the 
edifice. Or what if we grant (using a different 
metaphor) that many if not most heroes were 
heroic or genius or really pretty good in some 
ways and in other ways may exhibit character 
flaws, inconsistencies, what we see now as 
hypocrisy (How could Thomas Jefferson have kept 
slaves?!), etc.?

5. My base-line expectation is that folks who 
"should" know or know how or be perfect are just 
doin' the best they can. Stepping up to the plate 
and offering leadership is admirable. The 
problem, though, is how transparent the system is 
so that higher ups can get feedback from the 
lower-downs?

   I suspect that a major role for contemporary 
managers is that of building up feedback systems 
in which subordinates are not afraid to speak up 
and be heard. This kind of communication is 
needed. Also needed is the ability for leaders or 
managers not to feel torn up / down by 
criticisms---because a significant number of 
criticisms are insufficiently specific, 
mis-diagnosed, lack diplomacy or tact, impugn 
motivations, and are in other ways not-optimally 
constructive---if not outright destructive. So a 
leader has to build that into her system, too, 
not just in terms of resiliency, but 
communications among the various leaders giving 
support. (Think of what a clinic staff needs to 
do to avoid burn-out.)

6. Part of system dysfunction is lack of warm 
recognition up and down the status ladder. Lots 
of people in many systems are still fixated in 
their surly adolescent role and don't feel the 
moral obligation to thank others explicitly and 
clearly for what good is being done. This is the 
art of tact. (I'm appalled to discover that this 
is painfully true among elders, people who 
"should know better." Apparently caught up in 
their own feelings of victimhood and reacting to 
their own unconscious feelings of limited power, 
it's easy to blame or displace on secretaries and 
other intermediaries. Many people at all ages 
don't know the political realities of whom to 
complain to in order to get the best 
response---and also how to complain or seek 
redress or adjustment. Political art is not 
taught much or respected much in our culture.)

7. Perhaps most prevalent and subtly influential: 
Group cohesion and group morale overlap a lot, 
and group morale overlaps also with morale in 
other fields---family, personal finances, the 
numbers of people coming to your workshops, if 
they fill at all; how's life, how are other 
people in your life dealing with the economic 
downturns? How busy are you just trying to make a 
living?
      As things get tough, people pull in a bit. 
What's the pay-off in over-extending yourself? 
Less surplus energy is given over to helping the 
needs of the larger groups. Less money for 
charity, less participation in professional 
organizations. A 3% decline is felt, at least 
unconsciously, and it tends to lead to further 
reciprocated withdrawl. If you don't want to 
play, then I won't either.

       I don't question that, speaking of the USA, 
that the present (and soon-to-be-replaced) 
national political administration has been for 
many people a profound source of demoralization. 
Many people in the fields of psychology tend to 
be liberal, and this group has been targeted and 
denigrated. The hope of a renewal is there. It 
may be that the new administration may exhibit 
leadership and policies that again redound to an 
overall lift in morale and participation. We 
should not underestimate such general flows of 
psychic energy.

    -   -   -
And on and on. Your comments could add to this. 
To summarize, the simplistic diagnoses are 
prevalent and profoundly misleading, feeding 
residual teen-aged complexes of "them" and us, 
images of what the school faculty, parents, 
society, and others are doing to make life more 
complex than it needs to be. The truth is that 
they are doing all they can to improve things, 
but in fact they cannot do much more, or go much 
faster, because 82% of them haven't a clue how to 
improve things; and of the other 18%, half or 
more have what seem to be bright ideas that are 
in fact quite misleading or flat wrong; and those 
who will turn out to be right are going to have 
to spend five to twenty years in persistently 
making their case, consolidating their evidence, 
being heard, selling themselves, and not 
sabotaging their own efforts by being too 
obviously foolish in other ways (such as having a 
forbidden sexual escapade).  Thus does progress 
happen, as far as I can tell from my study of a 
variety of types of history.

I hope that progress does occur even at so slow a 
pace as to seem invisible, like trying to see an 
hour hand budge. The French revolution seemed 
hopeful but soon gave way to forces of reaction 
and Nazism rising in the intellectual jewel of 
Germany and in our own case, how could great 
America, the land of Jefferson and Lincoln, the 
symbol of both freedom and success have fallen 
into the same old errors of imperialism by a once 
popular recent administration? Where is the 
progress? If it is two steps and on step back, 
okay, but it often looks like one step up and two 
steps back.

Warmly, Adam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://grouptalkweb.org/pipermail/list_grouptalkweb.org/attachments/20090103/cf341fc1/attachment.html>