Skin carries – and reveals – the memory of the body’s interaction with the world, whether it is as an interface with the environment (the effects of being out in all kinds of weather, excessive suntanning, scars from injuries and burns) or as a manifestation of what the body has consumed over time (drug and alcohol abuse, diet, poisoning). We can look into a person’s face, and read aspects of their history, and this becomes easier and easier as they move into middle and advanced age.
The skin is not alone in this. Other parts of the body have different ways of remembering (and reminding), whether it is old injuries to tissue that become cancerous, injuries to joints that become arthritic, or toxins and chemicals stored in fat that when released with the burning of the fat can revive echoes of hallucinogenic experiences years before.
But skin is interesting because it is revelatory. Where the inner body is cryptic, the skin reveals as well as conceals, both things about itself and things about the body it clothes.
In this respect the parallels between skin and organisational culture become intriguing. Culture, like skin, stores memories of its history, and is affected by both inner and outward influences. Like skin, culture has a visible and revelatory aspect as well as a concealing one.
It doesn’t take long to get a feel for the culture of an organisation one has joined, just as it doesn’t take long for an experienced observer to read a face, a neck, hands. Like skin, culture carries baggage from the past, some of which is traumatic and creates scar-like pattern-behaviours, some of which comprises slow accretions of damage over time which weather the culture out of its early resilience and attractive glow. Culture, like skin, reflects very quickly the presence of strong toxins in the body corporate. And culture like skin, is slow and subtle.
Learning how to read the memory of skin over long periods of time and to trace causal linkages between early mistreatment and later consequence, creates a technical ability to read the destiny of skin from current patterns of lifestyle and behaviour. I mean destiny in a teleological sense, not absolutely determined, where particular identifiable outcomes are driven, influenced or made more likely by current behaviours.
And learning how to read the future of skin from present, repeated conditions, allows us to move from a simplistic, reactive and curative approach to the ailments of the skin (after much of the damage is already deeply embedded in memory), towards an early, educational, preventive and healing approach. From a “low” knowledge to a “high” knowledge. Understanding our memories allows us to understand our future, and gives us a capacity to influence our destinies. Sunscreen, parasols, moisturizer, indoor work, dietary changes, all gain new affordances and powers in our eyes.
So if culture clothes the body corporate as skin clothes the corporeal body, and if culture carries its own memory of injury as skin does, to reveal it slowly long years after the fact, can we also gain useful insight about the destiny of a culture from the analogy with skin? Can we learn to be more deliberate and effective in influencing a culture’s future health?
The analogy of skin does, to me, raise interesting questions about changes we might make to how we address organisational culture and change. Our higher knowledge about skin stresses lifestyle, deeply embedded and repeated patterns of behaviour, a diachronic view over many years – essentially recognizing the subtlety and slowness of skin. Yes, there is still the low knowledge of skin to address those sufferers for whom it is already too late, cosmetic surgery, cosmetics, or the market in palliatives and cures.
Our view of organisational culture, and our treatments, are still primitive, as primitive as we used to be about skin. The way we typically address culture is to take synchronic readings or snapshots, of states and desired states, and map engineering-type interventions to “fix” the identified gaps and problems – essentially the same as the crude, reactive, low knowledge approach to skin. And as in the “low” reactive treatment of skin, it’s hard to tell the boundaries between genuinely helpful treatments, mere slowing of inevitable decline, cosmetic cover-ups, or magic potions that have no effect? And as in the low knowledge of skin, we continue to inflict the slower injuries and poisons, or through ignorance, fail to halt them.
What would a recognition of the slowness and subtlety of culture give us? What would we be able to discover about the workings (and the possible futures) of culture if we took longitudinal views of how culture evolves and responds over time? Would we be able to give advice about specific lifestyle and behavioural changes for greater long term cultural health? How would we take such longitudinal views? I am sure that instruments such as Sensemaker can help to play a role, but what non-intrusive processes could we put in place to allow such instruments to do their work? And does anyone actually care about the destiny of a culture beyond the current financial year?
Comments (5)
This is brilliant and an anology you can use with all sorts of people. I have been stuck in a rut trying to come up with an analogy that can work in South Africa's very diverse 'cultures' and this will cut across all of them.
Posted by Jonathan Carter | February 25, 2009 5:34 AM
Posted on February 25, 2009 05:34
The analogy used here is excellent. What I would like to do is propose another analogy, perhaps one in a series that would form the basis of a model that compares and contrasts human and organizational characeristics. Although my suggestion is bit more commonplace, the analogy between the head and body, and the head of an organization and the rest of the organization's culture is worth exploring as one component of a complimentary set of examples that could be used allegorically.
Posted by Thomas Lipscomb | February 26, 2009 9:16 PM
Posted on February 26, 2009 21:16
Patrick
You have started a wonderfully compelling story of organizational culture, told in a language we can recognize. Either you have been a consultant for a long while, or you have thought long and hard about the role that culture plays in organizations. It isn't yet clear what your next step is, whether an engagement or more generic learning. In a way you are venturing into unknown territory here. To get deeper into the assessment and to start to be able to do the longitudinal views you have in mind, can I suggest that we consider some other uses, or different facets, of the Cynefin framework.
On behalf of folks that have been involved in consulting interventions, or anecdote or other story captures, or even appreciative inquiry engagements, they can through their experiences assemble some knowns and knowables about the organization’s culture. Knowns are the strong and obvious norms, while knowables are closer to corporate values, and perhaps include some obvious market dynamics (commissions and recognition and other rewards). It doesn’t take Sensemaker to make sense of this.
To go deeper, IMHO, you need to assess the *quality* of organizational memories, which is a much more difficult analysis. It is quite clear that conventional business practices which lead to layoffs, in the company or even the wider industry, introduce a malaise to the organization's skin that is akin to skin cancer. (For reference see Jerry Harvey’s great works on phrogs and depression blues.) The results of such practices are chaotic cultural workings which no management sense making can detect or resolve.
IF you want to find the true inner strength of the organization, it’s bones beneath the skin if I may modify your analogy a bit, then what you want to look for are the quality memories, ones of process patterns (good management) or organizational values (industry class leaders) for segments that have survived or even flourished in troubled times. This complex knowledge is worth more than gold, and Sensemaker might be just the tool to discover it with.
A useful reference for patterns and values in this complex frame is a new book by a former professor of mine. It is called “Appreciative Intelligence, From the Acorn to the Mighty Oak,” by Tojo Thachenkerry and Carol Metzer. I've seen some good news recently about Gore (the Goretex) company that suggests they might still be a world class organization. Another methodology which might provide some useful patterns in the complex frame is VNA...
Wonderful food for thought. And, please sir, may I have some more? (Isn’t that what Oliver Twist said to Dave Snowden ?-) Regards, tony
Posted by tony joyce | February 27, 2009 1:18 PM
Posted on February 27, 2009 13:18
Brilliant analogy Patrick.
Not only skin remembers it also forgets selectively. It is a necessary process of life, 2 distinct examples that come to my mind are snakes shedding skins and any house dust is constituted with a considerable portion of dead skin.
Regards, Murali
Posted by Murali | March 5, 2009 8:32 AM
Posted on March 5, 2009 08:32
Thanks for all the comments, I'm glad the analogy seemed to make sense. Apologies for the delay in responding, it's been a tight few weeks and I wanted to get the posts out there before I ran out of time, and I wanted to think through how to respond to the comments.
Jonathan, I'm delighted I hit your rut!
Thomas, my post on sanity addressed what I think are the constraints with the body/organisation analogy once we get into the mental life of an organisation. In fact, I ended up thinking that leadership in many respects is a distraction from the more interesting issues around the mental life of organisations - a focus on leadership in a way makes it easy not to grapple with some areas of genuine difficulty eg around responsibility.
Tony, yes, you're right, I wanted to use these posts to open up some questions that I myself am not clear about and would like to become clearer about. I like the references to Jerry Harvey's work, and yes, there's no reason why the different domains of the cynefin framework can't be used to gather insight into memory and culture. I really think there might be something very valuable in discriminating as you do between enduring memories and more ephemeral ones. I will chase the Thachenkerry and Metzer reference!
Murali, I like the selective forgetting idea... in my last post on repair, I talked about the shedding of cells to maintain the continuity of the whole body, but this dimension of forgetting was something I hadn't really considered. And of course this happens too in organisations, in very important ways. Thanks!
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March 9, 2009 3:41 PM
Posted on March 9, 2009 15:41