OUCH! What’s the Purpose of This?
- tom12973
- Feb 19, 2016
- 2 min read
A number of years ago I began a writing project that was called The Power of Uncertainty. I wrote quite a bit of content and yet something seemed to be missing for me. The premise of that writing was similar to what OUCH! is about; the problematic nature of the typical way we understand and thus formally act in organizations, and the problematic way we understand the individual within organizations.
I had interacted with lots of people on this topic plus wrote a number of blog posts with this focus and I realized that the interactions tended toward the more practical and the blog posts tended toward the more academic. The interactions focused more on the real day to day experiences people had while the blog posts focused more on explaining the ideas underlying our understanding of those experiences. The same pattern extended to the work I did with people; I could either just do stuff or explain why I was doing stuff.
I discovered sometimes you are just better off doing stuff than explaining it!
I also discovered that it helps to have coherence in what you do and how you do it. One of the most fundamental ideas behind OUCH! is that nothing, nothing happens in organizations outside of the interactions we have. So if I was going to engage in this writing project I should have as many interactions as I could. When the idea of blogging this book came along it seemed to fit on a number of levels:
The potential for lots of interaction.
Lots of this interaction would be emergent and unplanned.
Adaptation would occur based on these interactions.
While there was a sense of knowing what the intent of this work was about I could not be certain what that intent would actually look like as it progressed.
While I had a good idea of the messages I wanted to put out there, how people responded to those ideas, including ideas and applications of their own was very uncertain.
This format seems to be very coherent with what I (hopefully to become a we) am trying to do here. It is also not very comfortable. Uncertainty and interaction quite often are not very comfortable. But uncertainty and interaction is what we experience and do every single day in our (organizational) lives.
So here we are.
And what are my intentions with this work? I have 6 primary intentions at this point:
To illustrate that what we experience in organizations is not the typical way we understand organizations.
To illustrate that most organization theory and thus formal practice supports a drive for certainty as well as seeing the individual as a discrete and separate entity distinct from the contexts they experience; and that this theory does not match our experience
To illustrate a way of thinking about and understanding organizations that balances social construction with psychology and how this balance can affect our view of the individual in organizations.
To enable people to use our interaction model intuitively and within their interactions to help make sense of their work experiences.
To have the word OUCH! gain usage and meaning to capture the misfit between theory and experience in organizations.
By doing the above, to reduce the amount of blame, guilt and shame we generate and are exposed to in organizations.
Discussion and comment points for this post:
What are your intentions for participating in this work?
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