Organisational management and stages

I am fascinated by the works of Laske and Jaques, but am not convinced that being a successful manager has much to do with matching an individual’s level of mental complexity to a level of management. This is not only because organisations change in structure so quickly, a manger might find themselves at constantly changing levels. There is also evidence that the flatter an organisation, the better position it is in to adapt to a changing environment quickly, and I’m not so sure how well Jaques recommendations work with that. I am also becoming convinced that, while a certain level of cognitive development might be helpful, it is not as meaningful to the health of society generally as a high level of moral development. As Nick Shannon pointed out, at the last LIC meeting, a management consultant would be hard pressed to sell a system or set of ideas to an organisation by saying “actually, this may not improve your profits at all, but the health of society generally will be so much better”, (although there are some of us who will only invest in companies that are going after this. Alas, not enough yet. One has to accept that one’s pension might be bigger if invested elsewhere, and consider that loss in material wealth to be worth it.)

Even Kegan has said that organisations don’t like their managers to have attained the level of autonomy that tends to come with increasing development.

And, whatever the level, there is always shadow stuff; shadow stuff that can make emplyees' lives horrible miserable, if not actually bring down an organisation.

So, we seem to be stuck with a sort of paradox. It is actually not in the interests of organisations to have the sort of people working for them that are capable of making decisions that benefit the whole of society, not just the organisation. Maybe that’s one of the drawbacks of capitalism, but we don’t have anything else yet. Perhaps that’s where we should all be concentrating our efforts. Some have started of course.

The USA and the UK are both societies high in what Hofstede called ‘individualism’. The mass must not hold back the individual, which sounds fair and healthy, but there again, it often means in reality that the individual is allowed (if not encouraged) to exploit the masses. But ‘no man is an island....ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you’ (Donne), which is something we realise in those moments when we brush with the infinite truth: that which I am looking out of, is that which I am looking at (See ‘No Boundary’). Again at a practical level, those societies which have the least distance between the richest and the poorest are always the ones that come out highest on measures of happiness and contentment. They have little need of gated communities either.