Being overrun by the big machine.

Sometimes it feels like being overrun by the big machine, by the big tank that moves forward in its direction without anything that can stop it. And I was the poor guy who believed he could redirect it. Now I am in the middle of its wheels and mechanisms, feeling all the forces that push and squeeze me and that make me a bit scared. I am the one who is being redirected and thoughts come up: Should I change my mind about what I am trying to do?

Working in a big organization can make us feel like being a tiny wheel many times – just as Charly Chaplin illustrates it with his ‘wheelspinning’ worker in the film “Modern Times”. If we don’t get that feeling at all, we are either in a really great organization or it is that we are just too much part of it already – we are the wheel that turns nicely and we do not find anything wrong about that.We get what we expect from our work in it, or we just have already accepted that this is all we can get. In the latter case we just might have adapted our world view to the way how the organization runs, how it functions, how it defines how the world can be: How human beings need to behave and collaborate and what goals have priority. But is this the learning that we need? And is it the learning that the organization really needs to be succesful?

I am writing under the impression of a conversation with my manager, two days ago. A conversation as good-willing and open as it can be, with as much sympathy and respect for each other as one would wish and expect it in a modern company. Sounds like a nice chat right before Christmas, like a good experience. Rather easy. But it was not. It felt quite challenging. Challenging in a good way and in a bad way at the same time. It was about a very complex topic in work and about how I will continue to analyse it. The good part of challenge were feedback and comments related to my very individual tendencies of approaching that work: Strengths, predispositions and weaknesses that I sometimes let drive the direction into detours and that make me avoid things that I should not avoid, perhaps. Not comfortable to be confronted with it, not easy to admit and rethink. But basically it is a good challenge to be confronted with it. The bad part of challenge was how the conversation felt emotionally and how it was lead: It felt like a big push. Like ‘Let’s move on faster’. Like: ‘Don’t waste your time there, I know better that this is in vain.’ It felt a bit like: ‘We wanted you to analyse in this certain way and we expect you to fix what we assumed was the problem’. And I wondered why now that sort of time-pressure and impatience was coming up while they had told me that there was no short term expectation and no deadlines related to it. So I felt like my wheel being pushed with force into a direction where my wheel would not turn before having investigated and understood other turns first.The issue is complex, the task is to understand what wheels are turning together, first.It will not be solved by turning the wheels how they turn now – because that current way of functioning does not create the wished output. However, I was not really surprised by the style of conversation and that this direct leading and influencing took place. That is how we work and lead and try to develop people, today. Asking open questions in a spirit of respecting 100% ownership and with the knowledge what questions help the other think about the best analysis approach: Directing the conversation to the known facts and the unknown, the gaps – that is not yet part of the common, standard leadership competency in my organization.That would have been as difficult contentwise as it was now. But it would have felt much better and let thoughts move to the really important questions – instead of discussion two opinions about the best next steps.

The way how we lead conversations and how we expect that tasks and problems are being approached are one example for the forces that make an organization work in a certain way or in another way. Conversations are situations where often we can clearly feel the push into a certain direction of ‘wheel-turn’ very well. Especially if we talk to people where we feel a dependency of some kind: Here it was my framing of the formal powers (and its effects) that a manager has by his position. In another conversation it might be the fact that we need something from others.In bothe examples we will notice that some things go easily, without real disagreement and trouble and that there are other things that create reluctance, non-understanding or resistance. In the first case my wheel grabs into another as they are currently designed as a part of the whole organizational logic of roles, task separations, power-constellations, goals, priorities and ways of execution.In the second case we see the need to establish a new or different way of being a wheel and turning something. Then we find ourselves in the middle of a difficult debate.And in these debates it is where change starts.

The good news always is: Organizations are no tanks made of steel. They are complex setups of human collaboration, made of ideas.Sure, they are machines that produce outputs and cultures in which we live an emotional, subjective work life while we deal with the objective reality of actions and facts that they create around us. But they are not made of steel plates, wheels and screws. They are made of ideas, choices and actions.They are not tons of solid weight and solid, physical limitations. They are as soft and flexible as human beings can be (if they want to). They can be changed basically by any human being. It is not flesh against steel. It is ideas and choices against ideas and choices. As everybody plays with exactly the substance that makes organizations, sometimes it only needs little to influence or transform it. And there is even more good news. Once we manage to see clearer what drives and constitutes our organization and how its complex dynamics works, we can even find the spots where we can develop strong influence and where we start to change their logic and setup. Human beings and ideas have made an organization be what it is today and human beings and ideas make it do what it does every day. They can change it as well, at any time and at nearly any place inside or outside it.To add a realistic comment: Human beings in nearly any organization are even doing it already every day. Without human beings who change and influence their organization a little bit every day, most of them would disappear quite quickly due to a lack of adaptation to their feeding environment (called ‘customers’).

I felt like being turned over and squeezed by the big machine. However, I bet that this big wheel in it called ‘my manager’ felt a bit the same way, too. And he has not left the debate unchanged – as well as I did not. As one of my best friends once said: “The change starts in the debate”