Humans seem incapable of wrapping their heads around or accepting chaos. We’re really good at being resilient and responding to chaos as or after it happens, we just don’t seem to accept that it chaos is reality. We put enormous energy in to creating systems, cultures, rules, mores, etiquettes, collectively held ideas etc almost as if to ignore the fact that everything is essentially totally transient and out of our control. Which isn’t to say that I don’t like cultures and collectively agreed on ideas – I just think there is a deep irony at play here, especially with regards to how we build organisations and projects.
So if we start at with this idea of chaos then how do we create organisations, projects and workplaces equipped to deal with this reality of changeability and the random? How do we create conditions that are safe and supportive to be creative, responsive and make great work?
I think that systems, clarity of roles, access to information and shared understanding of vision are vital. I have also spent a lot of time training in and thinking about processes; meeting processes, decision making processes, training processes, info sharing and induction processes etc. Now though, I am starting to think that the culture and dynamic of a group or team is just as important as any structures that are collectively agreed on or written down in a constitution or business plan.
It isn’t an either/or with structure or culture – they certainly inform each other, but I have seen plenty of organisations with glowing values and structures on paper and really poor process and culture in reality. Walking the talk takes more than a plan with lofty values put together after 2 days with butchers paper and coloured textas.
…
A phrase we’ve been using amongst friends in Alice Springs is “we hold each other up by invisible threads” and I think it is this holding that creates the most dynamic and productive of spaces. That is, if you feel supported, safe, critically honest and held by your team, management, organisation then there is much more scope for exploration, growth and most importantly; creative risk. The most exceptional work, the most successful work, relies on the space to take creative risk; together.
So how to create the structure that best promotes a culture of honest, critical, challenging and supportive holding? What are the practical ways of building a dynamic and trusting culture within a project or team?
After many years rejecting the very idea of leadership, which was, I think a very unsophisticated approach to anarchist theory, I have started to understand that leadership is highly important and not very well taught, talked about or understood in general. Especially amongst NGOs, community orgs and in the arts. The tall poppy syndrome could also take some blame here I reckon.
Now I think groups and projects need leadership to flourish. Not necessarily one central leader for everything, different people can lead in different ways; ie Pantjiti, Makinti, Amanyi and Lorna lead Ngapartji Ngapartji culturally, whereas Scott and I lead it in the overall design and producing and Damian and Beth lead musically.
Building a good organisation or team culture is also something that is achieved by behavioural and cultural leadership within a team. Creating dynamics through deeds and practice, not just written guides. I have observed many groups and organisations suffering from dysfunction, bad treatment of each other, siege mentality, sniping or just making mediocre work because the dynamic does not hold each person up by invisible threads and support them to grow and do their best work.
The more held people are in an organisation the more flexible and able to move quickly, deal with emerging opportunities and chaos, the more creative and productive an organisation can be.
The ‘work of how we work‘ together is often overlooked or seen as secondary to the tasks at hand and our upcoming deadlines. If good work is not done building a strong, healthy and supportive internal culture then making brilliant work is impossible and people burn out and leave hurt rather than inspired by the work. Things also tend to stumble or fall apart when chaotic events and conflicts arise.
Because of chaos and because the terrain, politics, people, community with which we work are constantly changing and growing this work of how we work needs constant attention. It shouldn’t tip over in to navel gazing, as with all things it requires balance, but it needs to be much more valued in our planning, project design, collaboration and art making than it appears to me that it is at present.
Thinking Structures and Cultures 
9 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 26, 2010 at 10:55 pm
adam
Thanks Alex. This article made me think. In my org we put a fair of time into developing process and formalisations for a while and in retrospect it was largely because there was some underlying discord. After one person left, the culture improved a lot — greater trust, mutual respect, clear communication and solidarity — and this allowed us to relax the process around formal decision making etc. Learning people’s strengths and weaknesses and building a group project is a very human process, and I can’t see now how we could have built it trying to use rules to hold together competing wills. Well it would have been a lot harder anyway.
What needs to be written down and systematised seems to be all the mechanical, administrative tasks, various protocols, standards for delivering work. Exit strategies and decision making protocol are there somewhere, but only as an emergency fallback. We’re still trying to create a group organism that can exist without some or all of us at some point in the future and for that it can’t be all organic based on informal discussions and trust alone.
So we were able to move forward by simply getting rid of someone. What you’re asking is probably more difficult, how do you create a culture of respect and support which is more open and robust to different personalities, and I guess that’s where leadership sets the tone and encourages those sides in people. I expect you’re pretty good at this. But I totally agree with you that culture rather than rules should be the foundation. And none of that is necessarily radical and I’m pretty certain you’ll just as likely find it outside of anarchist collectives as within them.
July 27, 2010 at 12:24 am
woooo
Hi Alex,
Just dashing a quick response, I’m pretending to be working here so just a quick response. Regarding leadership, aint the question about passing on knowledge, being open and accountable. The indig folk will always have a lead on cultural leadership for Ngapartji Ngapartji style projects. But good practice is about rotation when needed, accountability, recallability and openness, passing on skills so that noone become restricted or dependent. If this doesn’t exist, when someone burns out or gets pushed out then you end up with a big hole and things tend to fall apart. Recall and rotation can work pretty well even in pretty complex stuff, I read that in the zapatista caracoles that they rotate responsibilities ever 20 days or something like that…
Blah blah.
v
July 27, 2010 at 12:33 am
matt
chaos and order are fluctuations of the same phenomena expressing itself in different phases. Both are interconnected and both provide the ability to create, kind of like dreams, which at the time are what they are, then in reflection seem absurd or strange and our waking life is what we accept as normal and in reflection can also seem absurd and strange too! by moving toward the chaos from the order, from the conscious to the sub conscious, how do we include our unknown in a process determined by deadlines etc? It would take a team of many skills and talents to not only be their one unique skill, but also to share more generously the collaborative process of creation – musicians content get’s channeled through a frequency spectrum allowing the lighting designer to choose colours according to a light spectrum which in turn informs the movement of a dancer etc…our actual creative process needs to be like a family, always engaging, interacting, not one element is left on it’s own…if we look at HOW to do this then work backwards we might allow structures to establish around chaos in a way the supports the chaos! mmmmmm
July 27, 2010 at 1:41 am
kl
I read something in an article on identities early this year that talked about how identities are always in flux as contested and negotiated spaces. I think that this is true of the leadership identity; too often we fall into best practice-y models held up by cultural, social and organisational based ideals. I think these things have a place, but when they become principles rather than tools, we lose the very dynamism, flexibility and reflexivity that makes humans so genius.
I’ve seen this happen as collectives transit into organisations; the small chaotic dynamic of a bunch of mates doin it for the love against all odds can quickly morph into the tedium of constitution writing, formal meetings and financial statements. In times like this I feel like a teenager whose just left home, trying to set up a ‘grown up’ house.
Not to say we don’t need some structure; it’s just a matter of finding it in a way that suits the individual changing situation. How we create structures that are contested and dynamic…well thats another blog post ain’t it?
July 27, 2010 at 9:05 am
Ren
I have been struggling along in my new education co-ordination job for the last 6 months, as I do I watch all my colleagues struggle around me. We separately force our way through the resistance that our work place has created without even acknowledging the hardship of the others. After discovering the impact of carrying such giant responsibility I asked a work friend “Why don’t we all work together, in a team? Why aren’t we supporting each other?” with her 12 years of experience at this school she gave me one word TIME. When does such a large cohort of staff stop finding the time for each other. The pressure, the work load, the unfair conditions won’t change over night but if we all just gave a little damn about one another I feel like big clouds would move on and we would have so much more to give the students.
July 27, 2010 at 11:26 am
alislisa
Thanks Alex, and other commentators, for your thoughts and words… I think that fostering a culture of responsibilities is really important in an org, and like the Zapatista example cited here, creating a dynamic structure where roles and responsibilities can change, be shared; in this part of the world especially, having ngapartji-ngapartji stylee mentoring happening as an ongoing part of doing [ie doing=teaching=learning] is possibly one good path to explore for answers to your questions… these are the ‘ideals’ of form of new ‘structures’, maybe, in the Platonic sense… but there’s also the lived experiential dimension of all this work – creating healthy work spaces, comfortable work spaces, creative zones that suit the creatives in them, malleable spaces… and creating senses of time that suit organic creativity – this might mean irregularly sized working blocks, sleep-ins for a week, siesta times, or whatever… I’ll leave it there for now x
July 27, 2010 at 12:01 pm
and
Interesting thought and thread.
I agree that the best option is less rules and more shared culture, not only does it reduce the bureaucracy, it sure makes for more fun.
Here’s the rub however, how do you create that culture and have a diverse group of people at the same time? I’ve been involved in organisations where late 20s/early 30s highly mobile funksters from pretty similar cultural and class backgrounds found it very easy to get along – lots of written down rules weren’t required because the common culture had already written them into us.
Bring in some more diversity and you start to have a problem because suddenly there are differences. Unwritten cultures can become cliques and prone to group think – when things do need to change (such as that transition to organisation) things can go awry if calm and open minds aren’t available.
The other alternative is just to resign yourself to working in small groups, but if the point is to change the world then shouldn’t these ideas scale to large groups? If they can’t we don’t actually have a social change formula – we have a lifestyle formula. And not everything can be a network of small groups.
And whilst that transition to organisation may be tedium (though there may be ways to lessen it) I don’t see staying as the young funky bunch as much of an alternative.
There are some interesting theories going around though – such as “Result Only Work Environments” that try and embrace some of the creative chaos whilst keeping a strong backbone. I’m reading and interesting management hack book atm that talks quite a lot about it called Drive – http://www.danpink.com/ – worth checking out. It’s focus is obv. for-profit enterprises but it’s interesting how much of urban po-mo funky way of working a lot these enterprises are adopting as a way to enhance creativity and keep people from quitting by giving them more control over their work environments.
Keep up the insights Aggy.
July 27, 2010 at 12:05 pm
and
Last post stripped out the Results Only Work Environment link – – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE
July 30, 2010 at 12:31 pm
aggyk
Thanks everyone for reading and for your comments – good encouragement to keep going!
I agree that the question of how you scale up the culture of a team, and manage diversity is a crucial one, as it is sometimes easier to build a strong team dynamic in a smaller group.
Ngapartji Ngapartji fluctuated between a core team of 5 staff, 6-8 core elders, 6 core young people and a touring company of 50, but worked with over 300 community members and presented to an audience of over 30,000. So keeping ‘on message’ or ‘on messages’ was something I thought about a lot. The touring team was made up of people of diverse ages, cultures, languages and areas of expertise. I found that inductions, open meetings with sufficient translation and time for different cultural approaches to discussions and decision making went some way to getting around the problems you raise and.
Maybe we don’t need big organisations if we can’t make them flexible and responsive and human? There is some interesting work going on in Amsterdam by the Institute of Network Cultures around these ideas.
More thoughts soon!