Organisations are Mirrors

Elliot Jacques (1995) suggests that “individuals unconsciously and collusively concoct organisations as a means of…defence against psychotic anxieties, thereby generating a fundamental cause of problems within those organisations’. This is to suggest that just as individual habits and behaviours maybe seen as ways of mitigating for our inner hopes and fears, so the organisation may become a mirror of these habits and behaviours, a mirror of our own identity.

This is no more true of founders as they conceive and then give life to their companies, when it is not unusual for these companies to mirror both the strengths and potential derailers of those who founded them. As with our individual psychology these patterns maybe hard to spot, becoming ever more obvious as the organisation scales, when subtle and insignificant imbalances can become significant fault lines. Left unchecked these can at best act as a drag on growth and at worst lead to the failure of the organisation as a commercial entity.

The propensity in all human beings to project those things that we can’t except about ourselves can led to us finding scape-goats for this demise either within or outwith the organisation. As a recent survey in Fortune magazine suggests, it is also perhaps unsurprising in our empirical world, that we land these failures at the door of rational explanations, blaming failures in strategy, product or simply a lack of investment.

But with his quote Jacques is suggesting an alternative solution, one that views organisations not as rational machines but as human systems, where paying attention to these underlying dynamics may enable the individual and the business to make better choices as they scale. It encourages them to distinguish between the patterns that serve them and their organisations well and, those that may be the cause of some the underlying challenges they face. Sometimes these can be habits and behaviours that served them well during start up and early scale up but which may not serve them well or even hinder their development in the future.

This makes change hard as shifts in these habits and behaviours or the systems and processes that reinforce them may be experienced as existential. Removing, as they might, the structure that provide psychological comfort in what can often be a emotionally challenging journey . Here a trusted advisor or coach can be helpful in supporting the individual or individuals through these key moments of transition.

Either way for founders facing growing pains it may be worth asking: how does my organisation mirror me?