Most times when facing the analysis of the change process of people or groups in the organizations or when we face change management strategies and programs, we do it from a rationalist, systematic and conscious perspective and sometimes we discover undesired reactions or unexpected behaviors which make us think we have forgotten something or we have not had some factor in mind.
According to Giles Amado, Professor of Psychosociology in the HEC Paris Management School, we have probably not considered neither respected the importance of the individual and collective psychic processes which occur in any social process, and change ones and, doing this, we have ran the risk of making a superficial analysis or approach.
We often have prejudices and assumptions on the subconscious being the useless and bothering part of mind and that Psychoanalysis is something that has to do with solving problems of mental health. In this article, I will try to offer a more positive and useful view of both concepts applied to the management and analysis of the organizational change.
The Psychodynamics Approach to Change
This approach, useful both to individual or collective change processes, has its sources on Psychoanalysis (Freud) and is mainly based on managing and introducing in the change management the inner part of people: their ideas, assumptions, fears, prejudices and feelings, conscious and unconscious ones. This is an approach which rejects a static and rational view of people and, therefore, considers people and moreover groups changing when exposed to different situations and even changing throughout exploring their own mental processes.
The study, comprehension and analysis of the unconscious processes, at individual and interpersonal level, are relevant in this approach.
Unconscious Processes and Defense Mechanisms
On a simplified way, we can say any individual and any group of individuals, has a social and psychological past history which, in one way or another, conditions them. All of us have been brought up in different environments and contexts, with cultural, political, legal, geographic, economic, technological, social and familiar differences which have had an influence in our character and behavior.
Basing on these individual differences, any change process in the environment or context, real or psychological, intentional or fortuitous, can bring about different reactions and perceptions in different people and in some cases, these perceptions will be of menacing and will lead the individuals to feel fear or anxiety.
We just have to observe the actual moment of global economic crisis which, even being a clear context change, for many people has a real effect and for other is just psychological, as it is not meaning any real change in their lives. Nevertheless, fear and anxiety of this environmental change can be greater in the latter because of their social or psychological past.
This anxiety brought about by changes in the environment and/or by the psychological perception of them causes in the individuals and also in the groups many unconscious mechanisms of defense designed to fight against the pain caused by anxiety or fear. Some of these unconscious mechanisms described by Freud are the negation of reality or facts, the transferences to past situations, the self-fulfilling prophecy known as “Pygmalion effect”, the projection of past situations to the future, fantasy, displacement of our feelings or thoughts to other, emotional repression, rationalization of irrational things or the unconscious differentiation between emotions and reason.
When these unconscious defense mechanisms appear at individual or collective level, we can observe strange reactions and behaviors, irrational reactions, personal attacks, violent discussions and destructive or less productive reactions which we should not understand without the perspective of the psychodynamic approach of the change.
Figure 1 “Unconscious mechanisms of defense”
I now invite the reader to remember and think about situations, individual ones, in the couple, familiar, in the group of friends, in team meetings and other work situations. Have not we all lived moments or situations in which we could observe this kind of unconscious or irrational reactions of behaviors? Did we understand them in that moment? Were we conscious that they have nothing to do with the content or rationality of the moment? Did we feel they were unconscious psychological mechanisms of defense? Did we analyze the fears and anxieties that any or more could be feeling and their causes? And, which context or change made them feel that fear or anxiety?
The understanding of this approach and the inclusion of these concepts in our analysis and management of change can help us to better understand the change processes and undertake more successful, more human, more mature and deeper strategies of collective and individual management.
When incorporating the psychodynamic approach of change, we can better understand how change affects people and groups, we can go in depth into the environmental elements which cause anxiety to one and another in our team and act in advance in a conscious and cautious way on it. We can better understand irrational situations and act on them without falling n them. We can promote a bigger self-knowledge among people in our organization and build more mature, more productive, more humane, more creative and more effective relations and teams.
According to Amado from the HEC Paris and other authors such as Leopold Vansina or Marie-Jeane Cobbaert from the Professional Development Institute of Belgium, the leader who understands and is able to apply this approach to his/ her relations with his/her collaborators and team, will create a balanced environment and space, which, on the one hand, will structure the way to work in team and, on the other hand, will let free space to open thought and creativity and they will get changes and decisions in the group be taken in the best possible way, with more rationality, information and data and with less psychological mechanisms and reactions of defense.
The strategy as a leader, not as a psychoanalyst, can be, being conscious of the model, of trying to talk and act over the causes of the environment and change which are generating the apparition of anxiety and, if this would not be enough and unconscious reactions and mechanisms appear, to make them see, bring them to the conscious side and put them on the table to be dealt in a rational way with the individual or group.
An example of the impact of the unconscious processes in the day to day. “The Abilene Paradox”.
The Abilene Paradox was introduced by the expert in Management Jerry B. Harvey in his article “The Abilene Paradox and other Meditations on Management” (Harvey 1974) and describes a phenomenon of unconscious social suppression through a familiar anecdote that takes place in Texas:
In a very hot afternoon of July in the town of Coleman, Texas, one family (father, mother, son and daughter-in-law) was comfortably playing domino in the fresh porch of their house, until the father suggests to make a trip towards Abilene (80 km. away, northwards) to have dinner. His wife says “it sounds great”. Their son is thinking and with doubts as the way will be long and hot, but he fears his preferences will go against those of the group and says “it is good for me if my wife likes it”. Finally, the daughter-in-law says “Of course I will go, I have not been in Abilene for a long time”.
The way towards and from in the old car of the father without conditioning air is exhausting, suffocating and long. When they arrive to the restaurant the meal is so bad as the trip. Finally, they come back home 5 hours later, exhausted and bad-tempered.
One of them, the son, lies and says “it was a great trip, wasn’t it?”. The mother says she would really have preferred to be at home, fresh, but she went because she had seen everybody excited with the plan. Then, her husband, the father and impeller of the idea, says “I was not very excited with the plan; I just wanted to please you because I thought you were bored”. His wife replies, “I just say so to make you happy, I would be mad if I would like to make this trip with a hot day as this”.
The family sat in the living-room, all of them reclined on their seats and they are perplex thinking how they can have decided together to make a trip which any of them really wanted to do. All of them would have preferred to be comfortably at home but any of them admitted or, neither said it in the moment, when they were in time to enjoy the afternoon.
This history can be funny and unusual; it reflects an unconscious phenomenon called “social suppression” which is regular and usual not only in social and familiar environments but also in organizations and companies with big costs and losses.
Who has not been in a formal and periodic meeting done from time immemorial and in which all members, even its leader, think it is a total loss of time? Does anyone say anything? How long and how much does it cost or has cost on time?
Who has not seen throughout its professional career, projects eternized on time, coping a big amount of resources and in which there are many people involved and any of them thinks this project is worthy or the proposed objectives are going to be achieved?
If we think about it, all of us can find unbelievable situations in which we have done or participated in plans, meetings, projects, initiatives, both personal and professional ones, in which neither ourselves really believed. Fear or anxiety to say it, to be the first, to the consequences, to the negative fantasies of what will happen if I take the opposite, will paralyze and block all of us and then, they paralyze the action and change.
This is just an example of the importance and the impact that the unconscious and psychodynamic processes have on the behavior of people and groups and how they affect the change processes.
Conclusions
- The rational and conscious mental processes are present in the people just in the wakefulness period while unconscious ones are present in a permanent way.
- There is an important presence of this kind of mechanisms in any process of social interaction or change and, most times, despite we pay them no attention, their importance and impact is huge even being difficult to be measured.
- A situational analysis or program of individual, group or organizational change which does not take into account these individual or collective psychical mechanisms runs the risk of being incomplete and superficial.
- The knowledge over the operation of these mechanisms and the different strategies to their analysis and application in processes of organizations and individual change can be very useful to leaders, consultant directors and change agents.
Bibliography
- Vansina, Leopold and Cobbaert, Marie-Jeanne. 2008. Psychodynamics for consultants and managers. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Amado, Gilles and Vansina, Leopold. 2005. The transitional approach in action. London: Karnac.
- Harvey, Jerry B. (Summer 1974). “The Abilene Paradox and other Meditations on Management”. Organizational Dynamics 3 (1): 63.
- J. McAvoy, T. Butler (2007). “The impact of the Abilene Paradox on double-loop learning in an agile team“. Information and Software Technology 49 (6) 552-563.
