In her MA thesis, Sarah Sutton (2007) proposes the concept of ‘corporate reverie’ linked to the role of ‘corporate parenting’, which is a responsibility in the role of senior officers in local authorities (as described in various parts of UK government policy (1998)). This role is particularly expected of these corporate parents in relation to ‘looked after children’ (in some form of local authority care). This role assumes that there is a function which a ‘good enough’ parent has provided (would provide, does provide), which for looked after children has been neglected, absent, or indeed supplied is some perverse / cruel form. Drawing on the experience of working with complex service systems on innovation and change management, I want to explore a series of questions:
- Something about ‘making meaning’ in groups, about helping organisations to be more effective at caring (for those who are members of them), about understanding how they help themselves. What kind of leadership ‘gaze’ might be needed to fulfil this function?
- Wondering about how one incorporates the capacity for reverie in an organisation – and when it might be needed – needed most. Are there times when it would not / might not be needed at all? And what is the relationship between reverie, frustration, dread and new experience (the core of innovation)?
- Something about the ‘nature’ of space – spaces between – for play, for entering into, for holding, for being held by, for being held in
- Something about the ‘quality’ (the qualities) of the ‘approach’ to one another, and the quality of ‘approach’ which an organisation tolerates and incentivises
- I wonder about a crucial component in this being about ‘conception’ and ‘preconception’ – about how to ‘free up’ space, how to make the space in which reverie is possible – is part of the role of an organisation where things mean (something), to co-create a free space in which reverie is possible. And yet that implies that an organisation is a kind of ‘empty space’, where one of the roles of the leader might be to stop that space being filled by ‘one who knows’. Is there a relationship between reverie and the ‘point of creative indifference’ (Perls) – and therefore, the reconciliation of opposites?
- What is really meant by the process of feeding back? Where one feeds back, having been fed? There is a kind of re-gurgitation, a holding up of a mirror, a feeding and re-feeding going on?
- Something collapses into the reverie – perhaps this is linked to the ‘unthought known’ becoming thought (and known in a form that is of use) – we have to ‘settle’ our differences, perhaps ‘settle on’ our differences
- I suppose I see this capacity for reverie as a counter-pose to the corporate ‘hysteria’ – where difference is intolerable. And I am reminded of some of the interactive processes that express reverie, make it material as a space – gazing, listening, noticing, attending to etc. How do these exist – is there a kind of ecology, in which reverie can be alive?
Slingshot