Intimate Innovation

In his ISPSO paper, in New York (1987) Harold Bridger[i] includes a diagrammatic illustration of some of the main institutional characteristics of an open system with its organisational components and interconnections.  The diagrammatic model indicates that such an institution is both “purpose-orientated” and “learning and self-reviewing”. This is a pretty accurate description of what many partnerships are like and feel like – and for anyone who has been involved in a group relations event organised around the “double task”, leadership in that system and leadership in a partnership are very similar experiences.

However, Bridger describes the boundary in the diagrammatic model of organisations and systems as a boundary of ‘designated accountability’. More often than not in complex settings, in relation to both the idea and the experience of accountability, it is far from clear what is designated, and how the designation carries any kind of authority. The boundary is more like a ‘zone’, the properties of which seem to be part protective, part delusional – an expansion chamber, of sorts, into which we can move, or expand (project) our need to find an answer, or conclusively (once and for all) meet a need. What properties might a ‘zone’ have that are not true of a ‘line’?

David Armstrong[ii] in his paper on ‘Making Meaning at Work’ has a coda on the Future of the Organisation. David Armstrong sees a risk:

‘The risk, it seems to me, is one of erosion, a shrinking, or at least a problematizing, of the boundary, as it were, available for the finding and making of meaning.  To put this another way, in such a context, the organisation may no longer function as a bounded psycho social field in its own right, but rather as a hub or “node” within a disbursed, fragmented, and loosely coupled network of activities in which, as the financier George Soros has suggested, “transactions” replace relationships in people’s dealings with one another’ (Soros, 1998, cited in Sennett 2006, Pages 25 and 55).

The notion of the organisation as a ‘hub or node’, invites us to think of partnerships as a system of ‘hubs or nodes’. At this stage in our thinking, we need metaphors to help us think through to the next stage – so we reach for

• analogies with ‘ecologies’, and
• neural pathways; synapses and their formation through habitual flows of information;
• the role of fat – as an insulator, a boundary;
• the way in which, in dynamic systems, stability is created through constant disequilibrium; and
• how the ‘health’ of the system is dependent on the complexity of the inter-relationships, their volume and the freedom of any one node to connect with any others, via one another.

All of these – and others – can act as ways of beginning to formulate some ‘lines of inquiry’. But David Armstrong and George Soros have left us with a question – how do you relate, when the pressure (the tendency, the habit, the expectation, the normalising stance) is to transact?

I wonder if partnerships are an example of a type of node in which there is an attempt to balance transacting and relating – the balance might be a bit of a trick (say, that if there are enough transactions, with enough repetition to them, they lay down a kind of neural pathway in the organisation and the approach to how we organise – in which the meaning lies not in the boundary, but in the inter-relationships).

Or, it might have a more generative quality – where we (in partnership) sense that there is a need to conceive of boundaries differently, including all of all of ourselves, all of all of our services, all of all of our clients etc This could find an analogue in the notion of the observer being part of the system, who in his/her relationship to the system, changes it.

So in some sense, all of the systems’ qualities are in the boundary, as a zone – not within it, but in it; as part of the fabric of it. In a similar way to that in which I could not feel or think without a body, so the separation of thought and mind is – in reality – meaningless. Viewed from this point of view, the boundary is the space; and the space the boundary.

Could it be the case that one can have a distributed boundary – a corollary of the image of boundaries ‘dissolving’ – in the same way that one can have distributed leadership? Using this way of thinking about it, the boundary has not dissolved in the sense of disappeared, but dissolved into the system – and appears to have disappeared. But it now functions in relation to the system as does memory or desire in relation to our bodies. The ‘intelligence’ of the boundary is distributed throughout the system.