I think there is evidence that partnerships – I am sure not exclusively, but pretty consistently – achieve something of strategic significance (the what) because of the way they work (their processes, or the ‘how’). And there are many instances of ‘how’ – we have mentioned ‘visioning’, as a prominent one – but I would like to consider how they ‘talk together.’John Shotter has worked on developing ways of understanding what is happening during ordinary, day-to-day conversations in organisations. These tools and concepts are resources for description and analysis. The principal ones are:
- Developed and developing events.
- Joint action.
- Rational invisibility.
- Feelings of tendency.
- The non-picturable imaginary.
Shotter (1984) discusses the idea of joint action which he points out always produces unintended and unpredictable outcomes. People generate between themselves, “without conscious realisation of the fact, a changing sea of moral enablements and constraints, of privileges and entitlements, and obligations and sanctions – in short, an ethos” (1993, page 39). Such evolving “organised practical-moral settings” cannot be traced back to the intentions of any one of us and so it is as if this setting or situation that we co-create has, for us, a “given” or “externally caused” nature. So, we are considering something closer to ‘ethos’ than to ‘silo’ when we think of the constraints of experience that are challenged and – potentially – changed through intimate partnership.
We are used to talking about ‘privatisation’ of the public realm and pubic services; I wonder if we could also consider the ‘primate-isation’ of it – in which state we are encouraged to believe that there is a ‘what’ (a strategic objective) that can be achieved without any attention to the ‘how’ (the strategic process). Or at the very least a reduction of all possible processes to one – the tyranny of the process ‘that works’; as if there were a recipe for relating, a prescription on how to be intimate, in exchange.
Slingshot