The ‘boundaryless’ organisation (Hirshhorn and Gilmore 1992) can stimulate large group phenomena such as feelings of loss of identity, a lack of coherence and connectedness[i] – yet also might provide a setting in which there can be a proliferation of connectedness through which some kind of coherence emerges. As Patricia Shaw[ii] discusses:
‘…we are not relating to one person at a time in a series of dyadic encounters but we are relating over time to a “community of others” without fixed boundaries’. She relates this to the common polarity of inclusion-exclusion and considers its dynamics.
‘Perhaps the most obvious way we experience power relations at work is in the way we are always acting to include and exclude others and experiencing ourselves as included and excluded. When such in-out, inside-outside patterns seem relatively stable we tend to talk of boundaries and the way re-drawing the boundaries may change the system’
This reminds me of working with a client recently in which new members of their board were confused by the facial expressions and body language of the established board members, interpreting their private rapport on display in board meetings as an ambiguous commentary on something unsettling. The new board members – extremely experienced – were joining in with their own exclusion from the governance system, since they were unsure of their power. Non executive directors were tending to get involved in executive domains of responsibility; and executives were withdrawing into their divisions, because they felt that they had negligible corporate power. The seeds of paranoia were being sown because of ambiguous stances in relation to who has what power and responsibility and accountability; this was experienced as ‘you are in’ and ‘I am out’. This is intimate communication with the volume turned up loud, running the risk of drowning out other thoughts and feelings.
Slingshot