WORKING AND LIVING WITH UNPREDICTABILITY

Annual Conference Report
held on 18thNovember 2000

How do you manage yourself in relation to the uncertainties of contemporary society?

You are invited to add your comments to a discussion started at the OPUS 2000 annual conference.

The conference explored certain propositions, some introduced by Eric Miller and others developed by participants:

How can I know in March what I will want to say in November? Working and Living with Uncertainty

Eric Miller

[This is a reconstruction from notes of a talk given to the OPUS Annual Conference]

Initially the title was an evasive response to an invitation to speak at this conference. Then, a week or so later, Bob Ayling, chief executive of British Airways and chairman of the New Millennium Experience Company, was quite suddenly and unexpectedly fired. This fed into my current preoccupation with the psychological and social consequences of the uncertainties and insecurities of work and employment. It also re-evoked a long-term interest in change and its effects especially the ways in which small changes can escalate leading to quite unanticipated consequences. Here is a favourite example:-

Borneo in the 1950s was ravaged by malaria and DDT offered a solution. Aerial spraying was especially easy because the typical Borneo village was a terrace of houses under one long roof. The result was a dramatic reduction in morbidity and mortality. There were however unexpected side-effects. One was the result of the food chain. Cockroaches fed on small insects contaminated with DDT; lizards fed on the cockroaches; and the concentration of DDT in the cats that fed on the lizards was such as to wipe out the cat population. Consequently rats multiplied, leading to a serious threat of sylvatic plague. This problem was dealt with by parachuting in basket-loads of cats from elsewhere. A second side-effect was that DDT killed the predators and parasites of the thatch-caterpillars that lived in the long-house roofs. The caterpillars multiplied and the roofs collapsed.

I will come back to ecological systems. My overall topic is the effect on us, at the individual and societal levels, of the rate of change and of increasing complexity and unpredictability. What are the uncertainties in contemporary society and what mechanisms are we using to deal with them? I am not offering definitive theories: my aim is rather to stimulate reflection and discussion.

I begin with my personal list of unexpected happenings between March and November.

First, in the financial sector, we saw the first South Sea bubble of the millennium: dot-com share prices, having rocketed up since Christmas, suddenly collapsed and we had the phenomenon of ten-minute millionaires.

Then the realm of science and technology was full of surprises:-

Einstein had told us that the maximum speed of light in a vacuum was 187,000 mph, but in July it was reported that scientists had passed laser light through caesium vapour so fast that it left the test chamber before it had finished entering. Travelling at some 200 billion mph it was 310 times faster than Einstein's maximum.
Completion of the human genome library was reported. Each genome has 3 billion base parts (building blocks).
The grid being developed to supersede the Internet will be one thousand times faster.

A report from a scientist: The risk of dying from an asteroid impact is 750 times higher than the chance of winning the lottery.

And there were various miscellaneous happenings that took me (and others) by surprise:-

Concorde crashed.
Sarah Payne, a little girl who had been sexually assaulted and murdered, became a national symbol, leading to a set of violent attacks on known paedophiles (and on one unfortunate female paediatrician!).
On TV some 3 million people were said to have voted in the Big Brother referendum.
The fuel crisis, which spread swiftly from France to UK and to other countries as far afield as the Philippines. Sir John Brown, chief executive of BP/Amoco (salary £1.45 million p.a.), was quoted as saying: We did not see it coming.
The Hatfield rail crash (with oddly, two of the four people killed being pilots) and the cracked rail crisis. We discover that Railtrack is responsible for safety but is penalised if track maintenance delays trains.
Floods.

These headline events are on top of the ordinary unpredictabilities of everyday life: the car won't start; gridlock on the motorway; a computer virus; a flu virus. We plan as if there is continuity yet know that such things are constantly happening. They are in the category of predictable unpredictabilities. For example, we know that several thousand people will be killed on the roads this year, but not who or when. We insure against some of these eventualities. About the lesser ones we are philosophical, talking about things coming in threes or about Sod's law (the central heating always choosing to fail on a frosty weekend morning). Or we may feel angry, as if they are a personal affront. Is road rage on the increase?

One proposition to explore is that the feeling of things escalating out of control, with the attendant anxiety about being left behind and never catching up, makes us ask where and how can I exercise power and control? Voting for Big Brother was a small harmless example; other responses may be verbal and physical aggression.

This is linked to the first of the four themes I want to explore:-

Death. Natural, unnatural or accidental death and defences against mortality; disasters, natural and man-made.
Ecological systems. These are important
a) in terms of human interventions will the system be resilient or collapse? and
b) as models of human systems such as organisations or communities having to absorb multiple change.
Change, and change in the rate of change.
Changes in the relatedness of individual to workplace and the implications for the rest of one's life-space in the context of continuous change. Where and how are needs for dependency and attachment met?

Death

The paradox of mortality is that death is a certainty but the how and when are almost completely unpredictable. It is the ultimate example of loss of control over our lives. Hence the following proposition:- Loss of control mobilises unconscious phantasies of death and dying.

As we well know, anxiety about mortality generates numerous and widespread social defences. They are important to note because, if that proposition is correct, they also serve as defences against anxiety about loss of control.

First, there are the virtually universal religious belief systems that deny the finality of death: the spirit lives on; there is an afterlife, whether in paradise (for example, for Palestinian suicide bombers) or in reincarnation. Fundamentalism is flourishing, especially among the deprived, but in more prosperous societies agnosticism is more common; hence other defences prevail.

One contemporary fantasy is that death can be prevented or postponed indefinitely - the defence of denial. Pharmaceutical research is always about to produce a new panacea that will save lives. It would be more accurate but less acceptable to say that it may postpone deaths. And the side-effects are often horrendous. Related to this are our expectations of the NHS: that (as Anton Obholzer has suggested) it is to be a keep-death-at-bay service. Denial can be pervasive: one modern London hospital was about to open when someone noticed that no mortuary had been included in the plans. The NHS can never meet our unconscious and conscious expectations. God-like consultants fail us. Not surprisingly suicides of doctors or nurses are higher than any other profession.

A third defence is to find the cause of death. Other societies distinguish between natural and untimely or violent death. The latter mobilises special rituals to placate the gods. The guilt of the survivors at having survived is allayed by reparation. Princess Diana was the outstanding example, but there was something of this in the public mourning of Sarah Payne. As Wesley Carr has pointed out, this helps us to work through bereavements and other losses in our own lives. In our society today the diagnosis of natural death is no longer acceptable: it undermines survivors defences against the anxiety over loss of control. It is as if to define the cause is equated with future prevention, future control. Linked to this is the blame culture. In mediaeval times witches were the target; now it is the doctor, the hospital manager, the driver of the other vehicle or, if all else fails, the Government. This applies not just to death but to injury, physical or psychological, real or simulated. The upsurge of litigation generates a culture of risk avoidance. Many hospital beds are clogged by patients who are ready for discharge but are kept in to be on the safe side.

Some societies prepare young people for adulthood by initiation ceremonies and ordeals. In Africa, a young Masai was and perhaps still is required to kill a lion in order to become a man. Risks are taken to prove that one can cheat death. Perhaps back-packing is our nearest equivalent. Raves and rock festivals, along with drugs and alcohol, may have a similar function, though the risks are denied the omnipotent sense of it can't happen to me.

Disasters, natural or man-made, with multiple deaths, mobilise comparable defences in us. For the victims it is another matter. Major events such as the Turkish earthquake or the Mozambique floods not only produce death and physical destruction but often also destroy the capacity of survivors to rebuild their community structures and cultures. But most big natural disasters pass us by: we see the pictures, feel some regret, perhaps send a donation and then it is yesterday's news. For the huge floods in East Bengal and Bangladesh at the end of September 2000 there were no reporters, no photos. Estimates of deaths were in the hundreds or thousands and of homelessness in the millions all of which produced a five-line news item in The Times. In order to identify with victims of disasters we need to feel it could have been me in there but for the grace of God as we used to say in more religious times. Planes, trains or ferries that we might actually have travelled on ourselves. Writing about the Concorde crash in July 2000, Will Hutton said that such a disaster legitimises our individualistic society's need to feel and to do so, however shallowly, together. Princess Diana had the same effect, and I would emphasise that it is also a sudden and unwelcome reminder of our own mortality. Concorde in particular had symbolised human potency, conquering distance and time, and it took just one strip of metal on the runway to prick that bubble of our omnipotence.

And perhaps that is a snapshot of our history since the industrial revolution, which can be seen in terms of scientific and technological advances towards increasing control, and fantasied omnipotence of man over nature, including prolongation of life, postponement of death and the implicit promise of immortality. But with almost every advance there have been unanticipated side-effects, ranging from thalidomide babies to the new version of CJD.

Interventions in Ecological Systems

Rural and agricultural programmes in third world countries, in which I was involved in the 1970s and 1980s, yielded hundreds of stories of unanticipated consequences. A new road was built to connect an isolated fishing village to the market economy. This it did. The fish were sold to the towns but the breweries sent their lorries in and all the new income was spent on alcohol. Farmers were encouraged to grow cash crops to replace their subsistence economy. The outcomes were some more income and serious malnutrition. And so on. Here is another DDT story, this time from Peru:-

The setting was a number of isolated, intensely cultivated irrigated valleys. Farmers had switched from sugar to cotton, which was more profitable, but output was hit by seven cotton pests. This was in 1949, when DDT became available and was ideal for pest control and elimination: it was lethal to most insects, had a long life and, because these were contained ecosystems, could be efficiently and cheaply sprayed from planes. For 2-3 years production increased by 50 per cent. Then six new insect pests appeared, while within six years the original seven had developed immunity. The response was, first, to increase concentrations of DDT and to apply it more often, and then to change the insecticide. (One is reminded of current pharmaceutical war on bacteria: bug -> drug -> superbug -> superdrug). By 1956 yields were lower than in 1949, control costs were much higher and the agricultural economy was close to bankruptcy. The ecological system had collapsed.

This story is obviously directly relevant to interventions in natural ecosystems: simplistic cause-and-effect thinking without regard for the complexities of the system as a whole may yield short-term benefits but be disastrous in the longer term. Beyond that, however, it also has implications for our interventions in human systems, such as businesses, schools, or tight-knit communities, which, I would argue, share many of the characteristics of ecosystems.

Such a system tends to evolve towards stability, usually through an increase in variety and complexity which give it resilience. Agriculture requires limiting natural variety and complexity to achieve productivity, but the modified system, including the human interventions, must acquire some stability in a new equilibrium. If the intervention is only local, there is a greater possibility that the surrounding variety will help to restore resilience. In other words, a domain of stability will emerge within a larger boundary. If, through accumulated changes, or massive shock, the limits of resilience are exceeded, the outcome is collapse or disaster.

In the Borneo example destabilisation was only local and temporary and not serious enough to defeat the purpose, and parachuting in the cats probably saved the day. The Peruvian example was a more global intervention, affecting the whole of each of those isolated valley systems, and short-term success was followed by breakdown. (Later there was good news from Peru. A sophisticated ecological control programme, which included, for example, introducing new beneficial insects, re-established the complexity of the food web and cotton yields rose higher than ever).

From this there were two lessons that I started applying in my organisational work 30 years ago. The ecosystem perspective shifts attention from enhancing efficiency to ensuring resilience and from maximising the probability of success to minimising the chances of disaster. For this the system needs to incorporate some redundancy, in the cybernetic sense of additional components that help to sustain reliability when something goes wrong. In the terminology of more modern complexity theory, a business enterprise, for example, like an ecosystem, can move from a stable equilibrium to a zone of bounded instability, where redundancy can help it to go on absorbing changes, but there nevertheless may come a point at which one more change leads to explosive instability. As with the familiar image of the butterfly flapping its wings in China leading to a hurricane in Florida, tiny events can escalate into unpredictable and dramatic change. We saw this on a large scale a dozen years ago when the Berlin wall came down and the communist regimes collapsed.

This leads me to my next theme:-

Change, and Change in the Rate of Change

From the industrial revolution onwards we became accustomed to regarding progress as a stepwise process. The era of the steam engine lasted for some 50 years before the internal combustion engine came along. Industries acquiring a new technology entered a period of bounded instability and then regained a stable equilibrium. Until relatively recently in the field of organisational development that was the assumption: change was an exception or deviation from the norm. My colleague, Kenneth Rice, and I started questioning that assumption in the early 1960s. At the Tavistock Institute we had been involved in the design of socio-technical systems to optimise technological requirements and human needs, with impressive results in terms of productivity and job satisfaction. Semi-autonomous work groups were becoming fashionable. We felt that whilst they were a good solution so long as the technology was stable, the strong identification of the workers with the production process meant that a change in technology would lead to explosive instability. We argued that different and separate systems - systems that would survive technological change were needed to meet people's needs for affiliation and attachment. We called these sentient systems.

Already at that time technical specialists such as systems analysts, computer programmers and electronic engineers were beginning to see themselves as professionals with transferable skills, neither wanting or needing a long-term affiliation to a particular firm. Already, too, companies were starting to contract out non-core functions such as printing or cleaning instead of using employees. Both trends gained increasing momentum.

As we know, the main drivers of change have been technology, capitalism and globalisation in interaction with each other.

Three vignettes from India illustrate this. In 1948 I was living in a small south Indian town in which there was just one radio, battery operated. In 1976 a book of mine was being published in UK and to my surprise it was typeset efficiently in Bombay. Today, books are no longer typeset; India has its own Silicon Valleys; and it is a major exporter of IT specialists to UK and USA.

A significant driver of scientific and technological advances between 1950 and 1990 was of course the Cold War. It is hard now to recapture the tensions and anxieties of 30 years ago. On the one hand, in 1969 the Americans put a man on the moon, which seemed to demonstrate that there were no limits to human achievement. On the other, we had the H-bomb, with its potential for self-destruction and the collapse of the global ecosystem. The human race seemed to be facing either immortality or extinction.

Since 1990 the rate of change seems breathtaking: e-mail has become ubiquitous; in the UK, at least 6 million households have access to the web; and there are 30 million mobile phones. Seventy per cent of 15-17 year olds have mobiles and users are getting ever younger.

There is the recent story of the man who, when he picked up his phone, heard a little voice say: Hello, dad, I'm in the womb Hang on, I'm going into a tunnel.

Most sectors of the economy are affected: most obviously telecommunications, but also the financial sector, manufacturing and many services, even the civil service. It is unclear whether the much publicised and costly failures in public sector computerisation - Inland Revenue losing its 1997 figures; the Home Office forgetting that criminals may use more than one name are a consequence of unrecognised complexities or of tension between civil servants desire for omnipotence and their resistance to change.

Internet companies have of course mushroomed. It is said an internet year is now three months: that is the time it takes to launch a new product, raise the finance, discover whether it is a success or a failure and preferably have another new product in the pipeline. Large corporations used to have 10-year or even 15-year plans. Now even 5-year plans are over- ambitious: a study of such plans in the mid-1990s found that after three years half the elements in the new plan had not been in it originally. Turnover of chief executives has become more rapid. A new CEO, hailed as a saviour, comes in with a new plan that is out of date before it is implemented and then departs with a massive award for the failure.

Conventional notions of organisation and management are in the melting-pot. Within today's businesses and other work settings some processes are to use the language of complexity theory in stable equilibrium, in that there is predictability in at least the short term. But these are embedded in a system that is operating in bounded instability on the edge of chaos. Those managements that perceive this, and many do not, are struggling to cope with this paradox. The more stable processes require control, but control is the enemy of the opportunism and creativity that are the requisites for survival. Following the recessions of 1979 and 1989, when delayering and downsizing produced massive redundancies, employees generally have reduced or withdrawn completely their psychological investment in the work organisation. With job security disappearing rapidly, the employee's relation to the employer is typically instrumental; loyalty, to the firm or to the boss, has become rarer and is replaced by compliance. The proportions of part-time, temporary and contract workers have grown considerably. Consequently old theories of motivation no longer work and employers are still struggling to find substitutes. One way is to categorise employees as either disposable or valuable. However, generous packages do not buy loyalty in this instrumental culture and a high turnover of disposables incurs not only the obvious costs of recruitment and training but, less obviously, the loss of tacit knowledge, the value of which is recognised only when it has vanished. One promising approach is the virtual demerger of large businesses into semi-autonomous mini-enterprises (see below).

Note the term enterprise. I use this instead of the more commonly used organisation because the idea of the organisation is obsolescent. It has of course always been no more than a construct, an image in people's minds. Essentially organisation is a process, relating people in roles to activities and to each other for performance of a task. It used to be a more tangible item with a hierarchical structure and culture that provided predictability, security and dependency. Whether employees loved it or hated it, it was central to their identity as individuals. That is now history. Careers are also becoming obsolete, except perhaps for lawyers or doctors. The past assumption was that in one's working life continuity was the norm, with perhaps occasional interruptions, such as a change of employment. Now discontinuities are the norm, with intervals of stability.

Changes in the Relatedness of Individual to Workplace

So what is the meaning of the workplace in people's lives today? Here I identify five kinds of relationship, with some overlap between them:-

For a growing number, self employment is the preferred option. This may mean starting one's own enterprise or operating as an independent contractor. There is some mobility in and out of employment. Overlapping with this.
There are more people who primarily derive their identity and satisfaction from their professions or specialisms. If they are not independent practitioners they will seek a work- place that at least enables them to use their skills and preferably values them. Related to this
People can and do become committed to an enterprise. For this to happen the task or project must be meaningful to them, their contributions are recognised, authority is based on competence rather than status and in this sense leadership is distributed rather than monopolised by one person. It may be a free-standing enterprise (and this culture is prevalent in the growing number of IT businesses) or, if it is part of a larger system e.g. a R&D unit or a specialist social work team it must have sufficient autonomy to meet those conditions. To the extent that they feel valued, and psychologically secure, people are freed to put much more of themselves into the work. But this is still a minority.
The number of part-time workers has greatly increased. They are mainly women, often with young children. They may or may not find the work itself satisfying, but if it is not they still have the compensation of a better work/life balance than most others achieve.
For too many perhaps most the work itself gives little psychological satisfaction. They have an instrumental relationship to the employer; they are compliant; and they often work long hours. So work is stressful; anxiety about losing the job is added stress; and because family life suffers there is stress at home too.

It is evident that few work-places nowadays offer the job security, predictability and dependency of the past. As noted earlier, we now have a culture of individualism and self-reliance - it is down to me. At the macro-level it seems to work. Despite constant news of redundancies, unemployment, now around one million, is at its lowest for 30 years. It is also consistent with the title of one of my books, From Dependency to Autonomy, in which I distinguished between an unhealthy, unthinking and almost infantile dependency on the one hand and, on the other, the self-management of a choice-making individual. I was arguing for forms of organisation corresponding to the kinds of enterprise described in 3 above. But what is happening to dependency needs? What strategies and defences are being used to deal with anxiety about insecurity and vulnerability, loss of control, and the shadow of mortality?

Denial and omnipotence are obviously present. Denial takes the form of it can't happen to me.

Our local electrician spoke at length about the joys of moving from employment to self-employment. When I asked him what would happen if he fell ill he rapidly changed the subject.

Fantasies of omnipotence get acted out most obviously by football hooligans and others who need to prove their superiority by attacking others. Many people compensate for external uncertainties by focusing on self-presentation. More attention is devoted to health and fitness: regular visits to the gym, buying organic foods, taking vitamin supplements. Perhaps more among women than men it is imperative to stay looking young. There is a wish for perfection: good enough is no longer good enough.

Linked to this is the search for the perfect partner. Twenty per cent of unmarried people have used dating agencies and the number is growing. It is an efficient way of identifying and assessing potential partners. Evidently the search is for a relationship that offers attachment without dependency. That search is taking longer: 50 per cent of women over 20 are living independently, according to one study; for men it is 25 per cent. Living alone oneself as the perfect partner may be seen as the safest solution: no loss of control; no unpleasant surprises.

However, the culture of individualism increases the need for connectedness. Social relations in the work place may be becoming more important, especially as family and community connections decline. City pubs are crowded with office groups at the end of the working day. There are more same-sex gangs - the girls going out with the girls and the boys with the boys - mates you can trust. The enormous usage of mobiles and e-mails seems to reflect a growing need to maintain and expand one's networks. It may also be a way of dealing with primitive separation anxiety that is evoked more often by the unpredictabilities of one's environment.

Summing Up

My first question was:- What are the uncertainties in contemporary society and what mechanisms are we using to deal with them? I also talked about the fear of things escalating out of control and anxiety about being left behind and never catching up, and put forward the proposition that loss of control mobilises unconscious phantasies about death and the anxieties that go with it. How are we defending ourselves against those anxieties? What ways do we find to exercise power and control? I have offered a few suggestions and I hope today's discussion will broaden and deepen our understanding of these processes.

Propositions Arising Out of the Conference

The way we think about the unpredictability of things is linked with a denial of death certain in itself but uncertain in the manner of its coming.

We may think of death as the ultimate loss of control. Then we may think of social defences against the anxiety aroused by our own mortality. We may think of the NHS as the keep death at bay service. The pharmaceutical industry also talks of saving lives but is in the business of postponing death.

We act as if death could not happen to us and are affronted by evidence to the contrary four deaths in the Hatfield rail disaster have led to a nervous breakdown in the rail industry. When are there risks that are acceptable? When is this turning a blind eye?

Complexity theory is seen to be at work. A few votes in Palm County, Florida, affect the price a psychologist pays for a car in Crouch End, London.

Social defences against death encourage omnipotent phantasies, which lead then to anger and despair and a litigious culture of blame and retribution. We experience our own bereavements through the deaths of others, Princess Diana, Sarah Payne, which are seen as both tragic and unnecessary.

The growth of health clubs while the population as a whole becomes less fit is an example of such a social defence.

Good enough is no longer good enough as we seek perfection, preferring to live alone rather than in flawed relationships. Open systems begin to behave like closed systems narcissistic and self-referring and or defensive and paranoid.

A defining moment was the landing of man on the moon, the highest narcissistic achievement of man a giant leap for mankind, whereby he can look back at his reflection in planet earth - in the midst of the cold war, the fearful stand-off between two super-powers on that same planet.

We can learn from ecological systems. Too much specialisation leaves a system vulnerable.

Human beings are like ecological systems looking for stability but also variety and resilience. Increased individualism gives rise to an increased need for connectedness. The exponential growth in the uses of mobiles and the internet would not have happened but for the way new technology helps us to cope with separation anxiety.

In an individualistic society, we have to project our aggression in to the mob.

The OPUS conference itself created its own sense of community, like an extended family, showing traditional respect to its elders, but this in itself created its own anxiety, with people referring to other dialogues that felt less safe but more real in this case, people in London speculating on a past event in Glasgow.

We see government as controlling and punitive, as a way of dealing with unpredictability. But social change can't be managed by control. We are experiencing a treadmill of change in organisational life, which is itself an attempt to avoid the potential for real change.

What do you think? Comments, experiences that develop or challenge these propositions, are welcome.