The Angry Seas

The winter storms have arrived and the steel grey sea is being whipped into a mass of white frothy foam before it crashes in pounding waves on the rocks. The leaden sky is streaked now and then with a shaft of light from a weak winter sun which gives the sea a strange silvery illumination. It can be quite spooky.

You really feel nature’s force here as the jet-stream fuelled winds barrel over the ocean to batter this exposed coastline and discharge its watery load. Winter has arrived.

Hole in the Wall

A couple of years ago, one particular storm was so powerful, the sea reached in and greedily gathered the boulders on the shoreline, dragged them out to the deep, and then rushed back in a fury and threw the stones at the shore, and our little harbour wall. It was a clean bowl and the resulting hole in the wall was quite sculptural, but devastating to witness.

Calm After the Storm

Once the storm has blown itself out, and moved on, calm does return. The damage done is there for all to see, and to remind us of who is really in charge. Such storms give you time to reflect as you shelter inside.

St. Angela’s Brief and “The Commander”

I was very excited by my first organisational development (OD) assignment on qualifying nearly 30 years ago. I joined an OD team to help a newly appointed Chief Executive, let’s call him Michael Parker, to “modernise” working practices at a large university teaching hospital, St. Angela’s.

Mr. Parker was, although relatively young, a recently retired military man who had answered the government’s call for more “outsiders” to become hospital managers and administrators.

An impressive man of tall and upright bearing, he personified politeness, authority and dignity. He had very clear objectives for St. Angela’s, having done his research carefully before starting his new job. He had identified three areas for improvement citing the need for “team-building” in the planning department, in the cardiac surgery unit, and in the medical research division.

Mr. Parker, known as “the Commander” behind his back, was used to having his instructions obeyed, even by “experts”, and was unconcerned about the details which fell to his Director of Development, let’s call her Sue Mackintosh. She was equally impressive, and very familiar with the chorus of rebuttals, and the howls of pain and derision, that met her announcement of the start of a series of “team-building” programmes.

“There is Theory and There is Practice”

I was very inexperienced and naive then. “Team-building” – classic text book stuff which I read-up and, with the team leader’s help, designed the necessary exercises that formed a programme of developments to improve people’s behaviour and performance.

Despite my scholarship and earnestness to meet the brief, nothing prepared me for the hostility that I faced, and the depth of the underlying problems. I was to learn through this assignment the meaning of my old professor’s phrase : “there is theory, and there is practice.” I know better now and value highly the wisdom of conducting a careful diagnosis of the real issues before embarking on any intervention.

The power struggles, once uncovered and revealed, were deep-rooted and Shakespearean, and “team-building” was hopelessly inadequate for the real task. I saw toxic Macbeth-like power struggles in the planning team which destroyed itself. I saw a tragic succession plan gone wrong in the cardiac surgery team in the vein of King Lear. And I saw the medical research team divided, as in the Capulets and Montagues, with dire consequences for its future. I also got set upon by the protagonists in each struggle as they turned on me, the “outsider”, the naïve interventionist.  Although bruised, I learnt much from the experience and, crucially, how to spot organisational psychopaths before they spot me.

Come back next time for the first of these power plays in the vein of Macbeth …..