CREATIVITY AND METAPHOR

When we take conscious action in the world (e.g., intervening to improve an organization), we do so on the basis of how we see and understand the world. Di¡erent viewpoints, therefore, give rise to very di¡erent actions and each of these is rational according to the viewpoint that encourages and justi¢es it. If we want to act creatively, it follows we have to think creatively.

Learning to think di¡erently, to inhabit di¡erent viewpoints, is not easy.

The educational system, which is often said to be about absorbing structured chunks of information that can then be reproduced in examinations, can constrain creativity. For whatever reason, very few managers ¢nd it easy to think in di¡erent ways about the operations and organizations they are responsible for and, as a result, they manage in predictable and restricted ways.

A simple experiment will con¢rm this judgement. Ask any group of managers, perhaps on a management development course, to draw a picture representing their organization and showing their position in the or-ganization. Over 90% will draw a conventional organizational chart setting out the hierarchy of authority that binds together di¡erent groupings. I have found, sadly, that this is the case even among managers who have alleg-edly been exposed to systems thinking. I would not feel happy, at the end of a course in creative holism, if managers did not feel comfortable drawing their organizations in at least four di¡erent ways, hopefully many more. It is essential to increasing the creative capacity of managers that they feel equally at home using a variety of di¡erent perspectives on problem situations and how they might be tackled.

One of the best ways of challenging our taken for granted assumptions is by exposing them to some alternatives. This process can be much aided if we learn to work with metaphors. For example, if we want to ¢nd out what mental model we carry with us as managers, we might ask whether we primarily see organizations as ‘machines’, ‘organisms’, ‘brains’, ‘cultures’,

‘political systems’, ‘instruments of domination’, etc. Using metaphors in this way helps us to bring clarity to what otherwise would be a hidden and unquestioned mental model. Metaphors are very good at this because they ask us to understand something in terms of a name or description that is not literally applicable to it. Usually, the thing described will be less well known, more intangible and the description will be more familiar; for example, when we describe an organization as a machine. Nevertheless, they will have some things in common and the metaphor will draw these out and highlight them. Thus, we become truly conscious of the biases inher-ent in our own favoured viewpoint. Original thinking can then be encour-aged by making use explicitly of other metaphors to reveal alternative perspectives.

Metaphors are extremely good at allowing us to explore our own world views and to assist with creative thinking. Morgan (1986, 1997) has done some very interesting work on di¡erent ‘images’ of organization that have proved insightful to managers. He selects some familiar metaphors (e.g.,

‘organizations as machines’), some newer ones (e.g., ‘organizations as £ux and transformation’) and some that are challenging (e.g., ‘organizations as psychic prisons’) with which to explore issues of management. For each metaphor, Morgan describes the salient characteristics that allow us to gain a greater insight into organizations and their problems, and indicates also its limitations ^ for all metaphors are limited and o¡er ways of not seeing as well as ways of seeing. This study is helpful in allowing us to elaborate and

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be explicit about the frameworks that dominate our particular management perspective and in allowing us access to alternatives.

Morgan selects eight important images of organization in his study, and we add a ninth, ‘organizations as carnivals’, from Alvesson and Deetz (1996). The nine metaphors are:

. organizations as machines;

. organizations as organisms;

. organizations as brains;

. organizations as £ux and transformation;

. organizations as cultures;

. organizations as political systems;

. organizations as psychic prisons;

. organizations as instruments of domination;

. organizations as carnivals.

The main characteristics of these nine metaphors are now outlined.

The machine view dominated management theory during the ¢rst half of the 20th century and, as we suggested, has been remarkably di⁄cult to shift from managers’ minds. It represents organizations as rational instruments designed to achieve the purposes of their owners or controllers. The task to be achieved is broken down into parts, and rules are established that govern the behaviour of these parts. A hierarchy of authority exercises co-ordination and control. E⁄ciency in achieving the predetermined purposes is the most highly valued attribute of the organization as a machine. This metaphor is seen as neglecting the individuals who make up the organization and as producing organizational designs that are too rigid in volatile environments.

The organism metaphor looks at organizations as wholes made up of interrelated parts. These parts function in such a way as to ensure the survival of the organization as an organism. Survival, therefore, replaces goal seeking as the raison d ’e“tre of the enterprise. Furthermore organizations, according to this view, are open systems that must secure favourable inter-changes with their environments, adapting to environmental disturbances as required. Managers in£uenced by this metaphor play close attention to the demands of the environment and ensure that subsystems are meeting the organization’s needs. Critics argue that the organismic viewpoint forgets that individuals or groups in organizations may not share the organi-zation’s overall purposes. They are not like the parts of the body in this respect. As a result the metaphor hides con£ict and internally generated change.

The brain metaphor, deriving directly from cybernetics, emphasizes active learning rather than the rather passive adaptability that characterizes the organismic view. This leads to attention being focused on decision-making, information processing and control. The organization having decided on its purposes must be designed as a complex system to respond to environmental disturbances relevant to those purposes. In turbulent environments this necessitates decentralized control because not all the information necessary to cope with change can be processed at the top of the organization. The organization must manage single-loop learning, correcting deviations from prescribed goals; it also needs to be capable of double-loop learning, changing the nature of its purposes if these become unattainable as the environment shifts. The brain metaphor is criticized for the lack of consideration it gives to individuals and their motivations, to power and con£ict, and to how purposes are actually derived.

The £ux and transformation metaphor is concerned with revealing what Morgan calls the ‘logics of change’ that give rise to the behaviour we see on the surface of organizations. We referred to this in Chapter 2 as a more structuralist orientation, seeking the mechanisms, or hidden processes, that shape those aspects of organizational activity to which managers normally devote their attention. The £ux and transformation metaphor, therefore, asks managers to be less super¢cial in the way they read what is happening in their organizations. Instead, they should map the counterintuitive behav-iour that is produced by interacting positive and negative feedback loops.

Or they should seek to understand the consistent patterns that underlie the behaviour of even the most complex and apparently unpredictable of systems. Critics of this metaphor, as applied to organizations, doubt whether there are any deep, structural ‘laws’ that social organizations obey and worry about the unregulated power that might be given to experts if they manage to convince others that such laws do indeed exist.

According to the culture metaphor, successful managers should devote their attention to the people associated with their organizations and to the values, beliefs and philosophies held dear by those people. People act accord-ing to how they see the world, and it is through the interactions between people that organizations take their form and derive their success or failure.

Corporate culture refers to the familiar and persistent ways of seeing and acting in a particular organization. Managers need to be stewards of corporate culture ensuring there is su⁄cient shared ground so that people pull together and damaging long-term con£ict is avoided, but also maintaining enough freedom of thought to encourage original thinking and innovation. Critics of the culture metaphor claim that it distracts

Creativity and metaphor 35

attention from other important aspects of organizational success, such as achieving goals, designing appropriate structures, managing resources, etc.

It can also lead to the ideological manipulation of employees.

The political metaphor looks at how organizations are governed, at the pursuit and use of power and at the micropolitics of organizational life. Indi-viduals in organizations can be competitive as well as co-operative, pursuing di¡erent interests that may con£ict. Often, as in the System Of Systems Methodologies (SOSM) (see Chapter 2), the possible political relationships that can obtain between participants in an organization are represented as being either unitary, pluralist or coercive ^ signalling greater con£ict and reliance on power, as a means of settling disputes, as we move along that spectrum. However refreshing this perspective might be, critics suspect that it can overemphasize and, by doing so, contribute to the politicization of organizational life. And it does so to the neglect of other factors crucial to the health of organizations.

The psychic prison and instruments of domination metaphors concentrate on the negative aspects of organizational life. The psychic prison perspective emphasizes the impact it can have on the free development of our thinking.

Certain organizational forms are seen by psychoanalytic theory as born of and contributing to repression. While the ideologies that sustain capitalist organizations are regarded by Marxist thinkers as preventing individuals from realizing their full potential. Employees become ‘alienated’, as the jargon has it. The instruments of domination perspective shifts from the indi-vidual to the group level and ¢xes attention on the way certain groups are exploited by others through organizations. The classical picture is of man-agers using hierarchy and control of the labour process to extract surplus value from the workers in order to bene¢t shareholders. This is extended, however, in the metaphor to embrace all other groups who might be exploited by organizations or at least excluded from decisions that impact on them ^ other employee groups, women, the disabled, those of a di¡erent sexual orientation, minority races, those in the community a¡ected by the or-ganization, the environment, etc. Critics see organization theorists and man-agement scientists who overuse these two metaphors as being themselves ideologically driven. They have swallowed a radical political agenda that they hope to thrust on others. They are characterized as being intellectual eli-tists who, for some reason, resent employees who are happy pursuing a nice house and car rather than self-actualizing themselves. They are seen as guardians of ‘political correctness’.

The metaphor of the carnival can help point to at least two aspects of organizational life that get suppressed by the other metaphors. At carnival

time normal order is suspended and creativity, diversity and ambivalence are encouraged. This helps us to see the fragility of the social order that is sus-tained in organizations and to recognize as well the presence of other voices and other aspects that are usually suppressed or marginalized. Carnivals are also meant to be light and bright, and to be places where people have fun.

There is much in organizations too that can be explained if we pay attention to playfulness, sex, irony, etc. Critics, of course, would see the overemphasis placed by the carnival metaphor on the ‘irrational’ aspects of organizational life as trivializing. Organizations are important social institutions and the well-being of all of us depends on them functioning well.

These metaphors have been elaborated to help managers be explicit about the biases that inform their own thinking and to enable them to consider some alternative assumptions about organizations and their management.

Undoubtedly, readers will feel much more comfortable with some metaphors and the vision presented of the world they inhabit than others. It is impor-tant, however, to persevere until you become reasonably comfortable looking at the management task from the perspective o¡ered by each of the nine metaphors.