Vignette 2 Excellence Model Workshop: April 2005

My position and purpose: I set up the Excellence Model workshops as a feed into the

service planning process and an opportunity to engage emotions with the Group. Previously, the Model was not linked in this way and the only outcome was a separate action plan which served no real purpose except attempting to plug the gaps identified through running the Model. My aim was to explore and capture a process of

emotional engagement that unearthed how we achieved “excellence performance” (as defined by the Model) and so uncover something of the role of emotions. I expected the sessions to uncover emotion and give deeper insight into ways of working and

behaviours behind areas of success. I think it was at this stage that I had my first idea that my ambition to transform the Service Plan into a vehicle to communicate the role of emotion in work might not happen. However, the process of exploration towards this aim was engaging me with a depth of knowing that excited me. I knew that I was working with emotions and they were within my subjectivity and ideas in a powerful sensing of energy.

Happenings: in a similar way to the Service Planning Workshop, I saw emotions

enter into the dialogue about enabling processes and results. I recognised that the continuation of the engagement process described in Vignette 1 was vital progress and could not be forced. I was maturing as a reflective practitioner, my knowing process was becoming more exercised, and the Group was becoming more relaxed in their opening out about how they felt about work and their relationships with emotion. “This [Excellence] Model is fine for profit-led businesses like BT but how can we relate to things like market share or bottom-line profits? Excellence for us as public servants is serving our residents in the best way possible. This whole process is quite annoying really but it’s what they want.”

The comment above echoed the Group’s worry about delivering for the organisation’s planning process despite the dissonance between work experiences and Model

exercises. Going with this feeling, I tried to push the Model to the background and use it as a framework of questions (see Appendix 1).

My reflection in action: I noticed that on every occasion when excitement surfaced

this was not about work areas that had been planned. On several occasions, though, the “plan” changed to incorporate the ideas as if they had been planned for. A

typical illustration of this was the idea to join up on site visits to trading premises so as to incorporate planning and trading standards inspections. This would save resources and give a joined-up customer service. The impetus to refine and work on this

innovative cross-working was lost when it was positioned by Resources Management as cost-saving – all the other service quality and customer experience issues seemed lost as they could not easily be accounted for, unlike mileage reductions, and they seemed too complex and risky to pursue further. The full energy in the idea from the staff was lost and the emotion cut down to a limited size.

The incorporation of the emotion-laden new work was not celebrated but subsumed into the plans and became commonplace. It was not just that the work that was sucked into the machinery of power but also that I could feel the emotion detach from the description of the innovative work – and with it the matter-of-fact inflexion in the voice of the storyteller became flat again. I could see that this had a numbing impact on the Group and me – our tales of last year’s innovations had become institutionalised, and emotionless. I saw this as a result of the collective formation of emotion at work (as I describe in Section 3.1). I reflected that the ownership of ideas in work engaged emotion in actions and in the telling but when it is realised that the superior power of the organisation subsumes the inferior subjective energy and spirit is lost – and with them go the emotion and the possibility of embedding expertise and opportunities to inspire others.

The Excellence Model framework started off by creating an alternative framework to organisational demands and processes, and presented questions of enabling processes and results in a new way. However, it was difficult to prevent the Model becoming a proxy for the organisation’s demands. The Group began to get anxious about scoring well enough against the criteria. The presence of the Model began to feel like a monster to be tamed or satisfied (I pictured the image of Giddens’ (1990) Juggernaut of Modernity). However, again reflecting on my anxiety from the previous Service Planning Workshop, I could take a detached view; floating above, listening and observing intently, then becoming immersed as exciting stories relayed innovative and transforming work.

I was excited about and very nervous of handling such a movement of creative energy in the Group and more markedly in me. The workshops were enjoyed by all but the crescendo of emotional connection was not sustained. I found that others and I kept checking ourselves so as to close down the emotional dialogue and ensure we constructed a suitable outcome for the Service Plan.

These exercises were proving cathartic as an outlet for the creative and passionate work that was largely hidden in the organisation’s teams. The tales were identifying

new power and supplying information for the objective model, yet there was no apparent way of holding this subjective energy in order to share it with the organisation.

I was beginning to see that I was part of the problem. This was revealing and

interested me in terms of how I could impact change. I was trying to use the models and concepts to discover emotion and package this up to impact on others in the organisation. Whilst my intentions were worthy and consistent with my research question, I was beginning to see that the motive to contain emotion in the Service Plan was in danger of becoming part of the commodification and appropriation process I had identified in my conceptual framework.

Without holding on to my learning and expression of emotion I would not have sensed this at all, and my research would have found a way of closing down and concluding. I felt excited about the way my action research opportunity brought out experiences of emotion in relationship with subjective workers in the organisation. My self-reflection with my inner-self was enabling me to see how emotion was in relationship with others and me in work; and I emphasise here that it was not the affective responses that emotional intelligence models were eliciting from human resource paradigms.