PNWD-UUA LEADERSHIP SCHOOL, Pt.2 of the Narrative

ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN THEORY

The emotional pitch that the worship services showed was paralleled by a high intellectual pitch and a growing awareness of group dynamics.

Organizational Development is a way of designing and managing systems so that they are constantly accumulating data, analyzing it, consciously designing changes, and then testing the consequences by accumulating new data, thereby starting the circle over. It’s not unlike the scientific method.

Another link between OD and UU ideology is TORI theory. TORI stand for trust, openness, realization and interdependence. It is based on the conviction that people learn most and best when they are not afraid, when they don’t have to hide what they think, when they can assert themselves and grow, and when they can work easily with others.

For me, this quote from a paper on “TORI Theory and Practise” by Jack R. Gibb, sums up the whole Leadership School experience: “Growth occurs when a person, on his own steam, on his own impetus, does things that reinforce desired physical responses and behavior patterns. Changed behavior results from showing feelings rather than from talking about them, from doing things rather than thinking about or observing them, from letting one’s self happen rather than examining one’s motives and from physically carrying out an impulse or making a choice. After growth people look different. Growth is its own reward. The kind of sustained learning and growth that makes possible living in trust comes from self-sustained and self-directed changes in life style and behavior patterns.”

Ord Elliott, then a professor at the George H. Atkinson Graduate School of Administration at Willamette U. in Salem, Oregon, is a young, dynamic, extremely appealing man who sends sparks flying in all directions. The basic material for the first year was fairly tried and true theory from communications, but it was presented in an energetic manner and often in conjunction with a game that proved the point.

We talked about basic skills like paraphrasing, describing observable actions of others to them, describing our own feelings, doing a perception check, and so on. We reviewed the task functions in a discussion: initiating, opinion seeking, opinion giving, clarifying, summarizing, consensus testing, as well as the maintenance functions: encouraging, expressing group feelings, harmonizing, compromizing, gate-keeping, setting standards.

Exercises were designed to give us chances to explore our own styles, to “catch ourselves in the act” of whatever we tended to do, and to help others see themselves in non-punishing ways. We did bird-cage type exercises and exercises like “lost at sea,” which prove that the group is smarter than the individual. (Unless you have a trained survivalist in the group.) One exercise, a key ever-after for me, was called “Win As Much As You Can” and was designed so that competitive people could win at the expense of the group and cooperative people would win as a group. I talked my partner into doing a trust-breaking maneuver at the end, so that we DID win as much as we could. (I hope I eventually explained to the group that I grew up in a family where my father was so invested in working for cooperatives that the family suffered financially.)

What gave me food for thought was the reaction of the group. Several people were simply stunned that I should be so selfish and actively avoided me for quite a while. In fact, until I expressed distress after a period of defiance. (I think they interpreted this as regret and compliance, to be rewarded with compassion, but they were mistaken. It taught me to be wary.) I’ve thought many long hours about that experience and what it meant in terms of my own motives, the great desire of UU’s to do what is “right,” the way symbolic issues become as serious as real ones and so on. Clearly liberals have “party lines” and enforce them as severely as fundamentalists. Tolerance for difference is mouthed but not practiced. (It’s also based more on socioeconomics, which some say is the true definers of denominations, than on values.)

As our consciousness about group dynamics and individual roles went up, a schism began to grow in the participants. Because it was summer and away from home and there was a good deal of liquor and music for dancing, there was a party element and pairing off. As usual, there were twice as many women as men and all the older, less slim and compliant women were not waltzed around the floor. We formed our own group, full of classic feminist anger, and did a lot of bitching. We resented the absence of more female leadership and chewed every small nuance over for sexism. A lot of anger focused on the noisiness of the party people. Looking back, I suspect there were a few lesbian feelers extended, mostly by older women, framing it as motherly comforting.

Some of the formal material included an essay by Pfeiffer and Jones on “Openness, Collusion and Feedback,” but somehow it didn’t “take,” at least on me, until I read it for the tenth time two years later. The problem was tattling or confessing material that was too intimate (common enough to now be designated as TMI: “too much information”) and also a lot of gossip about church affairs and individuals. There was no way to reality check this stuff or ground it through action of some kind and some of it was inflammatory enough to arouse a lot of emotions. Of course, it made wonderful ammunition for people who oppose TORI theory, openly or not. If this didactic material had been made real in a game it might have worked better, though it was explosive. Maybe we were actually working on some of this in the Credo groups. I discovered then (and rediscover now) that I have a real problem with such issues: I take what I hear much too seriously for one thing. For another, I do not always understand the consequences of disclosure, or how much can or “should” be done to “fix” problems, particularly in terms of confrontation.

OD touched and blended with the UU material again when we came to the influence of the organization’s ideology upon the way it is structured and empowered. We discussed power orientation, role orientation, task orientation and person orientation -- how they can interweave and how an organization can have both an overt and covert ideology which may conflict. We talked about assertive versus aggressive and the inevitable clashes between task-oriented people and maintenance or person-oriented people. These concepts became part of our vocabulary and, because we had words to think about such things, we began to see them around us right away. Instead of thinking, “Oh, oh! George is being a hard-head and putting down Annie again!” we could think, “Gee, George is wanting to get the task done now and Annie needs more reassurance that everyone is going to be included, so what will be a good thing to prevent a deadlock? Oh, it’s okay -- Tim is promising to call everyone and Annie can relax. We finally began to get the point of asking “How are you feeling?”

The FIRO-B pencil and paper test stands for “Fundamental Relation Oriented Behavior.” The idea was that the questions produced two scores in three categories. One score showed expressed desire for inclusion in the group and the other showed wished-for inclusion in the group. A second pair showed expressed desire for power versus wished-for desire for power. I forget the third category. After the “Win As Much As you Can” incident, everyone felt better when my FIRO-B score showed “expressed desire” and “wished-for desire” for inclusion were both zero! Which shows me that UU’s always feel better about “bad” things if they can be scientifically measured. I do feel that was a true score and that having my attention drawn to it so dramatically heped me to move into community more bravely. But it begs the question of why I was there at all and it predicts my much later departure from the ministry and the whole UU movement.

For all our interpersonal relations, Ord stressed five “norms:” to maintain sensitivity to depth and vulnerability; to participate; to experiment, especially on oneself; to take responsibility for one’s own actions; and to maintain openness strategically -- that is, to find what is comfortable and then increase the level no more than ten per cent.

Just for fun, we used the “Garbage Can Theory of Organizations:” “An organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision-makers looking for work.” This turned out to be quite true and relevant. To a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Anyway, to sum up, OD is NOT experts, sensitivity training, subversion, management by objectives, transactional analysis, Gestalt, job enrichment, crisis intervention, remedial programs, retreads, cooking-out conflict, a quick cure, or a superimposed structure. OD IS goal-oriented, system-wide, value-loaded (which is where it fits with UU), problem-focused, preventative and developmental, continuous and inevitable, long term, and change managing. It consists of a regular cycle of assessment (sensitively collecting data), diagnosis by the people within the system, team-building (flexibly and voluntarily), intergroup relations (Trusting, Open, Realizing and Interdependent), redesign (structurally), and assessment (back around to the beginning again and ready to start another cycle.)

Peter accompanied all of Ord’s theories with formal lectures on the history and doctrine of the UU’s, the theological basis and alternatives of UUism, and the specifics of the system of polity. He started with Jonathan Edwards (“Human beings are sinners in the hands of an angry God!”) and laid over against that William Ellery Channing (our likeness to God). We talked about the doctrines of election, original sin and atonement, and how the UU position reacts againt those Calvinist ideas. Peter emphasized how much our process, built on individual authority, is the core of our denomination and rests on our faith in people, and yet his key concepts were the Covenant and the Beloved Community.

As an active exercise we spent some time with the Rokeach series of values used a few years back in a denominational survey: one of qualities and one of hierarchy of goals. The items were given, then one sorts them in order of personal importance. This is my own hierarchy of qualities, highest first: honest, loving, forgiving, courageous, responsible, imaginative, logical, broad-minded, independent, helpful, capable, intellectual, self-controlled, cheerful, ambitious, obedient, polite and clean. “Obedient, polite and clean” came out last on EVERYONE’s list, which was a source of hilarity!

The other list was (my order): a sense of accomplishment, happiness, an exciting life, a world of beauty, inner harmony, a world at peace, national security, family security, a comfortable life, pleasure, salvation and social recognition. (As I type this list, I notice that I would put them in a different order now.) After arranging our individual lists, we compiled them in our Credo groups, then as a total group, and then compared with the typical Protestant list. That gave us a good deal of food for thought and some concrete ideology to deal with.


CREDO

The Credo groups were really the most intense focus for our own personality philosophy and beliefs. Each night we read aloud to each other what we had written during the day, then discussed a bit. Is the person a tabula rasa? (This is now in the pop culture as “The Blank Slate” with Stephen Pinker and others arguing against it.) Is he/she that which seeks to become? Is it a matter of genetics versus environment? Is a person naturally good, bad or neutral? What is the relationship between the biological being, the ethical and moral being, and the immortally transcendent being -- or do you accept that last? It was interesting that in my group the engineer offered his bullet list, the architect gave us sweeping principles in a metaphor about a sail boat, the young mother went to child-rearing theory, and we two older women -- at the time back in school -- had the most red-hot vivid papers.

The third Credo group took evil as a subject. The night itself was evil. People had spent the day reflecting on bad things from their pasts. The groups turned into almost cathartic, grieving sessions. Suicides, attempted murder, cancer, divorce, loss and corruption were thick in the air. Our group really suffered, including Peter, but we drew close together and some of the ice in our hearts was thawed.

The fourth night was “transcendence” and again everyone came through. We reached for every big and beautiful thing we could imagine and aspire towards. The architect told a story about being caught in a terrible storm on a fishing ship with a balky old captain who refused to take sensible precautions. They survived and when the architect got his feet back on the shore, he threw his arms around the first thing he saw: a big yellow dog! Because we had shared so much old terror the night before we were also able to share old joy. It would not be too much to say we were Unified (Unitarian) and Universally saved.

That was the first year. It was a week before I got MY feet back on the ground. I had a major problem with what to do with all this information and experience. It turned out to be very hard for me to explain to others, partly because it was so emotionally laden, but there was no “big yellow dog” I could safely throw my arms around. In the end I worked out more of the concepts at work than in the church. I also conceived of the idea of becoming a minister. (Hoping to follow the Leadership theories, I signed up with a therapist to do a self-investigation. She was Jewish, secular, and a feminist. I think she was too invested in success, healing and feeling good to be effective.)

So many people felt this problem of what to do “after” Leadership School, that some formed decompression groups or support groups. There was a short winter workshop that did follow up.