It wasn’t really that long ago—a million or so years in our line, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms—that instead of a gazelle we were being hauled off as a leopard’s tasty meal. Just picture some hominid in our line as the victim. For one, we’re far easier to catch. Take away our clothes, electricity, technology, and organizations and we’re right back there once again—a meager prey species hanging on for dear life.
Farfetched, you might say? Well, think again!
As explained in Tool Making to Making Time by Dr. Tom Blue and available as a download from this website (click “Books” on the Menu) we rose from a prey species to a dominant predator in groups (as in hunting bands). Sizeable, diverse groups can work with the quantum condition since the misconceptions of individual members cancel out. Our species ascended by taking advantage of the quantum condition in what has become the organizations that we know today.
Over time, our species selected for this ability, so that all of us are born to instinctively take advantage of the quantum condition in groups. This breeding went so far as to select for dyslexia, which gave individuals the advantages of heightened intuition and a multidimensional perspective (among other gifts). That’s why one in ten people has dyslexia today. That also implies that nine out of ten people (those without dyslexia) are at a disadvantage when it comes to a grasp of the organizational quantum condition. As for those with dyslexia, while advantaged, could be disadvantaged by dyslexia when it comes to reading or writing about the subject. In oral cultures, where dyslexia evolved, it didn’t pose the reading and writing difficulties imposed with the advent of writing, five thousand years ago. Two examples of dyslexic individuals were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize back to back (Einstein in 1921, Bohr in 1922) for their contributions to quantum mechanics. That’s the good news.
Now for the bad news. The quantum condition in organizations is a double-edged sword. We were also bred to use this condition to instinctively disassemble organizations no longer serving the common good. If organizations no longer work for the benefit of all, they must go. Today, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of organizations, does it! Since the fall of organizations happens instinctively and gradually, no one knows it’s happening. Having opted out of an intervention to turn things around (see below) the collapse takes about 20 years. Sigmund Freud called it the death drive—no longer taken all that seriously in individual psychology, but well documented in organizations by Joanne Faulkner. As she documented, the death drive “takes specific pleasure precisely in what is most painful.”
What makes it worse is that organizations abhor fixes to the problem:
- Should a professional refer an organization for help, that person (such as a CPA or attorney) likely looses a client.
- Should employees merely suggest an intervention by an outsider, he or she likely gets fired, as Isabel Menzies Lyth documented decades ago.
It doesn’t take long (three to six months with weekly group sessions), but it does take a trained outsider experienced in the intervention to turn things around.* Just to prove the point, Dr. Blue’s study, Tool Making to Making Time, experimentally controlled for an intervention in the mid-1980s, and what a difference it made. The two contrasting members of the treatment group, receiving the intervention, consisted of a small job shop in Twinsburg, OH rebuilding oil pumps and air-blast compressors to cool transformers at utility substations and, in sharp contrast, the largest single facility in the Continental U.S. producing blown-film plastic in Monroe, LA. The two members of the control group, not receiving the intervention, consisted of General Motors’ two light plants: the older taillight plant in Anderson, IN, where I had no contact, and the newer headlight plant 750 miles to the south in Monroe, where I had attempted to intervene.
The job shop in Twinsburg sold to General Electric in 1999 for an undisclosed amount and also, in 1999, the blown-film plastics plant sold to Tyco International for $85 million in cash. Three years later, Tyco made a name for itself with the $600 million theft from the company by its Chairman and CEO in cahoots with the CFO. The job shop in Twinsburg later broke away from GE in 2010 and regained the compressor business as FirstPower Group under the original owner along with a manager of engineering and quality from GE. FirstPower is now a billion-dollar business. As for the two light plants, they succumbed to the instinctive disassembly at GM without an intervention and suddenly shutdown simultaneously, lights out for good, on January 12, 2007 in GM’s backhanded New Year’s celebration of their Centennial Year.
Whoppee?
So, what can you do without losing a client or your job? Simply contact Blue Organizational Solutions (click “Contact” on the Menu). We’ll make the call, take the heat, and leave your name out of it. You could book a free session to learn more about us (click “Book a Session” on the Menu). Oh, you might also recommend this website or Dr. Blue’s book. Let people know they can contact us and book a free session. As you might have noticed, you can leave a comment on this post or on any other post. You can also email us with feedback (click “Contact” on the Menu) about our website or on Dr. Blue’s book. The detailed feedback is most appreciated.
Who knows, it just might make a big difference. Besides, who wants to fall prey and risk extinction, all over again?
Technical Footnote:
* Having coined the phrase midlife crisis in 1965, the Canadian psychoanalyst, Elliott Jaques, MD with a PhD from Harvard in social relations also originated the term, social-analyst in 1956 to describe someone who intervenes to allow corporate cultures to reclaim their quantum capabilities. In his research, he found the length of resource commitments to be a felt-fair measure across management levels. When someone moves up a level, so does the length of his or her resource commitments.
However, he missed the y² = 537e⁻0.76ⁿ equation in months for the maximum lengths of these commitments (where n is the 1, 2, 3, 4,… management level and e is the 2.71828… base of the natural logarithm). The 537 months cover the 45+ year career of the average employee. The exponent of 0.76 comes from the E = M0.76 ratio of energy to mass in microbes to mammals, wherein an elephant uses far less energy per gram of weight than a mouse. This equation reveals a Midlevel gap in the management structure from 3 to 6 months, which is also how long the intervention lasts. The intervention comes to an end when the participating group takes over the meetings and runs them. Then with the Midlevel staffed by this diverse employee group in superposition, the group stabilizes the entire management structure.
Converting the equation to a unit circle (with a radius of 1.0)
with y for the sine wave (shown below), one sine wave for authority and another sine wave for responsibility, at 90 degrees to each other in an electromagnetic wave (Key to Positions ■CEO ▲Division Manager ◇Plant Manager ○Operations Manager □Midlevel). The sine wave shows the wave-position duality that characterizes the quantum state in organizations, as does
- Niels Bohr’s shifts from one energy or management level to another (see “Stability→Profit & Spare Time, What a Bohr?“) for which he won the 1922 Nobel Prize
- Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, for which he won the 1932 Nobel Price, with either authority or responsibility statistically significant at any one time
- how a Midlevel group stabilizes the management structure with each member occupying every management level—all at the same time—in superposition
