Most of the thinking I encounter aimed at helping organisations grapple with their problems has to do with maps and frameworks of a world which is thought to exist ‘out there’. These two by two grids, parts and whole charts and frameworks, even imagined estuaries, are more or less realist and representationalist and make implicit sense to bodies which make their way in a spatial world. Surely it is common sense to think that you can’t understand what you are dealing with unless you map the territory, and that you can’t make a journey until you can identify your destination?
These ways of construing the world are what Kant referred to as regulative ideas — methods to think with. So, for example, imagine that the phenomenon you are trying to understand is a whole, and it is made up of interacting parts, does that help you understand what you are trying to grapple with any better? These regulative ideas are often ambitious, abstract schemes and attempt to understand big problems in the round. In this sense they are morally serious. There may be an acknowledgement that the whole can never be fully imagined or understood, and that the models may have to undergo modification in order to work, and then become quite elaborate. For example, it may be posited that there is a whole but it is also open to the environment, or because of its complexity the system imagined comprises a series of nested, open wholes all of which are open to the environment. There is always a problem with boundaries of maps and systems, and understanding the relationship between the parts and the whole, particularly if that relationship is understood to be non-linear. Exactly how the parts make the whole is something of a mystery when those parts are considered to be us, self-interpreting, rationally-irrational human beings. Mechanistic models then shade into critical models which take more of our argumentative selves into account.
In contemporary organisational life parts/whole thinking is taken up unreflectively and umproblematically; for example there is often an explicit invitation to align, perhaps where values are understood to be the parts of one’s self understood as a whole. In order for organisations to thrive, then, we are enjoined to ‘align’ our values and ‘behaviours’ with those of an organisation’s mission, vision and values, as though an organisation can ‘have’ values and alignment is always a good thing.
An alternative method to think with, particularly if we are trying to study complex social patterning, assumes that what is ‘out there’ is also ‘in here’. In other words, it directs attention away from abstract models of social trends understood as systems, or maps, and studies instead the patterns of relationship between people in the here and now, including how actors make sense of these patterns. Instead of imagining the whole to think about the parts, it studies local interactions to think about global patterns. It works inside-out, rather than outside-in, from the particular to the general, and doesn’t assume that what’s ‘outside’ is a whole, or a map. Local patterns of relating simply produce global patterns of relating and have a fractal quality.
I mentioned previously that abstract schemes of thought often have to make additional assumptions in order for the models to reflect the fact that drawing boundaries around phenomena is always problematic. Representationalist models have to work hard to represent what they claim to.
So what’s potentially problematic about paying attention to working in groups to understand more about broader social trends? What kind of work does an inside-out method have to do to be viable?
The first dilemma is whether the local can really tell us something about the global.
In order to be viable, then, a primary assumption of inside-out thinking is that we are highly social selves not isolated and discrete individuals cut off from one another. We are shaped by society, but at the same time we shape society in our continuous interactions with each other. Better understanding our relationships, which have a quality of regular-irregularity, tells us something about each other, but also about how society works. Unpicking our socialisation, past and present, gives us some insight into broader social patterns. And this also points to the importance of working in a group –an individual can only work out so much on their own through reflection, given our own biases and habits of thought.
How do we know, even if the work takes place in a group, that the group in question isn’t just describing their own particular circumstances with weak or no generalisability?
One of the pioneers of group working, SH Foulkes, argued that the socialisation process is always imperfect and that we all develop as deviations from the social norm. In any group of more than eight people, he claimed, you will have a sufficient variety of deviations to be able to say something about broader, general trends of socialisation. This is a method which values multiple points of view, then, where understanding is acknowledged to be manifold, partial and transient. It does not depend upon aligning with a single viewpoint, but may produce a good enough understanding, a rope made of many threads in CS Peirce’s terms, to go on with for now.
An opposite problem to the difficulty of our making stuff up in our interpretations of the world which flatters us and keeps our sense of self intact, is that, if we are shaped by society, then, maybe our thoughts are overly determined by that society. The way we are moulded by society constrains what we can imagine and talk about. To what degree can we do research which is insightful and tells us more than the taken for granted, which is defined by existing power relationships about what it is and isn’t possible to say?
One important aspect of group-based methods developed from the group analytic tradition is that they use free-association. There is no agenda apart from what participants in the group have in mind to talk about. This can make group sense-making sessions disruptive. The quality of discussion in the group depends upon the quality of participation of each and every one, and participants can surprise each other, and themselves, by what they find themselves talking about. Our unconscious motivations and more hidden social processes are made more manifest and are material to think and talk about. Given how much of our socialisation is unconscious and unreflective, there is some possibility that more about society becomes more visible.
Free association in the group and the lack of imperative to follow an agenda or achieve an outcome for the meeting allows the group to think out loud and achieve what Piaget refers to as ‘liberated convictions’. What I understand him to mean by this is that knowledge is produced through a combination of group processes which question and probe, which in turn provoke spontaneous insight based on participants’ original experience. Piaget accepts the shaping function of already accepted ways of understanding the world, but argues that there is room through improvisational inquiry to elicit insights which are more fully individual and unique. It maintains the social paradox of forming and being formed. Researching how we are socialised in the here and now cannot avoid using the ways of thinking, and power dynamics, into which we have become acculturated, but, particularly with free association and loosening the constraints about ‘outcomes’, can still produce the novel.
Inside-out thinking brings ‘out there’ in here, and pays attention to in-the-moment socialisation processes in order to think more broadly about the patterning of human bodies. It does not depend upon frameworks, maps or notions of wholes, but rather assumes that the local is a particular manifestation of the global, from which we can derive insights. It generalises from the particular to the general, with all the caveats about doing so — to broaden the inquiry and make it more robust then depends on reading other accounts of the same phenomena we become interested in to widen the circle of concern as much as possible, and to keep the inquiry process going.