Dangling Conversation

@markhillary asks "When you follow company Twitter accounts, do you like being able to see who runs the account, like a named person on the profile?"

I think that depends how gullible you are. When I get a letter signed by an Important Person, I generally assume it was written by his staff and signed in his absence. And when I get a mass-produced "personal letter" from an Important Person, I assume it was generated by a computer and signed by a programmer.

I got an email recently, which claimed to be a "A Personal Message from Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO, OMG and Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech and OMG Board Member". I wrote back and thanked Richard personally - not to the address on the email (which was omg_marketing@omg.org) but to his real email address. For some reason, he ignored this. I hope he's not ill or anything.

And corporate communications sometimes use a fictional identity. Gerald Kaufman MP once tried to phone a person in the Prime Minister's office who had responded to a letter, only to discover that "Mrs E Adams" didn't actually exist. [Source: John Walsh: Beware letters from fictional civil servants (Independent May 2011)] This kind of thing is convenient for bureaucracies, because it allows incoming communications to be sorted by topic and redirected to whoever happens to be on duty that day. I'm sure the same thing often happens with Twitter, to prevent a corporate spokesperson ever being confused with a private individual.

As for company bosses, politicians and other celebrities, it would be naive to imagine that they always write their own tweets. "Of course they don't", tweets @markhillary, "but allowing helpers to do broadcast stuff is surely OK if the conversational is genuine?" Well, that depends on your idea of a genuine conversation.

It seems to me that there are some serious sociological and ethical problems here - of public/private identity, authenticity and trust - and we are only just learning how to operate in this new world.

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@markhillary goes on to ask another question. "If you were interacting with a brand like Virgin Media, are you happy conversing with the brand?"

My answer to that question invokes Freud's concept of transference. Our psychological state (happiness, frustration) may depend on what we project onto a given brand or persona that we are conversing with. I generally try to separate my feelings about the company/brand from my feelings about the human being who is standing between me and the company/brand - but I don't always succeed. When we are really angry about something, it is difficult to avoid being rude or sarcastic to the junior employee that picks up the phone, even when we know it's not really their fault. Conversely, if the sales assistant is charming enough, it is tempting to buy something we don't really need.

Of course the CEO never picks up the phone herself. Funny that. When I'm conversing with the Virgin brand, I may fondly imagine that I'm getting Richard Branson's personal attention, but there is a little voice inside my head saying that's unlikely.

There is of course one thing that is likely to make me very unhappy indeed. Suppose I am naive enough to imagine I am having a personal conversation with Richard Branson or Richard Soley. Then the screen falls over and I see it is just some little functionary and not the Wizard of Oz at all. Isn't that just going to annoy me? Isn't it Richard, isn't it? #OMG.

Where is the fear?

@hnauheimer recommended a discussion in the Linked-In Organizational Change Practitioners group. Rauf Aslam Butt had asked why people FEAR to change, and this prompted a number of responses about resistance to change being caused by anxiety, ego, dislike of effort, fear of the unknown, and so on.

I thought it was interesting that we often describe other people as fearful, anxious, reactive, and so on, but never ourselves. WE are rational and THEY are emotional.

Sometimes resistance to change is a perfectly rational response to a flawed or ill-conceived initiative, as my friend Linda Levine pointed out many years ago. Many change programmes in large organizations are not properly thought through, and many large organizations are trying to run several incompatible change programmes at the same time. As Christina Buchanan said in the discussion, we should all fear badly-planned change.

The second good reason to fear change is that the change may get half-way through and then run out of money or trust. (People losing faith when the change gets to that inevitable dip in the middle.) Or there'll suddenly be a new person at the top with a different agenda.

People learn to be apprehensive about change because of accurate observation of what has happened in their organizations and elsewhere. Art Kleiner suggests that "resistance to change occurs not because people fear change, but because they fear the consequences of contradicting the perceived priorities of the core group" (Strategy+Business, April 2010). Rather than complain about "fear", maybe change practitioners should look at addressing the causes of fear. (Perhaps this was the purpose of Rauf's original question.)

When change agents perceive ordinary busy people as fearful or ego-driven, simply because they don't leap with enthusiasm and energy for every half-baked scheme that is put to them, or because they ask awkward questions, maybe there's a certain amount of projection involved. (Psychologists call this transference.) It might seem that the people who are really most anxious about this change and its immediate prospects are the change agents themselves? But that's not the whole truth either.

Following my post Where is the intelligence?, we might ask a similar question about the true location of the fear. Even if the change agents authentically acknowledge their own feelings about the change, and deal with these feelings in a healthy and mature manner, we might wonder if the change agents really owned these feelings, or whether they were sensitively picking up the anxiety embedded in the organization itself. (Psychologists call this counter-transference.)

Unless we are completely emotionally cut off, our feelings inside organizations are strongly connected to the emotional state of the organization as a whole. This applies to feelings such as motivation as well as anxiety, and applies whether we are change agents ourselves or the recipients of change led by other people - often we may be both at the same time.

Change agents should also acknowledge their own contribution to the sum total of fear and anxiety in an organization. One common tactic for change is to create something called a compelling event - a story that attaches fear to the status quo, prodding the organization reluctantly into the future like a herd of cattle. As a consequence of this tactic, many organizations are almost paralysed by the accumulation of would-be compelling events.

But in my opinion, one of the biggest errors of a change agent is to focus attention on the people who are most vocal in expressing anxiety about a given initiative - treating them as if they were the instigators of these feelings rather than merely witnesses to them, sometimes even trying to exclude or avoid them as if this will cause the bad feelings to disappear. But anyone who brings their concerns out into the open is doing you a favour, because these concerns can then be addressed, and the change programme will be better for it. It is the silent ones you really have to worry about.


Linda Levine, An Ecology of Resistance. In Tom McMaster et al, Facilitating Technology Transfer through Partnership (Springer 1997) pp 163-174

 

Related posts: Passive Adoption (December 2009), Why new systems don't work (December 2009), The Role of the Sceptic (April 2010)

Off-Label Trust

One of a series of posts about Off-Label

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In a pharmaceutical context, Off-Label refers to uses of drugs that are not approved by the regulators and cannot therefore be printed on the product label or officially promoted by the drug company. More generally, it refers to any unauthorized or emergent use of a product or service. In this blog posting, I shall explore the implications of off-label for trust.

There is a regulatory process that is supposed to allow medical practitioners and their patients to trust pharmaceutical products. Under certain conditions, trust in the regulatory process (authority trust) generates trust in particular products (commodity trust). One of these conditions is strict adherence by all parties to the label.

• Users must confine themselves to using the product as specified on the label.
• Providers must confine themselves to promoting the product solely as specified on the label.
  

Whether the drug company sales force is permitted to hint at off-label uses of a given product or not, this sets up a transference in which the nudge/wink (or enforced silence) of the salesman replaces the bureaucratic authority of the FDA.

Meanwhile, samizdat off-label information may circulate in the medical community, possibly based on direct/indirect trial/error experience by medical practitioners. This is a form of network trust.

Transference and Counter-Transference

Transference

Within psychoanalytic theory, there has been a great deal written about the phenomenon of transference, where the client uses the relationship with the therapist to replace something else, and becomes as it were addicted to the therapy/therapist.

A related phenomenon also occurs with management consultancy.

Counter-Transference

Counter-Transference refers to the phenomenon where the analyst or consultant picks up feelings that are relevant to the interaction with the client.

An inexperienced analyst or consultant may allow these feelings to interfere with the consultation.

An experienced analyst or consultant may be able to use these feelings as useful pointers towards What Is Going On.

Transitional Objects

"Interestingly, consultants and other change agents often become transitional objects for their client firms: The client refuses to ‘let go’, and becomes crucially dependent on the change agent’s advice in relation to every move." [Morgan p229]

"In helping to facilitate any kind of social change it may thus be necessary for the change agent to create transitional phenomena when they do not exist naturally. Just as father or mother may have to help their child find a substitute for Teddy, a change agent - whether a social revolutionary or a paid consultant - must usually help his or her target group to relinquish what is held dear before they can move on. Significantly, this can rarely be done effectively by ‘selling’ or imposing a ‘change package’, an ideology or a set of techniques. The theory of transitional phenomena suggests that in situations of voluntary change, the person doing the changing must be in control of the process. … If the change agent tries to bypass or suppress what is valued, it is almost sure to resurface at a later date." [Morgan p 229]

Notes

Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization

John Suler, The Psychology of Cyberspace (1996)

• Transference to computers and cyberspace
• Transference among people online 

Wikipedia: Transference

Related posts: Trust and Transference (January 2004)

Marx in the coffehouse

originally posted by John

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My inclinations being more Marxian than Freudian (unless saying that is already a Freudian giveaway) reification rather than transference is my preferred underpinning for trust’s vicarious (inconsistent, non-egoistic) dimensions. Apart from anything else it makes commodity trust and network trust such deliciously powerful things.


Similarly, reading Richard’s links, as an old time Paineite, I don’t put much reliance on Burke. I perhaps don’t know him intimately enough to go along with Goldsmith who called him ‘…an intellectual prostitute…who, born for the universe, narrow’d his mind and gave to party up what was meant for mankind’. (And I wonder, every time I see them, exactly what their adjacent statues outside Trinity College, Dublin, really stand for.) For me Burke is both public-man and the author of publicness. The Thatcherite policy TINA – there is no alternative – and President Bush’s you’re either with us or against us (both entirely trust-free propositions) both owe any political legitimacy they have to Burke. So, generally, I agree with Goldsmith.


I also agree with Richard’s point about people in public life being ‘supposed to know’ and this supposition being more problematic than my concerns with the narrower notion of ownership. I’m beginning to think the difference might be like the difference between Marx and Freud, between reification and transference.


This point was brought home to me on Saturday while reading an article by Max Hastings, a writer of a Burkean persuasion whose work I’d cheerfully lived without reading until that day, but who was writing in my newspaper. He made his point to me after two opening paragraphs in which he declared himself bitterly disappointed by the Hutton report. Tellingly, he then added, ‘I say this with regret. I am more instinctively supportive of institutions, less iconoclastic, than most of the people who write for the Guardian, let alone read it.’


My feeling instantly was that his regret arose from he and Hutton being members of the same (establishment) coffeehouse – figuratively if not literally – and as a result, knowing each other as public-men. The scales fell from my eyes and I saw in flash how the other eighty-odd percent of the population view the world. Hastings didn’t mention trust but I took trusting them to be part of his instinctive support for these institutions. I also took it that he felt his trust had been abused.


For a short while I was once a member of Mensa and once, briefly and uneasily, a member of a secret society whose monthly meetings were held under Chatham House rules. Reading those two sentences Hastings had written I recalled my unease at being in coffeehouses where things were ‘supposed’ to be known. And where knowledge was owned. And while Hastings seems perfectly happy being there, my own trusted principle is yet more Marx, Groucho this time: 'I'd never belong to a club that would have me as a member'.

Trust and Transference

When John talks about the Wizard of Oz, I think this relates to the way we project imaginary stuff onto our so-called leaders (or therapists). Freud called this "transference".



Interestingly there is a growing literature on another notion of transference in relation to online trust. This seems to be something to do with transitive trust - we imagine we can trust B because we imagine we can trust A.



Authority trust breaks down if the authority is imaginary (based on transference) rather than real. Network trust breaks down if the network is imaginary. And so on.



Lacanians define transference in terms of knowledge. The analyst is the one "supposed to know". In public life, we are surrounded by people who are "supposed to know". Lord Hutton is supposed to know the "truth" about the death of Dr Kelly.



To my mind, this is more problematic than mere ownership.