Maslow considered physical needs as the most basic. Obviously if a person is hungry or cold, they have no time for higher conceptual arguments, friendship or philosophy.
Physical needs, or base needs also presuppose a stable, holistic foundation, and it is in this analogy that we wish to develop our concepts. We wish to stress the holistic qualities of physicality. We think first of our bodies, and then its parts. Our bodies are a wondrous example of a complex system evolving through time to its nature and environment. Humans well know the penalty of depriving one of its components; the whole system pays.
Connected with this concept of physicality, there is the concept of adaptability, potentiality and expression. Our bodies are not only what we make them; they are the extension of our lives and purpose. The strategies and tactics of those purposes change and so must our physical bodies to react to the realities and practicalities of our lives.
In terms of an organization, we immediately draw attention to the associated idea of multi-disciplinary groups. As we shall see, it is a key component of how we learn, and how we think about learning. We naturally see the whole as a sum of discrete and component parts.
However, our physicality goes beyond that. Our physicality demands we act. It means our organizational structures matter a great deal. It means they are likely not nearly as fluid as they should be. It means without our explicit exercise, we shall surely decline.
Specialization
The world is increasingly specialized. However, various disciplines have been researching and learning about essentially the same phenomena for decades, incubated by the silos of their own disciplinary languages and research.
Too often, our executives no longer think in terms of the whole organization. They cannot. There is little formal training to do so. The Renaissance man is dead.
Perhaps part of the challenge is not to train the executive to consider the organization, but to bring the organization to the executive. The organization, the hive must begin to act like one. It must structure itself in order to do so. It must divest itself of its hierarchy even while it buttresses it in a much more aggressive manner, not so much in developing strategic endeavors, or financial decision making, but in the spiritual and emotional well being of the organization.
What does that mean? What does the individual need to learn to increase their effectiveness? For starters, we must begin with the idea of meaning or mission. Rarely is there an effective map of the organization that describes its purpose as an organism. Functional departmental organizational structures give almost no clue about an organization’s purpose, much less how it accomplishes its goals. A leg cannot be an effective leg until it understands how it relates to the rest of the body. Besides understanding the meaning or essential purpose of the body, components must understand how they fit. No real meaningful or creative contribution obtains until it does.
To illustrate, each cell contains all the DNA necessary to replicate the entire organism. No manager or queen or sergeant must give instruction to the ants in a colony. No manager needs to give instructions to the pipe team at Nucor Steel.
We speak of empowerment as an action rather than as a natural state of the organism. No ant needs to be empowered. Neither does any human unless constrained in the first place. No cell or Internet node needs to be encouraged to become engaged. Neither does any human unless constrained by conditioning or organizational structure in the first place.
This idea fits well with what we know about creativity; to imagine something new, we need to understand the big picture. However, specialization obscures the big picture. Many of our disciplines demand a level of specialization that will only grow deeper through time. Therefore, our structures must accommodate those specializations. We individually will never know everything.
To paraphrase Frankl, we must stop asking ourselves what we wish to do to enrich ourselves, and ask ourselves what the organization demands of us. What does the organization need to do to fulfill its meaning? If it does so well, it will do so profitably.
We therefore come back to the idea of engendering each associate, each team member, each component of the complex system, with the fairly simple meaning or purpose of their team. The specialists learn together driven by a common meaning or purpose, just as the purpose directs our body cells. Interestingly, that concept also describes one of the ways we learn.
Cognition as Distributed
The components of our physicality exhibit comparisons to one of the ways we learn. There is a well-known story going around the Internet that describes the wondrous and surprising tale of making a pencil; the tale describes the fact that no one person can make one.[i] No single organization makes it. It is the product of self-organizing specialists:
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!
In his research on cognitive learning, Hutchins describes distributed cognition in the navigation of a U.S. Navy ship out of the harbor, where six people using sophisticated tools made it possible to accomplish tasks beyond the capabilities of any individual member.[ii] The active distribution itself allows adaptability and excellence that no individual can perform.
Another familiar example is of the specialized members of a sports team. The team requires the input and contribution of a highly interactive group; in hockey, positions consist of goalie, defense, wing and center. There are six players on the ice and four specializations; this high degree of specialization relative to the number of players is common in sports, music, and teams in general. It is interesting to note that in football, where specialization is the most advanced, one of the key methods of confusing the opponent is to rearrange the specializations in new configurations and duties so the opponent cannot predict actions or outcome. Incidentally, doesn’t that sound like an effective business tactic?
Further, cognition is not merely distributed. As the psychologist Moreno noticed in self-organizing groups, as complexity theory stipulates, and as Adam Smith described in ‘the Invisible Hand,’ individual actions often occur within situations where spontaneous order evolves. No central plan or construct could possibly envision a blueprint detailed enough to replicate it. The order is the product of a never-ending series of adjustments made by individuals to the constantly changing environment in which they participate.
The creators of the group depend on this adaptability or reaction. A basketball team depends on the creative forces of this group dynamic. The game is not a never-ending series of pre-arranged plays and pre-choreographed ‘chess moves,’ so-to-speak, it is the artful positioning of the team that through its coordination and reactions creates successful situations.
Likewise, innovation in free markets is the product of members interacting in continual searches for improvement, survival and efficiency. No planner can reproduce this activity. They can only nurture the circumstances or environment.
Lastly, no parent engineer an adult. A person grows through a unique experiential journey, tempered by meaning and personal choice. Individual, group and organizational behavior exemplify these dynamics.
The conclusion to our examples is that organizations heavily dependent on hierarchical structures must be fully aware of the naturally suppressant effect that top-down choreography has on adaptability and creativity. The physical organization of a firm and its attendant culture exerts a fundamental effect on the complexity and ability of its members to successfully perform.
Synergy of the Physical Body
Perhaps because of a synthesis of the apparent dichotomy of components and the whole, Maslow noticed that actualized people exhibited an ability to appreciate a freshness or renewal of well-worn experiences and events. They appreciate their environment in new and wonderful ways. They find solace and beauty in familiar places. They rejoice in situations that for most of us inspire only semi-conscious awareness. The actualized person, on the other hand, finds at times an almost mystical wonder in these habitual and well-known circumstances.
Organizationally, the recurring theme of team actualization, the synergy of each specialized body part, of each specialized player, inspires well-adapted and sometimes new methods and approaches. Our psychology demands cohesive groups and our functional hierarchies often stand in its way.
References
[i] Leonard E. Read, I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1999), http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl0.html.
[ii] E. Hutchins, “The Social Organization of Distributed Cognition,” Perspectives on socially shared cognition (1991): 283-307.
