Organisations failing as sense makers

Organisations play a central part in the narrative of our lives but in the last quarter of the 20^th century, ambivalence, ambiguity and fragmentation have leached the 'spiritual mortar' out of them.

What we are witnessing is a spiritual revolt against fakery, tedium and inauthenticity. It is the hunt for a meaningful life rather than a Grail-like quest for the meaning of life.

Within the next 25 years, many large organisations will face two major crises. The first will be an existential evacuation from large organisations. The best and brightest staff will move from the 'nihilistic pyramids of inaction' towards communities of practice that place primacy on productiveness, wellness and ethics over Sisyphean workloads and deadline tyranny.

In Australia, the second factor is the migration of almost six million Boomers to retirement. They are already beginning to disengage from the workplace and move to a Grey Nomadic life, P&O Cruiser or spiritual adventurer. And there will be many more like me, who will have to work.

As Jung said "Many – far too many – aspects of life, which should also have been experienced, lie in the lumber room among dusty memories; but sometimes too, they are glowing coals under gray ashes." The Boomers are about to blow on those embers.

The 'Organisational Boomer' too is looking for a life after a working life. Do HR managers have the will or skills to entice some of them to keep working? What are the chances organisations will change to accommodate them? I suggest they will change but slowly.

Some HR managers can't even get head counts right let alone understand the demographic profile and the creative natures of their business groups. HR functionalist theories don't apply in the face of a radical qualitative revolt against old-fashioned organisations that pay lip service to change yet don't produce the goods.

The Marxist scholar Marshall Berman said: "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are."

Marx was wrong but Berman is right. Today, organisations reflect the zeitgeist - a fixation on form over content, expediency over ethics, fashion over intelligence and entertainment over news.

More and more we 'live in' organisations. We spend up to 10 hours a day in them and like a psychic prison, think about them when not at work. The walls between organisation and us are porous. Organisations now live in 'our heads'.

Organisational man and woman in the 1950s would not have understood this. There was work and then there was everything else. Work was a subset of society. Today the two worlds have merged creating a world of organisational work.

Organisations have replaced the church and social clubs as places to find meaning and solace, yet they offer little of either. There have been numerous articles and books on this topic with the most famous being Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone. People are using organisations as 'conduits of need' in which, to paraphrase T.S Eliot, they can hear the sound of cool water but find none.

The media shouts from its mastheads and morning drive radio programs about unemployment but very few discuss those middle and senior managers who 'walked', no longer believing their own priorities meshed with the goals of the organisation. For them, the organization 'lacked soul'. It militated against meaning.

Men and women in their 40's are now discovering that institutions 'ain't where it's at' as far as career progression, training, personal self worth or work/life balance. They are bailing out to start up their own businesses.

There have always been people who rejected the blandness and routine of organisational life. Literature is full of such tales: The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, Revolutionary Road and John Updike's Rabbit series of novels depicted organisational man in the throes of existential change.

Today though, there is added cultural momentum as small, locally based social movements hawk the benefits of authenticity in fashion, food and life style. There is also a rejection of simulacra – of mindless advertising, virtual reality, genetically modified foods and more.

This is a chaotic and dangerous time for organisations. They are tangled in contradictory and often paradoxical thinking. They take on problems they are not built to solve. They resort to restructuring and accounting when they should employ empathy and positive regard.

Add to this psychosocial change with the broad structural changes running through Australian workplaces. 20 per cent of people are now self-employed and about 1.3 million people work from home. Mature age people will work well in to their 60s and maybe 70s. Thirty years ago the average retirement age for men was between 55-60. These are radical and ongoing changes.

The trend to outsource work, downsize shifts and the continual revolution to specialize on the one hand and multitask on the other, has a pernicious anti-logic quality about it.

But the future is not all grim. Organisations are built by human endeavor and will power. Up and coming generations, in partnership with the remaining Boomers, will restructure the legal and ethical dimensions our institutions.

Expect to hear a lot more about new forms of collective bargaining and more fruitful partnerships between employers, Government and labour.