The virtues of building an organisational community

In the August 2002 issue of Boss, the AFR magazine, Michael Cave takes a look at a new paper in the Deakin Law Review, by Leigh Johns and Mirko Bagaric, on the morality of "expenditure networking" – that is, for example, buying lunch for a client. The paper apparently tells us that there is little moral difference between bribery and buying lunch. Duh. The paper’s authors note that some ‘incidental good consequences’ come from the practice of networking—such as, increased social interaction. Uh, yep.

In the same issue of Boss, articles take up other ‘new issues’ for corporates; social responsibility, giving staff a feeling of ‘meaning’ in their working life, handling the increasingly blurry boundary between work and family life, the difference between leadership and management, and so on.

I need to get up, walk around and shake my head. New issues? What? These may be new issues for the corporate sector, but for people in Community Development—or at least to me—they look eerily familiar.

The questions apparently teasing the minds of our finest corporate warriors are essentially the questions of creating community. They are the questions of achieving creative community participation, giving people meaningful lives, instilling moral and ethical values, providing support for the demands of work and family life, building social capital, bringing up the kids (a.k.a. the difference between leadership and management), and empowerment of individuals within the community, among others.

The purveyors of website ‘community’ software are the world champions at creating new types of ‘community’. They have given us ‘communities of interest’, ‘communities of commerce’, and recently ‘alumni communities’ (communities of people who used to live here, but now don’t, but can be networked into here via the internet). I’d like to add a type, one that I think needs some attention from those of us with an (offline) community development bent: the staff community.

The news for our nation’s corporate leaders is that despite Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as ‘community’, and when you are busily ‘creating a corporate culture’ you need to think about the same things you would think about when creating any culture or community. You need to think about power structures and relationships (‘co-evolution’, in the model contained in the paper I have just submitted to the international Community Development Journal), introduction of new talent versus use of experienced hands (‘sparse connections’ and the EVE dilemna, in the same paper), provision of resources and information (‘nutrients for the co-evolving agents’), corporate (and communal) goals, building trust and ‘social capital’, that ‘vision’ thing, and so on.

You need, it is true—as another article in ‘Boss’ points out—to understand the difference between leadership and management. Which reminds me of a story:

I was once asked by the CEO of a City Council what the attributes of a good leader were as we entered the 21^st century, and my reply was a saying from the Tao Te Ching: "When a good leader has finished, the people think they did it themselves." What we need, I said, is Taoist leaders.

From the blank looks I knew I had entered consultant heaven: I was one step ahead of the client. That Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching, had served me well in the past, and it had served a blinder this time.

The concepts underlying the quote—and the ideas of the Taoists—fit exactly with the ideas contained in my more academic paper for a community development audience: What we need to be creating is adaptive, self-organising, self-sustaining organisations. The ‘leaders’ of such organisations will be those who can create the appropriate structures and ‘rules’—and then leave the game.

If you’ve done your job properly, you’re only needed to occasionally ‘nudge’ the organisation in the appropriate direction, then let your self-organising staff ‘community’ do the rest. Again, the Tao Te Ching: "Manage a country as you would cook a small fish."

Communities—real, geographic communities—are complex, self-organising, self-sustaining, adaptive organisms. Nobody ‘manages’ the general affairs of a community (I am not talking here about council issues, such as rates and rubbish). It is a group of peers, with no central ‘leader’ (although there may be various civic ‘influencers’(think ‘nudgers’)).

Establishing

communities, or organisations—and repairing those that have lost their way—is a trick that only certain people (top CEOs, business leaders, and community developers) are good at. Some do it by instinct, some by terrible community art (all those mosaics!); most would benefit from some understanding of the black arts—I mean, emerging principles—of community development.

The key, the central element in establishing a community, a staff community, a corporate culture—(as the union movement has been saying for a long time, rightly as it turns out, though perhaps through a different lens)—is participation. Community participation, staff participation, early participation, genuine participation.

Building the ‘spaces’ for participation is no easy matter, but there are principles (see my paper!). Those principles summarise and extend more succinctly and directly many of the articles in my issue of ‘Boss’—which just goes to show that the lines between the community and corporate sectors, like the lines between work and family life, are blurry, blurred, dissolving.

Actually, the distinction between work and family life has always been blurry—all those files bought home from the office—it’s just that now we’re looking at the line from the other side: now family life is entering the office, not the office entering family life…

And as family life enters the workplace via the individual, community life enters through the aggregate of individuals: We extend our communal selves to the workplace as we extend our individual selves. We need to look at our new staff communities through a community development lens, and look twice at the hard, artificial boundaries we put up to keep individuals in their community ‘roles’. Keeping strict boundaries has never been a human forte.

Everything interesting in life, of course, happens at boundaries—but that’s another story.