Organizations as Living Systems
In the Sanctuary Model we make the case that instead of being seen as living systems, mental health programs and other social service and health care environments are seen as machine and treated as if organizational change could be “engineered”. One of the key mental model changes in the Sanctuary Model is recognizing that organizations are not machines but living systems.
A system can be defined as a set of interrelated elements that respond predictably and where the nature of the interaction is consistent over time. As a result, change at any one point will eventually have an impact on the total system and its component parts [1]. The hallmark of life is interrelatedness and interdependence and an understanding of these characteristics became known as “general systems theory” [2].
Another characteristic of living systems is “emergence” which occurs when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For example, in your body, organs emerge from combinations of cells, and an organization’s collective identity emerges out of the combined individual identities of everyone within the organization.
Living beings have both conscious and unconscious processes. For a living organism to be consciously aware, all the time, of everything that is going on would require brain power not available to individuals or organizations. So over time, and in the course of development, much activity that may at one point been conscious, deliberate, and strategic, takes on a kind of life of its own, outside of conscious awareness.
The longer an organization has been in operation the more likely it is that much of what occurs in the organizational culture is happening at the level of unconscious norms and basic assumptions, built on mental models that are completely out of view. Any challenges to these basic assumptions – which provide our individual and shared organizational minds with stability and security – are likely to give rise to anxiety and to “social defense mechanisms”.
Chronic and unrelenting stress has had and continues to have extremely detrimental effects on the overall functioning of the health and human services. As a consequence of exposure to toxic stress, individual workers within the organizations, managers and leaders of organizations and of systems, are likely to become more primitive, inflexible, aggressive, authoritarian and punitive and therefore unable to grapple with the level of complexity that characterizes every organization. Destroying Sanctuary describes the long-term, toxic effects of treating living systems as if they were emotionless machines.
The objective of the Sanctuary Model is to prescribe the ways in which living systems – families, groups, organizations, systems and societies – can begin restoring themselves to health.
Organizations as Living, Complex Adaptive Social Systems
The 20th Century Birth of a New Species
There is a different way of looking at and operating organizations – a different mental model than the one we have become accustomed to. The newer model is that of organizations as alive, possessing the basic requirements of living systems [3, 8]. In the business world, unlike the social service sector, this new mental model has been itself emerging in part due to the enormous pressures of globalization. Some strong proponents of this emergence point of view have claimed that “the 20th century gave birth to a new species – the global corporation… a life form that can grow, evolve, and learn”[9]. In this new paradigm, individual consciousness becomes even more – not less – important so that “the key challenge is to apply inner knowledge, intuition, compassion and spirit to prosper in a period of constant and discontinuous change” (p.6)[10].
Your body is a system. So too is the human service system, -and all of its components including the mental health system. A system is a set of interconnected elements that are interdependent so that changes in some elements or their relations produce changes in other parts of the system. A system is comprised of a set of components that work together for the overall objective of the whole [11, 12]. The main differences are that your body has been perfected by nature over the course of billions of years; your body stays in one geographical and quite limited physical space and is interactively guided (mainly) by one brain. The system you work in is – at most – about a hundred years old, and in all likelihood much younger than that, may be geographically widely disseminated, and is interactively impacted if not guided by thousands of brains. Systems are on the one hand, indispensable in a complex society. On the other hand systems – all systems that have not been shaped by Nature but by humans – are notoriously difficult to manage, move, start, stop, or change. John Gall, author and retired pediatrician expressed it best in his work on “Systemantics”,
“Systems are seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete... you have become absorbed... you are now a systems person!” (p.127-8) [13].
Unlike a machine - like your car, or your vacuum cleaner – your body and every environment that delivers human services are living systems – open, complex, and adaptive. Living systems are open systems because they accept input from their environment, they use this input to create output, and they then act on the environment. Living systems are adaptive because they can learn and based on that learning, they can adapt to changes in their environment in order to survive. As a living system, the human service system and every component of that system has an identity, a memory, and has created its own processes that resist changes imposed from above, but will evolve and change naturally if the circumstances are conducive to change. The mental health system is complex because it is comprised of other complex adaptive systems: the staff, administrators, and boards, the clients, and their families. It is rooted within health, public health and social service systems of a county and state, and all are set within a country, a country that is embedded within a global civilization. And all these components are complexly interactive with each other.
The past history of any service program, like the histories of the individual clients and staff, and the systems they are embedded within, continue to determine present behavior and in every moment, present behavior is playing a role in determining the future. All of these components – individual, group, organization, local government, national government, global influences, past, present and future – all are interacting with and impacting on each other in complicated ways, all of the time – that’s what makes things so complex. It is this complexity that compels the usual oversimplification that occurs whenever an individual or a group of individuals encounters the apparently overwhelming complexity of changing systems.
Living systems are not entirely controllable by top down regulation. Like the human body, a living system functions through constant feedback loops, flows of information back and forth. In the body, there certainly are hierarchies but these hierarchies are “democratic hierarchies” – power distribution is circular [14]. Regulation comes through feedback mechanisms and changes constantly over time, adjusting and readjusting to internal circumstances that have been altered and reacting and adjusting to external changes in the environment. Information from below in the hierarchy has as much influence as control mechanisms higher in the hierarchy. If you find this difficult to believe, just try focusing your own sophisticated intellectual attention on something when even your little toe is throbbing with pain.
The Unconscious Exists
And to make things even more complicated, not everything is as it seems. The recognition that we are profoundly divided, that the relatively recent evolutionary development of conscious awareness is layered atop eons of unconscious processing, goes back to the Ancients. Consciousness can be thought of as the beam of light from a flashlight in an otherwise dark room. The dark room is all that we are unaware of at any moment in time. Freud called this the “unconscious mind”, the storehouse of instinctual desires, needs, memories, and psychic actions that direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from this darkened realm. Jung described the “shadow” which in Jungian terms, represents the darker side to our personality which we do not consciously display in public – although other people may recognize their shadow selves. What we cannot admit to ourselves we often find in others – it is the part of ourselves that we are ashamed of and will not admit to ourselves [15]. Jung believed that there was a “collective unconscious” representing the deepest level of our minds and containing the accumulation of inherited experiences from all cultures, of all times. Lacan took a different spin on Freud and believed that the unconscious had a language of its own. Group theorists that we will touch on later, have recognized that when people come together and form a group, there are conscious and unconscious components to group life as well. Meanwhile, neuroscience has shown that very clearly, there are thousands, even millions of unconscious processes and that though we can become conscious of some of them, our consciousness or awareness occurs after the unconscious processes occur.
There is much in our lives that we wish not to be aware of and we find ways of keeping information out of consciousness, usually things that are distressing and laden with conflicts about the basis of life, or the basis of our reality. The point of defense mechanisms – individually and in groups – is to provide us with the illusion of certainty and safety and that protects us from being overwhelmed by anxiety, terror and helplessness. We will talk more about Terror Management Theory in Chapter 9. The study of traumatic experience has emphasized and brought to the fore an understanding of the ways in which people become even more divided under the impact of overwhelming stress as we will discuss in Chapter 2. For now, it is important to recognize that in looking at organizations as living systems and not as machines, we are required to understand that human beings and human organizations of all sizes have a dual existence at all times - conscious and unconscious realities - and that quite frequently they are in conflict with each other.
Emergence
A living system evolves, regenerates, and self-organizes to adapt to changing circumstances. Complex adaptive systems change constantly but the change is self-organized change, a process by which a structure and pattern emerges without that change being directed from outside [16]. Living systems learn and use that new information to alter present and future behavior. A living system is constantly balancing and rebalancing to maintain homeostasis. And in a living system there is no such thing as an absolute state of “health” – health is a relative term. You cannot feed a living system and then leave it alone - it must be fed and maintained all the time. Unpredictable things happen in complex adaptive systems – things that could not be predicted ahead of time because of the phenomenon known as emergence.
The simplest way of understanding emergence is that it occurs whenever the whole is greater than – or smarter than – the sum of the parts. It is about understanding how collective properties arise from the properties of parts and the relationship between them [17]. As neuroscientist John Holland has written in his book on the topic, “we are everywhere confronted with emergence in complex adaptive systems – ant colonies, networks of neurons, the immune system, the Internet, and the global economy, to name a few – where the behavior of the whole is much more complex than the behavior of the part (p.2)” [18].
Emergence helps to explain how collective phenomenon can arise and be different than the components that comprise it – which, by the way, is what true teamwork is all about. Just as neurons interconnect in networks that create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron and what emerges is consciousness, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive [19].
Pioneers in philosophy, psychology and mental health treatment have been wrestling with this notion of emergence for a very long time without having the language or science available at the time to address it. Recent scientific discoveries about the brain are providing a substantial, empirically-based foundation for long-standing philosophical, sociological and psychological observations about people and about how human groups function. This is in contrast with the long-standing influence of individualism on our thinking and behavior.
Sanctuary as a Living System
Now, if we are to think of the mental health system as a living system, what might be the implications of that? Since a living system is interactively connected to every other component of the system, you cannot impact one part of the human service system without impacting all of its components. If therapeutic environments are alive, then we must consider the functioning of all the levels of the organization and how each level interacts with the other, consciously and unconsciously. Every organization has a history and like the histories of the individual children and staff, and the systems they are embedded within, the organizational past continues to play a significant role in determining present behavior. And in every moment, present behavior is playing a role in determining the future.
As a living system, social service organizations do best when they self-regulate and when they have the time and energy available to keep information flowing throughout the system because the best kind of regulation comes through feedback processes that are constantly adjusting and readjusting over time and responding to changing circumstances. Living systems are interconnected and constantly communicating information vital to the well-being of the system as a whole and its component parts. This requires universal participation of everyone within a system and therefore social service systems, including the mental health system, must have the means and methods that promote universal participation, including processes that determine who needs to pay attention to what, when.
The human service delivery system should be the birthplace of emergent solutions to significant individual and social problems because its members have specialized knowledge in the area of human cognition, emotions, behavior, moral development, spiritual development, mind-body connections, and group dynamics. A living system evolves, regenerates, and self-organizes to adapt to changing circumstances. Living systems learn and use that new information to alter present and future behavior. A living system is constantly balancing and rebalancing to maintain homeostasis. The mental health system, like all living things, must be fed and replenished in order to perform its function for the society.
What would a “parallel process of recovery” look like for organizations, because that’s what we mean when we think of “system transformation”. Transformation means “A change in an organism which alters its general character and mode of life” and as one organizational theorist has pointed out, “if you want deeply rooted change, you need to apply deeply rooted methods”[16]. That’s what the Sanctuary Model is: a deeply rooted method. In the next chapters we will describe what we mean.
The position of this book is that the ideas about groupmind were on the right track, despite the controversy surrounding the concepts, and that entities emerge out of collective individual existences that cannot be explained solely by an analysis of individuals within the group. The study of normal groups and group dynamics provides a great deal of knowledge that is relevant to organizations. But to absorb that knowledge, we need a different way of thinking about human service delivery organizations and systems, a new mental model that approaches those systems as living organisms, not mechanical devices.
When people come together and accept the challenge of creating or changing organizations that reflect the Sanctuary Commitments, they are the latest in a long line of creative and visionary people to do so, just using other words in other times. As we hope this brief historical journey has shown, the concepts that underpin the Sanctuary Model are – for the most part – not new, but based on solid organizational and ethical principles that have been guiding human groups for centuries but that keep getting lost, forgotten, and displaced. The Sanctuary Model is a method of changing organizational culture within human service systems in order to promote the development of learning organizations that require 1) the presence of tension; 2) the presence of systems thinking; 3) a culture which facilitates learning [87] what one of the prime movers of the Therapeutic Community Movement, Maxwell Jones called a “living-learning environment”.
What is new about the Sanctuary Model is the integration into established wisdom of scientific discoveries that have been made about the human brain, human development, and the impact of traumatic experience. We cannot understand what happens to organizations today without understanding the impact of stress and trauma on groups.
Organization as Machine or Living System
Organizational Culture & The Learning Organization
Unhealthy Organizations and Toxic Leaders
References
- Napier, R.W. and M.K. Gershenfeld, Groups: Theory and Experience, Seventh Edition. 2004, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Von Bertalanffy, L., General systems theory and psychiatry, in American Handbook of Psychiatry, Volume One: The Foundations of Psychiatry, S. Arieti, Editor. 1974, Basic Books: New York.
