The Natural Systems Management Philosophy

PART I PARTICIPATORY MANAGEMENT: 
ITS FUNCTION AND PRACTICE IN PROGRAM IMPLEMENTATION

Program implementation using participatory management with organizations requires flexibility, insight, and a patient, understanding orientation.  The organization’s people and its structure is the client.  The people and the structure are a Gestalt.  The whole and the parts must move in synchrony for improvements to be realistic and enduring.  Program implementation also involves a mission.  The mission guides the formulation of goals, plans, and objectives.  Each forward movement in the implementation must be synchronized with the peoples' sense of readiness.  It must make sense to them and it must compel a commitment to the process and its unfolding goals and plans.  The following is a description of how one can achieve these objectives. 

One of the first premises in making a positive difference is to learn to truly see and accept the reality you have facing you.  Step back and regard carefully and slowly the people around you.  Then, when you feel you have a good grasp of what they are like and what their pattern is, consider that they have a big investment in staying the way they are.  The structure of their organization not only seems like an immutable reality to them, but also is like home to them.  The comfort of its familiarity is not easily dislodged.  Consider how extremely difficult it will be and should be to get them change their feelings, beliefs, habits, indeed their whole way of being.  Next, step back and regard the system, the patterns, the roles and relationships, the jobs, the way people structure their time, and the places where they spend their time.  Try to get to the point where you feel that you have a good grasp of the system; the dynamics of the system; and the investment that each person has in maintaining their part of the system the way it is.  When you arrive at that point, get very still and calm.  Try to feel how enormously hard it would be to get any of the persons, and therefore any part of the system, to change.  Feel how each part of the system is maintained by the inertia of all the other parts. 

When you hear people in meetings talk about doing something that you feel is completely unproductive and unworkable, consider what function this type of talk must have for them.  You see, the first premise is to accept the reality with which you are presented.  The next premise is that you have to learn patience.  You have to learn to wait.  However, you are not waiting idly.  All the while, you are waiting, not acting, you must listen, listen very carefully and deeply to everyone you encounter.  Listen to see the world from their perspective.  Listen and accept.  Let them know you are really listening.  Ask them if you have really understood their perspective.  You will eventually find, welling up from deep inside every person you listen deeply to, that way down deep, buried deep, is a caring, a longing for the good, and a longing for those very personal feelings to be heard.  Yet, there is a desperate fear that those deepest feelings, longings, and caring will be trampled on.  Then you will hear an agony not unlike your own.  You nurture and encourage those longings even if they seem different from yours or wrong.  You nurture them because you are communicating respect and acceptance of the little bit of authenticity that they are allowing you to see. 

It is an honor to have someone show, with authenticity, some of his or her precious feelings and hopes because this is so very hard to do.  It shows they are developing a trust with you.  A time will come when they will reciprocate and you can begin a genuine dialogue.  You can come to see the disagreements, in this new atmosphere, as informative missing pieces of what can become a more encompassing perspective.  The next thing you know, you will want to try something, even with a former adversary, to see how it will work.  This will be a mutual endeavor and not a condition of ‘mine against yours’ or ‘yours against mine’.  As a mutual endeavor, it lends itself to honest, mutual self-correction.  You are groping together toward vague feelings of how you wish things were.  Nevertheless, your groping is activated only toward that which is at hand, that which is most natural to grope toward at this moment.  It may not be much, and may not be successful, but it is a common venture.  You are creating a common destiny with your participants.  You are forming a bond.  This tiny little step is enormous in its implications. 

If you keep moving in this manner, day by day, month by month, trusting the process, you will wake up one day and find that fabulous things are transpiring.  It does not mean that a royal carpet is laid out for you from now on.  Set backs are to remind you to trust the process, to make you aware that you are to trust the process and how in the end, paradoxically, greater, more stable results come from this than from forcing the process.  Wait and see, calm and still, very patiently, and when the right moment comes, you are ready for your next small step with its enormous implications once again.  You never know where it is all going, you are not in control, you trust the process, and you realize that in the depths of each of us is this delicate, care-filled, longing.  Remember that this precious longing has been kept hidden for a reason.  These precious hidden feelings and wishes are carefully protected by psychologically barbed armor, weapons for repulsing, and narrow devotion to offensive strategies designed to force our own way and keep all others at bay.  We all see these and know that this side of each other is there because this is what we feel we must show in the non-trusting environment.  Now you know that beneath all of this defensive posturing is the same delicate, frightened, true longing and caring that is present in all of us. 

With this approach we actually do more when we do less, get more done by opening the way for others to try to realize their dreams, get more satisfaction by giving more credit and recognition, not so much for the correctness and effectiveness of what was done, but for the authenticity of what was done.  Strangely, by opening the way for each separate individual, the whole eventually forms a deep, strong, cohesive bond.  This seems like the long way around to achieving real effectiveness but, paradoxically, it is really the shortest, and the only way, for putting our hazy dreams eventually into their clear and correct form.  We never really know what the final form will be until we get there even though we usually think we know.  When we get there, we know, it just really feels right.  Therefore, even in this approach, we never know beforehand, but we do know when we have gotten there.  We remain open to possibility, to the unanticipated crashing in through our fixed perspectives and coagulated visions and opening up our blind spots to dazzling new visions.  Yet, even then, we later realize this was only just another step along the way toward something even deeper, even greater, that we were longing for and could only realize by trusting the processes within each other and ourselves and the processes of the whole to unfold naturally, in their own time and way.  We have to trust and to be open and wait patiently and respectfully until we get there to find out what it was toward which we were venturing.  We have to learn to trust the process.  What a beautiful mutual destiny and bond, what a strong natural force springs forth from this simple, authentic, natural process.