Organisations are having to survive and thrive in an environment of continuous change, where outcomes are increasingly unknowable. In this report, Professor Petruska Clarkson discusses how this will make even successful organisations more open to disorientation, turbulence, confusions, conflict and uncertainty. She explains why meeting this challenge effectively will require a new and greater kind of courage, and a different psychology from that which prevailed in the past. She argues that the attainment of particular knowledge or skills, or claims to a privileged access to answers, will no longer be able to reassure that crucial part in each human being which wishes for some higher authority to solve the problems and promises of complexity.

The report also explores Professor Clarkson's belief that success for organisations and individuals in the next millennium will demand a willingness to 'unlearn' ¾ to let go of the past, in order to experience the creativity and innovation that comes with trying to maintain a balance while taking advantage of the excitement of living and developing 'at the edge of chaos'. Using research based on interviews with successful managers in a thriving multinational company, she examines the reasons why the skills and attitudes of 'unlearning' are likely to prove to be of more value in the future than traditional notions of learning. She also highlights the relevance of the 'new sciences', like complexity and chaos theory, to the fulfilment of human achievement and creativity in the prevailing turbulent and unpredictable conditions.

Professor Petruska Clarkson is a Consultant Chartered Psychologist and Accredited Management Consultant with PHYSIS and the University of Surrey, the Roehampton Institute. She founded and runs PHYSIS. Her world-renowned academic and research work over 25 years is, therefore, complemented by practical business management expertise. Professor Clarkson teaches and consults to organisations, researchers, managers and consultants in the areas of organisational counselling, psychology, supervision, ethics, culture, creativity and archetype, as well as in organisational dynamics and management development. She has been a prolific author, with over 125 publications.

This report was edited by London-based Editorial Consultant Malcolm Peltu.

Understanding and applying the new sciences

Over the last ten years, I have become increasingly interested as a psychologist, management consultant, researcher and teacher in understanding creativity and achievement. I have focused particularly on the application to organisations and management of the 'new sciences', which encompass a wide spectrum of new ideas and paradigms. These include vital disciplines like complexity, chaos theory (Gleick 1987), quantum physics (Bohm 1980), Gaia (Lovelock 1988), and their cultural equivalent of post-modernism. My main aim is to discover how and when these ideas are useful, in order to assist organisations and individuals to bridge the gap across the academic and world divide. I hope this will enable people to think much more as they act ¾ and act much more as they think.

I strongly agree with Goodwin that the new sciences are important to creativity and achievement because they are concerned with 'fields of relationships'. As he observed, we are biologically grounded in relationships which operate at all the different levels of our beings as the basis of our natures as agents of creative evolutionary emergence, a property we share with all the other species. These are not romantic yearnings and utopian ideals. They arise from a rethinking of our biological natures that is emerging from the sciences of complexity and is leading towards a science of qualities which may help in our efforts to reach a more balanced relationship with the other members of our planetary society.

In order to help understand creativity and achievement in our turbulent times, an ongoing element in my research and consultancy has been qualitative studies in which I ask individuals in business and other fields about their views on success and creativity. I am continuously looking for organisations willing to collaborate with me on this research.

I also run a programme for management consultants, psychologists, physiotherapists and others based on an educational structure that promotes 'learning by enquiry', rather than through conventional notions of teaching by somehow pushing out 'knowledge' to students. The structure of learning by enquiry stimulates participants to question everything, including philosophical assumptions about why certain things are taught. Participants are encouraged to ask, and find their own responses to, questions like: 'What is it that I need to know? What is going on in the world? Where can I go to find out? How do I check on what I am doing? And how do I use what I have found out?' An experimental programme on these lines involving several PhDs has been running successfully since 1994.

This report summarises results of a qualitative research study I undertook among successful managers in a multinational company at the end of 1997. In addition to trying to understand the reasons for their success, I also wanted to assess their awareness of the new sciences.

Learning about business success from qualitative research

Participants in my qualitative study worked for a firm which has been on a steep curve of continuous success since undergoing a major transformation in the early 1990s. The senior manager of one of its business groups is keenly interested in organisational learning and complexity, which are central themes of my own work. This forged a firm foundation for our collaboration. I asked him to identify individuals in his group who were widely recognised as being able to thrive in the rapidly changing, turbulent and uncertain environment in which the company had made its recent successful transformation.

Capturing a sense of the skills, attitudes, behaviour and mindsets of high-achievers could help us to learn about the dimensions that should permeate the behaviour of others faced with the complexities and difficulties of the post-modern world. However, the aim was not necessarily to try to replicate that behaviour. The qualitative method I used does not seek to make generalisations based on a huge sample. In contrast, it is an exploratory approach using semi-structured interviews which seek subjective insights into what is going on in the organisation and the minds of the people being interviewed. The emphasis is on quality, not quantity.

For this kind of qualitative research, it is vital to conduct interviews in a way that fits into the interviewee's busy schedule. So, I carry out most interviews by telephone and keep them to no longer than about 45 minutes to an hour. In this case, the fact that all respondents were chosen by their boss for the interview and were all men added constraints to trying to generalise the results.

One of the primary problems of working in the new sciences is the difficulty posed by finding a vocabulary that can be generally understood, once we step out of the conventional Newtonian-Cartesian duality paradigm and the particular vocabulary and meanings people have grown up with. Nevertheless, the behaviour of many people who do not use concepts from the new sciences consciously is actually congruent with some of the new sciences. For instance, ideas from complexity theory literature underpin the way many managers seek to cope with the dynamics of today's complex and competitive global business marketplace, although they may not be aware of that literature.

A technique I use to avoid the problem of unfamiliar and imprecise language is to ask a wide range of 'scattershot' questions to see what responses I can pick up on a variety of experiences and ideas. Some of the questions I asked are in Figure 1 (see end of report).

Questions to elicit insights into unlearning, achievement and creativity

I am convinced that it is impossible to learn without first unlearning. You have to give up the past in order to learn new things. However, people don't often talk about unlearning as an important skill, although there is much discussion on learning, which has many in-built inefficiencies. That is why I included an explicit question on unlearning in my interviews, as well as using the scattergun to pick up less explicitly expressed perceptions and experience on this subject.

One of the questions I particularly like to ask is about what people do when they don't know what to do. This gets to the heart of creative problem solving. It focuses on the processes where intellectual capital is created and people develop 'future fitness' in terms of the emotions, attitudes, mindsets and thinking capabilities that provide a fluent capacity to survive and succeed in today's rapidly changing and unpredictable world.

From my research in a variety of companies, I have also identified intuition as a prominent issue. One of the primary skills required today is the fast processing of minimal cues in uncertain conditions. Intuition can be the fastest and most accurate way of doing this because it fills in logic gaps and allows creativity. Intuition is one of the distinguishing features of all great entrepreneurs, who know instinctively what the right thing is to do next ¾ before they even know why it is a good idea. This 'alignment with the future' will become increasingly important in a world where we will never have all the data needed to make decisions. The intuitive skills required to make progress in these circumstances are like those demanded in white-water rafting, where you have to know how to react when the right information resurfaces from the rush of data coming towards you. I am sure more training programmes in developing intuition within organisations will be needed, such as one recently started at the University of Hertfordshire.

The ability to deal with everyday difficulties and hostile attacks, like a sneering remark at an important meeting, is an indicator of what I call 'a low centre of gravity'. This is a characteristic of people who can maintain their balance, resourcefulness and creativity in difficult and unpredictable circumstances. It is typified by top tennis players who are always ready to respond effectively, whatever direction the ball comes from, and with whatever speed and spin it has been hit. Psychological attitudes that maintain this kind of low centre of gravity keep you mentally alive, on the move and constantly creative. If you become rigid, you lose the capacity to respond effectively.

A vital quality for coping with the unexpected is the capacity to learn effectively from failure, as will as success. I explicitly asked people to think of such an experience in order to gauge how they react to setbacks. The question about how others react to their success at work relates to important factors concerning the 'psychology of fame'. This affects the group dynamics around people who are outstanding in a special way. And I asked how many times a day the interviewee laughs as a kind of 'reality check'. I could tell during the course of our interview whether the number of times he made me laugh tallies with his perception of his capacity for laughter.

Provisional results from analysing the interviews

I subjected all interviews to detailed discourse analysis. Within the limitations and qualifications relevant to this kind of qualitative study, as outlined earlier, I feel the early findings I am reporting now provide a good enough indication of the notions, preoccupations and concepts that energise these successful managers. The preliminary results provide at least some indication of what is happening in an organisation doing very well at the moment, and confident of doing even better in the future. They can also throw light on how other organisations should prepare to face fresh, unpredictable challenges.

Everyone has ideas about factors affecting success that could have emerged from my interviews, such as flexibility, courage, ambition, strong egos, intelligence, confidence, manipulative skills, views of self-worth and openness. Many of these were indeed present in some form or other in the responses I obtained. However, the single most important issue which was explicitly addressed in most interviews concerned human relationships at work, including communication and facilitation skills. As one interviewee said: "I have never thought of myself as a people person, never would have said 'I have good interpersonal skills'. Yet, given the chance to develop those, they came out."

Full information from the interviewees is available for other researchers to study, although some details have been changed to protect the identities of interviewees.

Why relationship is the most important factor

My past psychological research has found out, over and over, that human beings live and breathe relationship. They learn and unlearn in relationship, not independently as isolated individuals. A similar story was corroborated surprisingly easily from my analyses of these interviews, even though I wasn't looking for it as the initial motivation for the study had been primarily to investigate learning, unlearning and the new sciences. Yet, the importance of relationship in the organisation was unmistakably there in the interview data, for instance in statements like: "What has changed most for me has been an awareness of the importance of relating with others."

Relationship needs to be understood as being fractal across scale. At a microscopic level, the fractal relationship takes place intra-psychically ¾ in terms of how we relate to our selves and manage the internal objects within us. At a macroscopic level, relationship is fractally concerned with interpersonal, organisational and cultural dimensions. The shape of a relationship identified at one scale might very well reflect relationships at other levels. All levels should be implied whenever the notion of relationship is used. This is also a fundamental concept in complexity theory. According to Mitleton-Kelly, for instance: 'Complexity arises from the inter-relationship, inter-action and inter-connectivity of elements within a system and between a system and its environment.'

Metaphor as a strange attractor

Another factor which emerged strongly from interviews was the way myth operates as a strange 'attractor', binding a system to a pattern of behaviour in which there are multiple points of attraction within a finite space. I may have identified this because I am attuned to this dimension through my work on myth and metaphor in organisations. However, I had expected that, with interviewees who are high-flying managers in an aggressively competitive industry, the myths might have related to selfish, money-oriented beliefs. It surprised me to find something quite different came across: a sense of life's energy, or physis, and the liveliness and enjoyment that is best expressed by the French word jouissance.

The archetypal hero in this set of interviews was Jason, the adventurer who sets out as the leader of a good, strong team raring to go and get the Golden Fleece, and do lots of other wonderful things. Jason is also the archetype for management consultants and the kind of outdoor team development exercises used by many organisations. Myths and archetypes form iterative, fractal patterns which profoundly shape our relationships, both binding us and setting us free. We cannot escape from the shape of archetypal pressures. For instance, all managers have a fear of being supplanted by a colleague while they are away for a time, as happened to Odysseus when he returned from his adventure to find his best friend had taken command. Understanding the nature and significance of archetype can help us to feel more safe, creative and real by giving us a better sense of who we are.

Mythical structures can exist within organisations as well as people. This can have vicious effects if it results in a person being unfairly treated, say by becoming a scapegoat for something that is more to do with an organisational myth than an individual's actual personality and behaviour. An understanding of the nature and effect of myth and archetype can help to turn around even this kind of institutionalised structure. Archetypes can also be a wonderful educational aid.

A number of comments from interviewees highlighted the role of myth in the organisations:

§ "A high degree of emotion, and probably not on best behaviour … creative when surrounded by people who are engaged and excited by the topic"

§ "You get in that groove … I like communicating via imagery rather than words"

§ "When I made the leap … watch how powerful this is going to be. To be frank, its not. It takes time … Strange initiation processes and rites of passage."

Walking the new sciences, but not talking the new sciences

Although a key objective of the study was to find out what the respondents knew about complexity and other new sciences, a striking feature was the relative absence of the explicit use of new science vocabulary during interviews. For instance, the question about autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980; Teubner and Willke 1997) was generally greeted with incomprehension and an element of embarrassment. So, I stopped asking it after receiving comments like: "I don't think I am consciously using any knowledge from the area of the new sciences in my work."

Nevertheless, I found the presence of many indicators in the interviews which I could associate with people who have an implicit psychological understanding and utilisation of many new science concepts, although they cannot articulate such ideas. These people could be said to be 'walking the walk, but not talking the talk'.

For example, there are two quotes from survey participants which illustrate the notion of the coexistence of opposites from quantum physics theory. The first person sees an answer emerging if he is given sufficient space and room, while the other one says the answer comes when the heat is on:

§ "The answer will probably just come if you give it room. It's a question of having the space to be able to do that"

§ "… relied on being very observant and picking up on subtle issues, body language, inflections, what is said and what is unsaid. Use intuition to flag to the other person what you think the background issue really is ¾ hit and miss, but the process should accelerate the effectiveness of the conversation. Only on reflection [am I aware of using intuition in my work]. The process is a vary rapid pace, crisis-type environment. Unaware at the time."

The five key relationships at work

The importance of relationship, metaphor and lack of new sciences awareness were clear messages from the interview data. I then went through several attempts at analysing the data to find emergent patterns, before I formulated a framework that I hope will make sense from the data I had collected. The process I used for this analysis mirrored the personal strategy for problem solving of one of the study's respondents: "The best way for me to solve problems is to gather together all the data, dump it in one place and stare at it until I see a pattern. It's the intuitive approach and it works for me. More recently, I have realised the importance of checking it with other people. Talking generates insights as well, and that works even better."

The framework I eventually identified after much thinking and discussion is structured around five different kinds of human relationships. I classify these as:

1. Working Alliance: The basic contract by which people agree to work together within an organisation.

2. Unfinished: Known in some psychological disciplines as 'transference', in an organisational context it is best understood as the human relationship equivalent of 'unfinished business'.

3. Developmental: This is where an organisation's human resources are built in an incremental, linear way using conventional training and developmental psychology approaches to learning.

4. Personal: The person-to-person dimensions of human interaction, which are the glue of social interaction in the working community within an organisation.

5. Transpersonal: Concerns the organisation's wider mission and purpose. Unlearning is particularly important here because these relationships are likely to involve unpredictable 'step changes', rather than a gradual incremental evolution.

Figure 2 (see end of report) summarises these key dimensions of the relationships as they contribute to the organisation and human motivation, and in terms of signs which indicate a dysfunction is occurring in a relationship. As a psychologist, I also think it is important to highlight the particular psychological disciplines which are relevant to different relationships. This framework is a good fit with important pre-existing sorting systems in the management literature, organisational theory, psychology, marriage guidance, and many other activities which are trying to understand human behaviour. The names I have given to the relationships are ones I use for my own coding system, although I realise some people may find more appropriate names for different contexts.

The five dimensions are in all our relationships, but this shouldn't lead people to whoosh the relationships together into one big bundle. Most respondents in the study demonstrated an implicit awareness of all five. However, they could benefit from understanding, differentiating and using them much more clearly and specifically, as each relationship has its own characteristics and requirements for terms of the optimisation of human potential in complex adaptive systems.

An enormous amount of benefit can be gained by taking a more considered approach to untangling the relationships to find out precisely when, where and how different relationships are used, and the distinct issues and problems relating to each. Many problems are caused by failing to identify whether, say, people are currently working in developmental relationships or the survival mode of the working alliance. Very different approaches would be needed to overcome difficulties in each of these.

The working alliance

The working alliance is the most important relationship because it is essential for survival. If there is clarity in definitions of the purpose and objectives of the working alliance, the other relationships can flourish. On the other hand, if the basic working alliance is not solid, everything else will be undermined and there will be no business or organisation to speak of.

The working alliance is concerned primarily with basic hygiene and safety factors that must be catered for to enable other dimensions to function at all, let alone to function well. The psychological disciplines which could be drawn on to facilitate this relation come from the mainstream behavioural schools, such as psychophysiology and ergonomics, where learning is perceived in terms of classical Pavlovian and Skinnerian conditioning.

Typical responses during interviews which indicated respondents were talking about working in this survival mode included:

§ "Most people who work for [our company] are astute about financial planning for their future, so we relate the business context in words they can understand"

§ "I was very much a producer"

§ "I used to be an extreme problem solver"

§ "There is a lot of data flying around the organisation ¾ bombarded by information in emails, and a lot of it is not particularly well focused. This is swamping people and not allowing them the time to do more useful things."

At a time when 'downsizing' has entered the management vocabulary as a euphemism for cutting staff number and making people redundant, most people now work with the knowledge that more jobs could be lost in the future. The people I interviewed had survived and succeeded during a period when there had been a large cut in the workforce. This can lead to what I call 'survivor's guilt', similar to that faced by survivors of traumatic disasters. The interviewees were also having to live with the continuing fear of losing their job if they fail to market themselves sufficiently well next time, which can lead to anxieties about trying to act in ways the organisation might regard as being the proper behaviour. These kinds of underlying fears were summarised by a study respondent who said: "Occasionally I get in a panic…" about future job prospects.

The survival skills necessary for developing aspects of the intra-psychical, interpersonal, organisational relationships of the working alliance are completely different to those needed in other relationships.

The unfinished relationship

Many unresolved past experiences which people take to psychoanalysis and therapy shouldn't be present at work. But they often are. These can become the 'grit in the oyster' which causes unproductive behaviour by interfering with the working alliance through positive or negative distortions based on unhelpful past experiences. The 'unfinished' dimension is sometimes referred to as the 'transferential' or 'projected' relationship because a person can transfer or project elements of their past relationships into current ones. For example, people can bring to their work environment their grieving for a previous job, or difficulties from their relationships at home.

The unfinished relationship is characterised by unrealistic hopes or fears, loyalties or resentments which may, or may not, correspond with the actualities of an individual's current work situation. People's reactions can then become inappropriate, exaggerated, overly defensive, and sometimes destructive of the contractual working relationship. The causes of this could go back to childhood problems with parents, for example leading to continuing fights with any authority figure, or an unwillingness to listen to what others are saying. As a couple of respondents noted:

§ "I do it [unproductive behaviour] at times but I find that the people I have the highest degree of tension with are in the sense of unresolved issues."

§ "In some meetings, some people are forever putting up barriers to things that inhibit the creative process."

The dynamic here is associated with the 'pop psychology' of Freudian and psychoanalytic approaches, which seek the roots of problems in unconscious forces deriving from primitive anxieties to do with sex and aggression. Prejudice based on a stereotype can be a version of the unfinished relationship because it is not connected with the here-and-now of this person, in this particular work environment. Instead, the stereotype is derived from an accumulation of information, mis-information, emotions and images drawn from the past.

The concept of the unfinished relationship helps to clarify why some workplace problems may not be affected by what is actually going on now in the organisational setting, but by personality difficulties related to things which occurred to an individual in the last few years, or as a teenager, child or baby. This was graphically illustrated by Renn Zaphiropoulos when he was president of Versatec, one on the world's largest producers of electrostatic printers. In his introductory talks to new employees, he was wont to exhort them to: 'Please remember at all times that your boss is not your mother or your father!'. This may seem crude, but is a reasonable attempt to try to deal with the problem that people always hope and want to love and be loved, and to have someone to take care of and who will take care of them. Much cynicism and disillusion can follow if this need is badly handled and the expectation is shattered. But great benefit can come from resolving such unfinished relationships successfully through unlearning past dysfunctional patterns and experiences.

Overcoming problems caused by unfinished relationships

A respondent in the study provided a good insight into the kind of problem which arises from the incomplete resolution of past relationships: "I think we do not fully understand the behaviour barriers to the effective sharing and exchange of knowledge, and I think it is becoming more strongly a barrier now than it was before, as the organisation gets flatter and flatter and as the competition increases and people go through journeys similar to mine ¾ questioning the meaning of success ¾ and how to deal with the insecurity that comes from that and induces the kinds of behaviours that are barriers to knowledge exchange … its very difficult for people."

The first steps towards dealing with dysfunction in unfinished relationships are to acknowledge that such relationships exist at work, then to try to distinguish them from other kinds of relationship. From this base, skills can be developed to minimise, neutralise, or channel the energies of the unfinished relationship back into present tasks. Unlearning is one of the essential skills for this. People with unfinished relationships can free themselves to respond effectively and creatively in the here-and-now only if they can unlearn their previous negative and dysfunctional strategies. Once confidence has been established, individuals can do things differently, and do them well. In some cases, however, unfinished relationships are so crippling that they cannot be resolved within the working environment.

Interviewees who highlighted other facets of the unfinished relationship made observations like:

§ "The degree to which I know myself and finding power in that.";

§ "The change of culture has been more challenging than I thought it would be."

§ "In the past, people were more cynical and looked at the downside, why it shouldn't be done."

A particularly insightful comment in this context came in response to the question about how the interviewee dealt with an experience he regarded as a failure: "But the good thing was that it caused me to start doing different type of work and challenging what I thought success was. People were putting barriers in the path to what I thought was success, so I had to think whether I wanted to get there anyway. I needed that 'fall from grace' to give me the challenge and spur my development."

The developmental relationship

In contrast to the unfinished relationship, with its need to make up deficiencies in the past, the focus of the developmental relationship is on establishing the adult professional. The aim is to equip people to be empowered, more autonomous and better resourced for the future, while maintaining a sense of excitement by providing sufficient 'stretch' at work to avoid boredom ¾ but without leading to burn-out. This is done largely by providing the information, support and challenge which helps individuals to learn in an incremental, linear way through the conventional training and developmental psychology methods traditionally employed by organisations.

The psychology which underpins this is based on techniques like adult learning, development models, the use of psychological tests to increase self-knowledge, coaching, counselling, enabling, mentoring, and '5% continuous improvement' skills. There were many examples in the interviews of what is involved in developmental relationships:

§ "I moved from … selling, delivering to becoming more of a coach, a mentor, a facilitator ¾ that really required a shift in my own behaviour … careful to look for feedback from other people as to what they needed from me."

§ "We have a manager who devolves a lot of responsibility"

§ "Setting criteria for the competencies we think people need."

§ "One of the key learnings was understanding that a lot of the challenges and development issues that I was going through were quite predictable and quite common … Now I believe that the function of HR [human resource management] is to deal with the whole person and we have a much bigger obligation to enable people to go through their continual development, inclusive and exclusive of work."

§ "I didn't want to move from that 'comfort zone' ¾ yet you know that you are not going to improve unless you drag yourself out of that and go to a new experience.

§ "The ability to accommodate within a team of different people who are at different places psychologically and in their learning … we try to discover what it is the individual wants to learn and to create the opportunity for him."

The last quote pinpoints the best kind of educational response, where someone actively wants to learn something. The organisational environment can influence what an individual might want to learn, say towards something that is connected to survival in the job. But for education to be effective, the desire to learn must ultimately come from an internalised motivation, as anyone who has battled to teach people who don't want to learn can testify. There's a world of difference between people who come eager to learn and find out new things, and those who stubbornly don't want to budge from their current state of knowledge.

The personal relationship

Subjective appreciation of another in the person-to-person dimensions of human interaction is the prime focus of the personal relationship. This has to do with being, rather than learning. However, many people can learn to improve their human relationships. Companies may also build on the personal relationship to support organisational purposes by setting up self-development groups or in-company action learning sets.

If the personal relationship is based on trust ¾ but not unconditionally ¾ and respect for a person's self-worth, it can act like the oil in the conduct of effective working relationships in organisations. This can result in a working community with a healthy culture, based on the support of shared tasks, shared experiences and shared values. Psychological disciplines which have emphasised this relationship use concepts drawn from such humanistic universes as the theories of motivation and personality of Maslow (1970) and team building.

The value of this person-to-person dimension was emphasised by a number of interviewees:

§ "I work through my personal influence"

§ "The softer skills are more important to us than the just the technical stuff. We need to move [more] to the people side."

§ "I think there is a requirement to get more people involved in the process. A lot of change, stimulation and thought comes from the fringe now."

§ "There is some tension, but its positive tension."

§ "Very often the issue is elemental but not obvious. Mainly it is through open and frank interaction that you get people to tell you what it really is."

§ "I like to think that I am a person who people like to work for. I hope they respect me."

The way personal relationships can help a person to mature was indicated by the comment: "On a friendship level, I think that people who have seen me make the transition have been very supportive and impressed. I depend on that positive reinforcement." Another response touched on the important role that personal relationships can have in helping to deal with unfinished relationship problems, like that which causes some people to be nervous about authority: "Very frequently, I probably try to make people laugh, especially subordinates."

The transpersonal relationship

Human relationships that extend beyond the people that any one individual knows to encompass the organisation as a whole are what I classify as 'transpersonal'. The most tangible form in which this has become acceptable in organisations is the growing preoccupation with organisation cultures, mission statements and corporate visions and values. These are all ways in which connections between people create something more than the sum of their individual selves.

This concern with wholeness makes transpersonal relationships the place where the ideas from the new sciences are most likely to be fruitful. Until recently, dominant theories of organisation and management have concentrated on separation and the subsequent linking of roles, tasks and responsibilities. Our traditional science, philosophy and psychology have emphasised separation. The new sciences are more relevant to key characteristics of transpersonal relationships, such as their focus on holistic approaches, the psychology of meaning, higher connections, unpredicted step changes, complex systems, quantum effects, archetypes, non-local interactions, paradox, and the coexistence of opposites.

Complexity theory, for example, acknowledges that changes are unpredictable in a turbulent environment. It emphasises evolution with, rather than adaptation to, a changing environment. This alters the perspectives and assumptions which underlie traditional management and systems theories. Some older approaches can also provide a source of education for transpersonal leadership at all levels in an organisation, for instance through the concern in gestalt psychology with creating meaningful wholes for all human experiences and perception. The psychological perspectives typified by Jung are also pertinent here.

The introduction of concepts from the new sciences should be most effective within the transpersonal relationship because it is here that people are likely to find a resonance between the new concepts and the relationship structures inside themselves, as well as in their interactions with others. Many people make a mistake by trying to put ideas from the new sciences into the wrong relationship at the wrong time. For example, uncertainty and unpredictability should not be focused on in the working alliance relationship when people are worried about their job survival, promotion or defending a budgetary decision at a meeting with the Chief Executive.

In one major government department where I provided consultancy and support during a period where a culture of changes was being actively pursued, someone said to me at the end of a course: 'Things may still seem to be chaotic, but they no longer feel so awful'. This indicates why acknowledging and dealing with uncertainty can be better than trying to pretend everything is going fine, even when the outcome is intrinsically unpredictable.

Living on the edge of chaos

The transpersonal relationship involves factors at the far boundaries of what we know, which is why it is often called a state of 'bounded instability' or 'the edge of chaos'. This relationship influences efficiency and effectiveness because it always involves an erring in one direction or another, and whichever one is fully developed brings with it a new problem. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said the world is in a continuous state of flux, pointed out over 2500 years ago that whatever we succeed in doing contains the seed of the next problems. This means

transpersonal relations require individuals and organisations to unlearn what has worked well previously. This is very different to, and even trickier than, unlearning in the unfinished relationship, where it is necessary give up things that have not worked in the past.

An important motivation for unlearning what has worked well is the jouissance, the fun, the liveliness, the exhilarating excitement engendered by a change which could enable us to do something that seems completely impossible. One of the aims is to achieve the business drive towards ever-upward performance graphs by trying to establish, through non-local interactions, something which breaks the bounds of causality. Jungian psychology is particularly relevant here. Jung called people's need for causality a neurosis and said they get sick always wanting to know what caused an event. As one study respondent asserted: "I have given up … the assumption that if something is logically correct then it must be the right answer." Logic is good and needs to be followed, but it can sometimes be exactly the thing that can stand between you and a golden new moment.

Many other remarks made in interviews provided evidence of the strong transpersonal dimension in this organisation's relationships, and the significance of unlearning in this context:

§ "I decided to take the jump [to a people management role] but it was counter to my model of success previously, so surprised me."

§ "Living with chaos feels comfortable now."

§ "[giving up things that were right requires] A mindset acknowledging what we don't know, both to ourselves and to others. It's not always easy to do that. In some ways it is counter to traditional attitudes."

§ "… trying to understand whether natural systems were random or chaotic … challenges the competencies of people … issues of confidence, the need to depend more on our intuitions rather than on deductive logic, and it requires us to have a deep understanding of what makes people tick … a deeper understanding of oneself."

§ "…Not a comfortable place to be. It is breaking from the more linear paradigm … its more intuitive … there is a much larger degree of inclusion, bringing the fringe closer and taking the benefit of those thoughts and intuition. That too is uncomfortable, because the reason those people are on the fringe is that they are different from you."

§ "As a creative individual I admire Bill Gates. He appears to have those qualities: coming up with wacky ideas, some of which may not work, though some which do. Richard Branson is another."

Knowledge, skills and attitudes for turbulent times

The five relationships summarised in Figure 2 all exist inside us, and between us and others we work with. They all have something to do with certain kinds of learning, but only the unfinished and personal relationships provide the right climate for unlearning. In unfinished relationships, unlearning is necessary to change behaviour which has become stuck in unproductive patterns. In transpersonal relationships, people need to give up on previous clamourings to make way for new music.

This framework of relationships can help to provide valid insights to help individuals and organisation to identify the strategies which are likely to be most effective in particular relationships, such as introducing ideas from the new sciences in transpersonal relations but avoiding them in the working alliance when people are concerned primarily about escaping from an urgent problem. The framework also reinforces a key finding from the sciences of complexity: for an entity to survive and thrive it needs to explore its space of possibilities and to encourage variety; complexity also indicates that the search for a single 'optimum' strategy is neither possible nor desirable. My framework highlights the space of possibilities for human relationships in organisations.

Effective approaches are available to develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to support vital aspects of these relationships, such as intuition, establishing a low centre of gravity, understanding how to use working groups, even learning how to laugh. I also teach 'void skills' to enable people to deal with situations where the world seems to be collapsing beneath your feet, you don't really know what is going on ¾ and there is no light in the enshrouding darkness. Void skills will be ever more important in our fast-changing world, where we can no longer expect things to continue along a predictable linear path for ever. People who take a fixed position in marching ever onwards and upwards along the same path are likely to be faced with more cyclical growth paths containing unexpected discontinuities ¾ which could pitch them into the void.

Given the accelerating pace of business life and the growing flood of electronic and other information bombarding us, the ability to have a low centre of gravity and an intuitive sense for getting to the heart of the matter is essential. It is not possible any more to keep ahead of developments in most fields, even if, like me, you are a fast reader and sleep very little. Nevertheless, if you prepare yourself by formulating precise and relevant questions and objectives, and you maintain a low centre of gravity, then you can relax into relationships where you begin to trust that you will find the right information, at the time you need it.

Understanding the vital part played by myth in our relationships is another skill of growing significance. We are increasingly being affected by the millennium archetype: of things ending and new things beginning. However much we may think we are not influenced by advertising and the mass media, we are all creatures of culture. And culture is a complexity field in which myth gives us a way of knowing our freedom within some bounded instability.

Unlearning for the new millennium

A few organisations might take a systematic approach to giving people time to think (see for example Slocum and Frondorf 1998). However, this is not feasible in most firms.

Given the pressures on business, it would be unrealistic to expect substantial extra time and resources to be made available to help people understand, and to reflect on, their ability to enhance different relationships. Managers must, therefore, ensure that learning and unlearning takes place within everyday activities and ongoing relationships, rather than outside normal work process in, say, a lecture theatre or counselling room. It is also important to integrate learning and unlearning into everyday activities because that is where relationships are enacted. The whole organisation must be undergoing learning and unlearning all the time, not just certain individuals for specific periods.

Organisations must ensure they have the capabilities required to support the development of the kinds of knowledge, skills and attitudes I have outlined in this report. They can then embark on their new millennium adventure with confidence in the ability of their human resources to meet any unexpected challenge, with an inexhaustible creative spirit and jouissance.

References

Bohm David "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1980)

Gleick James "Chaos" London: Heinemann (1987)

Lovelock James "The Ages of Gaia" New York: Norton (1988)

Maslow Abraham "Motivation and Personality" New York: Harper & Row (1970)

Maturana Humberto R and Varela Francisco J "Autopoiesis and Cognition" Boston: Reidel, 1980.

Slocum Kenneth R and Frondorf D Scott "Developing Knowledge Through Dialogue: The SENCORP Management Model" Warwick: ESRC Business Process Resource Centre, Warwick University, 1998.

Teubner Gunther and Willke Helmut "Can Social Systems be Viewed as Autopoietic?" Warwick: ESRC Business Process Resource Centre, Warwick University, 1998.

Figure 1: Sample questions from the qualitative research interviews

What are the most useful things you have learnt in your work?
Will you please talk to me for a few minutes about how you are using knowledge from the new sciences in your work?
What has proved to be wrong and ineffective?
What has changed most in your habits, thinking or emotional life?
Would you describe your personal strategy for solving problems?
Have you noticed any changes in your habits, thinking or emotional life which have occurred spontaneously (i.e. without your conscious intention)?
Have you given up any assumptions, beliefs or convictions?
Would you say you have done unlearning, as well as learning?
What do you do when you don't know what to do?
What are the best conditions for creativity?
How would you define autopoiesis?
Which highly achieving individual do you admire?
Has your sex drive increased or decreased?
How much money do your earn and do you think its is enough?
Would you talk to me about intuition and how it applies to you?
If someone said to you "You don't know what you're talking about" in a hostile and aggressive way at an important meeting, what might you have done or said?
How did you deal with an experience where you felt you had failed?
How have your closest colleagues reacted to your success?
How many times a day do you laugh?

Figure 2: Assessment Framework for Relationships at Work

Figure 2
RELATIONSHIP	Contribution to the Organisation	Human Motivation	Some Signs of Dysfunction
Working Alliance (Behavioural psychology)	Achieving organisational tasks	Practicing learning ¾ necessary for survival Doing; competence; productivity	Lack of clarity of goals, objectives, role Task-dominated, sterile, driven work culture
Unfinished (Transference) (Freudian psychology and other secondary process + paradigms)	Grit in the oyster	Completion resolution Unlearning of dysfunctional, outdated learning	Barriers to change Fixed, disruptive patterns of relationship; resistance
Developmental (Adult learning & Developmental models)	Developing the organistion's human resources	Learning of identified knowledge, attitudes and skills Growth & development	Loss of excitement, lack of 'stretch' Boredom; neediness; burn-out; over- or under-protection of staff
Personal (Humanistic Psychology)	Developing the orgainsation as a working community with a healthy culture	Enjoying learning in community Shared organisational goals, friendship, intimacy, community	Uncontactiful conflict and competition\Lack of feeling of being personally appreciated; loss of task focus
Transpersonal (Heraclitus and other primary process + psychologies such as Jung; Complexity)	Developing the wider mission and purpose for the organisation as a whole	Unlearning to discover emergent order Chaos & complexity; meaning & archetype; holism; connection & connectivity; paradox & contradiction; quantum physic	Physis: life energy at work Unwillingness to trust primary process; meaninglessness; anomie; ennui; disregard of ethic