Organizations: After Fracture

I work at a Jesuit Catholic institution steeped in mission and vision. I'm also - as an alumna of this very same institution - personally steeped in the mission and vision. It might seem counter-intuitive, then, for me to suggest that a fracture in a mission-committed organization shouldn't be addressed with mission language.

Why? Two (non-exhaustive) answers:

1. Maybe the mission isn't the problem.
2. Maybe the mission is the problem.

In late April, the faculty of my liberal arts and sciences college voted to change our undergraduate core requirements. The vote fell largely (but not fully) along departmental lines - 66% of the faculty voted for a radical amendment to the core, while 33% of the faculty voted for a more conservative amendment. The more radical amendment passed, and it will adversely affect faculty and programs in six of our fifteen academic departments, almost all of which are in the arts and humanities. But this doesn't tell the whole story. In the last major revision to the core program, approximately 5% of the faculty voted against the proposal. By the standards of our college and simply by working the numbers, what unfolded in April and May over the core constitutes a significant fissure.

Colleagues in departments negatively affected by this vote are likely employing many strategies to respond to this change. These range anywhere from leaving the job entirely, to accepting the results by "making do with what we have," to departmental and programmatic advocacy through structural means, maybe adopting a mercenary mindset (more on that in a later post), some combination of these, or something beyond all of these. Leaders and colleagues on the winning side of this change may respond to this range of strategies by insisting on things like "come back to the mission," or "use the mission as your north star." But colleagues on the losing end of the change may very well have been using the mission to guide their core votes.

If everyone is using the mission to guide their choices, and contrary results emerge, what do we make of this?

Maybe the Mission isn't the Problem

In responding to fractures like the one I describe above, organizations could bracket the mission and consider other elements that contributed to the fracture. Curiosity directed to system operations is a good place to start: evaluate processes (a primary culprit); consider the distribution of power inside a process and the potential for asymmetrical expression of that power once the process is either underway or complete; and study organizational history.

• Attention to power distribution is important to recognize which choices are offered, the rationale for these choices, and whether alternatives are meaningfully included. This attention is also instructive in evaluating the significance and substance of consequences (likely and remote) that follow from institutional changes.
• Organizational history is useful to illustrate how power tends to be concentrated and whether current concentrations and distributions of power are unusual or "business as usual." Describing the relationship of past to present in these terms will help to identify strategies for navigating future change and, if equity is desirable, doing so with greater and more equitable distribution of power in relation to institutional change.

These issues extend to the structure of the organization and its priorities, as well as pressures operating at social, cultural, and political levels. These pressures creep into organizations, no matter how well an organization thinks itself shielded from them. So the broad landscape matters, too, and recognizing its role in shaping power, choices, and process can help to respond to a fissure. Empowering as many people in the organization as are interested to inquire after processes might lead to more robust repair.

Beyond process, people. Individuals at all strata of an organization have reasons for the choices they make relative to the organization; fractures happen because individuals don't feel that their reasons have been adequately attended to. When a fissure is large enough - say, a full third of an organization are on the losing end of an institutional change - that's data that has individual force behind it, data that says something about the proposed institutional change needs attention.

Repairing fractures requires vertical attention (from leaders to employees) and horizontal attention (from employees to employees), ensuring that everyone who wants to speak has the opportunity to do so, to be heard by others, and to have their concerns register as significant and worthy of consideration.

Just because the mission may not be the precipitating cause of the fracture, though, doesn't necessarily mean that it should be the guiding force of repair.

Maybe "the Mission" is the Problem

Fractures can occur when different versions of an organization's mission are deployed as driving change. In employee-to-employee repair, working collaboratively to recover a shared and genuine sense of the mission is important. This allows employees to share things like "what I meant by ...." and "that's important because ...", which each facilitate individual sharing and the prospect for a baseline understanding of the mission elaborated in community. A shared place to start again may help individuals on any side of a fracture re-engage. This also makes space for nuance in the way individuals interpret and understand the mission; equipped with this diversity of interpretation and understanding, an organization may go forward toward challenging circumstances with robust and wide-spread buy in. Put another way, instead of merely "speaking the mission," the organization might approach change by "speaking the mission in its diverse expressions."

But there's a deeper issue attending the mission-as-problem, and that's mission-as bludgeon. This happens when the mission - or a version of it - gets used with normative force, or as an "ought to." Its exercise in institutional change drives employees into positions aligned with concentrations of institutional power from a desire to be recognized as "committed to the mission." In the worst-case scenario, mission-as-bludgeon comes to take the place of evidence and data; employees are expected to take the mission as data driving institutional change, and those who don't come along are judged to be insufficiently committed.

It's always possible that mission-as-bludgeon is an unintended consequence of including mission language in institutional change. This follows from an erroneous assumption that everybody "gets" the mission in exactly the same way. The data from our core vote shows that such a disconnect is possible, where a faculty splits two to one over a shared educational enterprise and all of us have the mission in view. In both vertical and horizontal attention to repair - from leaders to employees, and from employees to employees - it's necessary to clarify and continue clarifying the function of the mission. It's also necessary to hold open the possibility that employees feel that the mission has been used as a tool of exclusion and not only of distinction.

A mission-committed organization believes that the mission is what distinguishes it from its competitors in the product landscape because of the way the commitments shape offerings and services. Distinction is externally-focused; it takes the purchaser as its intended recipient, and is used as an invitation for those outside the organization to join in. When a mission-committed organization turns the mission on those already inside - unless it is carefully, clearly, and collaboratively understood - the version of the mission in circulation can be used as a tool to separate believers from unbelievers.

This separation is completely artificial - everyone on the inside belongs to the organization either on account of the mission itself or with a favorable view of its possibility. The mission is the problem when there are in-groups and out-groups inside the organization. In this way, the mission is functioning structurally, serving as a process component in the change that's taken place.

Something needs resetting here, and it isn't down to a simple insistence on the organization's mission. I'd submit that what's actually required is seeing the mission itself as implicated in the fracture. When it becomes a tool of division, mission commitments should be subject to the same scrutiny as other institutional processes that need reform, revision, or restatement.

All of the above assumes as an axiom that it is desirable to repair fractures in an organization. A fracture is the end result of an extended process through which the organization and the individuals in the organization have experienced tremendous erosion of trust, of collegiality, and the horizon for creative possibility. Repair requires curiosity about processes and people in and impacted by the process; it requires affective capacity, where leaders and employees are supported to engage and process emotions associated with change; and it requires flexibility for everyone such that the a "true believer" test relative the mission is abandoned, whether this test is held as conscious or unconscious expectation. Finally, a fracture indicates that even the mission is inadequate on its own to hold the organization together; in this instance, attention to its function in processes should be high on the list of repair strategies.

Check out Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University.

Since 2022, I've worked on the team at Compass Ethics, an organizational ethics consultancy that's built almost entirely of philosophers. We think a lot about change, transformation, and helping organizations change and transform in ways that are consistent with the values they identify.

Though I've learned a ton working with Compass, the ideas in this post don't necessarily reflect those of the consultancy. The ideas in this post don't reflect (and are not intended to reflect) those of the academic institution with which I'm affiliated.