It’s always interesting to look beneath the surface and see what is really going on in an organization. Bob Marshak has been working in this area for a long time; he has more than 30 years’ experience working for the private and public sectors. He is a scholar and resident at the American University at Washington and has spent a lifetime observing, participating and dealing with covert processes.
DC: Bob, why don’t you take us through the main idea?
RM: I have worked in organizations for many years, mostly as an internal and external consultant, dealing with some version of change. What I found is that what’s really going on is often not what is on the table and what people are talking about. So the bottom line is that frequently it’s the unseen or unspoken or unaddressed dynamics that are blocking or limiting individuals, teams and organizations--especially during change. The ability to notice things that might be going on, regardless of your role, is what the book is about. A lot of it is just how to notice what most people don’t say and how do you see what is not there?
DC: This is where I think finance people get absorbed with the rules of accounting; marketing people all are very focused at what the customers want but it’s the HR people who are looking at the internal dynamics and while all managers should be aware of covert processes, it’s the HR people who by the nature of their profession are the ones whose duty it is to be most alert to these kinds of things.
RM: I think that’s totally true David and it’s useful in many different kinds of ways. One of the hard things is that frequently these are the kinds of things that a lot of managers wish would go away. They just want HR people to deal with this stuff and that in itself is one of the covert processes of organizations, which is the messy human side of things. Both overt and covert are often thrown to HR professionals, because managers just want to deal with the rational technical things.
Covert things usually have very negative connotations and there are three major reasons why things are covert: fear in an individual (or a team or in the culture) of revealing things that are considered inappropriate or illegitimate because if you express them they will be punished. Secondly, people hide their valuables as much as they hide their vulnerabilities and their vices. So often, we miss out in organizations on things that are people’s highest aspirations because if they express them, they are afraid they would be ridiculed and therefore they keep them secret. Thirdly, there are the blind spots and blocks that we have, kind of our tacit assumptions about things. We are assuming something or we have a paradigm and therefore we don’t see something as an option.
DC: What is interesting is that there are actually several different things going on that make things covert, it’s not just a single cause.
RM: Yes, and frequently what happens is people devote themselves to one type of covert process, so you can get a book on politics, you can get a book on the unconscious, but not very many people put them all together and that was one of the real challenges when I was beginning to work on this with my colleague, Judith Katz. The Covert Processes Model is an eclectic model based on a lot of different psychological and sociological theories based on the very common metaphor that is used almost everywhere in the world about what’s out in the open or on the table versus under the table.
By keeping it in the metaphorical imagery, I find that I can go into most organizations and use language that people will understand. Things that are overt are readily discussed in organizations. If they are raised, they will stay raised, people will talk about them, and for profit organizations, it’s almost always financial matters. If you are in a governmental agency, it’s almost always the budget process, again back to money and those things are usually considered the appropriate things to talk about. The things that are denied are usually considered inappropriate; in the context they are illegitimate or are not to be talked about. We don’t talk about lust, desires for power, emotions, or political things - things like that are often under the table.
My model also has unexpressed processes: those are the secret hopes and dreams that are above the crowd that are too good to be true. We all know people who are considered dreamers. ‘That’s pie in the sky so I don’t want to hear your grandiose idea about how we could be this great and wonderful company; let’s just keep it real and let’s get practical.’ So we kill off all our inspirational ideas.
In the middle of the model is the prism. The prism is a notion that says we experience things through a filter. This is a range of things that we learned in childhood. Its formal theories, our values and beliefs, cultural models, paradigms, and mindsets. All of these things are the way we interpret the world. It is what determines what is considered legitimate - and ‘on the table’ - and illegitimate – ’under the table or above the clouds.’ So when we look at something, we are working through this filter.
Also in the model are repressed processes: the notion of our repressed unconsciousness—coming out of Freud and Jung.
Untapped processes comes out of transpersonal psychology and the notion is that just as we have repressed negative aspects we also have aspects of ourselves that are super-positive or spiritual dimensions. When we deny them and don’t tap into them those will leak into what we are doing in various ways.
DC: Does this model apply globally or are there differences from country to country?
RM: I have worked quite a bit all over the world and especially in Asia and I think the notion of what is public and what’s private, what’s expressed and what isn’t expressed, varies culturally. In North America, especially if you are in the US, there are things that you can put out pretty bluntly that you would never say in Japan, Korea or China. That’s because in the prism of that culture, what you can put on the table and what goes under and above changes.
If I am in a work team and they seem to not be addressing some pretty obvious dynamics, I am going to ask myself, what is going on? If they are supposed to be transforming the organization but what they are really doing is tinkering, one question I might have is: ‘Is the reason they are doing this because of some belief that they are here to fix the organization versus invent a new organization?’ Is that what is holding this team back and therefore, do I need to make some kind of intervention around their beliefs about their assignment?
Another place where the covert process could be is where things are denied and located under the table. So maybe they are not addressing this because they are afraid of how radical the change will be and they won’t be able to cope in this organization. In our culture you can’t express vulnerability, you can’t express fear and therefore these ideas are not coming up.
Perhaps another place is they are not expressing their secret hopes about what could happen. They are holding themselves back from some of the greater dreams.
You could also have things repressed and buried in the subconscious. Maybe somehow the team leader reminds them of their mother and father and therefore they are acting out in some reactive way from childhood.
DC: I can see developing an awareness of these different sorts of covert processes, but I can’t imagine a manager calling me in and saying, ‘Gee! We may have some covert processes in my area.’ How does it come about that you get a chance to apply this?
RM: A very good question and I think a lot of people, because of the kind of training that they have, often come in and do a team building intervention or an appreciative inquiry intervention. I see this much more as, “Well we know we can look at a situation in three different ways, and I’m asking you to look at in an additional way.” So you are seeing what is happening. How about seeing what is not happening and use that to make some judgments about what is the most appropriate thing to do. But we can’t deal with issues until we see them.
Often managers will call me in the routine way that they would do with anybody else: “I am working on reorganization, I am working on strategy, I am working on team building, and I am working on a conflict between this department and that department” or whatever. So in addition to all the other ways that I might look at the situation as a consultant, I am also wondering whether any of these other covert processes are going on. Then I act on it. I don’t make an announcement.
I will give you a quick example. I was called in one time to do team building for the CEO of a major corporation. The person who called me in was the vice president of administration and they began talking about doing team building because there seemed to be a lack of collaboration in the organization, things broke down and didn’t happen and there wasn’t any follow through. So when the person presented who was going to be at this team-building event, I noticed that there were key jobs missing that would typically be present. For example, the attendees did not include the chief operating officer. So I said, “Doesn’t the chief operating officer report to the CEO? Why is the chief operating officer not going to be in this meeting?” The answer was the chief operating officer has his own camp and we don’t mix the camps. They drew me an organization chart with a CEO with about five people reporting to him and then a COO parallel to the CEO with about five people reporting to him. The question was why are we doing team building with half the team? The answer was they don’t talk to each other. I said, “But the presenting problem is, how do we get more collaboration? I don’t understand what you are doing,” and the answer was, “Well, we can’t do anything else so we thought we would try this.”
So at one level whether it was covert or overt, it was about the inability of the organization to deal with this friction between the two leaders of the organization. My comment was until that could be dealt with; they were not going to be able to deal with lack of collaboration and conflict because it is being role modeled at the top.
RM: There are six dimensions of change. What are the kinds of things that are involved in any change effort? One thing is almost always the reason, the case for change, and the logic. I can go almost anywhere in the world these days, and listen to management give the same story, which is basically because of the forces of globalization, information technology, and increased competition, we have to downsize, offshore, get lean and mean, be virtual, whatever it is. All of this is the overt logic, and typically, what most managers want to do is come up with the reasons, they announce them, and the expectation is, of course, that people will do what they are told. That doesn’t happen because often there are other things going on like politics and lack of engagement and the inability to deal with emotions and not dealing with the mindsets and psychodynamics.
So, let us take a look at each of these a little bit more. The logic here is management is really operating under an implicit assumption that change occurs when there is a solid rational analysis that logically convinces people they need to change. This new logic leads people to think, feel, and act differently, and so they make the announcements. If they get any other reaction, the assumption or the behavior is almost like well, people are being emotional, they are being illogical, and I cannot deal with them. This then becomes an excuse to walk away from having to really manage people versus just announce it. I find in most organizations, logic is insufficient and if that is all you have, your change effort will usually fail, and it will fail for any one of the following kinds of reasons:
Politics: A lot of people don’t like to think of organizations as areas where there is very much politics going on. We like to think of them as rational instruments where people logically operate. But the simple truth is that I may be the head of IT, I may not agree with the organization change, I may want to operate in a way that is based on what I think is in the best interests of the organization, and you have to deal with me, because I have power, I have a point of view, I have my own rationale and logic. I am not necessarily trying to feather my own nest, but if we begin to think of organizations, not as hierarchical relationships but really as constituencies with people who have different mindsets, different orientations, different needs and interests, and that to bring about change, you have to start aligning these interests in a way in support of it, you get change when there is a new political configuration, not just an order, and so, we have to deal with the politics.
As an example, I remember an organization where the people had been hired on and they had been asked mostly to be very smart producers of a certain kind of product and service. The organization was highly centralized, and all the selling and account managing was done by a few people at the top. They didn’t want the people at lower levels to deal with customers and part of that was around control. Well later, as things started to shift, they couldn’t make enough money, so they decided they needed more entrepreneurial efforts from lower levels. They went back to the very people who they had hired to only be technically competent and told them to go out and sell, and that didn’t happen, of course. People at the lower levels were saying, “I wasn’t hired to do that, I am not here to sell schlock services, I want to work on the project, why am I being asked to bail out for the incompetence of the people at the top?”
People at the top were just walking around saying, “We gave them good reasons, what is the matter with them?” So, different points of view, but a failure to understand that there is any kind of need at all to try and deal with the political dimensions of things.
Inspirations, value based: this is the notion that people will change not because we give them a rational reason to change but because we tap into some non-rational deeply held value or hope or dream. This mobilizes them, and regardless of their logic, they are compelled to want to think, feel, or act differently. The classic model of that comes from the United States and the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. It was intended to tap into people‘s highest aspirations of the greatest good of a society, regardless of what was actually happening.
And you can only imagine what it would be like if Dr. King had gotten up and said something like, “I have an analysis, and I have found there have been 43 acts of discrimination and that these have led to a 10.3% decline in the gross national product, and therefore, we have to…” you can see where I am going with that. It is different, that is the case for change, but it is not inspirational, doesn’t turn me on.
And the other thing that happens, I will go back to the example I just gave, is often management will come in with what turns them on, what they think is exciting, maybe it is money, maybe it is a position in the company, but it doesn’t tap into the unexpressed values and hopes of the workforce or may even get in the way of it.
So instead of finding how we can turn people on, we are so afraid that they will be turned off, we don’t look for ways to turn them on. We don’t have people giving the inspirational reason for the change. We are too busy giving the analytic and so we miss a wonderful opportunity.
Emotions: This is a different dimension that is not identical but certainly in the same spirit as inspirational, and that is often people would not put out their emotions. Typically in organizations, expressions of fear, tears, and anger are sometimes okay but frowned upon. Any kind of emotional expressions are often seen as a signal that people have lost control, and therefore, we don’t talk about them. I recall working with an organization that was dealing with whether or not to change its name and identity. It had done a variety of market surveys, and it was seen as being kind of a cold mechanical place.
It was in the business of selling comfort foods, food stuffs that we like. They decided they needed a warmer image, they needed a friendlier image. So, they began talking about not only how they could change the culture of the company but ultimately change the very name of the company because in market surveys the name just didn’t work. And they had done every bit of analysis you could want, they checked it out with the board. As I sat in a room with the CEO and other executives, they kept telling each other why they had to do this but they never took the vote to actually do it. Finally at one point, I just said, “You have given all the reasons, but no one has spoken about their feelings about this. Are you glad, sad, mad, what is going on here?” They gave me that kind of look like, “Bob, do you seriously want us to talk about this?”
I didn’t say anything, and then they said, “We don’t like it. We like the old name that is who we are, that is who we grew up to, it is going to be really sad.” They talked about it for a while, took a break and came back and said they were ready to do it and they did it. It doesn’t always work that way. The inability to express what was stopping them from taking the vote, and the ability to put it on the table if you will, it is a small little act, but it is what moved them along.
DC: I have been at meetings where there have been no quantitative people, and you need somebody with a finance or engineering background who can sit down and say, “Can we just look at the numbers a little bit to make this concrete?” Sometimes that is what you need, but more often the case is not that we lack the quantitative people. More often the case is that what is missing is somebody who can surface this issue about something like emotion—and what a great service that is to the organization just to bring that in at the appropriate place.
RM: Yes, and I think most people are familiar with the notion that sometimes what people need is an opportunity to just release or express themselves. They don’t have to problem solve. Managers and executives are supposed to be great problem solvers, so if somebody is talking about being unhappy or sad, everybody wants to solve the problem, which they may not be able to do. The problem is that they were changing the name, and people are going to be unhappy and that is the way it is, and so you let them cathart for a few minutes and then you move on. That is all they need, just listen to them talk for a while and you don’t offer any solution.
Mindsets: This is the notion of the ways we think about things. Maybe it’s a set of beliefs and assumptions, maybe it is a theory, maybe it is a paradigm, maybe it’s whatever you want, and we don’t often look at that. Historic examples are the mindset of an industrial organization, which was created back in the 1900’s, where you bought and owned just about everything you could, so you had complete control over the production and manufacturing process and distribution. Henry Ford would go out to South America to buy rubber plantations so that he would have the source of rubber for tires and that was a mindset.
We have mindsets like that that are built into what we do—and we don’t go back and check and say does that make sense in today’s world?
Sometimes if you listen to the way people talk, you’ll pick up on it. I was in an organization and they wanted to do transformational change because they needed a whole new way to think about what they were doing and needed radical revolution. But the way people were talking in the meeting, they were saying things like, “We have to make sure there is not too much downtime, and I don’t know why we need to deal with that, it’s not broken, so let us just leave it alone. Let’s get this up and running as quickly as possible.” Well if you listen to that language that is not the mindset of transformation that is the mindset of I am a repairman, and something is broken and I am going to try and fix it.
I said to them, “Maybe you want to rethink what you are doing. I am not sure you are here to fix something that is broken so much as you are to invent a whole new organization. What would it be like if you were inventing a new organization?” That was an invitation for them to frame and to use a different mindset in what they were doing, and it took them down a different kind of path. But here, the hidden dimension was not that they were trying not to do the work, but they just had a way of thinking that was limiting them.
DC: This is where you as a consultant, whether an internal or external consultant, have enough distance from the process that you can hear what is going on at a more abstract level than just the words, you are seeing the pattern in the conversation that is really more important than any specific sentence.
RM: Yes, absolutely. Even if I am in the same organization, when I was an internal consultant, the ability to move around to different divisions and headquarters and fields, you could see differing mindsets at work and certainly, now having worked in many different kinds of organizations, you can pick up on it, and you can see a little bit more than other people do.
But I also find it useful just to ask a simple question of, “I wonder what mental model they would have to have to be approaching this assignment this way,” and begin to be almost like an anthropologist and begin to wonder about that.
That doesn’t mean that I am absolutely positive about what it is what they are doing, but it is a hypothesis that I can test by making a comment or doing something relatively subtle that might shift them into a different way of working on something. Very frequently that is what I do. I found this especially when I have been an internal consultant that some of my best work is not done when I am in a formal intervention mode but when I am wandering around, casual conversations, things that people don’t really notice as being a specific: “Now Bob is going to do the intervention”—but a way of working that sets things up on the path are more likely to succeed and where I have perhaps am a little bit more tuned into where the dead ends are.
Psychodynamics: The term for the unconscious if you will, and there is a fair amount of literature about the unconscious at work. Anxiety is anything that makes us anxious; we will drive our unconscious into overtime and will do all sorts of things. So for the unconscious, when we are anxious about something, we may start blaming other people or put projections on to them about ourselves and other kinds of things, but the simple reality is in most organizations, we don’t talk about the unconscious. We don’t work it, we think that is for employee assistance, and it is not an area to move into, although if you are in human resources, and you are doing things, it is helpful to have at least some rudimentary knowledge because you run into it.
When I was running a task force as an internal consultant, somebody acted in a way that just seemed a little bit out of the ordinary. It felt like they were treating me like I was their father or something. In psychodynamic terms, that might be transference where they have suddenly become five years old and are throwing a little temper tantrum. I think we have all been in a situation sometimes that feels that way, and this is just to remind us that this goes on. There are also studies about groups and the unconscious. When the group is feeling anxious about a task, the typical reaction on an unconscious level is that groups really do become highly dependent on the leader to tell them the answer to everything.
Of course, when you can’t tell them the answer to everything, they kill the leader—or that group will fight or flee as opposed to work rationally. It’s only as the group begins to have its anxiety reduced a little bit, that they begin to work through this. So, one kind of answer is if you are seeing some of that kind of behavior as a manager, what you are trying to do is reduce the anxiety in this group. What can we make a little bit more certain? How can we make people little less concerned that everything is out of control and put things in place a little bit? This will pass and their normal functioning can come into play. So, again, this is marker that says this is going on but it’s not an invitation to play amateur psychologist.
DC: But that business about recognizing that the critical thing to do at a certain time may be alleviating anxiety was a great tip that people should be keeping in the back of their mind.
RM: Yes, that certainly would be nice. So, an important question is how to see a hidden dynamic. How do you know it’s there? You notice what is missing, that’s the bottom line. So a clue that something is missing is when there is an over-emphasis or an omission in an expected pattern, and another way is to pay attention to symbolic expressions, which may provide clues to the subconscious ways someone is experiencing the world. When I’m listening to somebody talking about fixing the organization, that’s almost like a symbolic metaphor that they are fixing a car, and that just does not fit for transformation.
I was doing a workshop on covertprocesses and there were some engineers in the group saying, “Bob, I cannot really follow this touchy-feely stuff.” I had been around engineers my whole life. My father was an engineer. So, I wrote up this formula and explained it. That made it much more understandable, and of course for me, it was just silly, but for them, it was putting something a little bit in a format that was more familiar to them and therefore more user friendly. Although, they would try and point out how my mathematics were wrong because I tried to make it a mathematical formula, which it is not.
Basically, it says, what’s my clue that something is covert? A clue that something is missing is if there is an over emphasis or an omission in an expected pattern given the context. I will give you a quick example. If I start saying, “Let me tell you about my childhood. It was a wonderful childhood. Everybody in it was wonderful. My mother was wonderful. My brothers were wonderful. My sisters were wonderful. My uncles were wonderful. My aunts were wonderful. All my cousins were wonderful. All my teachers were wonderful. All my friends were wonderful. The neighborhood was wonderful.” Does anything stand out in what I’m saying there? One thing is I am purely emphasizing wonderfulness so much to an extreme, am I covering something up? If you really listen to what I said, I didn’t mention the father figure.
Maybe I didn’t have a father, but if I were sitting around, I’d wonder why this has not been mentioned. So, if I’m interviewing a manager about some work that they want me to work on, it’s like what are they emphasizing, what are they de-emphasizing, why are they not mentioning something?
Sometimes our unconscious speaks to us and sometimes it speaks to us metaphorically. So, if the team is saying this place is like a prison, I might wonder, instead of just saying, well I understand you feel confined, I might say, “Well that’s interesting, who is the warden and who are the guards?” I might play the whole thing out because some part of them is expressing some information that maybe they are withholding from their conscious mind, but once they tell me a story I might start deciphering it metaphorically or musically. I was working for an organization at one time and their job was to again radically transform the organization and they were very stuck. On a break somebody was humming a tune, and we both figured out that it was the theme song to Gone With The Wind. That signified to the person and to others that they were afraid that the whole way of life of the organization was going to end. The expression came out of their unconscious.
I was in an organization one time and I noticed they were drawing ads for an ad campaign and they had a humanoid figure with no eyes and it just struck me as very odd. I was talking to some manager later about what the difficulties were in the organization and I got about 10 different things. I asked about vision and they said that was their biggest problem, they had no vision and wondered how I knew that. I said, “You were advertising it.”
DC: Again, all fascinating examples of just being a little bit more tuned in.
RM: People will be reluctant to deal with covert process because they feel it is unsafe; because they will be ridiculed or punished or whatever. So, somehow, you have to create a psychologically safe environment if you want people to talk about things. Safety is environments where people have a sense of trust. The trust that you are going to use data appropriately and not as a voyeur or not to get them, and also a little sense of control where they are not being made to reveal too much too quickly, but they can have a little bit of control over the process.
You are trying to get movement; meaning it’s more important to get the system, the individual, the team, and the organization to move in the direction they need to and not have people have to be exposed for what they are doing; that just gets resistance and people hide out if they feel like you are trying to expose what they are doing. Hearing them say, “Yes, I’m a self-serving liar,” is not likely to happen, but people might stop doing something if you get movement. I think you need to assume people are trying their best as opposed to thinking people are stupid. One reason for this is if you assume people are trying their best but they are getting strange results, it leads you to wonder what must be their mindset that would lead them to do that.
So, it’s the anthropological question. What mindset would lead a rational person or a person intending to get results to do certain behavior that to me looks strange, tells me that they may have some strange ways of trying to do something and if we address those strange ways of doing, we can change the behavior? Look in the mirror. I think we all have to be aware of our tendencies to see things certain ways and is it them or is it me? Isn’t it strange that in every group I am in there always seems to be issues of power, or there is always avoidance of conflict, or issues of diversity or it’s always there being autocratic – is it them or is it something about me? So, we really need to polish up our own prisms and know about ourselves and certainly you have to be consistent with expectations of you and your role.
You really need to be clear about what you are doing. If you are moving into areas that are new or different, you need to get some permission to look at it. You can certainly say, “Do you want to look at something or not?” But to jump right into something can make you the person that is creating an unsafe environment.
DC: It seems to be quite a playful approach that you have, it’s all very positive, you are asking questions, you are getting people to self reflect. You started off mentioning covert processes sometimes has a negative sense but you turned it around and the whole thing came across feeling very positive.
RM: Thank you. That is certainly intended and the covert processes are in some ways wonderful, in some ways for marketing. But it very definitely takes people down certain kinds of paths that are negative—the idea that anything that is hidden or covert should be eradicated and done away with. Now, I’m keeping myself open to a much broader range of possibilities and I’m also interacting with people in a much more accepting way where they are more likely to be open with me because they are going to read my body language and pick me up differently. So, it is really important and in some ways, the term covert processes works a little bit against the spirit of it, but I have never found a good substitute.
