The human givens audit

There are three main types of thinking that need to be checked for. Autistic thinking by our decision makers is the biggest source of blinkered solutions causing us more problems than they solve, but nonetheless it usually springs from good intentions.

However, there are two other styles of thinking that can come to dominate an organisation that are not so well intentioned, psychopathic thinking and cult thinking.

A survey published in 1996 found that one in six UK managers is a psychopath.[92] The classic signs of psychopathy that these managers exhibited were: emotional coldness, bullying, deceit, lack of remorse and love of risk. As these people intimidate, ingratiate and charm their way to more senior positions in an organisation, they will often employ other psychopaths to fill lower managerial roles. This can result in a culture of bullying which undermines the mental health of ordinary staff members.

The third style of ill-intentioned thinking that can come to dominate an organisation to the detriment of its members and, ultimately, the wider public, is cult thinking.[93] Cult thinking is not, as many people assume, confined to strange minority 'religions'. It can be found in businesses and political movements and in academic, educational, psychotherapeutic, scientific and sports organisations as well. Typically, in organisations run on cult lines, there is a progressive attack on the member's needs for autonomy, for connecting to the wider community and having a stable family life, combined with a perverse abuse of the need to be stretched.

The cult-making process can be quite subtle. In a business with this affliction, special company outings and weekends away from one's family for staff members only (to 'foster company spirit'), is one such technique. Others include: repeated (indoctrination) lectures extolling the company's commitment to its workers in return for staff loyalty; the expectation that responsibility to the company (to be a good company man or woman) must supersede family responsibilities; the creation of an atmosphere of insecurity by expelling or demotion of scapegoats for trivial reasons; encouraging a cult of personality around a 'leader' etc.

Any company, institution, political party or religious grouping that progressively undermines the ability of the people involved with it to get their needs met is actually regressing them to a state of infantilism: the very opposite of the human givens approach.

From a human givens perspective, the way to begin to understand an organisation is first to be clear about what its real function is. That involves specifying what needs it is supposed to be meeting and what its actual effects are on its customers/clients and staff. These have to be set out in concrete terms (i.e. not in nominalisations).

In a company, for example, the needs of customers, staff and shareholders have to be given equal priority. If the needs of one group are met without equal attention being paid to the others, we know we are back dealing with straight-line thinking and therefore that the organisation will ultimately fail. From such a perspective it is easy to identify delinquent companies, governments and institutions. Generally speaking, in a non-greed driven world, the larger the organisation, the more people's needs it should be meeting in order to justify its existence.

It is important that all parties connected with an organisation get their needs met in balance through what it does. This 'looking both ways at once' aspect has to be incorporated into the process when changes are recommended. (It is because this is not happening at present that psychopathic personalities often terrorise their way to positions of power in our institutions, using fear and intimidation to create a bullying culture that, as well as damaging the people working in it, further alienates the institution from the rest of society. The handmaiden of tyranny is always emotional arousal. When politicians obtain and maintain power by encouraging raised emotions in the people around them — by using terms like 'war on terror', 'weapons of mass destruction', 'anti-social behaviour' (all nominalisations that mean different things to different people) — and promote 'feelings' and 'belief' above thought, tyranny is the inevitable result.

Management's urgent task, therefore, is to ensure that the organisation flourishes in a way that serves both the people outside it (that it was set up to help), and the people inside (who work for it). A way of assessing how well the psychological needs of both groups are taken into account should be built into the system. This would ensure that any change of structure or practice instituted in the organisation does not impinge on these needs. Facilitating alignment with the human givens should be at the core.

In assessing the health of an organisation, people with proven relevant expertise need to design and operate a human givens needs audit appropriate to that organisation. Simultaneously, a human givens psychological resources audit should be carried out. That means, for example, seeing if an institution is stimulating a healthy use of imagination in its workers and clients (rather than unhealthy greed or worrying) or whether or not cult-like behaviour is being induced.

No political or ideological interference with the assessment should be tolerated, nor any that stems from any other vested interests. By doing a human givens audit, using the most comprehensive up-to-date knowledge available, we can identify and measure how well an organisation is working to satisfy human needs. And the dangers for the wider society that arise when an organisation is working against the givens of human nature will be more easy to identify.

The human givens approach to institutions will reveal what should be added to, or subtracted from, the way they are managed in order to balance and improve them. In the course of time some institutions may need to be abandoned as too unwieldy and difficult to change. For example, the NHS is in such a management shambles that the only way forward might be for a new, properly managed, pluralistically organised health care system to gradually grow up alongside it. As that happens, the dead weight of the NHS centralised organisation could be slowly shrugged off like a snake shedding its skin. (If this seems inconceivable now we only need to look back twenty years at how the USSR seemed to most people such a permanently entrenched power system. Now it has gone, a mere footnote in history.)

This effort at reform will employ knowledge from many disciplines. There is a great deal to take into account. Sociological knowledge for example — how the greater disparity in wealth in a society directly correlates with health, longevity, crime and violence on our streets (because the violence in our streets is simply the mirror image of the institutionalised violence that prevents people getting their needs met[94]) — should be incorporated. The long-term view cannot ignore the fact that violence proliferates in any society when its institutions prevent people from flourishing.[95]

BACK TO TOP                                                                  Read On >>