The lack of large, high quality organising ideas

A flourishing organisation grows in an organic way. Its structure is determined by organising ideas that are big and flexible enough to encompass all conceivable eventualities. To succeed, everything has to be in place at the right time: people, skills, money, geographical location, the required technology and infrastructure, and the need (market) for its product or services. When an organisation is running well it is because the people in it share similar perceptions about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how best to do it. Such perceptions derive from organising ideas.

To some extent the degree of refinement of shared perceptions in any group can be used as a measure of how advanced it is. Conversely, crude shared perceptions are a mark of the primitive nature of an organisation or society. For example, when only crude perceptions (beliefs and ideologies powered by straight-line thinking) are imposed on us by government, government interventions inevitably fail.[51]

An organising idea is always needed to shape our perception and our thinking. This is because we organise what we see and experience through what we believe we know.[52] Thus an organising idea determines where we look. It guides our research. All human undertakings operate from organising ideas and, if we are learning, we are continually refining and updating them to understand the world. Real understanding comes from the type of thinking that produces organising ideas large enough to make sense of the detail. (This, of course, takes considerable effort. It stretches our mental faculties.) A new organising idea that is any good is always bigger than earlier ideas and able to explain the anomalies that previously caused confusion.

Progress comes from this type of thinking. For example, Florence Nightingale came to understand the relationship between cleanliness and health, and then managed to reduce the fatality rate among wounded soldiers in the Crimea from 40% to 4% by introducing basic hygiene practices and improved sanitation.[53] This was her big organising idea. As the idea spread it refined earlier ideas about the importance of cleanliness to health.

Organising ideas that are useful, however, can be lost again. Because of bad management and government interference NHS hospitals in the UK today badly need a 'Florence Nightingale'. Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI) caused by poor hygiene practices affects 300,000 people a year.[54] Over 5,000 die unnecessarily of it each year in Britain alone and it contributes to the death of a further 15,000. It costs the NHS more than £1 billion a year and loses at least 3.6 million bed days.[55] (Many doctors believe the true fatality figures are worse because doctors are so ashamed to record HAI as a cause of death.[56]) This far exceeds all fatalities inflicted by terrorists throughout the whole of Europe and the USA in the last ten years.[57]

When individuals and groups don't refine their organising ideas they become set in their ways and operate mechanically out of conditioned habits and emotion. Their plans and efforts are likely to be self-defeating because they have difficulty assessing changing circumstances. This is because, like rats in a maze, they are incapable of seeing the bigger picture. And, prior to them instigating changes in an organisation, the chances are that there was a degree of functionality in it. This is because, when people are given responsibility and left to their own devices, human ingenuity can usually make things work in a 'good enough' way. But when straight-line thinkers, especially those suffering from TOD, force unnecessary changes onto people, they invariably make processes more bureaucratic, less efficient and less humane. And when such people have power it can be dangerous for the rest of us. (Hitler, for example, had autistic psychopathy.[58])

A good example of what we mean by this is that, when schools are designed and managed in a straight-line way — without taking into account how to realistically work in tune with the psychobiological givens of how children learn and teachers teach — the requirements for a successful teaching environment can not be met. The end result of that is that whatever level of functionality the school previously had becomes destabilised.

We believe that this kind of approach to tackling problems has played a large part in the rising levels of disenchantment, dissatisfaction, mental illness and crime and violence in our society.

The opposite of autistic, straight-line thinking is organic thinking. All human groups are living organisms. All the separate systems that go to make up a living organism must have independence and must interrelate. The human body, for example, contains many organs and, if the whole body is to work well — heart, kidney, liver, and immune system ... and so on — have to operate to some degree autonomously, but if any one part is impaired, it affects the totality. You cannot change one system in the body without impacting upon others: so, when a liver becomes diseased, it makes us sluggish, affects our mood and impairs our ability to think clearly. (The best doctors are those with a holistic approach to diagnosis.)

We see organic thinking just as clearly in the practice of psychotherapy. To effectively help an emotionally distressed person, a psychotherapist must take a flexible, organic approach and look at their patient's life in the round — his work situation, how much control he feels he has, the quality of his intimate relationships and friendships, the status he perceives he has, his diet, and whether he is being satisfactorily stretched (physically and mentally) to maintain a sense of meaning and purpose. Therapists who know how to help people get their unmet needs fulfilled better produce good, lasting results in the quickest time.[59]

Organic thinking is concerned with how interrelated elements of any given set of patterns work together. It looks at how instigating change in one part of a system impacts on other aspects of the system. It also asks, would a change really make the system more effective? (If it ain't broke, don't fix it!)

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