Telling Them What They Know: Organizational Change, Defensive Resistance, and the Unthought Known
Abstract
The author explores the psychological dynamics of feedback to clients by examining the method and processes of organizational diagnosis and change. In so doing, the concept of the unthought known is introduced along with several other psychological concepts to help explain the clients' initial response to consultant feedback. In particular, the author submits that it is not so much that clients do not know what consultants tell them at this stage of the process of organizational change as much as it is the case that they had not thought of it. This understanding of the change process and feedback to clients has important implications for working effectively with clients' inevitable defensive resistances and anxieties. Two case vignettes are offered as illustrations of defensive resistance and the unthought known in organizational change consultations.
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1.
1. Narrative data gathered from observation, participation, interviews, historical documents, factual information, and so on.
2.
2. See H. Levinson (1972, 2000) for systematic presentation of organizational diagnosis.
3.
3. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory stresses the intersubjective and interpersonal. It is therefore more applicable to organizational research as a study of cooperative and collaborative endeavors.
4.
4. This confrontation with the undiscussable may be in contrast to some versions of organizational change such as appreciative inquiry.
5.
5. See M. F. R. Kets de Vries's (2001) concept of the “authentizotic” organization (p. 305).
6.
6. See W. R. Bion's (1962/2006) Learning From Experience and his notion of the dyad of container and contained.
7.
7. Grotstein (1985) writes:
8.
Of particular importance is the phenomenon of the split transference in which the analyst seems to represent one aspect of an internal object, and an object or objects on the outside represent other split-off aspects. It is very important to “gather the transference” as Meltzer (1967) advises. (p. 168)
9.
8. I make a distinction here between organizational culture and organizational identity in that the latter is the psychological substructure or foundation for the former consisting of artifacts, values, and assumptions.
10.
9. They are described in Ogden's (1994) revision of Melanie Klein's object relations theory as comprising three modes of organizing experience: depressive, paranoid-schizoid, and autistic-contiguous.
11.
10. I wish to acknowledge the helpful correspondence on this subject with Howard F. Stein and Seth Allcorn.
12.
11. See Diamond (2007).
13.
12. Correspondence with Howard F. Stein.
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Article first published online: July 8, 2008
Issue published: September 2008
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