‘Giving means accepting to lose something: to be truly ‘Human Centric’, you have to be prepared to sacrifice ‘Goal Centric’.

Human centric Vs Goal Centric

‘Putting people back at the heart’ is the mantra that everyone repeats, hand on heart, to ensure the support of a social body that is sailing at a dead end and gradually losing its footing in the infernal spiral of change. Yes, but a company, whether it has a mission or not, must constantly improve its performance in order, at the very least, to ensure its survival and, at best, to defend or develop positions that will give it more comfortable room to manoeuvre. In management literature, this can be summed up in the dichotomy of being ‘Goal Centric’ and ‘Human Centric’ at the same time, which is a perilous balancing act, now and in the future.

In his book ‘Approche systémique dans les organisations’ [2004], Alex Mucchielli recounts a delicious example of a fiasco during an almost minor organisational change:

Sales staff from a software company were visiting their customers (prospecting and follow-up) to develop their offers. During these visits, certain technical questions were raised with the sales staff, who were unable to answer them directly because they lacked sufficient expertise. They then have to turn to the team of programmers, who are saturated, disrupted in their work by these incessant calls. It was therefore decided to set up an IT mailbox service in which sales staff could post their questions, which the programmers would then answer at times that they were familiar with and which would not disrupt their work.

This is how the process was imagined:

Système relationnel Final

It was a fiasco and the system was abandoned, both by the programmers, who didn't open the mailbox, and by the sales staff, who didn't take the trouble to send their requests to the mailbox.

How can this fiasco be explained?

To understand what is commonly, and perhaps incorrectly, referred to as resistance to change, it would have been necessary first to consider how the ‘system’ functioned before the mailbox was installed, in other words what the cooperation dynamic was (= organisational sociology). This is shown below:

Système relationnel initial

The diagram, based on observation, illustrates the chain of interactions that took place when dealing with requests from sales staff: telephone contact with the programmers meant that sales staff had to ‘defer’ to the programmers in order to get a response from them, while at the same time making the most of their sales know-how with their customer (the person who knows how to talk to get what they want).

The parallelisation of the 2 relational systems, like the new configuration of the system, neutralises the direct relationships in which the recognition of each other was played out. In fact, apart from management, nobody had any interest in seeing working relationships transformed:

• The programmers, opening the letterbox, would have been obliged to respond to requests, whereas previously they could easily avoid these requests.

• The relationship between the sales person and the programmer was reversed, with the programmers serving the sales person, without deference or recognition.

• Checking and listing requests, as well as checking responses, would have enabled programming errors to be identified, which would have reduced the areas of uncertainty for customers regarding certain malfunctions.

• Sales staff, no longer able to provide immediate responses to customers, could no longer see themselves as a valuable link with the company.

• - Customers, for their part, according to sales staff, were no longer interested in receiving an asynchronous response without being able to discuss it with a specialist.

  
  

According to Alex Mucchieli, this new system basically calls into question the professional recognition of the protagonists, their intrinsic value in the system: the sales people are no longer valued by the customers, the programmers no longer have a relationship with the sales people and are losing room for manoeuvre, which they cannot accept.

What lessons can we learn from this example?

There are countless lessons to be learned (in particular from the strategic systemic analysis framework), but let's focus on one that was mentioned in my foreword: being ‘human centric’ means first and foremost, and before any instrumental approach to empathy, benevolence, commitment, well-being at work, personal fulfilment, leadership, etc., being able to recognise, respect, preserve and consider the links between human beings that are the very essence of an organisation. Admittedly, there are games and behaviours that are, or sometimes appear to be, at odds with Goal Centric, but these games and behaviours are the foundations for creating links between people. By trying to eradicate them without considering them, we produce tasteless mechanics. 

Marcel Mauss, in his ‘Essay on the Gift’ (1925), showed how the social cohesion of primitive societies was maintained through ‘gifts’ between individuals. While we no longer exchange pottery, today we give time, expertise and advice, but also recognition, deference, congratulations, time, etc. ... :

• Giving → The giver creates a bond with the receiver: ‘the salesman pays deference to the programmer’.

• Receiving → Accepting the gift means recognising this relationship and the implicit obligation to give back.’ The programmer receives the gift ’

• Giving back → The one who has received must, in turn, make a gift in return, often of equivalent or greater value.’ and gives his time to respond, even if he is busy ’

Our societies have come a long way since primitive societies, which blurred our relationships between people (power, ambition, money, etc.), but the very essence of human groups, of an organisation, of a ‘Human centric’, is indeed this capacity to weave links through barter, exchanges or gifts in a symbolic and mutual recognition of the individuals in the system.

In my opinion, the future of human-centred organisations lies in their ability to respect the imperative need of human nature to create links between people.

As Norbert Alter, a great Mauss scholar, reminds us, giving requires a degree of sacrifice on the part of the giver if it is to be valued by the receiver. If companies want to remain human-centric, they will also have to ‘sacrifice’ Goal Centric on the altar of the quest for productivity at all costs, at the risk of seeing an ever-increasing level of disengagement. ‘Sacrificing Goal Centric means accepting to lose a bit of hyper-rationality, process,... in short, prescription, to give way to ‘real work’ by and for individuals.