By Gerrit Van Wyk.
A blog about facilitated workshops, and an article about social engineering I recently read, connect in an intriguing way.
The blog makes the point facilitated workshops are common, and indirectly aim to control how people act to make them predictable. To do so they often use engineered jargon, or tools of propaganda, such as inclusiveness, openness, and honesty, which supposedly make them democratic, participative, and transparent, but that’s not what happens in practice. As the writer observes, facilitated workshops serve to reinforce existing structures, not change, or challenge them.
Workshops commonly follow predetermined formats. For example, participants must introduce themselves at the beginning, which creates conformity and control over the group, which makes it difficult to ask questions without being seen as deviating from the group. Participants must commonly also agree to a set of rules for engagement – what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas – which directly opposes the claimed openness and honesty.
Facilitators not only control the content, but also agenda and time, which controls the limits of discussion, and in effect turn participants into pupils. It leaves no space for spontaneity and learning. Workshops often end up with idealized plans, brainstormed in too little time with too little discussion, which participants are supposed to take to their workplaces, where, in my experience, they disappear without trace.
The second piece, an article about the rise of social engineering, begins with Bernays’ theory of public relations in society, according to which professionals must use sociology, psychology, social psychology, and economics, to influence the public at large for their own benefit. Notice how workshop facilitators hew to the same cloth. A better society will emerge from elite technocratic leadership.
How did this come about? Between about 1850-1950, engineers believed their work could benefit society by improving it. To them, conceptually, designing and building bridges and machines is no different from designing society. The idea came about one may engineer society as well, using technology and based on scientific facts. To make that work, experts must operate beyond democratic decision making.
Early sociologists wanted to reform society, management theorists to manage workers industrially, and public relations experts, like Bernays, to use mass media to shape society on a large scale. In short, society could be engineered, as if it was a bridge, or project.
Key to social engineering is social control, and the first step inevitably collecting data to get the “facts”, which then creates a wealth of opportunities for intervention. To scientific managers, like Taylor, physical laws equally apply to society, and when you find those laws, you gain control over it. The ultimate star to aim for was to make everything in society more efficient, which became a cult that to this day cannot be questioned. Even kitchens of the time were redesigned to bake a lemon-meringue pie more efficiently. I suspect it tasted the same, or worse, but at least it was made efficiently, so the cook would have time to do more baking.
The obstacle to reform, and management theorists, who often worked in tandem, was government bureaucracy. The way around it was engineered consent using mass media. What masses of people think could be engineered, from the shadows, and governments and bureaucrats would have to follow these beneficial ideas that the masses now want.
Starting at ground level, one may argue an archeology of facilitated workshops shows its roots in social engineering, and social engineering, like all forms of engineering, is deeply rooted in the Cartesian perspective of reality. In other words, a world that works like a clock or machine, which means its predictable, can be designed, controlled, and made more efficient by experts from the outside in. That works just fine when building bridges, but utterly fails when humans are involved.
Which is where the firsthand experience, and description of what happened in the facilitated workshop in the blog becomes interesting. As such, it is a description of what we consciously observe, which closely follows the traditional reasoning behind workshops, and engineering, but we know underneath that, in the shadows, is a cauldron of human interrelationships and interactions that are immensely complex, and which we typically ignore, or treat as a black box, as does the blog description. What we socially see and do, and how we interact at workshops, is very different from what we are supposed to, and how it is designed.
Workshops is a social game, drifting like flotsam on an ocean of human social complexity. As Cartesian thinkers, we focus on and emphasize the game, but once you look deeper, you start seeing people and their interactions in the shadows behind it, which is what really matters.
Jung argued you can know what is in the subconscious only indirectly, and in the same way, one must listen to what people say, and look at what they do, and how, carefully, to fully understand the dynamics of human social life, otherwise it slips by unnoticed.
The problem, as Ralph Stacey once pointed out, is we are obliged to participate in the game, and short of isolating yourself from society, there is no escaping it, but at the same time, one may learn about the social dynamics behind it, and how to play the game better.
We don’t currently have a satisfactory theory for how to go about it. Stacey’s theory stops short of stepping over the threshold and through the door, which requires ditching the Cartesian perspective of reality as foundation of facilitated workshops, and social engineering, and replacing that with an understanding that our reality, and specifically human social reality is complex, and works according to different principles and laws than those of physics and science. When you apply that understanding to human social interaction, it becomes transparent, and you begin to see social games as the small piece of the iceberg above the surface, and the much larger complex social world hiding underneath it, which is inevitably what holes and sinks the ship.
Knowledge of complex phenomena doesn’t give you control over it, nor the ability to become more efficient, but it does allow you to dance better. Complexity, like a dance, is constantly on the move, and leading it. Knowing about the dance, and how it works, allows one to move and adapt better in response to it.