ESSAY

How Things Happen: A Cross-Cultural Look at Collective Action

Part 3 – Towards Spontaneous Local Action: How to Foster a Sense of Belonging

‘How can I make things happen?’ This is the core question guiding human efforts at organizing collective action. It’s what leaders are expected to do, what MBAs are supposed to train, and what any manager struggles with. Over the course of 2023, Patrick Laudon and Dr. Julien Leyre got together to explore this question. Their year-long conversation resulted in a series of five essays – of which this is the third. (Read second essay)

‘How can I make things happen?’ This is the core question guiding human efforts at organizing collective action. It’s what leaders are expected to do, what MBAs are supposed to train, and what any manager struggles with. Over the course of 2023, Patrick Laudon and Dr. Julien Leyre got together to explore this question. Our year-long conversation resulted in a series of five essays – of which this is the third.  

At the beginning of our previous essay, we articulated one central paradox. If things change all the time, and of their own accord, how is it at the same time possible to guide or resist their evolution? In other words, how is it possible to propose that I can make anything happen or get a group of people to do things, if things are understood to simply happen on their own? More generally, how is it possible for any individual or group to somehow orchestrate any form of coherence in any organization?

As we pointed out, commonly used tools to maintain organizational coherence include binding contracts and financial incentives, articulated to performance measures and other KPIs. Those act as sticks and carrots to keep people focused on the work, and loyal to the managerial structure. Executives also follow carrots and sticks – desirable benefits, and the fear of losing them.

Beyond extrinsic incentives, however, what gets people to ‘care’ beyond the letter of their job description? Proactive engagement requires more than binding agreements, project software and performance management. What prompts people to face the myriad issues that come up day to day, and spontaneously coordinate as they do so?

The Lure of Charisma

A common Western solution is to look for the power of charismatic leadership, keeping people emotionally attached to whoever gives them a sense of direction. This is best accompanied with the appeal of a compelling vision. The leader imagines and projects a future state of the world, which the company is allegedly moving towards. Because they want that vision to come to life, people contribute beyond the pure scope of their contract.

All this harks back to the separation of strategy from implementation – and various myths of the genius individual shaping the world in line with their unique insights. In its idealistic form, the model proposes that a great strategy will compel implementation through the sheer power of original vision. In a more pragmatic variant, it implies that considerable resources should be spent to make the vision as appealing as possible, using all the tricks of psychological manipulation.

In this essay, we would like to explore a different avenue. What would happen if our focus was primarily to nurture a sense of shared belonging? Our premise is the following. For anything to happen in a group, there has to be a minimal amount of consensus. At the very least, there needs to be some agreement that the people present ‘belong to the same group.’ Otherwise, how can I reliably expect other people in my group to do what they agreed to do, or communicate that they won’t? One step further, we propose that a strong sense of belonging will lead the people who form a group to sense their collective potential. In turn this will result in a drive towards better collective action. Let’s explore this more in detail.

Belonging Through Participation: Tojisha Ishiki

To understand what binds people together in an organization, and prompts them to take spontaneous initiatives for its maintenance, we turn to the Japanese expression Tojisha Ishiki 当事者意識. It literally translates as the consciousness (意識) of being a directly involved party (当事者). A more elegant translation would be ‘participant awareness.’

Here is a concrete example of how this manifests. Imagine that I go wandering around my neighborhood, see a piece of litter, and pick it up. Tojisha Ishiki is the drive to pick up the litter. This drive comes from a sense that the neighborhood street is somehow an extension of my home. Hence, it is my responsibility to pick up litter, as I would in my living room or my garden.

We propose that this behavior is related to whether we experience a sense of belonging – or not – with a group. This sense of belonging is bounded. Close enough to home, I will pick things up. Further away, I might not even notice any specific piece of litter. I might just think ‘this place is dirty,’ as an external observer would when describing what is ‘not my problem.’ However, the precise boundaries are blurry. Right outside my home, I will most likely feel an urge to pick up the litter unless I’m rushing or grumpy. A few streets down, I might only do so if I see the same discarded cup multiple times, or if I’m in a particularly helpful mood. My sense of belonging is not binary. It is more or less intense in different places and at different times. It spreads in concentric circles across spaces I experience as connected with each other.

If we consider the phenomenon from a different angle, we can frame it as a non-exclusive way to define identity. Instead of operating through sharp polarization (I am of here, not of there), Tojisha Ishki defines identity by relative focus. I am particularly strongly of here, and to a lower extent of there. Identities are not mutually exclusive alongside clear boundaries. They’re fluid, anchored in local experience, and experienced with different degrees of intensity.

If we translate this to the organizational context, my sense of belonging is strongest in relation to my functional team, my immediate colleagues, or those who share the same ‘corner’ of the office. It extends by proxy to the rest of the organization. And it doesn’t stop there: it reaches across supply chains, clients and stakeholders, though at a lesser intensity.

Sense of Belonging and Ownership

The ‘sense of belonging’ is more than a warm fuzzy feeling of connection. It carries a strong sense of potentiality, which in turn drives the desire to keep the group functional. The model says that ‘because I’m part of a collective, I will look after it.’ This includes custody for the things that it owns and the spaces where it exists. When people find themselves in a situation where they feel that an issue is relevant to them, they’re driven to spontaneous action. Simply put, belonging creates desire.

Fostering a sense of belonging requires coherence between internal experience and external reality. It manifests internally as a drive to act, but also depends on an actual sense of control and ownership over the day to day conditions of life. If people have no capacity to affect their immediate surroundings, that sense of belonging will be lost. Managers and consultants like to say that people should have more accountability. Various initiatives are put in place to increase this ‘accountability’ or ‘sense of ownership’ through training, coaching, or incentive systems. Yet all too often, people are structurally not able to take action. If the structures are such that people are not in fact ‘owning’ anything, they’re hardly likely to act as if they did.

This being said, what we call a sense of belonging should be distinguished from cooperative ownership. Strictly speaking, in cooperative structures, ownership is collective. Meaning, the people who belong to the cooperative have a right to share in the profits, and formal ways of influencing decisions. This does not necessarily translate into ‘a sense of belonging.’ There may well be an office made up of employees appointed by the part-owners, who dictate rules and norms that apply even to part-owners – therefore depriving them of a ‘sense of belonging.’ Of course, being part-owner of a company might enable people to promote structures fostering a sense of belonging, such as policies that maintain local autonomy, but this is a distinct matter.

Besides, a sense of belonging is compatible with corporate structures. The following observation confirms it. When asked if their organization is dictatorial or free, employees rarely rise up to the question of shareholder power or board decisions. They care about the two levels of management above them. It is not so much about the right to shape the high-level direction of the company. Rather, what matters is direct ownership of process, activities, and one’s surroundings. How then can this sense of belonging be concretely nurtured? This is the object of our next section.

Creating a Collective Through Language

The best way to identify whether an individual experiences a sense of belonging is to observe the language they use to describe common challenges. Do they talk about what is happening in the organization using words like ‘I’ or ‘We?’ When they describe something, do they link it to their own experience and responsibility? Do their personal circumstances and existence come forward when describing challenges? Do they also have emotions attached to what is happening? Do things seem to touch them? Positive answers all indicate a sense of belonging.

By contrast, a person who is part of the organization on a purely formal basis will talk of the collective as if they were perceiving it from the outside. This applies whether they’re a contractor or a formal employee. Instead of saying ‘we’ or ‘I,’ they will speak of ‘this company,’ expounding at length how it is like this and like that. They speak as if they were a spectator or a newscaster, describing things from the outside.^[1]

This external discourse tends to be not only distant, but critical. The reasons for this bias are in part cognitive. When you see things from the outside, you cannot rely on your immediate feelings or intuition to understand what is happening. Instead, you’re likely to look for a model and use this as a standard to measure reality. You look for the gaps and point at them. This critical stance may also be driven by practical motives. Criticism is often perceived as a sign of intelligence. It is, at least, the sign that one is not accepting reality without reflection. If you don’t have a strong ‘sense of belonging’ to keep you in the group, it’s tempting to compensate by asserting intelligence. It’s a way to justify your own existence.

A paradoxical consequence is that the people who have no strong sense of belonging tend to sound more confident and articulate. Distance allows them to present an elegant theory of the organization. By contrast, people with a strong sense of belonging tend to provide more nuanced accounts, since their understanding is derived from ripples of emotions and embodied perceptions. Nor do they have a clear sense of what a perfect organization might look like. They’re not comparing their organization to some external model of perfection. Instead, they’re likely to accept a measure of mediocrity, and tolerate the flaws of the company they’re in. The result of all this nuance is a somewhat confused and hesitant expression. It reduces their capacity to be heard. This applies all the more so as conversational models in the organization default to debating mode.

From Debate to Dialogue

What we call ‘debate’ here is a mode of conversation that involves two or more people pitching different ideas, with supportive arguments. Debate typically happens in front of a third party, as part of a broader system that involves a distinction between those who decide, those who propose, and those who execute.

In its most common incarnation, it is part of a linear resource attribution process. ‘What we do’ is decided at regular intervals in specific forums to set strategy. The allocation of resources towards different projects hinges on an adversarial process that takes the form of a competition between alternatives. Debates can also be conducted during implementation, to re-allocate scarce resources when things don’t go according to plan.

Debates are essentially verbal competitions to select the best course of action. The capacity to convince others through rhetoric is an essential skill here. That’s how people can ‘win the debate,’ and hence influence the collective. This might explain the efforts spent making flashy PowerPoints in most corporate settings. Attracting attention and convincing the audience is how you gain a mandate, and the associated budget. No resources should be spared to get those results. The same applies to competitive pitch nights in start-up environments. So what if more effort goes into making a compelling point than exploring a problem from all angles? The name of the game is to win the debate. Once resources have been allocated, there will be time enough to review the proposal.

Not only does debating result in considerable effort spent on persuasion, but participants are polarized by design. The model does little to encourage mental flexibility around a shared topic or interest. Rather, it reinforces differences.^[2] Placing polarization at the core, debate is at odds with nurturing a sense of belonging. Consensus building is better achieved through a different form of conversation we call ‘dialogue.’

Dialogue is not about convincing people through better command of language combined with effective use of numbers and inspiring images. If anything, a rhetorical bend should be viewed with confusion or suspicion. Instead, deep listening and slow articulation of shared objectives is the right attitude here. A slower, non-polarizing approach may lead to shifts in participants’ understanding of their shared reality. Dialogue allows them to perceive it from different angles and at different levels of abstraction. This more open mode of conversation allows participants to segment the world differently, perceive different potentialities, and hence transform things.^[3]

The fundamental element to building and maintaining a sense of belonging through dialogue is treating all members of the group with respect. People who are part of a business generally know what must be done. If someone has reached a stable position of responsibility in a large organization, they are likely to have demonstrated intelligence and problem solving capacity. However, this knowledge does not exist fully formed in any one brain. Rather, it needs to be brought to life through deliberate processes.

Facilitation protocols that optimize for mutual listening rather than persuasion are core to building a sense of belonging. Techniques such as Open Space Technology can promote dialogue, and sow the seeds of group consensus. Open Space Technology is a structured way to organize conversations. In a conference format, it allows participants to decide what they want to talk about, as long as it is related to the shared central question. Participants are encouraged to move freely from one topic to another in the middle of the conversation. Such a facilitation model will not only reveal ‘what people think about a topic.’ It will also give a sense of what people think should be the object of the dialogue. In our experience, it has happened several times in such forums that a pressing agenda articulated by the leadership team differed from what the participants found important.

Emerging Collective Desire

Let us return to a question mentioned in the introduction of this essay. How do you articulate the shared desire of a group? In a model that separates strategy and implementation, the implicit image of the leader is that of a man guiding animals. It’s a shepherd leading his sheep to greener pastures, or it’s a bullfighter shaking the vision like a piece of red cloth, inciting people to run full speed ahead. People don’t know what they want, so goes the logic. Luckily, some bold individuals have the brains and guts to put a vision forward. Sure enough, they end up attracting followers from the hordes of the weak, the fearful and the confused.

The corporate trilogy of Mission, Vision, Values is a manifestation of this approach. It’s a rhetorical model driven by leadership, centralized, and abstract. In its most extreme version, the model relies on messianic or Napoleonic notions of leadership. The group is ‘held together’ through the power or ‘mana’ held by rare individuals. Those exceptional individuals move people to action based on the sheer strength of their vision. People feel a strong sense of connection through their common bond with the leader. This charismatic leadership is what manifests in many ‘guru-founder’ type start-ups. They combine a visionary leader with a heavy top-down corporate culture. The only alternatives for workers are submission or demission.

In bottom-up models, collective action is not about articulating an idea first in the abstract, then gathering the resources to manifest it. Rather, it’s about inviting a collective to perceive its own latent potentialities. Of those, help it select which it most wants to bring to life. And then guide its collective action so that this desired future will be more likely to come real. This is not a one-off endeavor, but an ongoing one. It is what we might call a Protean approach to strategy.

The art of the leader, in this model, is to sense the collective desire, and give it a recognizable shape. Influence is not based on the capacity to ‘have good ideas and convince others.’ Rather, it derives from the depth of connection with the organization, which yields greater capacity to sense what happens, and bring others along. More important than rhetorical skills is the art of deep listening. Influence is a two-way street. It is ultimately driven by an open commitment to collective desire. This has serious consequences on recruitment. Which is what we will turn to in the next essay of this series.

^[1] The same applies to broader collectives, including the country, and the globe. Do people talk about the government as ‘we’ or ‘they?’ When describing the state of the world, do they show a sense of direct implication, or do they give a detached analysis? This distinction echoes the one made by Kierkegaard between existentially engaged individuals – who have ‘skin in the game of life,’ so to speak – and abstract thinkers who describe world systems as if they weren’t part of them, and therefore comically miss out on what matters.

^[2] What we call debate closely resembles what Peter Senge calls ‘discussion’ in The Fifth Discipline, contrasting it with ‘dialogue’. Senge further emphasises how the word ‘discussion’ relates to words like ‘concussion’ and ‘percussion.’ Its etymology reveals an implicit image of mutual violence.

^[3] This short section aligns with discourses and proposals that highlight the importance of slowing down. See, for instance, Time to Think by Nancy Kline, or any of the ‘slow schools’ more broadly.