Dr Eliat Aram, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 1

Opening conversations towards compassionate leadership:

thoughts offered by Eliat Aram, CEO, The Tavistock Institute of
Human Relations

The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was founded alongside
the foundation of the NHS, and indeed its sister organisation- The
Tavistock Clinic- immediately became part of the NHS. Leading
differently, leading well, leading ethically are ongoing questions
to grapple with no matter what level of seniority one holds in an
organisation and certainly have been a core part of my experience
and exploration of taking up the CEO role of the TIHR.
The Institute I run works with all sectors but has a particular
affiliation and recognition in the public sector. Recently I have
written a short thought piece on the recent experiences around
the Jimmy Saville scandal which was published on our website. In
that, I pointed out the difficult experience of leaders and their
institutions, when our most beloved and needed public
institutions (the BBC, the NHS, the Police) are constantly seen as
letting us down through failing on their respective core purposes
of serving the public via - the core purpose of publishing the truth
and making it available; providing care and health for individuals
and families; or providing safety and security to individuals and
communities. All these institutions, we would think, need to have
compassion as one of their core values, yet somehow it is not our

Dr Eliat Aram, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 2
experience of them. How come? We need to ask ourselves what
are we doing which isnt working and how can we change, but
really change, to do better and achieve our purpose. I will try
today to give a perspective on the possible dynamics that are
blocking our capacity to learn from difficult and painful
experiences, a perspective that may make you think about why we
let go of compassion, of care, even of ethics, sometimes.
I will talk to you about shame, panic and complexity. I will talk to
you about relationships. I will talk to you about the importance of
talking.

A complexity framework:
In my opinion and based on my practice, in our psyche as well as
in our collective discourse, thinking, reflecting, leading, designing
and intervening are all linked. Over the last few years I have
become increasingly interested in the process of design, and its
range of meanings - from planning and structuring based on linear
thinking where a high degree of certainty is assumed, to an
increasingly emergent design process which I believe suits better
an uncertain reality where linear principles do not apply in the
same way, or are not even very useful.
I also strongly believe in inter-dependence and that individuals
cannot operate well in any way, shape or form, on their own. We
are all connected- whether we are conscious of that, unconscious

Dr Eliat Aram, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 3
of that or deny that. This is not a new idea or a revolutionary
thought, and probably most of you would instinctively agree
however, I would suggest to you that the systems of organisations
within which we operate show that we actually live in a very
individualistic-based world, where both success and failure are
attributed mostly to individuals or an individual and where we pay
lip service to the notion of collaboration.

Why is that? because in believing in the idea of groups we have to
let go of some notion of control that we otherwise very much like
to hold on to; we have to accept that what we see is not all there
is; we have to find ways to live and learn with and from diversity
and multiplicity, with one another but even more complicatedly-
within ourselves.

I will shortly ask you to do a small exercise that illustrates the
richness and power that exist within us and within groups, even
before we look at the wider system of organisations, communities
and society.

Patricia Shaw, in her seminal book Changing Conversations in
Organisations speaks from the framework of complexity theory to
suggest that conversations are themselves organising, they
organise our experience, they organise our lived experience at

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work in our organisations. This may sound circular and that may
be true- it is certainly paradoxical, as the proposition is that we
are constantly, through the medium of talking, in the main, are
organising, experiencing, negotiating, and reorganising our
experience of ourselves in the different contexts in which we
operate, much of it at work. In this process of what Shaw refers to
as the value of just talking there are challenging propositions to
our habitual way of making sense of our worlds. In particular
these have to do with how we understand control and being in
control and the implications to our planning and predicting
activities; to our sense of individuation as we are here engaged in
a process where our status, hierarchical position, power base are
flattened, where every talking participant has a potential to
influence a direction of planning and of change.
Using a complexity lens on leadership requests a shift of paradigm
of structure, from a linear to a non-linear world view and hence
design. So that:

When I talk about linear planning I am pointing to a particular set
of assumptions:
1. an organisational hierarchy where the decision making is at
the top and so is the accountability (at least where ethical
practice is in place);

Dr Eliat Aram, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 5
2. enough certainty to assume that action-plan A will lead to
result B;
3. self belief and self confidence, even self sufficiency.

When I talk about emergent planning I am pointing to a different
set of assumptions:
1. an organisation which is more aware of its informal
hierarchy, perhaps has a different image of itself, such as a
network, although at the same time would recognise that
the formal hierarchy has ultimate accountability for the
results.
2. recognising that there is high degree of uncertainty around
us which means that our planning might only be
incremental, needs to be open to changes and adaptable
and may even require fundamental change to it.

To achieve this we require:

3. a culture of collaboration and participation
4. leaders with enough self- resource and trust in colleagues to
know that we can work towards the plan together

The value of talking and of conversation as shaping strategy and
lived- experience in organisations has been noticed, using a

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different language, already in the 70s by Tavistock practitioners,
Trist & Emery, in their book Towards a Social Ecology contextual
appreciations of the future in the present:

To succeed in a problem-continuing environment post-
industrial politics must become both more informed and
more participative than the politics of industrialism, more
devolved and open to more rapid and continuous feedback.
Post-industrial man will spend more of his time in politics
than industrial man and more in the planning processes
associated with it. He may be presumed to have the leisure.

The statement is rather nuanced. You can see that they recognise
that the leader has to have an understanding and an appreciation
of the political nature and power dynamics embedded in
conversation; the dance between a formal and an informal
engagement; the relationship between emotions and behaviour,
between self and other, between me and myself- so the
movement between inward and outward..

When working from a complexity framework, based on the
principles of emergence, self-organisation and paradox,
psychological and psychotherapeutic frameworks are useful to
draw on as they offer a vocabulary to the feelings we have when

Dr Eliat Aram, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 7
we enter and aim to learn, to make sense of, and develop from
the messy world of experience. Stacey (1996) suggested five
parameters in the measurement of level of complexity in
organisations that may be manageable, i.e., will keep the
organisational system at the edge-of-chaos without tipping it over
to chaos/anarchy/disintegration or, on the other hand would not
be too similar and simple to keep the organisational system in a
state of stability, leading to stagnation, stuckness, rigidity and
effectively death. This five are:

Rate of information flow
Degree of diversity
Richness of connectivity
Level of contained anxiety
Degree of power differentials

As you can see some of these parameters are generally externally
driven (come from outside of us like information flow) and some
are internal and perhaps depend on who we are and where we
come from (eg contained anxiety).
Anxiety, organisational and individual is a rather ubiquitous
dynamic and I would like to add to that the dynamics of panic and
shame.

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I believe that much of the recent scandals as a result of which we
feel our organisations and their leadership have failed us is due to
organisational shame.

Elsewhere I have argued that the affects of panic and shame are
an integral part of any potentially transformative process of
learning, where our sense of identity is at risk of being
transformed, or of course - destroyed.

I argued that panic is simultaneously relationally constructed and
individually experienced, and may be thought of as a response to
anxiety that serves the purpose of not dealing with the situations
provoking that anxiety. The fear of the fear is translated into
panic.

I also linked panic to waiting for something to happen, dreading it
and avoiding it until it arrives. Panic is, then, an investment of
energy into not feeling and not knowing that leads to exactly that
which is being avoided.

The physical symptoms of panic include not breathing, irritable
bowel, stomach pain, feeling sick, feeling weak, near fainting, and
problems with sleeping. At an organisational level we might see

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rushed reactions, knee-jerk reactions, stress, burnout, escalation
of processes and policies and a blame culture.

I associated panic with a strong desire to be with others, with
avoidance of being alone and ascribing great importance to what
others think, however not in a constructive way but in a way that
can result in group think, fear of being an odd-one-out and, most
importantly, loss of imagination and having very concrete
thinking.

The fear of being on ones own, out of control and in constant
need of support makes it extremely difficult to think, imagine,
plan and reflect.

It is important to understand that my hypothesis is that it is not
change itself that leads to panic because when that which is being
unconsciously avoided does happen, the panic symptoms diminish
and the capacity to manage is found. It is the phase before a
change, the waiting period, which is experienced as panic. The
investment is in trying to maintain a strong in control sense of
self. The fear is of dependency yet people who are panicky are
highly dependent.


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I regard the interlinked process of panic and shame as a response
to deep-rooted fears to do with inclusion and exclusion and the
consequent potential for being humiliated and shamed. Anxiety
generated by endless waiting and preparing to be abandoned and
rejected, reflecting past experiences, is replaced with panic, anger,
rivalry and fear of closeness. All these are expressing difficulties of
relating... shame arising from the fear of the public symptoms of
panic contributes to the dynamics of inclusion-exclusion.

Shame is an affect that arises in relation to others and has to do
with looking and being looked at, taking the form of a wish not to
be seen, to hide. It tends to be a feeling of the whole self, or the
whole organisation not being enough as opposed to guilt which
is the feeling accompanying the experience of doing something
bad, of hurting another, of breaking some moral codes. So shame
drives a wish to hide whereas guilt would drive a wish to conceal.
When shame is converted to feelings of inadequacy and fear of
exclusion it may in turn provoke violence and aggression. This may
take the form of envious attacks that destroy relationships Of
course these actions would generate guilt in a person with
integrity and the cycle goes on.

These two processes of panic and shame are, therefore,
simultaneously individual and social. The particular society we live

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in, the West in this case, requires that we conduct ourselves in
particular ways and our compliance is assured by particular kinds
of personality and mental process, that is particular ways in which
people experience themselves. In other words, particular societies
require particular forms of we and I identities. All of this relies
on shame to sustain the particular kinds of self-restraint required
by Western society at this time. These complex responsive
processes, are paradoxically both civilising factors in our society
(eg potty training) and potentially destructive if not treated with
compassion and care.

What do I mean by compassion and care towards our shame?
I suggest that shame is an integral and inevitable part of any
learning process because when we engage in a process of
learning, we engage in a variety of groups, having to deal with
exclusions and inclusions, with being categorised, with being
assessed and evaluated, all of which can trigger our fear of being
seen to be incompetent, our competitive wish to be the best, or
perfect, and moreover our need to be acknowledged to be
worthy, from which we derive our meaning in life.

In suggesting an understanding of shame and panic as complex
responsive processes of relating in any context where there is a
potential or a wish for learning, I am not aiming to find solutions

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to reducing or ridding it. I am suggesting that the most valuable
thing we can do is learn to endure them and work with them as
inherent aspects of our human imperfect selves, to have
compassion for our imperfections, for our capacity to have blind
spots, to not know, to make mistakes.

I believe that if we are really to learn from mistakes we need to
learn to hold them in mind as opportunities not only as disasters.

Learning lies in holding paradoxical aspects together in creative
tension, not in attempting to resolve or avoid those tensions.
Avoiding, concealing, hiding- are a recipe for the kind of
scandalous conclusions and let downs we are currently
experiencing. Compassionate leadership would be that which
works with - not against - not knowing, uncertainty, ambiguity,
frailty.

Our care systems and the way we manage our vulnerable
members of society- the old, the sick, the young are a mirror of
how we conduct ourselves, defensively barricading our aggression
or creatively working - negotiating, engaging in citizenship
behaviour, finding and taking up authority for ourselves and on
behalf of others, taking risks with integrity for a joint purpose for

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around which we organise ourselves with our natural human
messiness.

This is linked for me to the notion of a spirit of inquiry which I
think is also expressed by Bion in Attention and Interpretation that
the act of faith (F) depends on disciplined denial of memory and
desire (p. 41). For Bion, the act of faith is based on an acceptance
of the unknown, since nobody knows what will happen, and it is
essentially a spiritual approach to the self but from his point of
view, the act of faith derives from a scientific state of mind, and
should be freed from its usual religious connotations.

His closing comments in the book are:

what is required (for Achievement- EA) is not the
decrease of inhibition but a decrease of the impulse to
inhibit; the impulse to inhibit is fundamentally envy of the
growth-stimulating objects. What is to be sought is an
activity that is both the restoration of god (the Mother)
and the evolution of god (the formless, infinite, ineffable,
non-existent), which can be found only in the state in
which there is NO memory, desire, understanding (p.
128-9).


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In that same book, Attention and Interpretation, he draws on
Keats negative capability. Keats (1817, from letters to George
and Thomas Keats):

several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once
it struck me what quality went to form a Man of
Achievement, especially in Literature, and which
Shakespeare possessed so enormously I mean
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Bion quotes from Keats in order to reinforce his idea that the
analyst is more able to analyse when he frees himself from the
need to understand and make sense. He suggests that the more
disciplined the analyst is to release himself from having any
possession of memory, desire, understanding or sense, the more
possible it would become for him to work best with what the
patient needs.

Why am I telling you this? Because there is a particular form of
leadership that really speaks to me, which is embedded in this
idea. Leadership would be about participating in the social process
of interaction in local situations in the here-and-now without

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assuming a capacity to step out of, or beyond, or aside from, the
interaction.

In short, leading a change process compassionately would be
participating in a co-created process without assuming a capacity
to know more or beyond or outside of the human interaction, and
with the capacity to endure uncertainty and doubt with a touch of
humility as to ones individual capability.

I will end with a poem from Rilke which I love. It is offered in the
original German language and in a free translation:

Catch only what youve thrown yourself, all is
Mere skill and little gain;
But when youre suddenly the catcher of a ball
Thrown by an eternal partner
With accurate and measured swing
Towards you, to your core, in an arch
From the great bridge-building of God:
Why catching then becomes a power
Not yours, a worlds.

Reiner Maria Rilke, translated by Donald Marshall
and Joel Weinsheimer in Gadamer, reprinted 2006,
Truth and Method.


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