- Email: [email protected]
Conversation with Will McWhinney
Conversation with Will McWhinney
J
found Will McWhinney’s notion of “remythologizing” (see his and Jose Batista’s article on page 46) one of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in recent months. There is much material available about renewal, revitalization, culture, and myth. The idea of rediscovery of the fundamental stories and beliefs which constitute the organization is a somewhat different way of talking about these processes. The baby of tradition and past achievements does not have to go out with the bathwater of empty policies and purposes that have lost their meaning. This is what I find refreshing about McWhinney’s concept: a commitment to change that is far-reaching, but a commitment also to continuity and coherence. I thought readers might enjoy hearing some more about these ideas in the more informal language of an interview. We caught up with Will McWhinney this past summer in Washington, D.C. at the annual meeting of the Association of Humanistic Psychology- where, I discovered, he was completing a term as president.
59
60
VAILL:
Maybe it would be useful if, to get started, you simply repeated what the main thing is that you want people to understand about remythologizing.
MCWHINNEY:
Remythologizing is a way of using a deep sense of an organization’s core process to continuously revitalize the organization. The core is the sense of the essence of an organization, just as the personality is of the person. It’s the fundamental notion, which often was created in the very beginning, sometimes in the very first words about it, as was the case with the telephone company. Alexander Graham Bell’s comment, “Come here, Watson, I need your help’- it’s not an exact quote, but it’s very close- set the concept of service. That phrase epitomized what Bell wanted to do.
VAILL:
It was the perfect use of the telephone. I mean, the man could not have summoned help without the telephone.
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right-but there we had the notion of the telephone as service, you see. Yet when the telephone was brought to England shortly after its invention, it was viewed as a competitor of the telegraph, so its use rapidly became a matter of government economic policy. In this country, the fundamental use remained, “Help me, extend me, connect me.” So the instrument became part of the whole concept of service to the individual, the family, or the person as opposed to an instrument of commerce and infrastructure in society. Here’s a case where the very first words out of someone’s mouth created the root metaphor, and the myth was built around that. The early origins of a particular system often carry the blueprint of its development -much in the same way that the early origins of a human being often carry the way in which the child develops into an adult.
VAILL:
So one important dimension is that the myth and the remythologizing process capture the reasons why the organization exists at all?
MCWHINNEY:
Not so much why, but its central mission, central activity, central way of doing things that you might call simply habit. But it’s very deep habit. I recently had an opportunity to see how persuasive a root metaphor can be. In a conversation with one of the original faculty of the Fielding Institute I inquired about the earliest events in Fielding’s history. He began by describing a teaching event, in fact a failure at teaching, that he indicated served as a starting point for building a new mode of learning. He followed with a description of three more events that preceded the actual opening of the Institute. After about five minutes, I broke into his tale with, “Incredible, you have just described the steps in the admissions process that has been used three times each year for
the last 15 years!” This event, the Admissions Contract Workshop, is, according to prevailing belief, a systematically designed screening process based on psychological and pedagogical principles. But after listening to the retelling of its origins, I could see that it’s simply a ritualization of the founding sequence of event, rooted in the unconscious. Changes cannot be made in it, any more than a storyteller can change an epic poem. VAILL:
So it’s a story they tell themselves about how necessary it is?
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. According to the story, it is a rationally devised event. But now we see that it is a series of accidents-indeed, a rather good set. The accidents have been transformed into the rational base of choice. Without making the process conscious, you can’t change it. It is unadaptable. It is the best possible design.
VAILL:
And it is the vehicle for the institution’s philosophy. I mean, that’s the sacred part of it. “This is the way we do things at Fielding.”
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. These, of course, are sacred stories. They happen out of time, in the world of “once upon a time.”
VAILL:
I suspect, then, that this rationalizing process would apply to many other activities if you use the story as a way of differentiating yourself from other organizations. For example: “We’re not a big state university bureaucracy where you’re just a number. We have a highly personalized contracting process,” and that sort of thing.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, in this case the process is still alive, but it has been inaccessible to change because the source has disappeared.
VAILL:
“The only way to do it” is all that’s left.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes. And it continues to resist change. When you exert a lot of pressure to change it the response is simply, ‘This is the best way to run it.”
VAILL:
And yet, circumstances cur2 change. That method could become obsolete.
MCWHINNEY:
You have the problem right- that gets to the heart of what often happens. In the telephone companies the original concept of service is no longer a viable technical/economic myth. The various Bell companies appear unable to understand this. Rather, they have simply gone into depression, as an overall system, at the organizational level and among the employees. It is precisely the case where the method (in this case,
61
mission) has become obsolete, but because its source was unconscious, methods to find a new one are inadequate. To change it, the methods or myths must become visible as myth, so that the people involved can consciously reengage with the founding energy, reinterpret the myth as necessary for the present circumstances, and find new methods that integrate the story with the present.
62
VAILL:
O.K., I think that’s a good summary of many of the points you make in the article. Let me push on to the next question now that we’ve established the thrust of mythologizing. One of the attitudes that people might have as they think about this mythologizing is that it seems like an artificial or contrived process. First, do people have this feeling, and second, if you run into it how do you deal with it?
MCWHINNEY:
I am not sure which of those feelings people have about discussing organizations and behavior using mythic and symbol models, but you are correct that many people are turned off or even offended. Even at Disney’s Imagineering, the mythic language needs to stay on the product side of the house. The most important thing is to respect those feelings and use the very technology of symbolic analysis to understand where people may be coming from and how best to proceed. I think the most evocative approach is to recognize the scientific world and its rational methodologies as the prevailing societal myth. Like other mythic systems, it contributes greatly to human existence; yet it has limitations. Each myth has different rules of evidence, different plots, different goals. We can use both storytelling and statistical analysis to inform us, make decisions, and tell lies. A current difficulty is that most of us who are trained in social science and management traditions do not yet know the rules for manipulating symbols, so we have trouble separating the wise from the wicked. So for a while we will be subject to a lot of shallow work that is contrived. I take it as my responsibility to build as reliable a science and art of symbolic method to underlie my work as I have learned to use for empirical studies and action research.
VAILL:
Do you see any backlash in the way the new organizational tion consulting uses myth language?
MCWHINNEY:
Certainly. There is a lot of contrived work. But in some instances the power of the interpretations is so unexpected that the clients reject it out-of-hand as fake or fortune-telling stuff. The myth can be too bald an exposition of what is going on. Technologically trained managers often can’t accept an explanation because it seems to fit too well. In many instances they will reject knowledge arising out of a foreign tradition. We have to learn to tell the truth with greater compassion.
transf orma-
VAILL
:
I think I see. When you were talking about AT&T a minute ago the notion of service flitted through my mind. Isn’t it interesting that some Bell operating companies, which supposedly have a regionally defined mission, are now marketing yellow pages nationally? If you were talking to a regional telephone executive you might want to say, “What’s with this impulse to go national? Where does this energy come from? You have a limited mission. You’re only supposed to be concerned with your region. Why are you trying to sell your yellow pages in Washington, DC?” I sense you’re suggesting that the individual might have a similar kind of shock of recognition as he realizes how deep in himself is the feeling of wanting to serve broadly- I mean, irrespective of time and space: “My mission is service.”
MCWHINNEY:
I wouldn’t jump that quickly, but you have the first of a series of clues.
VAILL:
No, I mean, what I’m trying to understand here is what happens to a Bell system executive with a deeply ingrained feeling of service. Some judge cuts off 90% of his market and says, “Restrict yourself to your region, ” but what bubbles out of him is a spontaneous idea to market his yellow pages nationally.
MCWHINNEY:
Of which he may have no understanding.
VAILL:
Or which he might never quite have put together that way. But back to my question of whether it felt contrived. You are saying that as the individuals make that connection, it no longer feels artificial to them? They then with much more eagerness begin to dig in to what the core myths . . .
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. So, for example, the core is even more transparent at Walt
‘. current difficulty is that most of us who are trained in social scienceand managemenf traditions do not yet know the rules for manipulafing symbols, so we have trouble separating the wise from the wicked.”
63
Disney Imagineering, the R&D division. I asked a group of senior designers, project directors, and architects to describe what was going on in the rides in the Park. I said, “What age group do these appeal to?” In a moment or two, they began to recognize, for example, that Bambi epitomized the whole notion of forced separation for the first time from a parent and then coming back to the parent. They recognized things about unintended separations, about the first wandering away from home with the notion of coming back just to see what it was like to be separated, with no intention of going someplace. Within a few minutes, many other examples are on the table - barn, barn, barn, you could pick them out like that. Less than a week later they came back to me with exceptions rides or films that didn’t fit the “story.“ So the next week they were talking to me about Huck Finn. “Oh, that is the next development of a child. That is what happens when you are eight or ten years old. You go out to seek the world- not to be away from your parents, but to seek the world.” So they began to develop that one. They began to think, “What’s the next thing in the development of the person?” and they came up with the next stage and example in the Disney work. They came up with those out of their enthusiasm. I didn’t tip them off. All I would do is lead them into the notion of the myths that are appropriate to particular development stages.
64
VAILL:
And also your role is to help them be more conscious of the underlying story that has been grounding their action?
MCWHINNEY:
Yes. The grounding
VAILL:
Supporting
MCWHINNEY:
These things were all working out of those models that Walt Disney was working on.
VAILL:
Without
MCWHINNEY:
The function in the life of a person-
VAILL:
So the product at Disney is selling, but basically you don’t know why it’s selling because you don’t know what it’s appealing to . . .
MCWHINNEY:
Exactly. They did not understand the deep meaning. They could reproduce that product beautifully but the product’s vitality had disappeared. There will continue to be up-grades, but there have not been any new ones for a long, long time. Now the Disney people have to face a new market. They hated the idea of moving into the adolescent
that is underneath
the unconscious.
the foundation.
ever having thought of what their function was? in particular
of a small boy.
world. To them, adolescents were bad: Adolescents cause trouble, they break up the place, they don’t spend much money. We needed to get the designers to realize they needed to go into the new market willfully. Once they saw that Walt Disney himself was psychically stuck at childhood in his own creativity, they could accept the notion that they could stay with the same human values but now focus on an adolescent or a young adult. To date there are just three or four examples in the entire Disneyland structure of adolescent or young adult entertainment. They are still anomalies. My own part was very small, but it did help a little bit; and then in that short time all of the people who were interested in young kids actually drifted out of that division and into other divisions. VAILL:
It’s interesting that for adolescents the models that we had became so out of date. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor in Nutional Velvet, or whatever: It was just a fairy-tale adolescence, not the real world that today’s adolescents are living in.
MCWHINNEY:
I’m departing a little from remythologizing, but I want to give a sense of how we got that going. First we got a good smart group of adolescents to go to Disneyland. When they came back we interviewed them on what they got out of it. The first thing that they did was give back stereotypical answers - answers we all knew before we went there, answers that a good teenager ought to give. “A total wipe-out; we had a nice time.” After deciding that that wouldn’t work, we happened to find a couple of young improvisational actors who had been working for Disney in another capacity. One was 26, the other younger. We said, look, you go down there and pretend you’re teenagers. Come back alive as teenagers. They came back with a whole bunch of stuff. The comment I enjoyed most was, “Hey, the best thing I saw down there was a real tree with artificial roots!” It turns out there was a real tree with metal covers designed to look like roots to cover a lot of wires going up into the tree. Here were cast iron roots for a live tree. What he picked up, of course, was what is missing from the Park.
VAILL:
Absurdity.
MCWHINNEY:
Absurdity. It’s a contradiction, wiped that out absolutely.
VAILL:
It’s the same phenomenon it tickles them.
MCWHINNEY:
So you want absurdity, but the Park has no absurdity. It’s been taken out, everything from the simple mirrors we used to enjoy in the fun
it’s the nonsense; and Disney Parks have
that appeals to teenagers in Mud Magazine;
65
houses to all the contradictions in Disney movies which were seen as scaring people. Take Snow White, for example; they cleaned up most of the stuff in Snow White.
66
VAILL:
Bambi going over the waterfall.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes-all the things where there’s some kind of contradiction or impossibility. Not just scary things, but things that have an unmanageable reality. Being scared is one thing, of course; kids love being scared.
VAILL:
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I suppose, is the most dramatic, where the sorcerer’s apprentice inadvertently triggers the magic spell. The brooms start marching and the water starts rising. . . .
MCWHINNEY:
That would be one. Maybe a clearer one is in Pinocchio, where good/bad conflicts come up. Those are all wiped out in the Park; he’s just a good little boy. All the stuff about being playful and destructive is wiped out. So the movies had the whole rich life of a child.
VAILL:
So what they’ve done is accidentally sanitize adolescence so that it was no longer appealing to the adolescent, who wants some violence and absurdity.
MCWHINNEY:
And competition and testing himself. All the testing things have been taken out, too. Now they see that . .
VAILL:
This was at Disney World, Disney Epcot Center?
MCWHINNEY:
Primarily in the Disney Magic Kingdom. The remythologizing was getting them in touch with the blockage in Walt Disney’s own growth and letting them say, “Oh, since that blocked us before, what is essential in the Disney story?” What is essential in the Disney story are these rich human values that we think of as family values in the best sense. So you continue those and see them in places like Splash and Three Men and a Baby. Those films are within the Disney belief system but deal with adult issues. Still fantasy, as it is in Captain E-O. You know, the Captain E-O film, it’s Michael Jackson doing a new mythic story, but it’s a story of a quest. Michael Jackson has to give beauty to a haggard queen and he has to penetrate her fortress, transform her guards into dancers, and bestow the gift of beauty. That’s a perfectly eighteen-yearold pastime, the search for the Grail and the rest of the King Arthur stories. But little kids don’t find it terribly good; even though they like the dancing and stuff, it’s not anywhere near as moving for a six-yearold as it is for a sixteen-year-old. It’s not just a Jackson movie; it has a sense of mission.
VAILL:
In these examples you’re giving now, the myth that is being presented has to somehow correlate with the life stage of the audience.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, in this particular
VAILL:
You’re not saying that in general, if I have a room full of executives and we are talking about remythologizing the company, that I necessarily have to calibrate the process to the lifestage that the individuals are in?
MCWHINNEY:
No. One of the works we’re just beginning now is a dissertation being done by a woman working in Israel. She is a senior O.D. person for the largest firm, it’s actually a conglomerate, in Israel, called Koor. There are two pieces. One is the triple myth of the whole Old Testament history of Jews, particularly the Babylonian and Greek captivities. Then there were the myths of Zionism that grew up in the Russian villages in the 19th century and the creation in the early 1920s of the Koor Corporation, which was sort of the economic arm of Zionism. Those stories were so deeply related- in ways which were originally very powerful- because they pulled together those three streams of the mythological return, the mythic return in the Old Testament. There was the movement out of Russia and the drive to get out- the peasants to get back to the homeland wherever the homeland was, metaphoric or real. It became real as Israel became a possibility and as economic enterprise was founded to make it possible. Those three came together. It appears now that there are two very, very difficult aspects of that story that continue to be treated mythologically out of the old myth, which has now been lost, and are now extremely dsyfunctional. One of them is the myth that called for a kind of holy return- it’s a holy trip and therefore money was given, as it were, for pilgrims. It was called “national capital”; the money came from all over Europe and the United States. It was given, before the government was established,
use.
“I’m looking at remyfhologizing-not mythologizing, not creating new myths. 1 don’t think you can create new myfhs simply by sifting down af a fable and coming up with a new tale.”
67
for the founding of the Palestine kibbutz and other establishments. It was outside the stream of normal economics. They never asked, “What is the best economic return on this money?” It was kept simply for the purpose of reestablishing the homeland.
68
VAILL:
It was a very focused kind of charity, I guess you could say.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, but the money was not put to the best economic use. In such circumstances, of course, you don’t ask that question. If you give money for charity in church on Sunday, you simply don’t question how it will be used.
VAILL:
Not even if you give it to a university
MCWHINNEY:
Right. You don’t ask whether it’s going to be well used economically. So Israel has this tradition of using huge amounts of money for national capital that is outside the stream of normal financial control. It’s sacred money. No one, including finance professors, has ever understood why this money is somehow so misused.
VAILL:
Misused by Koor, you mean?
MCWHINNEY:
No, the choice was a cultural one- really made by the economy in general and expressed by the government. Koor and the government are deeply related. But no one thought of this fund as a sort of sacred cache of money; they had not gone back to the origins to recognize that was the way in which they were originally solicited. Now they need to ask how they could transcend the mythic origins to identify what would be appropriate uses of this money today. We should not deny the original myth in asking this question. The myth is still very powerful. Rather, the need is to become reawakened to the original purpose so
. . .
as to free one to make new choices for allocating these monies - choices that recognize their nonsecular origins. VAILL:
Can you give an example of inappropriate
uses of the money?
MCWHINNEY:
Using this capital to build infrastructure, roads, and farms that were highly labor intensive. The original image of the new Jewish state was one which provided constructive work- work with the hands, regardless of whether the product was economically useful. They wanted to build a nation with solid, earthy jobs. Such work countered the Russian Jewish image that they did nothing but “air work” in the “air trades.” They wanted to get away from the image of the wandering Jew. Thus they created work out of an image of “good work.”
VAILL:
Was this inconsistent with the sacredness of the story of the return to the homeland?
MCWHINNEY:
No, the work was consistent with the story. It is not consistent with the reality of the current markets. So it fit the story. They got the jobs, but the work misuses money according to contemporary economic rationality. So now they’re continuing to maintain roads or work on farms when they should be allocating the money differently to make the state work. But they’re being held back by an unconscious tie to the old values called “providing honest labor for the Jewish worker. ” It becomes obvious when you review the myths of the state. One finance professor, when he saw this story about the national economy, said, “I’ve been working on that stuff for 20 years and I never could understand it.” It was that much of a sudden awareness. When you call the money essentially sacred capital, it produces a sudden understanding of how the money had been used.
VAILL:
So, in effect, the story did not provide sufficient guidance on what to do with the money. Basically, those who were spending the money were simply spending it on symbolic activities to fulfill the story.
MCWHINNEY:
And probably
VAILL:
Well, certainly if you were coming from the depression in Europe where there was no work at all, you might have been thrilled to hear, “We’ll give you a shovel and you can build a road, one scoop of dirt at a time.”
MCWHINNEY:
Especially if you bought deeply into the American “experience” of the Jewish homeland. It had a very powerful meaning, and it was absolutely critical- but that meaning gets lost and you don’t quite know
in 1925 or 1930 that was totally appropriate.
69
why you do these things today. You don’t recognize YOU were doing them out of habit.
70
VAILL:
A somewhat ridiculous parallel to the story would be giving a freshman a lot of hard books to read at the university because the story is when you go to a university you read hard books. So we will fulfill the story by giving you a lot of hard books to read whether they have anything to do with anything or not!
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. But of course they once did and still think they do, and you can prove it. It’s similar to the unexamined myth about studying Latin to make the brain work better.
VAILL:
But then, along about Thanksgiving, ing this?”
MCWHINNEY:
They were not properly institutionalized! They were not initiated properly, so they are still asking questions they shouldn’t be asking. They need a better initiation rite!
VAILL:
Let me move on to another area that has been implicit in a lot of what you’ve said. I just want to talk a little bit more in detail about it. That is the process by which the new story becomes real for a group and then begins to sink into, not necessarily unconsciousness, but a place where it can play the role of a new foundation. That process. A lot of management consultants and human resources people, as you know, are going around doing visioning workshops and we’re getting new metaphors up on the wall on newsprint and we’re drawing pictures of the organization of the future. There’s a lot of activity to try to get the new story told in the first place.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, that would be useful if we were able to start freshly. But we can’t do it without some recognition that we are still dominated by old stories. We will gain both greater freedom and more energy by returning to the source in the founding myths.
VAILL:
But there is something you have to do to the old myth to make it vibrant again, to make it exciting again.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, but that’s the rebirth, you know, there’s a name for this whole thing, “renaissance. ” If you understand the core then you can modify the story. You don’t drop the old story and start with a new one. You still use the original one. You have to identify it and work out a new sequel to it. It uses the same founding myth, revitalized.
the freshman asks, “Why am I do-
VAILL:
That I had not really understood.
MCWHINNEY:
I’m looking at remythologizing - not mythologizing, not creating new myths. I don’t think you can create new myths simply by sitting down at a table and coming up with a new tale.
VAILL:
Well, no-1
MCWHINNEY:
Let me give you an example of how deeply entrenched are the cultures of work that are ignored in organizational visioning exercises. Caribbean workers in the multinational firms are caught between cultures with very different basic myths of origin. Not only is there a conflict between the cultures of northern Europe transmitted and modified by American business practice, but there are the still-unconsolidated myths in the traditions that have come together to form the SpanishAmerican culture. Each of these myths/traditions has different stories about the relationship between work and control. We can see it in the phrase, “get work out of.” This notion is acceptable where the myths of creation separate spirit and matter, as in Christian-Judaic cultures. But in the Caribe Indian, as in most of the cultures of pre-Columbian America, the spirit is inherent in both the product and the work that creates it. In the Indian myth, you, the work, and the product are one. So it is a violation to work under another’s direction or cause (such as their profit). Visions of organizations that do not take this violation into account will be impaired, unable to use the energy of birth and rebirth.
VAILL:
They won’t work for somebody else’s reason?
MCWHINNEY:
No, the employer can have his own reasons, so long as they don’t violate the fundamental unity of the work. So if you design systems that proceed from the product itself rather than from orders coming from on high, the work will not violate the culture and thus will be effective. This is not the present situaton in most multinational corporate workplaces. The present models and the ones being imposed from the United States are based on authority myths. Since the essence is profit, not production of quality goods, they are not effective. The result is that the workers simply comply in order to return to the family with adequate income. It can be very different when the work grows out of one’s heritage. One operation I watched in Puerto Rico clearly supported this view. The work is locating errors in electronic computer boards. This is normally tedious work, requiring close attention. In one group, however, a woman developed great skill in and enjoyment of the work be-
brought
this up because I don’t think you can, either.
71
cause she saw a close relation between this high-tech task and lace making. This allowed her and those who worked with her to tie the task back into their heritage and so find drive in the work itself, not in the external motivation of wages and threats. Following this line allowed the task to be redesigned integratively with the meaning of work. So here in this case, it’s going back to that myth which connects with the spirit that is the most productive and the most satisfying.
72
VAILL:
So it’s the myth that makes the most sense to the very people whose work we’re talking about.
MCWHINNEY:
Exactly said, precisely said. Seeing that, and allowing them to respect their own myth, they then say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I like to do. Oh, you guys want me to do that? Let’s go to work,” instead of resisting. You see what I’m really trying to say: There are different ways of looking at it, but all of them go back to something that looks like essencesomething, for instance, that comes out of the creation of a story, out of the early history of an event, as with the development of the telephone industry. The myths all come from some sense of what the essence is of what I’m doing, what the real deep product is that I am producing. And that process has to be reengaged.
VAILL:
I think behind what you’re saying is sort of a theory of what holds groups of human beings together, that they have to have a myth or some connection. I mean, it could be complex and multifaced, but there’s one in there somewhere if the organization has been viable over the years and has managed to sustain itself. It may be buried under layers and layers of jargon, or it may be that organizational memory is fragmented in a million different ways and people have a hard time really remembering what the organization was all about and how it got started. But the myth is in there somewhere.
MCWHINNEY:
You can often find clues that enable you to pull it out and what you get is frequently just incredible. I was sitting in the boardroom listening to the company’s officers talking about their deep involvement in giving service. They seemed to have an inordinant need to care for their suppliers and their customers. They always went out of their way to make sure that they ordered parts far enough ahead so it wouldn’t be inconvenient for the manufacturer to make them. They were scrupulous in taking care of their customers and the people who serviced them: the electrical people, the shipping people. It was an absolute rule to always do it even though they realized they were putting themselves at an economic disadvantage. For some reason I turned and said, “Tell me about that picture on the wall.” There was a picture of this nice old gentleman with about
40 people standing in front of an office building amid piles of rubble. The picture was taken three months after the San Francisco fire. The man’s new building was earthquake-proof; everything else on the block had been destroyed. They told me tales of how he took care of all the other shopowners on the block, helped them replace their goods, lent them money; how he was the saviour on the block. It was five minutes before anyone made the connection with their obsession with service. VAILL:
Does it turn out that that act of his has a lot to do with what the company means fundamentally?
MCWHINNEY:
I can’t prove that, but the sense of relief that spread around the room as they entertained that idea is evidence enough for me.
VAILL:
The coincidence between a strong awareness today that we must take care of our key stakeholders and we must give balanced attention to all of them draws on an event in which the founder literally saved his neighbors 80 years ago.
MCWHINNEY:
There is often some event which furnishes a key that opens the door to a story. In fact, the underlying deep principle, I think, is that the stories allow us to find paths through contradictions and enigmas that have worked in the past. And those stories work. The company is still alive, people are still alive, the culture is still alive. It must have provided a way through the complexity which works. As we continue to use it, the path gets deeper and deeper and safer and safer. But after a while it gets so deep you can’t crawl out of it.
VAILL:
Yes, you’re in a trench. Does the organization have to be failing, though, or in some kind of deep trouble in order to make the remythologizing appropriate?
‘IA] lof of middle managers have come fo see the world fhrough their own personal sfories. So fheir complainfs may reflecf privafe sympfoms . b a an organizafional problem . . . or some mix of fhe fwo.” b
b
b
73
74
MCWHINNEY:
Not necessarily. In a sense, Disney wasn’t in any trouble at all. They were in transition and in their case the film division had already caught on, but their Disney parks had not caught on. This was a case where, internally, the organization wasn’t working- but it was not in deep trouble. What is called deep trouble may be the occasion for a reawakening and a return to the founding myths. When a business begins to run into anomalies all over the place, when things aren’t working the way they used to, markets don’t hold together the way we expect them to, people aren’t working the way they used to, it is likely that the organization has lost contact with its essential story. The business still may be on an upward curve economically, but people sense that something’s wrong.
VAILL:
A feeling that I run into a lot in mature corporations is an intense feeling on the part of people with greater seniority that, “It’s not the way it used to be, we don’t do the kind of work we used to do, we don’t get the same kind of people in here that we used to get, we aren’t playing the role we have historically played.” They really are reporting that the organizaton somehow is undergoing some kind of transformation that they don’t understand. This would say to me that it’s drifting away from the core myth.
MCWHINNEY:
That could be happening especially if you pick it up all over the company. If you pick it up among just the older groups, what’s happening may be that they’ve lost their own myth, the myth of their own youth. Once they’re disconnected from their own dream, any world they live in will seem deficient. Therefore, to me, those are untrustworthy stories by themselves. I note that a lot of middle managers have come to see the world through their own personal stories, and can’t let go of them until some kind of mid-life transition. They are still kind of waiting for the stories to come true. But eventually you have to entertain this idea that they have lost the corporate myth. It could be that the whole company has lost contact with its past. So their complaints may reflect private symptoms, they may reflect an organizational problem, or they may reflect some mix of the two.
VAILL:
I see what you’re saying. I am actually thinking of comments in which the person regrets that the company is getting into something that historically it would not have gotten into, or that it’s working in a way that it would not historically have worked. You’ve probably heard military men talk, for instance, about the character of the army and how it was different in Vietnam or about their idea of the way an American army ought to function.
MCWHINNEY:
It is interesting that you bring up the military, for it’s one institution
that
continually goes back to its roots. Almost every great general had a history book in his pocket. VAILL:
The military is much more conscious of its history than are most institutions.
MCWHINNEY:
Deeply so and explicitly. Patton was an avid student of Caesar. Rommel was a student of Southern generals; he recognized their genius in creating such high mobility. Also, it’s worth looking at the training provided a society’s potential leaders; they are taught myth in the form of history. The schools which are trying to create leaders of a society teach people the myths of that society. They may call it history, but it embodies the myths and values that collectively direct destiny. Whether you’re teaching the myth through trivial tales - George Washington and the cherry tree - or the serious tales we call history, it is the present representation of the myth. Note where we teach history. We don’t teach much in engineering schools. You won’t find it at trade schools. It is important at the Ivy League schools, at Amherst and Williams, and at the service academies- the places from which society expects to get its leaders. Those institutions are concerned with continually maintaining a vital connection between the roots of the nation and current governance. This is achieved by staying in contact with the myths of origin and tales of heroism and accomplishment.
VAILL:
We’re living in a society that loves to debunk myths. America is full of investigative reporters and muckrakers who love to talk about what a womanizer John Kennedy was, or what an authoritarian Harold Geneen was, or that somebody had his hand in the till. We’re very good at looking for the feet of clay of our leaders.
MCWHINNEY:
I think this is evidence of how great is the current need to reconnect with the myths that carry the essential values.
VAILL:
I guess my concern is it makes the person uneasy when they hear the story being told. We’ve trained a whole generation to be very skeptical about romantic stories that purport to provide meaning.
MCWHINNEY:
Let’s say, for example, the story that does provide meaning for the Kennedys is the role of Joseph Kennedy in reference to Harvard. He was insulted; he was put down unendingly. Remember that in connection with the conversations around their dinner table - the deep intensity of the way his children were taught. That’s the story. These other stories are not the myths; they’re gossip about the Kennedy behavior. You need to separate them into core and gossip. Both may be true but have different roles to play in history.
75
76
VAILL:
Well, but still, two things about Joseph Kennedy. One is the lifelong womanizing he engaged in. Who was it, Marian Davies? The other was that he made all his money by selling short and he got rich off the misery of the great stock market crash. My point is that it’s the result of modern investigative reporting and chronicling that those things about Joseph Kennedy have been discovered. In 1959, when his son was running for President, he had a halo over his head.
MCWHINNEY:
You or I may have a myth of our own behavior which in some sense turns out to be a repression. In this case, the myth is really not the core myth but an envelope around it to hide the core myth from ourselves. You can’t guarantee that what somebody says is what the core myth really is. For example, the acclaimed myth could be that we are an upstanding, moral family when, in fact, the real energies of the family came out of the ability to “take suckers,” or sell short. But you can distinguish between these facades and a core myth. You can almost tell when the core myth begins to come out because energy begins to flow, people begin to see things, new and innovative ideas are proposed.
VAILL:
I think we have a wonderful current example of this and that’s what happens when Tom Peters starts to talk about excellent companies. People begin to get really excited when they listen to his stories because I think he’s tapping a wish, a combination of a wish and a memory, that lots and lots of executives have.
MCWHINNEY:
Two things here. One, you need to exercise some caution in distinguishing between myths and fantasies. They’re very different energies.
VAILL:
Yes-are
MCWHINNEY:
He’s getting people involved in fantasies. His story may be more or less true. I’m not trying to say that he is wrong, but when he tells a story, the response may be fantasy: “Wow, we could be up there!”
VAILL:
That’s right, “We could be up there” taps into wishes and hides fears.
MCWHINNEY:
But when you tap into the myth, it’s quite different: It’s a relief and inward joy. “I’ve found myself .” And it’s not exuberance; it’s “Ahhhhhhh, now I know.” It’s this incredible sense of touching base. Very revealing. Now, I’m not saying that Peters doesn’t sometimes touch base, too. But mostly you touch base by going inward-usually inward to events, but almost always to events that confront you with stuff out of your own unconscious. Now, you may tell a tale which as a metaphor evokes a memory or just a feeling at first. And Peters may be doing that. But
you saying that Tom Peters is telling fantasies?
these instances of remythologizing come out of a deep core memory which, once contacted, often taps floods of memory. Suddenly, people may start pulling out their own histories; there’s a kind of streaming of evidence. VAILL:
We call that “reminiscing”
or “telling war stories.”
MCWHINNEY:
Literally, the war story is the recollection of a founding myth. War stories are often tales surrounding an occasion in which people have confronted death, so they are tales of rebirth or refounding of oneself. Refounding oneself in the face of death or starting a new organization or launching a new idea is akin to a male’s giving birth. It gives new direction to life. Sometimes it is a true founding event, but more often it is the kind of transition represented in fairy tales of growing up, myths of the hero’s return, and mid-life transformations. In following the mythic element in Walt Disney’s work we see tales recapture birth trauma -a war story-as well as the war stories of our generic childhood, made safe in the amusement parks. The European Renaissance is the great example of reawakening in Western culture. It was a return for a better start, made possible through reconnection to the arts and culture of the Greeks but energized by an engagement with new issues in nature and society.
VAILL:
Do you think they understood at the time that they were going through a rebirth?
MCWHINNEY:
Oh, I think so. It was called the Renaissance.
VAILL:
But did they call it a renaissance? My question is this: At what point in history did people begin to call it the Renaissance? You see, I still have some questions about the role of awareness in this whole process and to what extent you’re aware that you are revitalizing and reenergizing
“Refounding oneself in the face of death or starting a new organization or launching a new idea. . . . gives new direction to life. It is [a] kind of transition. . . .”
77
your stories about yourself and revisiting your myths. This goes back to my original question about its seeming phony and contrived. I have a hunch that if you shine too bright a light on this process, people will say things like, “Do we really need to go through things like this?”
78
MCWHINNEY:
There are a lot of situations in which I would be skeptical about all these mythic exercises. On occasion they are the childish escape valves for those who wish to deny reality; for others, they are snake oil with which to take in those who have lost confidence in their own judgments about the future and, most dangerously, they may be the tools of megalomaniacs working to establish new myths of state-like Hitler’s in Mein Kampf. We have a great capacity to fool ourselves, particularly when we are most vulnerable to being “sold” a tale. The guidance principles which I think are the most reliable are those based in the ancient tales we recognize as myths and which are most open to examination and reinterpretation in the present context. In times of rapid or fundamental change, our rational logics have not served us well. I place more confidence in the revitalized tales that can be set against conditions present in an organization, its society, and its environment.
VAILL:
Do we need to focus on a single organization to do remythologizing, or could we talk about remythologizing a whole class of organizations? I’m looking at this question to bring a final focus to this exploration. The university, for example, is an institution with which all of our readers are familiar; many observers are saying that the modern university has all sorts of problems with this core mission, its identity and sense of direction, its role in society . . .
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, we can treat it as we did in looking at work in the Caribbean, by first going back to the models which served as the root metaphors. There are myths about inquiry and learning just as there are about growing up and fighting battles. And there are historical founding events for the university in classic times, in the Arabic and Christian centers that emerged in the high Middle Ages of Europe and in 19thcentury America. The founding myths in each of these traditions still provided guidance well into the 19th century.
VAILL:
The Morrill Act of 1962, which created the land grant universities, began a whole new tradition - not only did they go into vocational education, they even refused to cater to the intellectual, social, or political elites.
MCWHINNEY:
So in each source there are myths or root metaphors that are most clearly identified in tales of the founding. In the Morrill case we might
be able to understand the divergence of their path by exploring the childhood of central individuals in the land grant movement. A useful heuristic is to assume that the new myth grows as a countermyth to the established institutions and their myths. If we are interested in creating a new learning institution or better managing a university, we should explore the ways in which the mythic strands interweave to form the current institutions. VAILL:
So if you take a job as president of a state university, you had better realize that to treat it as a liberal arts college will lead to a lot of misunderstanding.
MCWHINNEY:
Exactly! In fact, there are some myths about what happens to people who don’t listen to myths. For example, King Tantalus . . .
VAILL:
I think this may be a good place to stop. Thank you for these amplifications on your approach to remythologizing.
MCWHINNEY:
Thank you. Sharing stories is always a pleasure.
79
J
found Will McWhinney’s notion of “remythologizing” (see his and Jose Batista’s article on page 46) one of the more intriguing ideas I have come across in recent months. There is much material available about renewal, revitalization, culture, and myth. The idea of rediscovery of the fundamental stories and beliefs which constitute the organization is a somewhat different way of talking about these processes. The baby of tradition and past achievements does not have to go out with the bathwater of empty policies and purposes that have lost their meaning. This is what I find refreshing about McWhinney’s concept: a commitment to change that is far-reaching, but a commitment also to continuity and coherence. I thought readers might enjoy hearing some more about these ideas in the more informal language of an interview. We caught up with Will McWhinney this past summer in Washington, D.C. at the annual meeting of the Association of Humanistic Psychology- where, I discovered, he was completing a term as president.
59
60
VAILL:
Maybe it would be useful if, to get started, you simply repeated what the main thing is that you want people to understand about remythologizing.
MCWHINNEY:
Remythologizing is a way of using a deep sense of an organization’s core process to continuously revitalize the organization. The core is the sense of the essence of an organization, just as the personality is of the person. It’s the fundamental notion, which often was created in the very beginning, sometimes in the very first words about it, as was the case with the telephone company. Alexander Graham Bell’s comment, “Come here, Watson, I need your help’- it’s not an exact quote, but it’s very close- set the concept of service. That phrase epitomized what Bell wanted to do.
VAILL:
It was the perfect use of the telephone. I mean, the man could not have summoned help without the telephone.
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right-but there we had the notion of the telephone as service, you see. Yet when the telephone was brought to England shortly after its invention, it was viewed as a competitor of the telegraph, so its use rapidly became a matter of government economic policy. In this country, the fundamental use remained, “Help me, extend me, connect me.” So the instrument became part of the whole concept of service to the individual, the family, or the person as opposed to an instrument of commerce and infrastructure in society. Here’s a case where the very first words out of someone’s mouth created the root metaphor, and the myth was built around that. The early origins of a particular system often carry the blueprint of its development -much in the same way that the early origins of a human being often carry the way in which the child develops into an adult.
VAILL:
So one important dimension is that the myth and the remythologizing process capture the reasons why the organization exists at all?
MCWHINNEY:
Not so much why, but its central mission, central activity, central way of doing things that you might call simply habit. But it’s very deep habit. I recently had an opportunity to see how persuasive a root metaphor can be. In a conversation with one of the original faculty of the Fielding Institute I inquired about the earliest events in Fielding’s history. He began by describing a teaching event, in fact a failure at teaching, that he indicated served as a starting point for building a new mode of learning. He followed with a description of three more events that preceded the actual opening of the Institute. After about five minutes, I broke into his tale with, “Incredible, you have just described the steps in the admissions process that has been used three times each year for
the last 15 years!” This event, the Admissions Contract Workshop, is, according to prevailing belief, a systematically designed screening process based on psychological and pedagogical principles. But after listening to the retelling of its origins, I could see that it’s simply a ritualization of the founding sequence of event, rooted in the unconscious. Changes cannot be made in it, any more than a storyteller can change an epic poem. VAILL:
So it’s a story they tell themselves about how necessary it is?
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. According to the story, it is a rationally devised event. But now we see that it is a series of accidents-indeed, a rather good set. The accidents have been transformed into the rational base of choice. Without making the process conscious, you can’t change it. It is unadaptable. It is the best possible design.
VAILL:
And it is the vehicle for the institution’s philosophy. I mean, that’s the sacred part of it. “This is the way we do things at Fielding.”
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. These, of course, are sacred stories. They happen out of time, in the world of “once upon a time.”
VAILL:
I suspect, then, that this rationalizing process would apply to many other activities if you use the story as a way of differentiating yourself from other organizations. For example: “We’re not a big state university bureaucracy where you’re just a number. We have a highly personalized contracting process,” and that sort of thing.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, in this case the process is still alive, but it has been inaccessible to change because the source has disappeared.
VAILL:
“The only way to do it” is all that’s left.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes. And it continues to resist change. When you exert a lot of pressure to change it the response is simply, ‘This is the best way to run it.”
VAILL:
And yet, circumstances cur2 change. That method could become obsolete.
MCWHINNEY:
You have the problem right- that gets to the heart of what often happens. In the telephone companies the original concept of service is no longer a viable technical/economic myth. The various Bell companies appear unable to understand this. Rather, they have simply gone into depression, as an overall system, at the organizational level and among the employees. It is precisely the case where the method (in this case,
61
mission) has become obsolete, but because its source was unconscious, methods to find a new one are inadequate. To change it, the methods or myths must become visible as myth, so that the people involved can consciously reengage with the founding energy, reinterpret the myth as necessary for the present circumstances, and find new methods that integrate the story with the present.
62
VAILL:
O.K., I think that’s a good summary of many of the points you make in the article. Let me push on to the next question now that we’ve established the thrust of mythologizing. One of the attitudes that people might have as they think about this mythologizing is that it seems like an artificial or contrived process. First, do people have this feeling, and second, if you run into it how do you deal with it?
MCWHINNEY:
I am not sure which of those feelings people have about discussing organizations and behavior using mythic and symbol models, but you are correct that many people are turned off or even offended. Even at Disney’s Imagineering, the mythic language needs to stay on the product side of the house. The most important thing is to respect those feelings and use the very technology of symbolic analysis to understand where people may be coming from and how best to proceed. I think the most evocative approach is to recognize the scientific world and its rational methodologies as the prevailing societal myth. Like other mythic systems, it contributes greatly to human existence; yet it has limitations. Each myth has different rules of evidence, different plots, different goals. We can use both storytelling and statistical analysis to inform us, make decisions, and tell lies. A current difficulty is that most of us who are trained in social science and management traditions do not yet know the rules for manipulating symbols, so we have trouble separating the wise from the wicked. So for a while we will be subject to a lot of shallow work that is contrived. I take it as my responsibility to build as reliable a science and art of symbolic method to underlie my work as I have learned to use for empirical studies and action research.
VAILL:
Do you see any backlash in the way the new organizational tion consulting uses myth language?
MCWHINNEY:
Certainly. There is a lot of contrived work. But in some instances the power of the interpretations is so unexpected that the clients reject it out-of-hand as fake or fortune-telling stuff. The myth can be too bald an exposition of what is going on. Technologically trained managers often can’t accept an explanation because it seems to fit too well. In many instances they will reject knowledge arising out of a foreign tradition. We have to learn to tell the truth with greater compassion.
transf orma-
VAILL
:
I think I see. When you were talking about AT&T a minute ago the notion of service flitted through my mind. Isn’t it interesting that some Bell operating companies, which supposedly have a regionally defined mission, are now marketing yellow pages nationally? If you were talking to a regional telephone executive you might want to say, “What’s with this impulse to go national? Where does this energy come from? You have a limited mission. You’re only supposed to be concerned with your region. Why are you trying to sell your yellow pages in Washington, DC?” I sense you’re suggesting that the individual might have a similar kind of shock of recognition as he realizes how deep in himself is the feeling of wanting to serve broadly- I mean, irrespective of time and space: “My mission is service.”
MCWHINNEY:
I wouldn’t jump that quickly, but you have the first of a series of clues.
VAILL:
No, I mean, what I’m trying to understand here is what happens to a Bell system executive with a deeply ingrained feeling of service. Some judge cuts off 90% of his market and says, “Restrict yourself to your region, ” but what bubbles out of him is a spontaneous idea to market his yellow pages nationally.
MCWHINNEY:
Of which he may have no understanding.
VAILL:
Or which he might never quite have put together that way. But back to my question of whether it felt contrived. You are saying that as the individuals make that connection, it no longer feels artificial to them? They then with much more eagerness begin to dig in to what the core myths . . .
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. So, for example, the core is even more transparent at Walt
‘. current difficulty is that most of us who are trained in social scienceand managemenf traditions do not yet know the rules for manipulafing symbols, so we have trouble separating the wise from the wicked.”
63
Disney Imagineering, the R&D division. I asked a group of senior designers, project directors, and architects to describe what was going on in the rides in the Park. I said, “What age group do these appeal to?” In a moment or two, they began to recognize, for example, that Bambi epitomized the whole notion of forced separation for the first time from a parent and then coming back to the parent. They recognized things about unintended separations, about the first wandering away from home with the notion of coming back just to see what it was like to be separated, with no intention of going someplace. Within a few minutes, many other examples are on the table - barn, barn, barn, you could pick them out like that. Less than a week later they came back to me with exceptions rides or films that didn’t fit the “story.“ So the next week they were talking to me about Huck Finn. “Oh, that is the next development of a child. That is what happens when you are eight or ten years old. You go out to seek the world- not to be away from your parents, but to seek the world.” So they began to develop that one. They began to think, “What’s the next thing in the development of the person?” and they came up with the next stage and example in the Disney work. They came up with those out of their enthusiasm. I didn’t tip them off. All I would do is lead them into the notion of the myths that are appropriate to particular development stages.
64
VAILL:
And also your role is to help them be more conscious of the underlying story that has been grounding their action?
MCWHINNEY:
Yes. The grounding
VAILL:
Supporting
MCWHINNEY:
These things were all working out of those models that Walt Disney was working on.
VAILL:
Without
MCWHINNEY:
The function in the life of a person-
VAILL:
So the product at Disney is selling, but basically you don’t know why it’s selling because you don’t know what it’s appealing to . . .
MCWHINNEY:
Exactly. They did not understand the deep meaning. They could reproduce that product beautifully but the product’s vitality had disappeared. There will continue to be up-grades, but there have not been any new ones for a long, long time. Now the Disney people have to face a new market. They hated the idea of moving into the adolescent
that is underneath
the unconscious.
the foundation.
ever having thought of what their function was? in particular
of a small boy.
world. To them, adolescents were bad: Adolescents cause trouble, they break up the place, they don’t spend much money. We needed to get the designers to realize they needed to go into the new market willfully. Once they saw that Walt Disney himself was psychically stuck at childhood in his own creativity, they could accept the notion that they could stay with the same human values but now focus on an adolescent or a young adult. To date there are just three or four examples in the entire Disneyland structure of adolescent or young adult entertainment. They are still anomalies. My own part was very small, but it did help a little bit; and then in that short time all of the people who were interested in young kids actually drifted out of that division and into other divisions. VAILL:
It’s interesting that for adolescents the models that we had became so out of date. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor in Nutional Velvet, or whatever: It was just a fairy-tale adolescence, not the real world that today’s adolescents are living in.
MCWHINNEY:
I’m departing a little from remythologizing, but I want to give a sense of how we got that going. First we got a good smart group of adolescents to go to Disneyland. When they came back we interviewed them on what they got out of it. The first thing that they did was give back stereotypical answers - answers we all knew before we went there, answers that a good teenager ought to give. “A total wipe-out; we had a nice time.” After deciding that that wouldn’t work, we happened to find a couple of young improvisational actors who had been working for Disney in another capacity. One was 26, the other younger. We said, look, you go down there and pretend you’re teenagers. Come back alive as teenagers. They came back with a whole bunch of stuff. The comment I enjoyed most was, “Hey, the best thing I saw down there was a real tree with artificial roots!” It turns out there was a real tree with metal covers designed to look like roots to cover a lot of wires going up into the tree. Here were cast iron roots for a live tree. What he picked up, of course, was what is missing from the Park.
VAILL:
Absurdity.
MCWHINNEY:
Absurdity. It’s a contradiction, wiped that out absolutely.
VAILL:
It’s the same phenomenon it tickles them.
MCWHINNEY:
So you want absurdity, but the Park has no absurdity. It’s been taken out, everything from the simple mirrors we used to enjoy in the fun
it’s the nonsense; and Disney Parks have
that appeals to teenagers in Mud Magazine;
65
houses to all the contradictions in Disney movies which were seen as scaring people. Take Snow White, for example; they cleaned up most of the stuff in Snow White.
66
VAILL:
Bambi going over the waterfall.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes-all the things where there’s some kind of contradiction or impossibility. Not just scary things, but things that have an unmanageable reality. Being scared is one thing, of course; kids love being scared.
VAILL:
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I suppose, is the most dramatic, where the sorcerer’s apprentice inadvertently triggers the magic spell. The brooms start marching and the water starts rising. . . .
MCWHINNEY:
That would be one. Maybe a clearer one is in Pinocchio, where good/bad conflicts come up. Those are all wiped out in the Park; he’s just a good little boy. All the stuff about being playful and destructive is wiped out. So the movies had the whole rich life of a child.
VAILL:
So what they’ve done is accidentally sanitize adolescence so that it was no longer appealing to the adolescent, who wants some violence and absurdity.
MCWHINNEY:
And competition and testing himself. All the testing things have been taken out, too. Now they see that . .
VAILL:
This was at Disney World, Disney Epcot Center?
MCWHINNEY:
Primarily in the Disney Magic Kingdom. The remythologizing was getting them in touch with the blockage in Walt Disney’s own growth and letting them say, “Oh, since that blocked us before, what is essential in the Disney story?” What is essential in the Disney story are these rich human values that we think of as family values in the best sense. So you continue those and see them in places like Splash and Three Men and a Baby. Those films are within the Disney belief system but deal with adult issues. Still fantasy, as it is in Captain E-O. You know, the Captain E-O film, it’s Michael Jackson doing a new mythic story, but it’s a story of a quest. Michael Jackson has to give beauty to a haggard queen and he has to penetrate her fortress, transform her guards into dancers, and bestow the gift of beauty. That’s a perfectly eighteen-yearold pastime, the search for the Grail and the rest of the King Arthur stories. But little kids don’t find it terribly good; even though they like the dancing and stuff, it’s not anywhere near as moving for a six-yearold as it is for a sixteen-year-old. It’s not just a Jackson movie; it has a sense of mission.
VAILL:
In these examples you’re giving now, the myth that is being presented has to somehow correlate with the life stage of the audience.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, in this particular
VAILL:
You’re not saying that in general, if I have a room full of executives and we are talking about remythologizing the company, that I necessarily have to calibrate the process to the lifestage that the individuals are in?
MCWHINNEY:
No. One of the works we’re just beginning now is a dissertation being done by a woman working in Israel. She is a senior O.D. person for the largest firm, it’s actually a conglomerate, in Israel, called Koor. There are two pieces. One is the triple myth of the whole Old Testament history of Jews, particularly the Babylonian and Greek captivities. Then there were the myths of Zionism that grew up in the Russian villages in the 19th century and the creation in the early 1920s of the Koor Corporation, which was sort of the economic arm of Zionism. Those stories were so deeply related- in ways which were originally very powerful- because they pulled together those three streams of the mythological return, the mythic return in the Old Testament. There was the movement out of Russia and the drive to get out- the peasants to get back to the homeland wherever the homeland was, metaphoric or real. It became real as Israel became a possibility and as economic enterprise was founded to make it possible. Those three came together. It appears now that there are two very, very difficult aspects of that story that continue to be treated mythologically out of the old myth, which has now been lost, and are now extremely dsyfunctional. One of them is the myth that called for a kind of holy return- it’s a holy trip and therefore money was given, as it were, for pilgrims. It was called “national capital”; the money came from all over Europe and the United States. It was given, before the government was established,
use.
“I’m looking at remyfhologizing-not mythologizing, not creating new myths. 1 don’t think you can create new myfhs simply by sifting down af a fable and coming up with a new tale.”
67
for the founding of the Palestine kibbutz and other establishments. It was outside the stream of normal economics. They never asked, “What is the best economic return on this money?” It was kept simply for the purpose of reestablishing the homeland.
68
VAILL:
It was a very focused kind of charity, I guess you could say.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, but the money was not put to the best economic use. In such circumstances, of course, you don’t ask that question. If you give money for charity in church on Sunday, you simply don’t question how it will be used.
VAILL:
Not even if you give it to a university
MCWHINNEY:
Right. You don’t ask whether it’s going to be well used economically. So Israel has this tradition of using huge amounts of money for national capital that is outside the stream of normal financial control. It’s sacred money. No one, including finance professors, has ever understood why this money is somehow so misused.
VAILL:
Misused by Koor, you mean?
MCWHINNEY:
No, the choice was a cultural one- really made by the economy in general and expressed by the government. Koor and the government are deeply related. But no one thought of this fund as a sort of sacred cache of money; they had not gone back to the origins to recognize that was the way in which they were originally solicited. Now they need to ask how they could transcend the mythic origins to identify what would be appropriate uses of this money today. We should not deny the original myth in asking this question. The myth is still very powerful. Rather, the need is to become reawakened to the original purpose so
. . .
as to free one to make new choices for allocating these monies - choices that recognize their nonsecular origins. VAILL:
Can you give an example of inappropriate
uses of the money?
MCWHINNEY:
Using this capital to build infrastructure, roads, and farms that were highly labor intensive. The original image of the new Jewish state was one which provided constructive work- work with the hands, regardless of whether the product was economically useful. They wanted to build a nation with solid, earthy jobs. Such work countered the Russian Jewish image that they did nothing but “air work” in the “air trades.” They wanted to get away from the image of the wandering Jew. Thus they created work out of an image of “good work.”
VAILL:
Was this inconsistent with the sacredness of the story of the return to the homeland?
MCWHINNEY:
No, the work was consistent with the story. It is not consistent with the reality of the current markets. So it fit the story. They got the jobs, but the work misuses money according to contemporary economic rationality. So now they’re continuing to maintain roads or work on farms when they should be allocating the money differently to make the state work. But they’re being held back by an unconscious tie to the old values called “providing honest labor for the Jewish worker. ” It becomes obvious when you review the myths of the state. One finance professor, when he saw this story about the national economy, said, “I’ve been working on that stuff for 20 years and I never could understand it.” It was that much of a sudden awareness. When you call the money essentially sacred capital, it produces a sudden understanding of how the money had been used.
VAILL:
So, in effect, the story did not provide sufficient guidance on what to do with the money. Basically, those who were spending the money were simply spending it on symbolic activities to fulfill the story.
MCWHINNEY:
And probably
VAILL:
Well, certainly if you were coming from the depression in Europe where there was no work at all, you might have been thrilled to hear, “We’ll give you a shovel and you can build a road, one scoop of dirt at a time.”
MCWHINNEY:
Especially if you bought deeply into the American “experience” of the Jewish homeland. It had a very powerful meaning, and it was absolutely critical- but that meaning gets lost and you don’t quite know
in 1925 or 1930 that was totally appropriate.
69
why you do these things today. You don’t recognize YOU were doing them out of habit.
70
VAILL:
A somewhat ridiculous parallel to the story would be giving a freshman a lot of hard books to read at the university because the story is when you go to a university you read hard books. So we will fulfill the story by giving you a lot of hard books to read whether they have anything to do with anything or not!
MCWHINNEY:
That’s right. But of course they once did and still think they do, and you can prove it. It’s similar to the unexamined myth about studying Latin to make the brain work better.
VAILL:
But then, along about Thanksgiving, ing this?”
MCWHINNEY:
They were not properly institutionalized! They were not initiated properly, so they are still asking questions they shouldn’t be asking. They need a better initiation rite!
VAILL:
Let me move on to another area that has been implicit in a lot of what you’ve said. I just want to talk a little bit more in detail about it. That is the process by which the new story becomes real for a group and then begins to sink into, not necessarily unconsciousness, but a place where it can play the role of a new foundation. That process. A lot of management consultants and human resources people, as you know, are going around doing visioning workshops and we’re getting new metaphors up on the wall on newsprint and we’re drawing pictures of the organization of the future. There’s a lot of activity to try to get the new story told in the first place.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, that would be useful if we were able to start freshly. But we can’t do it without some recognition that we are still dominated by old stories. We will gain both greater freedom and more energy by returning to the source in the founding myths.
VAILL:
But there is something you have to do to the old myth to make it vibrant again, to make it exciting again.
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, but that’s the rebirth, you know, there’s a name for this whole thing, “renaissance. ” If you understand the core then you can modify the story. You don’t drop the old story and start with a new one. You still use the original one. You have to identify it and work out a new sequel to it. It uses the same founding myth, revitalized.
the freshman asks, “Why am I do-
VAILL:
That I had not really understood.
MCWHINNEY:
I’m looking at remythologizing - not mythologizing, not creating new myths. I don’t think you can create new myths simply by sitting down at a table and coming up with a new tale.
VAILL:
Well, no-1
MCWHINNEY:
Let me give you an example of how deeply entrenched are the cultures of work that are ignored in organizational visioning exercises. Caribbean workers in the multinational firms are caught between cultures with very different basic myths of origin. Not only is there a conflict between the cultures of northern Europe transmitted and modified by American business practice, but there are the still-unconsolidated myths in the traditions that have come together to form the SpanishAmerican culture. Each of these myths/traditions has different stories about the relationship between work and control. We can see it in the phrase, “get work out of.” This notion is acceptable where the myths of creation separate spirit and matter, as in Christian-Judaic cultures. But in the Caribe Indian, as in most of the cultures of pre-Columbian America, the spirit is inherent in both the product and the work that creates it. In the Indian myth, you, the work, and the product are one. So it is a violation to work under another’s direction or cause (such as their profit). Visions of organizations that do not take this violation into account will be impaired, unable to use the energy of birth and rebirth.
VAILL:
They won’t work for somebody else’s reason?
MCWHINNEY:
No, the employer can have his own reasons, so long as they don’t violate the fundamental unity of the work. So if you design systems that proceed from the product itself rather than from orders coming from on high, the work will not violate the culture and thus will be effective. This is not the present situaton in most multinational corporate workplaces. The present models and the ones being imposed from the United States are based on authority myths. Since the essence is profit, not production of quality goods, they are not effective. The result is that the workers simply comply in order to return to the family with adequate income. It can be very different when the work grows out of one’s heritage. One operation I watched in Puerto Rico clearly supported this view. The work is locating errors in electronic computer boards. This is normally tedious work, requiring close attention. In one group, however, a woman developed great skill in and enjoyment of the work be-
brought
this up because I don’t think you can, either.
71
cause she saw a close relation between this high-tech task and lace making. This allowed her and those who worked with her to tie the task back into their heritage and so find drive in the work itself, not in the external motivation of wages and threats. Following this line allowed the task to be redesigned integratively with the meaning of work. So here in this case, it’s going back to that myth which connects with the spirit that is the most productive and the most satisfying.
72
VAILL:
So it’s the myth that makes the most sense to the very people whose work we’re talking about.
MCWHINNEY:
Exactly said, precisely said. Seeing that, and allowing them to respect their own myth, they then say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I like to do. Oh, you guys want me to do that? Let’s go to work,” instead of resisting. You see what I’m really trying to say: There are different ways of looking at it, but all of them go back to something that looks like essencesomething, for instance, that comes out of the creation of a story, out of the early history of an event, as with the development of the telephone industry. The myths all come from some sense of what the essence is of what I’m doing, what the real deep product is that I am producing. And that process has to be reengaged.
VAILL:
I think behind what you’re saying is sort of a theory of what holds groups of human beings together, that they have to have a myth or some connection. I mean, it could be complex and multifaced, but there’s one in there somewhere if the organization has been viable over the years and has managed to sustain itself. It may be buried under layers and layers of jargon, or it may be that organizational memory is fragmented in a million different ways and people have a hard time really remembering what the organization was all about and how it got started. But the myth is in there somewhere.
MCWHINNEY:
You can often find clues that enable you to pull it out and what you get is frequently just incredible. I was sitting in the boardroom listening to the company’s officers talking about their deep involvement in giving service. They seemed to have an inordinant need to care for their suppliers and their customers. They always went out of their way to make sure that they ordered parts far enough ahead so it wouldn’t be inconvenient for the manufacturer to make them. They were scrupulous in taking care of their customers and the people who serviced them: the electrical people, the shipping people. It was an absolute rule to always do it even though they realized they were putting themselves at an economic disadvantage. For some reason I turned and said, “Tell me about that picture on the wall.” There was a picture of this nice old gentleman with about
40 people standing in front of an office building amid piles of rubble. The picture was taken three months after the San Francisco fire. The man’s new building was earthquake-proof; everything else on the block had been destroyed. They told me tales of how he took care of all the other shopowners on the block, helped them replace their goods, lent them money; how he was the saviour on the block. It was five minutes before anyone made the connection with their obsession with service. VAILL:
Does it turn out that that act of his has a lot to do with what the company means fundamentally?
MCWHINNEY:
I can’t prove that, but the sense of relief that spread around the room as they entertained that idea is evidence enough for me.
VAILL:
The coincidence between a strong awareness today that we must take care of our key stakeholders and we must give balanced attention to all of them draws on an event in which the founder literally saved his neighbors 80 years ago.
MCWHINNEY:
There is often some event which furnishes a key that opens the door to a story. In fact, the underlying deep principle, I think, is that the stories allow us to find paths through contradictions and enigmas that have worked in the past. And those stories work. The company is still alive, people are still alive, the culture is still alive. It must have provided a way through the complexity which works. As we continue to use it, the path gets deeper and deeper and safer and safer. But after a while it gets so deep you can’t crawl out of it.
VAILL:
Yes, you’re in a trench. Does the organization have to be failing, though, or in some kind of deep trouble in order to make the remythologizing appropriate?
‘IA] lof of middle managers have come fo see the world fhrough their own personal sfories. So fheir complainfs may reflecf privafe sympfoms . b a an organizafional problem . . . or some mix of fhe fwo.” b
b
b
73
74
MCWHINNEY:
Not necessarily. In a sense, Disney wasn’t in any trouble at all. They were in transition and in their case the film division had already caught on, but their Disney parks had not caught on. This was a case where, internally, the organization wasn’t working- but it was not in deep trouble. What is called deep trouble may be the occasion for a reawakening and a return to the founding myths. When a business begins to run into anomalies all over the place, when things aren’t working the way they used to, markets don’t hold together the way we expect them to, people aren’t working the way they used to, it is likely that the organization has lost contact with its essential story. The business still may be on an upward curve economically, but people sense that something’s wrong.
VAILL:
A feeling that I run into a lot in mature corporations is an intense feeling on the part of people with greater seniority that, “It’s not the way it used to be, we don’t do the kind of work we used to do, we don’t get the same kind of people in here that we used to get, we aren’t playing the role we have historically played.” They really are reporting that the organizaton somehow is undergoing some kind of transformation that they don’t understand. This would say to me that it’s drifting away from the core myth.
MCWHINNEY:
That could be happening especially if you pick it up all over the company. If you pick it up among just the older groups, what’s happening may be that they’ve lost their own myth, the myth of their own youth. Once they’re disconnected from their own dream, any world they live in will seem deficient. Therefore, to me, those are untrustworthy stories by themselves. I note that a lot of middle managers have come to see the world through their own personal stories, and can’t let go of them until some kind of mid-life transition. They are still kind of waiting for the stories to come true. But eventually you have to entertain this idea that they have lost the corporate myth. It could be that the whole company has lost contact with its past. So their complaints may reflect private symptoms, they may reflect an organizational problem, or they may reflect some mix of the two.
VAILL:
I see what you’re saying. I am actually thinking of comments in which the person regrets that the company is getting into something that historically it would not have gotten into, or that it’s working in a way that it would not historically have worked. You’ve probably heard military men talk, for instance, about the character of the army and how it was different in Vietnam or about their idea of the way an American army ought to function.
MCWHINNEY:
It is interesting that you bring up the military, for it’s one institution
that
continually goes back to its roots. Almost every great general had a history book in his pocket. VAILL:
The military is much more conscious of its history than are most institutions.
MCWHINNEY:
Deeply so and explicitly. Patton was an avid student of Caesar. Rommel was a student of Southern generals; he recognized their genius in creating such high mobility. Also, it’s worth looking at the training provided a society’s potential leaders; they are taught myth in the form of history. The schools which are trying to create leaders of a society teach people the myths of that society. They may call it history, but it embodies the myths and values that collectively direct destiny. Whether you’re teaching the myth through trivial tales - George Washington and the cherry tree - or the serious tales we call history, it is the present representation of the myth. Note where we teach history. We don’t teach much in engineering schools. You won’t find it at trade schools. It is important at the Ivy League schools, at Amherst and Williams, and at the service academies- the places from which society expects to get its leaders. Those institutions are concerned with continually maintaining a vital connection between the roots of the nation and current governance. This is achieved by staying in contact with the myths of origin and tales of heroism and accomplishment.
VAILL:
We’re living in a society that loves to debunk myths. America is full of investigative reporters and muckrakers who love to talk about what a womanizer John Kennedy was, or what an authoritarian Harold Geneen was, or that somebody had his hand in the till. We’re very good at looking for the feet of clay of our leaders.
MCWHINNEY:
I think this is evidence of how great is the current need to reconnect with the myths that carry the essential values.
VAILL:
I guess my concern is it makes the person uneasy when they hear the story being told. We’ve trained a whole generation to be very skeptical about romantic stories that purport to provide meaning.
MCWHINNEY:
Let’s say, for example, the story that does provide meaning for the Kennedys is the role of Joseph Kennedy in reference to Harvard. He was insulted; he was put down unendingly. Remember that in connection with the conversations around their dinner table - the deep intensity of the way his children were taught. That’s the story. These other stories are not the myths; they’re gossip about the Kennedy behavior. You need to separate them into core and gossip. Both may be true but have different roles to play in history.
75
76
VAILL:
Well, but still, two things about Joseph Kennedy. One is the lifelong womanizing he engaged in. Who was it, Marian Davies? The other was that he made all his money by selling short and he got rich off the misery of the great stock market crash. My point is that it’s the result of modern investigative reporting and chronicling that those things about Joseph Kennedy have been discovered. In 1959, when his son was running for President, he had a halo over his head.
MCWHINNEY:
You or I may have a myth of our own behavior which in some sense turns out to be a repression. In this case, the myth is really not the core myth but an envelope around it to hide the core myth from ourselves. You can’t guarantee that what somebody says is what the core myth really is. For example, the acclaimed myth could be that we are an upstanding, moral family when, in fact, the real energies of the family came out of the ability to “take suckers,” or sell short. But you can distinguish between these facades and a core myth. You can almost tell when the core myth begins to come out because energy begins to flow, people begin to see things, new and innovative ideas are proposed.
VAILL:
I think we have a wonderful current example of this and that’s what happens when Tom Peters starts to talk about excellent companies. People begin to get really excited when they listen to his stories because I think he’s tapping a wish, a combination of a wish and a memory, that lots and lots of executives have.
MCWHINNEY:
Two things here. One, you need to exercise some caution in distinguishing between myths and fantasies. They’re very different energies.
VAILL:
Yes-are
MCWHINNEY:
He’s getting people involved in fantasies. His story may be more or less true. I’m not trying to say that he is wrong, but when he tells a story, the response may be fantasy: “Wow, we could be up there!”
VAILL:
That’s right, “We could be up there” taps into wishes and hides fears.
MCWHINNEY:
But when you tap into the myth, it’s quite different: It’s a relief and inward joy. “I’ve found myself .” And it’s not exuberance; it’s “Ahhhhhhh, now I know.” It’s this incredible sense of touching base. Very revealing. Now, I’m not saying that Peters doesn’t sometimes touch base, too. But mostly you touch base by going inward-usually inward to events, but almost always to events that confront you with stuff out of your own unconscious. Now, you may tell a tale which as a metaphor evokes a memory or just a feeling at first. And Peters may be doing that. But
you saying that Tom Peters is telling fantasies?
these instances of remythologizing come out of a deep core memory which, once contacted, often taps floods of memory. Suddenly, people may start pulling out their own histories; there’s a kind of streaming of evidence. VAILL:
We call that “reminiscing”
or “telling war stories.”
MCWHINNEY:
Literally, the war story is the recollection of a founding myth. War stories are often tales surrounding an occasion in which people have confronted death, so they are tales of rebirth or refounding of oneself. Refounding oneself in the face of death or starting a new organization or launching a new idea is akin to a male’s giving birth. It gives new direction to life. Sometimes it is a true founding event, but more often it is the kind of transition represented in fairy tales of growing up, myths of the hero’s return, and mid-life transformations. In following the mythic element in Walt Disney’s work we see tales recapture birth trauma -a war story-as well as the war stories of our generic childhood, made safe in the amusement parks. The European Renaissance is the great example of reawakening in Western culture. It was a return for a better start, made possible through reconnection to the arts and culture of the Greeks but energized by an engagement with new issues in nature and society.
VAILL:
Do you think they understood at the time that they were going through a rebirth?
MCWHINNEY:
Oh, I think so. It was called the Renaissance.
VAILL:
But did they call it a renaissance? My question is this: At what point in history did people begin to call it the Renaissance? You see, I still have some questions about the role of awareness in this whole process and to what extent you’re aware that you are revitalizing and reenergizing
“Refounding oneself in the face of death or starting a new organization or launching a new idea. . . . gives new direction to life. It is [a] kind of transition. . . .”
77
your stories about yourself and revisiting your myths. This goes back to my original question about its seeming phony and contrived. I have a hunch that if you shine too bright a light on this process, people will say things like, “Do we really need to go through things like this?”
78
MCWHINNEY:
There are a lot of situations in which I would be skeptical about all these mythic exercises. On occasion they are the childish escape valves for those who wish to deny reality; for others, they are snake oil with which to take in those who have lost confidence in their own judgments about the future and, most dangerously, they may be the tools of megalomaniacs working to establish new myths of state-like Hitler’s in Mein Kampf. We have a great capacity to fool ourselves, particularly when we are most vulnerable to being “sold” a tale. The guidance principles which I think are the most reliable are those based in the ancient tales we recognize as myths and which are most open to examination and reinterpretation in the present context. In times of rapid or fundamental change, our rational logics have not served us well. I place more confidence in the revitalized tales that can be set against conditions present in an organization, its society, and its environment.
VAILL:
Do we need to focus on a single organization to do remythologizing, or could we talk about remythologizing a whole class of organizations? I’m looking at this question to bring a final focus to this exploration. The university, for example, is an institution with which all of our readers are familiar; many observers are saying that the modern university has all sorts of problems with this core mission, its identity and sense of direction, its role in society . . .
MCWHINNEY:
Yes, we can treat it as we did in looking at work in the Caribbean, by first going back to the models which served as the root metaphors. There are myths about inquiry and learning just as there are about growing up and fighting battles. And there are historical founding events for the university in classic times, in the Arabic and Christian centers that emerged in the high Middle Ages of Europe and in 19thcentury America. The founding myths in each of these traditions still provided guidance well into the 19th century.
VAILL:
The Morrill Act of 1962, which created the land grant universities, began a whole new tradition - not only did they go into vocational education, they even refused to cater to the intellectual, social, or political elites.
MCWHINNEY:
So in each source there are myths or root metaphors that are most clearly identified in tales of the founding. In the Morrill case we might
be able to understand the divergence of their path by exploring the childhood of central individuals in the land grant movement. A useful heuristic is to assume that the new myth grows as a countermyth to the established institutions and their myths. If we are interested in creating a new learning institution or better managing a university, we should explore the ways in which the mythic strands interweave to form the current institutions. VAILL:
So if you take a job as president of a state university, you had better realize that to treat it as a liberal arts college will lead to a lot of misunderstanding.
MCWHINNEY:
Exactly! In fact, there are some myths about what happens to people who don’t listen to myths. For example, King Tantalus . . .
VAILL:
I think this may be a good place to stop. Thank you for these amplifications on your approach to remythologizing.
MCWHINNEY:
Thank you. Sharing stories is always a pleasure.
79