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How remythologizing can revitalize organizations
The two examples cited in this article illustrate how the process of remythologizing matches myth, product design, and type of employee to reinvigorate an organization.
How I&mythologizing Can Revitalize Organizations Will McWhinney Jo& Batista The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artistic temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers . . . -Thomas Mann
emythologizing is a process that recaptures the original source energy of organizations and communities; it summons back to consciousness the founding ideals and the ofttold tales that helped establish and maintain an organizations identity, thus linking the primal energy with present conditions. There are many examples of renaissance in political and social history, and individual spiritual rebirth is an almost daily occurrence; however, the revitalization of an organization by capturing its essential idiom is less common. The culture of organizations -let alone the idea
that each organization might embody a core myth-has only recently been recognized at all; nevertheless, the maintenance of a mature culture depends on the revitalization of existing industrial, educational, and social service organizations. Such economy of ideas is essential where much of the social as well as physical territory has been claimed. We can no longer escape beyond the frontier, as the Mormons did when they went to Great Salt Lake more than 100 years ago. This article describes the development of the remythologizing process and the way in which it has been used in two widely different situations. The method requires uncovering the myths of creation (that is, origin and development) and the related tales that consciously and unconsciously guide the course of organizations and cultures. Interpreting the myths and tales in light of current issues reconnects them with the founding energy, giving them appropriate strategic direction
for a new “take-off.” This process is critical to the letting-go of old habits and beliefs and the adoption of new strategies that still make use of the cultural heritage. In some cases our search for basic myth may take us to original cosmogonic myths of the creation of the earth, of life, and of man and woman. This is the case in one of our examples, in which a consulting group had the task of creating new social and business organizations in the Caribbean. For an existing and major institution-such as the Koor conglomerate, which controls a quarter of all manufacturing in Israel -we considered the Old Testament tales as well as the foundation of the Zionist Movement. Some currently operating myths may prove detrimental to an organization’s vitality: To bring an American telephone company into the 21st Century may require disconnecting it from the images and myths of service that emerged with urbanization in the late 1800s. The myths and fairy tales of Western Europe were essential to the evolution of the Walt Disney entertainment empire, particularly as they combined with the world view of Middle America in the 1920s and of the psychosocial dynamics of a boy growing up in this context. In this approach to revitalization, we look both for the “stories” that initially gave the institutions their life and for the stories of the larger culture in which they are embedded. The story is the mythologem that tells “how things are done,” not then or now but always in the life of the living being, group, or culture. Such a story is not the institution’s history, though it may be brought in part from the unconscious by recalling past events. It tells of “once upon a time,” taking the form of a tale. The story, assuming it is accurately identified, is the core process of the organism or the organization, a process through which the organism maintains its identity and continually recreates itself. It so permeates the preconscious that it emerges
unwittingly to affect the general atmosphere as well as the detailed decision making of the organization. Identification with a living myth establishes an entity that is self-reflexive-it knows what is natural to itself and what is foreign. With such self-awareness, an organization is more likely to be self-organizing and to maintain itself by having members whose goals and dreams are in tune with the myth. The Navajo Indians used their sand paintings in precisely this way to heal individuals who had become ill by being out of tune with their nature. The rituals, which lasted several days, centered on the telling of archetypal stories recalled in the sandpaintings; this telling brought about a “cure” by bringing the patients into harmony with their natures. The Christian celebration of Holy Week is also a tale, a retelling of the last days of Christ’s life through which the individual recognizes the indwelling spirit of the cosmic Christ and is reborn in its presence. As with living things, the stories can get old and tired; the “founding” history is forgotten and gradually drops out of consciousness. We often secularize what had been held sacrosanct, and with the loss of the sacred element the tale becomes history. This secularization reduces mystery to a set of rules of behavior and supports a version of “history” from which all ambiguity and controversy have been purged. Perhaps the greatest literary exposition of this phenomenon is presented in Feodor Dostoevski’s tale of the “Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. In this tale the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, on His reappearance in front of the cathedral at Seville, that He “has done His piece” and has nothing more to say to the people-that the Christ story is now owned by “those who have corrected Thy work.” The loss of power of the original story is similarly epitomized by the degraded corpus of Aristotelian (and other classic) work that was avail-
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able to the medieval scholar. The Renaissance is a grand example of the remythologization of the culture of classic times, thus tapping the founding energy of Western Civilization to refound the culture. Our purpose here is to look beyond the processes that gradually erode the potency of such stories. We look instead at their vitality and explore the archetypal myths of the culture and other tools of psychosocial analysis through which organizations and societies can be revitalized. A corporate executive described the process in this way:
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Will McWhinney is presidennt of Enthusion, Inc., an organizational consulting firm in Venice, California, and a co-founder and mentor of the Human and Organizational Development Program at the Fielding Institute. He was years with the associated for more than twenty at UCLA, Graduate School of Management where he helped to bring sociotechnical systems work from Europe and to create the first muster’s program in arts management. He received a B.A. in philosophy and physics from Union College and u Ph.D. in industrial administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. In the late 1960s McWhinney begun the development of open-systems planning for the design of new high QWL manufacturing plants and urban redevelopments. Over the next decade he developed this change technology into a general consulting approach called meta-praxis. His current focus for the meta-praxis approach is designing the management of highly creative scientists and artists. McWhinney is also experimenting with a combination of family-systems theory and open-systems planning to help family-managed businesses; he is publishing u series of articles on this practice in New Management. This current article on remythologizing (written with 10~2 Butistu) describes a practice that is emerging from joint work with his students at the Fielding Institute on myth and symbol from a Jungian perspective.
Managing corporate identity means preserving the roots and fostering the growth of the tree. In other words, we cannot violate corporate identity. On the contrary, we must try to find out what is fundamental in this identity and on what roots the tree will be able to grow. . . . I consider myself unuprootable.
The return to the fundamental “root theme” for the purpose of energizing the organism is a process that is similar to what we call remythologizing. It is an ancient process used by traditional healers such as the Navajo medicine men and, in one way or another, by all those who have produced genuine social revolution. As Mircea Eliade indicated in his book Myth and Reality (Harper & Row, 1968), the myths of origin played a central role: As the exemplary model for all “creation,” the cosmogonic myth can help the patient to make a “new beginning” of his life. The return to origins gives the hope of rebirth. Now all the medical rituals we have been examining aim at a return to sources. We get the impression that for archaic societies life cannot be repaired, it can only be re-created by a return to sources. And the “source of sources” is the prodigious outpouring of energy, life and fecundity that occurred at the Creation of the World.
The process, which is carried out differently in each culture, produces different results with each issue being addressed. Here we are presenting a mode that is useful today with individuals, organizations, and communities.
We provide some examples of this process and, in the final section, we introduce some ideas about how to use the recovered story to build social institutions that are alive with the contemporary environment and issues. Some details of these processes and the outcome are provided in this article, but first we offer two examples of the remythologizing process. More details may be found in Jose Batista’s How to Rebuild Spanish America (unpublished dissertation, 1988). Two EXAMPLES: A MACRO AND A MICRO CASE In a sense all examples of deep exploration into the “story” of a living object are both macro and micro. Every tale must be told in the context of an older, more encompassing one; every new creation emerges from a setting. The story, as an embryo, emerges “from nothing”; yet, after it is created, we can demonstrate its causes, historical as well as effective. In this section we introduce two ongoing studies in which we have had to go to different levels of sources to search for the essential story. Where and how deep one must go is a matter of research strategy and the amount of effort one can devote to bring what is unconscious to light. The first example, explicitly a macro-study, is of the Caribbean setting mentioned above; the second is of the creative processes that underlie the Walt Disney phenomenon. It is formally a micro-study, but it is also one with worldwide impact.
The Impact of Caribbean on Organization
Cultures
The need to design an organization in the Spanish-American culture of the Caribbean led us to consider three diverse systems of myths, one from each major source of the culture: the Caribe and the related MesoAmerican Indians; the various tribes of Ne-
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Jo& Batista is currently the manager of human resources planning and development in field service and sales for Digital Equipment Corporation. In addition to holding P number of positions in human resources at Digital, he has worked as a field service engineer (servicing accounting and computing equipment) for a number of companies. Batista received a B.S. in business administration from Upper Iowa University, an M.A. in organizational behavior from Vermont College, and a Ph.D. in human systems from the Fielding Institute. He has done additional course work at National Training Laboratories, Tavistack Institute, the University of Michigan, and the University of New Hampshire. A recognized change agent in human development and organizational transformation, he has served as a consultant in motivation and change management for a number of public agencies in Puerto Rico.
groes brought as slaves from Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the Spanish conquistadores who brought with them a decadent mix of monotheistic Mediterranean cultures. I will introduce here one line of thinking that they followed based on these myths. Being concerned in the design of or-
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ganizations involving issues of power, hierarchical relations, and “rights,” we looked for myths that dealt with differentiation. One thread of evidence is the way in which the cultures relate matter and spirit (body and mind). Our study indicates that the Indian myths support a belief in the fundamental unity of matter and spirit. While the material definition of man is transitory, his spirit and matter reside as one in perpetual unity. Knowing that the Meso-Americans held this belief makes it easier to understand the occurrence of mass suicide and ceremonial murders of vast populations, as well as the Meso-Americans’ lack of interest in personal immortality and ownership of personal property. All things (both animate and inanimate) are considered to be of one Spirit, so there is never a disconnection from the material. Possession, even individual life, has little meaning in this belief system. A great variety of cultures were represented in the Negro peoples brought over to the Antilles and Meso-America: Calebar, Dahomey, Bantu, Yoruba, and others, each with its own mythology. Many of the cultures share an understanding of the spirit/matter relation that is significantly different from that of the Meso-American. Even though they too held to an eternal unity of spirit and matter, they believed that a person’s spirit maintains an identity at death. Further, they held that the spirit can be manipulated to affect matter (body); this explains the source of voodoo practices. Spirit and matter are separable, whether directly or by the intervention of the gods. To carry the metaphor to the language of organizations, the relation of spirit and body can be managed by the participant or by intervention by the Chief Executive Officer. The Catholic and Mediterranean traditions that the Spanish and other Europeans brought to the Caribbean view spirit
and matter as separate, interacting only as a special blessing of the Deity. In some sects this leads to the conclusion that the connection is a miracle, either a one-time or a continuing privilege offered to man as Gods agent on earth. A fourth culture has emerged from the forced intermingling of these three root cultures: the Mestizo, a subculture that arose primarily out of the rape of the black and Indian women by the conquerors. This is a cultural origin also represented in certain myths of creation, such as that of the citizenry of Imperial Rome stemming from the rape of the Sabine women. In a sense the Mestizos are the product of the “miracle” brought from Europe by white men - a cruel origin compared with that of other cultures- that is reflected in the values of that subculture today. It is provocative to compare the hierarchical structure that has emerged in this multicultural setting with the forms that have arisen in the agricultural, industrial, and governmental organizations. The three concepts of executive, manager, and laborer clearly parallel the world views of European, black, and Indian. Ther? is also a suggestive parallel between the Mestizo and the disenfranchised supervisors who are neither boss nor laborer - neither spirit nor matter. Thus an organization’s problems are greatly complicated in the Caribbean, where the supervisors are in large part, Mestizos. Difficult as the supervisory role may be in some European and American organizations, it becomes an institutionalized ignominy for the Mestizo to report to a person of European origin; a particular instance proves this point. In a Puerto Rican plant of an American company, management made an effort to install a quality-control system based on the Deming model that was developed to operate within the traditions of the Japanese culture. It assumed a hierarchical structure wherein
supervisors had to submit daily signed reports of any errors made by their employees; the supervisors were in effect required to routinely “confess” publicly to weakness in their control over workers. Considering the social origins of the plant’s employees- or simply their macho attitude - it is not surprising that the errors did not get reported. Some errors were constructively handled within the units, but most of them were hidden. Thus a quality-control method that is effective on the continent- and in Japan where it was developed -proved to be almost worthless in the Caribbean. This example shows the inappropriateness of the Anglo-American concept of work and authority structure in the Caribbean culture. Where the Caribe Indian beliefs have survived, working for wages is a degradation, for it constitutes a violation of the integral matter-spirit connection; selling the matter profanes the spirit. Where the Anglo worker looks for meaning, the Indian worker wants integrity. Other violations occur in the pacing of work, in employment relations, and in motivational efforts designed to improve performance. Effective organizations probably cannot be developed in the Carib-
bean from the Anglo-American models without a general reconsideration of the culture that has evolved from the three ethnic sources. Rebirth of the Creative Cycle Walt Disney drew much of his creative energy and many of his themes from the psychic concerns of the male child from birth to adolescence. These were most often expressed through fairy tales and myths, through which Disney made unconscious aspects of these concerns available to his audiences. Specifically, there are three archetypal sources that account for the majority of his major animated films and much of what has been translated into the attractions at Disneyland’s and Disney Worlds Magic Kingdoms: I. The passage from life to near-death and back to life that occurs at everyone’s birth. This experience is particularly apparent in the attractions (and the transitions between them) that require a passage through an intermittently blocked tunnel. The familiar example is the “fun house,” with its dark tunnel full of frightening images and gates that open only as “guests” (the Disney term for customers) suddenly encounter them - much like -
“The culture of organizations . . . has only recently been recognizedat all; neverfheless, fhe maintenance of a mature culture depends on fhe revifalizafion of exisfing industvial, educafional, and social service organizafions.”
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what occurs in the birth canal. Such passages also appear in various entries to the park. The experience of caves in the scenic and romantic rides is probably also a reflection of the womb. 2. The first separations from home, mother, or family, often as a ‘stolen child. ” These are tales in which the child is taken from home, has a frightening adventure, and is returned to his or her home (as in Bambi or 101 Dalmatians). The story of Snow White as presented by Disney appears to be a variant version of this type of tale in which the child is sent away by her stepmother to be killed. Disney omitted the Oedipal conflicts of the original story, which suggests that he was unaware of or unconcerned with feminine issues in general and a girl’s developing sexuality in particular. 3. The second class of separations, in which the child chooses to venture out to see the world without a particular pursuit or objective. This is a test of the child’s first feelings of independence from his or her parents. Experiencing Tom Sawyer’s Island and Pinocchio reexposes one to this archetypal developmental event. In his book The Uses of Enchantment (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), Bruno Bettelheim provides an explanation of the child’s engagement with these seemingly painful events: “A particular story may indeed make
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some children anxious, but once they become better acquainted with fairy stories, the fearsome aspects seem to disappear, while the reassuring features become ever more dominant. The original displeasure of anxiety then turns into the great pleasure of anxiety successfully faced and mastered. “The adult similarly experiences pleasure by recalling the “anxiety mastered.” A fourth level of development provides a powerful clue for reopening the creative power of the Disney myth. It demonstrates that a new entertainment attraction cannot be created without the appropriate level of psychic maturity in the artists, and thus provides a suggestion of what must be done to revitalize the Disney empire. EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was intended to be an experimental city at Disney World in Florida, but appears instead to be the creation of a child in the period of latency just before puberty sets in. In other words, it is a grandiose version of the typical expression of a young boy about eight years old who is intently focused on a hobby- often with a scientific basis- in a first heavily masked encounter with his own power. The adult Disney wished initially to create an experimental city to show how technology could contribute to a better life. The “boy genius” in Disney could envision these technological aspects, but creating such a city would have involved him in designing for the full life of families in a community, with its conflict, competition, achievement, economics, issues of growing up, sexual life, love and friendship, and death -aspects of life that were totally removed from the eight-year-old persona that was conjuring up the EPCCYI’ fantasy. Creation of the living city required a far more mature persona. More important, the failure of EPCOT as an experimental city exemplifies the judgment that the chief designer/creator
must have access to the emotional experience of that which he is creating. Equally important for the Disney corporation was the fact that the creative support team had been assembled for over 50 years to produce for the child. While there is less evidence that the support staff must also be in tune with the product, the habits of producing for the child must have dulled their sensitivities to the needs of an adult population. Disney’s genius fed on his unconscious expression of his own childhood. He was able to transform his own dimly remembered emotions into archetypal experiences that captured similar emotions both in the children who are still experiencing the elemental feelings and in the adults in whom the memory is so nearly lost that they almost never remember that they had experienced such pains and pleasures. Yet Disney’s work does include numerous exceptions that show the work of an adult persona. The initial Mickey Mouse cartoons that made Disney famous, the dancing skeleton animation of the early 1930s that is the first evidence of Disney’s dark side, and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at the Magic Kingdom affirm that Disney was also capable of creating out of a fully adult psyche. Disney would not be entirely welcome today at the parks that bear his name, any more than Christ was at the cathedral in Seville in Dostoevski’s tale. The disciples/ employees of the Disney parks, who long ago suppressed the vivid engagements with dark fantasies, have “cleansed” the unconscious material from Disney’s images lest it evoke a sense of evil, morbid fears, and unwelcome connections to worldly ways. They made sure there was nothing in the park to appeal to the competitive or achievement-oriented impulses of adolescents and young adults. The custodians of Disney’s creations and traditions have over the years rationalized his expressions, eliminating as far
as possible the dark side of any story. They have even eliminated anything paradoxical or puzzling, two conditions that child psychologists assure us are neither enjoyed by the normal child nor desired by many parents. A typical means of maintaining such repression of the more mature emotions and needs is to build a climate of adulation for the purity of the cleansed image. Adulation, reenforced by organizational and social pressure, blocks awareness while it maintains control of the audiences, employees, students, and the like. One damaging outcome of this demythologizing is the loss of the power that flowed from original, inherently rich, psychologically complex images of the founding genius. The images have become pallid, and few of the more energetic, darker images get through from the unconscious. What at one time gripped both the literal child and the “child-within” has become a mere souvenir of a now-faded excitement; the power is memorialized only in the symbolic trinkets that continue to sell so well in the Disney parks. A more serious loss-both for the creators and for the “guests”- is the inability of the current artists to grow beyond what the master had conceived. The source from which he drew creative energy has been suppressed, blocking access to the essential mythic elements and to the source of unique and clear images. By reaching beyond the limitations of Dis-
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ney’s particular psychic drives, the designers can retain the core energies of the Disney myth and direct it to new market niches.
REMYTHOLOGIZING
The European Renaissance in the 16th and 17th centuries provides a grand model for the remythologizing process. It was an occasion of returning to ancient sources with a new curiosity that uncovered ideas and energies that had been repressed for a millenium. Methods of revitalization involve uncovering sources of vitality and associating them with new conditions to form new lineages and new directions. Remythologizing is a particular means of revitalization that proceeds by reinterpreting symbols in the underlying archetypal stories and by utilizing the primal energy of creation associated with such stories. The methodology involved is close to that of psychoanalysis, but drawing on Jungian rather than Freudian thinking; it interprets myths, stories, and symbols as the evidence of unseen personal and communal processes in an attempt to find ways of both using the energy inherent in this psychic material and freeing the system from habitual and degenerate interpretation. As in good psychoanalysis, recalling the past does not provide excuses for old failings but frees the system in the present from its unconscious entrapments. Thus freed, the system can build on its traditions, natural talents, and resources. By building on the myths of origin, remythologizing may in some cases produce completely novel directions.
STAGES OF REMYTHOLOGIZING
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Although the method is more an intuitive than an analytic approach, a typical sequence of stages has been used in the work to date.
1. Bringing
to the surface the myths of founding (origin) on which the culture is based. The first stage is to identify the underlying drives through the myths, stories, and tales used by the creator. It uncovers the psychic forces that have been rationalized out of sight. The analysis provides a connection between the “stories” that were selected and the material that has become unconscious. This stage starts with a depth analysis that probes beneath the rationalized expressions of purpose and constraint, seeking the psychosocial dynamics. Just as psychologists use knowledge of various syndromes to alert themselves to underlying issues, we use the clues provided by myths, epic tales, folk history, and sacred artifacts to find the core process or story of a culture. The analysis can be supported by participative studies in which various contemplative exercises induce states of heightened awareness of unconscious material the members have “forgotten. ” For example, a study of deviant behaviors at Disneyland suggests that frequently experienced adolescent vandalism is the “dark-side” response to the elimination of any challenge in the legitimate entertainment provided by the park. By expressing the deviant behavior in tales of fantasy, we can get at the aspect of the story that is being denied and thus understand how it is an inverted expression of the organization’s dynamic. 2. Reviving the myths of founding. It is typical of this method, richly exemplified in the return to the ambience of Greece’s Golden Age during the Renaissance, to find the core story in terms of the founding events. So the process is one of returning in history to regain the wholeness that underlies the organism. The purpose is not an antiquarian pursuit, but one that aids in developing a formulation of the psychosocial dynamics in terms of the contemporary issues and environment. The generative source of these myths may be found in the culture’s cosmogony, the
tales of its creation such as the Olympic tales or the early books of the Bible, or in the creative act that founded the enterprise or community. Much of the American telephone industry’s history arises from Alexander Graham Bell’s transmission of the first phone message: “Watson! Come here, I want you.” Awareness of such source events could help uncover the dynamics of the creative process of a genius or a culture. In Disney’s case the cosmogony is essentially that of “Everyboy” in the particular cultural setting of the midwestern American family. The dynamic is thus one of growing up within the traditional family context. 3. Recommitment to the revitalized myth. In this stage the tale is retold with new understanding and new interpretations born of placing it in the contemporary setting and dealing with issues of the current level of personal and/or societal maturity. This revitalized tale provides the direction and energy for a creative thrust, rather than a reversion of rerationalized extensions. The identified dynamic is played out and extended into areas not exploited by the creator. In the case of Disney, this extension can be made simply by following the stages of life of anyone growing up within the value context of the typical American family. This broadens the creative possibilities to myths and tales derived from the essential life processes of all age groups, not just those of a prepubescent boy. By extending Disney’s root processes, we can use his particular world view to develop entertainment for each age group. Such use of mythology, for example, leads to the creation of a character such as Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker as a modern expression of the “coming-of-age” stories that are epitomized in the tales of King Arthur’s Knights. Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche and Frank L. Baum’s novel The Wizard of Oz are similar expressions of the woman’s coming-of-age myth. The story of Ulysses in
the original epic form provides the classic tale of man at mid-life finding his life’s role and meaning deeply challenged. There are many contemporary versions of this process - for example, the tragicomedies of Woody Allen. The task in this stage is to lay out the stream of myths dealing with the identified dynamic, in this case the life cycle of man, identifying enough incidents to give us access to the underlying “story” and to display the complexity of motivations and the twists the psyche takes as it manifests the “human adventure.” The method outlined in the above stages for reconnecting the artistic effort with its original source of direction provides the focus and criteria for vital extensions of the form, suggesting the story line and pointing to the essence without establishing banal rules of plot and character. Rather, the myths evoke from creative people the same creative energies they drew from those who first formed the myths and epic tales in past ages. In the Caribbean culture, reconnection with the myths of origin provides an understanding of how the various peoples and their overall culture relate to work and authority. It is clear that work has a totally different meaning for each of the cultural groups: For the once-European, it is related to immortality and the symbolic power of money; for the black and the Mestizo, there is a more direct connection between the material and the power to manipulate the system; and for those still connected to the Meso-American traditions, work is integrally related to the spirit and cycle of life. The stories of these cultures need to be reinterpreted and integrated to achieve organizational forms that will be effective and durable. The three stages of remythologizing parallel the traditional creative cycle, using a specific analytic approach to vitalize the culture - an approach that: Is directed specifically toward the forl
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gotten (or repressed) aspects of the relevant culture. Searches for a particular origin or archetype with its associated psychosocial dynamics and reinterprets it to fit the current situation. Presents the new story as a revitalized form of the old- drawing on the core story, though not necessarily on its incidentals. The intent of this process is not simply to gain awareness, but to inspire changes in organizations and cultures. l
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THE USESOF MYTH
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The social and organizational designs that grow out of remythologizing can be effected according to different design strategies. The rediscovered and reinterpreted myths provide designers with a story (mythologem) from which to derive values, direction, and intent to guide their designs. They also provide critical aspects of the culture to indicate what is acceptable to the members working within the revitalized organization. Many small changes can occur immediately from gaining awareness of the founding myths. The redesign around the supervisory job in the Spanish-American culture, a role that is often filled by Mestizos, is an example of a local change. This change is just a beginning, for there are far more significant factors and difficulties to be taken into account. For example, the fundamental unity of spirit and matter in the Indian tradition leads to ideas of social reform close to those of liberation theology. However, in order to develop highperformance organizations based on this unity, we need to reckon with demands associated with the other mythic traditions that make up the total culture. A formidable obstacle to remythologizing is another set of stories, often mis-
labelled as myths, that have grown around the founding myths; they obscure the primal energy and direction. For example, the Disney organizations responsible for creating new theme park entertainment have been designed and staffed for two decades in ways that reinforce the “myth” that Disney’s business is concerned entirely with the child’s world. Thus one of the changes required if the myth is to support new markets is the addition of project directors, artists, and writers who are tuned into the issues, tales, and myths of older “guests.” The change also requires executives who can manage these very different types of personalities. As in the analogous psychodynamic processes, there will be a period of stress and disorganization, even of demythologizing, as the energies from the renewed vision replace the rationalized institutions. As was so clearly demonstrated during the Renaissance, the defenders of the established myths do not easily give up their version of the founding “truths” through recognizing the indwelling core myth. The difficulty of replacing the incrustation of habit leads to another approach to remythologizing. Remythologizing has been accomplished historically through founding new organizations; revitalization can seldom begin with the “head” of an organization or community. The revitalization is typically accomplished by a group’s act of breaking away from the parent, though there are many cases in which the revitalized myths are deliberately nurtured within enclaves established in an existing organization. The open-system forms of industrial work-clearly a revitalization of community models of production have been most successfully developed in the “green field” sites that are physically isolated from established work settings within a company. Similarly, it is unlikely that either
the management or the parents of guests at Disney’s Magic Kingdoms could tolerate an expansion of the park psychodynamics to activities that are particularly attractive to adolescents and young adults. Just as EPCOT is physically distant from the Magic Kingdom, so must entertainment involving paradoxical confrontations, competitiveness, achievement, and other adult excitements be set up in separate entertainment centers, possibly even under a new corporate identity. This has already been done for cinema productions with Disney’s successful Touchstone subsidiary, which is producing quality entertainment for adults in line with the Disney “story.” Even when revitalization with myths of origin is initiated by senior leaders, the direct route of reinterpretation is typically fought by followers; those good followers include many “true believers.” The leaders may establish a protected enclave where a revival can be nurtured, or they may leave, as did Apple Computer founder Steven l? Jobs, to set up a new organization. The return to the original energy of a venture is apparently more threatening to the established followers than it would be if the leadership took a totally new direction. Tinkering with the origi-
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nal message weakens the authority of the current establishment; therefore, a reborn myth or mytho2ogem needs to be protected from the followers - as was done, for example, by setting up a subsidiary such as Disney’s Touchstone - until the new message can become familiar, literally, to the family. Another time-honored use of remythologizing is to provide for a merger of two founding stories at the occasion of a marriage that unites two great lineages. Thus the merger of two organizations today requires refounding if there is to be common meaning and expectations among the members of the merged organizations. The refounding can be accomplished through a joint storytelling and capturing of the essential values of both organizations in a new story that includes icons from both “houses.” When the renewed myths bear on a total culture-as in the Caribbean-their renaissance becomes more problematic. In the past there was always an open frontier on which to try new and renewed myths. The occupation of North America was virtually a laboratory for such experiments, and the American Revolution epitomized the success that can be achieved with separation. Now, as
[The remyfhologizing process] requires uncovering the myths of cueafion (that is, origin and developmenf) and the related tales fhaf consciously or unconsciously guide the course of organizations and culfures.”
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Jose Batista hypothesized in How to Rebuild Spanish America, success in remythologizing societies is most likely to occur in island nation enclaves such as those in the Caribbean. Remythologizing not only can serve as an access to vitality; it can also provide critical understanding of organizational sto-
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This approach to organizational dynamics has its origins in Carl Jung’s recognition of the power of cultural symbols as a means of understanding psychodynamics. Though relevant material can be found in many places in his work, Essays on u Science of Mythology, which he co-authored with C. Kerenyi (Princeton, 1949), is the most focused of his works on the interpretation of myth. Mircea Eliade contributed further to this tradition in Myth and Reality (Harper & Row, 1968). But it has been the work of Joseph Campbell that has made this material available to the American public and, in turn, Paul Moyer’s illustrated television interviews with Campbell (done shortly before Campbell’s death in 1987) that have brought that work to popular attention. The text of these interviews has been published as The Power of Myth (Doubleday, 1988). Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchuntment (Alfred E. Knopf, 1975) provides background for understanding the child’s use of myth, akin to the general methods underlying the use of myth in organizational revitalization. The epigraph at the beginning of the article is from an essay by Thomas Mann (Essays of Three Decades, Alfred E. Knopf, 1937) reflecting on Mann’s own sense of the mythic. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is one of the great archetypal mythic writings of the twentieth century. The basis for the role of myth in Caribbean culture follows a tradition that is best represented in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. The
ries by laying bare the ethical and social issues that are hidden under our expurgated and rationalized stories. So it’s not just that old myths can be revived; more to the point is that their examination can lead to a return for LZbetter start and, ultimately, to the founding of new organizations for a new age.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
source work is his three volumes of Mythologiques. Volume I has been translated into English as The Raw and the Cooked: introduction to a Science of Mythology by John and Noreen Weightman, 1969. In the past five years there has been renewed interest in myth and symbols in the corporate setting, leading to a number of seminal collections of articles. For example, see Peter Frost, Larry Moor, Meryl Lewis, Craig Lundberg, and John Martin, Organizational Culture (Sage, 1985). Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 1985) provides a good critique of the extension of these methods into the everyday corporate culture. The specific use of myth in Walt Disney’s work is well discussed in Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version (Simon & Schuster, 1985). Readers who may wish to understand the dynamics of the current Disney culture may enjoy Storming the Magic Kingdom (Alfred E. Knopf, 1987), John Taylor’s report on the takeover and revitalization of the Disney empire by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.
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How I&mythologizing Can Revitalize Organizations Will McWhinney Jo& Batista The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artistic temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers . . . -Thomas Mann
emythologizing is a process that recaptures the original source energy of organizations and communities; it summons back to consciousness the founding ideals and the ofttold tales that helped establish and maintain an organizations identity, thus linking the primal energy with present conditions. There are many examples of renaissance in political and social history, and individual spiritual rebirth is an almost daily occurrence; however, the revitalization of an organization by capturing its essential idiom is less common. The culture of organizations -let alone the idea
that each organization might embody a core myth-has only recently been recognized at all; nevertheless, the maintenance of a mature culture depends on the revitalization of existing industrial, educational, and social service organizations. Such economy of ideas is essential where much of the social as well as physical territory has been claimed. We can no longer escape beyond the frontier, as the Mormons did when they went to Great Salt Lake more than 100 years ago. This article describes the development of the remythologizing process and the way in which it has been used in two widely different situations. The method requires uncovering the myths of creation (that is, origin and development) and the related tales that consciously and unconsciously guide the course of organizations and cultures. Interpreting the myths and tales in light of current issues reconnects them with the founding energy, giving them appropriate strategic direction
for a new “take-off.” This process is critical to the letting-go of old habits and beliefs and the adoption of new strategies that still make use of the cultural heritage. In some cases our search for basic myth may take us to original cosmogonic myths of the creation of the earth, of life, and of man and woman. This is the case in one of our examples, in which a consulting group had the task of creating new social and business organizations in the Caribbean. For an existing and major institution-such as the Koor conglomerate, which controls a quarter of all manufacturing in Israel -we considered the Old Testament tales as well as the foundation of the Zionist Movement. Some currently operating myths may prove detrimental to an organization’s vitality: To bring an American telephone company into the 21st Century may require disconnecting it from the images and myths of service that emerged with urbanization in the late 1800s. The myths and fairy tales of Western Europe were essential to the evolution of the Walt Disney entertainment empire, particularly as they combined with the world view of Middle America in the 1920s and of the psychosocial dynamics of a boy growing up in this context. In this approach to revitalization, we look both for the “stories” that initially gave the institutions their life and for the stories of the larger culture in which they are embedded. The story is the mythologem that tells “how things are done,” not then or now but always in the life of the living being, group, or culture. Such a story is not the institution’s history, though it may be brought in part from the unconscious by recalling past events. It tells of “once upon a time,” taking the form of a tale. The story, assuming it is accurately identified, is the core process of the organism or the organization, a process through which the organism maintains its identity and continually recreates itself. It so permeates the preconscious that it emerges
unwittingly to affect the general atmosphere as well as the detailed decision making of the organization. Identification with a living myth establishes an entity that is self-reflexive-it knows what is natural to itself and what is foreign. With such self-awareness, an organization is more likely to be self-organizing and to maintain itself by having members whose goals and dreams are in tune with the myth. The Navajo Indians used their sand paintings in precisely this way to heal individuals who had become ill by being out of tune with their nature. The rituals, which lasted several days, centered on the telling of archetypal stories recalled in the sandpaintings; this telling brought about a “cure” by bringing the patients into harmony with their natures. The Christian celebration of Holy Week is also a tale, a retelling of the last days of Christ’s life through which the individual recognizes the indwelling spirit of the cosmic Christ and is reborn in its presence. As with living things, the stories can get old and tired; the “founding” history is forgotten and gradually drops out of consciousness. We often secularize what had been held sacrosanct, and with the loss of the sacred element the tale becomes history. This secularization reduces mystery to a set of rules of behavior and supports a version of “history” from which all ambiguity and controversy have been purged. Perhaps the greatest literary exposition of this phenomenon is presented in Feodor Dostoevski’s tale of the “Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. In this tale the Grand Inquisitor tells Christ, on His reappearance in front of the cathedral at Seville, that He “has done His piece” and has nothing more to say to the people-that the Christ story is now owned by “those who have corrected Thy work.” The loss of power of the original story is similarly epitomized by the degraded corpus of Aristotelian (and other classic) work that was avail-
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able to the medieval scholar. The Renaissance is a grand example of the remythologization of the culture of classic times, thus tapping the founding energy of Western Civilization to refound the culture. Our purpose here is to look beyond the processes that gradually erode the potency of such stories. We look instead at their vitality and explore the archetypal myths of the culture and other tools of psychosocial analysis through which organizations and societies can be revitalized. A corporate executive described the process in this way:
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Will McWhinney is presidennt of Enthusion, Inc., an organizational consulting firm in Venice, California, and a co-founder and mentor of the Human and Organizational Development Program at the Fielding Institute. He was years with the associated for more than twenty at UCLA, Graduate School of Management where he helped to bring sociotechnical systems work from Europe and to create the first muster’s program in arts management. He received a B.A. in philosophy and physics from Union College and u Ph.D. in industrial administration from Carnegie-Mellon University. In the late 1960s McWhinney begun the development of open-systems planning for the design of new high QWL manufacturing plants and urban redevelopments. Over the next decade he developed this change technology into a general consulting approach called meta-praxis. His current focus for the meta-praxis approach is designing the management of highly creative scientists and artists. McWhinney is also experimenting with a combination of family-systems theory and open-systems planning to help family-managed businesses; he is publishing u series of articles on this practice in New Management. This current article on remythologizing (written with 10~2 Butistu) describes a practice that is emerging from joint work with his students at the Fielding Institute on myth and symbol from a Jungian perspective.
Managing corporate identity means preserving the roots and fostering the growth of the tree. In other words, we cannot violate corporate identity. On the contrary, we must try to find out what is fundamental in this identity and on what roots the tree will be able to grow. . . . I consider myself unuprootable.
The return to the fundamental “root theme” for the purpose of energizing the organism is a process that is similar to what we call remythologizing. It is an ancient process used by traditional healers such as the Navajo medicine men and, in one way or another, by all those who have produced genuine social revolution. As Mircea Eliade indicated in his book Myth and Reality (Harper & Row, 1968), the myths of origin played a central role: As the exemplary model for all “creation,” the cosmogonic myth can help the patient to make a “new beginning” of his life. The return to origins gives the hope of rebirth. Now all the medical rituals we have been examining aim at a return to sources. We get the impression that for archaic societies life cannot be repaired, it can only be re-created by a return to sources. And the “source of sources” is the prodigious outpouring of energy, life and fecundity that occurred at the Creation of the World.
The process, which is carried out differently in each culture, produces different results with each issue being addressed. Here we are presenting a mode that is useful today with individuals, organizations, and communities.
We provide some examples of this process and, in the final section, we introduce some ideas about how to use the recovered story to build social institutions that are alive with the contemporary environment and issues. Some details of these processes and the outcome are provided in this article, but first we offer two examples of the remythologizing process. More details may be found in Jose Batista’s How to Rebuild Spanish America (unpublished dissertation, 1988). Two EXAMPLES: A MACRO AND A MICRO CASE In a sense all examples of deep exploration into the “story” of a living object are both macro and micro. Every tale must be told in the context of an older, more encompassing one; every new creation emerges from a setting. The story, as an embryo, emerges “from nothing”; yet, after it is created, we can demonstrate its causes, historical as well as effective. In this section we introduce two ongoing studies in which we have had to go to different levels of sources to search for the essential story. Where and how deep one must go is a matter of research strategy and the amount of effort one can devote to bring what is unconscious to light. The first example, explicitly a macro-study, is of the Caribbean setting mentioned above; the second is of the creative processes that underlie the Walt Disney phenomenon. It is formally a micro-study, but it is also one with worldwide impact.
The Impact of Caribbean on Organization
Cultures
The need to design an organization in the Spanish-American culture of the Caribbean led us to consider three diverse systems of myths, one from each major source of the culture: the Caribe and the related MesoAmerican Indians; the various tribes of Ne-
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Jo& Batista is currently the manager of human resources planning and development in field service and sales for Digital Equipment Corporation. In addition to holding P number of positions in human resources at Digital, he has worked as a field service engineer (servicing accounting and computing equipment) for a number of companies. Batista received a B.S. in business administration from Upper Iowa University, an M.A. in organizational behavior from Vermont College, and a Ph.D. in human systems from the Fielding Institute. He has done additional course work at National Training Laboratories, Tavistack Institute, the University of Michigan, and the University of New Hampshire. A recognized change agent in human development and organizational transformation, he has served as a consultant in motivation and change management for a number of public agencies in Puerto Rico.
groes brought as slaves from Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the Spanish conquistadores who brought with them a decadent mix of monotheistic Mediterranean cultures. I will introduce here one line of thinking that they followed based on these myths. Being concerned in the design of or-
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ganizations involving issues of power, hierarchical relations, and “rights,” we looked for myths that dealt with differentiation. One thread of evidence is the way in which the cultures relate matter and spirit (body and mind). Our study indicates that the Indian myths support a belief in the fundamental unity of matter and spirit. While the material definition of man is transitory, his spirit and matter reside as one in perpetual unity. Knowing that the Meso-Americans held this belief makes it easier to understand the occurrence of mass suicide and ceremonial murders of vast populations, as well as the Meso-Americans’ lack of interest in personal immortality and ownership of personal property. All things (both animate and inanimate) are considered to be of one Spirit, so there is never a disconnection from the material. Possession, even individual life, has little meaning in this belief system. A great variety of cultures were represented in the Negro peoples brought over to the Antilles and Meso-America: Calebar, Dahomey, Bantu, Yoruba, and others, each with its own mythology. Many of the cultures share an understanding of the spirit/matter relation that is significantly different from that of the Meso-American. Even though they too held to an eternal unity of spirit and matter, they believed that a person’s spirit maintains an identity at death. Further, they held that the spirit can be manipulated to affect matter (body); this explains the source of voodoo practices. Spirit and matter are separable, whether directly or by the intervention of the gods. To carry the metaphor to the language of organizations, the relation of spirit and body can be managed by the participant or by intervention by the Chief Executive Officer. The Catholic and Mediterranean traditions that the Spanish and other Europeans brought to the Caribbean view spirit
and matter as separate, interacting only as a special blessing of the Deity. In some sects this leads to the conclusion that the connection is a miracle, either a one-time or a continuing privilege offered to man as Gods agent on earth. A fourth culture has emerged from the forced intermingling of these three root cultures: the Mestizo, a subculture that arose primarily out of the rape of the black and Indian women by the conquerors. This is a cultural origin also represented in certain myths of creation, such as that of the citizenry of Imperial Rome stemming from the rape of the Sabine women. In a sense the Mestizos are the product of the “miracle” brought from Europe by white men - a cruel origin compared with that of other cultures- that is reflected in the values of that subculture today. It is provocative to compare the hierarchical structure that has emerged in this multicultural setting with the forms that have arisen in the agricultural, industrial, and governmental organizations. The three concepts of executive, manager, and laborer clearly parallel the world views of European, black, and Indian. Ther? is also a suggestive parallel between the Mestizo and the disenfranchised supervisors who are neither boss nor laborer - neither spirit nor matter. Thus an organization’s problems are greatly complicated in the Caribbean, where the supervisors are in large part, Mestizos. Difficult as the supervisory role may be in some European and American organizations, it becomes an institutionalized ignominy for the Mestizo to report to a person of European origin; a particular instance proves this point. In a Puerto Rican plant of an American company, management made an effort to install a quality-control system based on the Deming model that was developed to operate within the traditions of the Japanese culture. It assumed a hierarchical structure wherein
supervisors had to submit daily signed reports of any errors made by their employees; the supervisors were in effect required to routinely “confess” publicly to weakness in their control over workers. Considering the social origins of the plant’s employees- or simply their macho attitude - it is not surprising that the errors did not get reported. Some errors were constructively handled within the units, but most of them were hidden. Thus a quality-control method that is effective on the continent- and in Japan where it was developed -proved to be almost worthless in the Caribbean. This example shows the inappropriateness of the Anglo-American concept of work and authority structure in the Caribbean culture. Where the Caribe Indian beliefs have survived, working for wages is a degradation, for it constitutes a violation of the integral matter-spirit connection; selling the matter profanes the spirit. Where the Anglo worker looks for meaning, the Indian worker wants integrity. Other violations occur in the pacing of work, in employment relations, and in motivational efforts designed to improve performance. Effective organizations probably cannot be developed in the Carib-
bean from the Anglo-American models without a general reconsideration of the culture that has evolved from the three ethnic sources. Rebirth of the Creative Cycle Walt Disney drew much of his creative energy and many of his themes from the psychic concerns of the male child from birth to adolescence. These were most often expressed through fairy tales and myths, through which Disney made unconscious aspects of these concerns available to his audiences. Specifically, there are three archetypal sources that account for the majority of his major animated films and much of what has been translated into the attractions at Disneyland’s and Disney Worlds Magic Kingdoms: I. The passage from life to near-death and back to life that occurs at everyone’s birth. This experience is particularly apparent in the attractions (and the transitions between them) that require a passage through an intermittently blocked tunnel. The familiar example is the “fun house,” with its dark tunnel full of frightening images and gates that open only as “guests” (the Disney term for customers) suddenly encounter them - much like -
“The culture of organizations . . . has only recently been recognizedat all; neverfheless, fhe maintenance of a mature culture depends on fhe revifalizafion of exisfing industvial, educafional, and social service organizafions.”
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what occurs in the birth canal. Such passages also appear in various entries to the park. The experience of caves in the scenic and romantic rides is probably also a reflection of the womb. 2. The first separations from home, mother, or family, often as a ‘stolen child. ” These are tales in which the child is taken from home, has a frightening adventure, and is returned to his or her home (as in Bambi or 101 Dalmatians). The story of Snow White as presented by Disney appears to be a variant version of this type of tale in which the child is sent away by her stepmother to be killed. Disney omitted the Oedipal conflicts of the original story, which suggests that he was unaware of or unconcerned with feminine issues in general and a girl’s developing sexuality in particular. 3. The second class of separations, in which the child chooses to venture out to see the world without a particular pursuit or objective. This is a test of the child’s first feelings of independence from his or her parents. Experiencing Tom Sawyer’s Island and Pinocchio reexposes one to this archetypal developmental event. In his book The Uses of Enchantment (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), Bruno Bettelheim provides an explanation of the child’s engagement with these seemingly painful events: “A particular story may indeed make
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some children anxious, but once they become better acquainted with fairy stories, the fearsome aspects seem to disappear, while the reassuring features become ever more dominant. The original displeasure of anxiety then turns into the great pleasure of anxiety successfully faced and mastered. “The adult similarly experiences pleasure by recalling the “anxiety mastered.” A fourth level of development provides a powerful clue for reopening the creative power of the Disney myth. It demonstrates that a new entertainment attraction cannot be created without the appropriate level of psychic maturity in the artists, and thus provides a suggestion of what must be done to revitalize the Disney empire. EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was intended to be an experimental city at Disney World in Florida, but appears instead to be the creation of a child in the period of latency just before puberty sets in. In other words, it is a grandiose version of the typical expression of a young boy about eight years old who is intently focused on a hobby- often with a scientific basis- in a first heavily masked encounter with his own power. The adult Disney wished initially to create an experimental city to show how technology could contribute to a better life. The “boy genius” in Disney could envision these technological aspects, but creating such a city would have involved him in designing for the full life of families in a community, with its conflict, competition, achievement, economics, issues of growing up, sexual life, love and friendship, and death -aspects of life that were totally removed from the eight-year-old persona that was conjuring up the EPCCYI’ fantasy. Creation of the living city required a far more mature persona. More important, the failure of EPCOT as an experimental city exemplifies the judgment that the chief designer/creator
must have access to the emotional experience of that which he is creating. Equally important for the Disney corporation was the fact that the creative support team had been assembled for over 50 years to produce for the child. While there is less evidence that the support staff must also be in tune with the product, the habits of producing for the child must have dulled their sensitivities to the needs of an adult population. Disney’s genius fed on his unconscious expression of his own childhood. He was able to transform his own dimly remembered emotions into archetypal experiences that captured similar emotions both in the children who are still experiencing the elemental feelings and in the adults in whom the memory is so nearly lost that they almost never remember that they had experienced such pains and pleasures. Yet Disney’s work does include numerous exceptions that show the work of an adult persona. The initial Mickey Mouse cartoons that made Disney famous, the dancing skeleton animation of the early 1930s that is the first evidence of Disney’s dark side, and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at the Magic Kingdom affirm that Disney was also capable of creating out of a fully adult psyche. Disney would not be entirely welcome today at the parks that bear his name, any more than Christ was at the cathedral in Seville in Dostoevski’s tale. The disciples/ employees of the Disney parks, who long ago suppressed the vivid engagements with dark fantasies, have “cleansed” the unconscious material from Disney’s images lest it evoke a sense of evil, morbid fears, and unwelcome connections to worldly ways. They made sure there was nothing in the park to appeal to the competitive or achievement-oriented impulses of adolescents and young adults. The custodians of Disney’s creations and traditions have over the years rationalized his expressions, eliminating as far
as possible the dark side of any story. They have even eliminated anything paradoxical or puzzling, two conditions that child psychologists assure us are neither enjoyed by the normal child nor desired by many parents. A typical means of maintaining such repression of the more mature emotions and needs is to build a climate of adulation for the purity of the cleansed image. Adulation, reenforced by organizational and social pressure, blocks awareness while it maintains control of the audiences, employees, students, and the like. One damaging outcome of this demythologizing is the loss of the power that flowed from original, inherently rich, psychologically complex images of the founding genius. The images have become pallid, and few of the more energetic, darker images get through from the unconscious. What at one time gripped both the literal child and the “child-within” has become a mere souvenir of a now-faded excitement; the power is memorialized only in the symbolic trinkets that continue to sell so well in the Disney parks. A more serious loss-both for the creators and for the “guests”- is the inability of the current artists to grow beyond what the master had conceived. The source from which he drew creative energy has been suppressed, blocking access to the essential mythic elements and to the source of unique and clear images. By reaching beyond the limitations of Dis-
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ney’s particular psychic drives, the designers can retain the core energies of the Disney myth and direct it to new market niches.
REMYTHOLOGIZING
The European Renaissance in the 16th and 17th centuries provides a grand model for the remythologizing process. It was an occasion of returning to ancient sources with a new curiosity that uncovered ideas and energies that had been repressed for a millenium. Methods of revitalization involve uncovering sources of vitality and associating them with new conditions to form new lineages and new directions. Remythologizing is a particular means of revitalization that proceeds by reinterpreting symbols in the underlying archetypal stories and by utilizing the primal energy of creation associated with such stories. The methodology involved is close to that of psychoanalysis, but drawing on Jungian rather than Freudian thinking; it interprets myths, stories, and symbols as the evidence of unseen personal and communal processes in an attempt to find ways of both using the energy inherent in this psychic material and freeing the system from habitual and degenerate interpretation. As in good psychoanalysis, recalling the past does not provide excuses for old failings but frees the system in the present from its unconscious entrapments. Thus freed, the system can build on its traditions, natural talents, and resources. By building on the myths of origin, remythologizing may in some cases produce completely novel directions.
STAGES OF REMYTHOLOGIZING
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Although the method is more an intuitive than an analytic approach, a typical sequence of stages has been used in the work to date.
1. Bringing
to the surface the myths of founding (origin) on which the culture is based. The first stage is to identify the underlying drives through the myths, stories, and tales used by the creator. It uncovers the psychic forces that have been rationalized out of sight. The analysis provides a connection between the “stories” that were selected and the material that has become unconscious. This stage starts with a depth analysis that probes beneath the rationalized expressions of purpose and constraint, seeking the psychosocial dynamics. Just as psychologists use knowledge of various syndromes to alert themselves to underlying issues, we use the clues provided by myths, epic tales, folk history, and sacred artifacts to find the core process or story of a culture. The analysis can be supported by participative studies in which various contemplative exercises induce states of heightened awareness of unconscious material the members have “forgotten. ” For example, a study of deviant behaviors at Disneyland suggests that frequently experienced adolescent vandalism is the “dark-side” response to the elimination of any challenge in the legitimate entertainment provided by the park. By expressing the deviant behavior in tales of fantasy, we can get at the aspect of the story that is being denied and thus understand how it is an inverted expression of the organization’s dynamic. 2. Reviving the myths of founding. It is typical of this method, richly exemplified in the return to the ambience of Greece’s Golden Age during the Renaissance, to find the core story in terms of the founding events. So the process is one of returning in history to regain the wholeness that underlies the organism. The purpose is not an antiquarian pursuit, but one that aids in developing a formulation of the psychosocial dynamics in terms of the contemporary issues and environment. The generative source of these myths may be found in the culture’s cosmogony, the
tales of its creation such as the Olympic tales or the early books of the Bible, or in the creative act that founded the enterprise or community. Much of the American telephone industry’s history arises from Alexander Graham Bell’s transmission of the first phone message: “Watson! Come here, I want you.” Awareness of such source events could help uncover the dynamics of the creative process of a genius or a culture. In Disney’s case the cosmogony is essentially that of “Everyboy” in the particular cultural setting of the midwestern American family. The dynamic is thus one of growing up within the traditional family context. 3. Recommitment to the revitalized myth. In this stage the tale is retold with new understanding and new interpretations born of placing it in the contemporary setting and dealing with issues of the current level of personal and/or societal maturity. This revitalized tale provides the direction and energy for a creative thrust, rather than a reversion of rerationalized extensions. The identified dynamic is played out and extended into areas not exploited by the creator. In the case of Disney, this extension can be made simply by following the stages of life of anyone growing up within the value context of the typical American family. This broadens the creative possibilities to myths and tales derived from the essential life processes of all age groups, not just those of a prepubescent boy. By extending Disney’s root processes, we can use his particular world view to develop entertainment for each age group. Such use of mythology, for example, leads to the creation of a character such as Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker as a modern expression of the “coming-of-age” stories that are epitomized in the tales of King Arthur’s Knights. Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche and Frank L. Baum’s novel The Wizard of Oz are similar expressions of the woman’s coming-of-age myth. The story of Ulysses in
the original epic form provides the classic tale of man at mid-life finding his life’s role and meaning deeply challenged. There are many contemporary versions of this process - for example, the tragicomedies of Woody Allen. The task in this stage is to lay out the stream of myths dealing with the identified dynamic, in this case the life cycle of man, identifying enough incidents to give us access to the underlying “story” and to display the complexity of motivations and the twists the psyche takes as it manifests the “human adventure.” The method outlined in the above stages for reconnecting the artistic effort with its original source of direction provides the focus and criteria for vital extensions of the form, suggesting the story line and pointing to the essence without establishing banal rules of plot and character. Rather, the myths evoke from creative people the same creative energies they drew from those who first formed the myths and epic tales in past ages. In the Caribbean culture, reconnection with the myths of origin provides an understanding of how the various peoples and their overall culture relate to work and authority. It is clear that work has a totally different meaning for each of the cultural groups: For the once-European, it is related to immortality and the symbolic power of money; for the black and the Mestizo, there is a more direct connection between the material and the power to manipulate the system; and for those still connected to the Meso-American traditions, work is integrally related to the spirit and cycle of life. The stories of these cultures need to be reinterpreted and integrated to achieve organizational forms that will be effective and durable. The three stages of remythologizing parallel the traditional creative cycle, using a specific analytic approach to vitalize the culture - an approach that: Is directed specifically toward the forl
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gotten (or repressed) aspects of the relevant culture. Searches for a particular origin or archetype with its associated psychosocial dynamics and reinterprets it to fit the current situation. Presents the new story as a revitalized form of the old- drawing on the core story, though not necessarily on its incidentals. The intent of this process is not simply to gain awareness, but to inspire changes in organizations and cultures. l
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THE USESOF MYTH
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The social and organizational designs that grow out of remythologizing can be effected according to different design strategies. The rediscovered and reinterpreted myths provide designers with a story (mythologem) from which to derive values, direction, and intent to guide their designs. They also provide critical aspects of the culture to indicate what is acceptable to the members working within the revitalized organization. Many small changes can occur immediately from gaining awareness of the founding myths. The redesign around the supervisory job in the Spanish-American culture, a role that is often filled by Mestizos, is an example of a local change. This change is just a beginning, for there are far more significant factors and difficulties to be taken into account. For example, the fundamental unity of spirit and matter in the Indian tradition leads to ideas of social reform close to those of liberation theology. However, in order to develop highperformance organizations based on this unity, we need to reckon with demands associated with the other mythic traditions that make up the total culture. A formidable obstacle to remythologizing is another set of stories, often mis-
labelled as myths, that have grown around the founding myths; they obscure the primal energy and direction. For example, the Disney organizations responsible for creating new theme park entertainment have been designed and staffed for two decades in ways that reinforce the “myth” that Disney’s business is concerned entirely with the child’s world. Thus one of the changes required if the myth is to support new markets is the addition of project directors, artists, and writers who are tuned into the issues, tales, and myths of older “guests.” The change also requires executives who can manage these very different types of personalities. As in the analogous psychodynamic processes, there will be a period of stress and disorganization, even of demythologizing, as the energies from the renewed vision replace the rationalized institutions. As was so clearly demonstrated during the Renaissance, the defenders of the established myths do not easily give up their version of the founding “truths” through recognizing the indwelling core myth. The difficulty of replacing the incrustation of habit leads to another approach to remythologizing. Remythologizing has been accomplished historically through founding new organizations; revitalization can seldom begin with the “head” of an organization or community. The revitalization is typically accomplished by a group’s act of breaking away from the parent, though there are many cases in which the revitalized myths are deliberately nurtured within enclaves established in an existing organization. The open-system forms of industrial work-clearly a revitalization of community models of production have been most successfully developed in the “green field” sites that are physically isolated from established work settings within a company. Similarly, it is unlikely that either
the management or the parents of guests at Disney’s Magic Kingdoms could tolerate an expansion of the park psychodynamics to activities that are particularly attractive to adolescents and young adults. Just as EPCOT is physically distant from the Magic Kingdom, so must entertainment involving paradoxical confrontations, competitiveness, achievement, and other adult excitements be set up in separate entertainment centers, possibly even under a new corporate identity. This has already been done for cinema productions with Disney’s successful Touchstone subsidiary, which is producing quality entertainment for adults in line with the Disney “story.” Even when revitalization with myths of origin is initiated by senior leaders, the direct route of reinterpretation is typically fought by followers; those good followers include many “true believers.” The leaders may establish a protected enclave where a revival can be nurtured, or they may leave, as did Apple Computer founder Steven l? Jobs, to set up a new organization. The return to the original energy of a venture is apparently more threatening to the established followers than it would be if the leadership took a totally new direction. Tinkering with the origi-
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nal message weakens the authority of the current establishment; therefore, a reborn myth or mytho2ogem needs to be protected from the followers - as was done, for example, by setting up a subsidiary such as Disney’s Touchstone - until the new message can become familiar, literally, to the family. Another time-honored use of remythologizing is to provide for a merger of two founding stories at the occasion of a marriage that unites two great lineages. Thus the merger of two organizations today requires refounding if there is to be common meaning and expectations among the members of the merged organizations. The refounding can be accomplished through a joint storytelling and capturing of the essential values of both organizations in a new story that includes icons from both “houses.” When the renewed myths bear on a total culture-as in the Caribbean-their renaissance becomes more problematic. In the past there was always an open frontier on which to try new and renewed myths. The occupation of North America was virtually a laboratory for such experiments, and the American Revolution epitomized the success that can be achieved with separation. Now, as
[The remyfhologizing process] requires uncovering the myths of cueafion (that is, origin and developmenf) and the related tales fhaf consciously or unconsciously guide the course of organizations and culfures.”
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Jose Batista hypothesized in How to Rebuild Spanish America, success in remythologizing societies is most likely to occur in island nation enclaves such as those in the Caribbean. Remythologizing not only can serve as an access to vitality; it can also provide critical understanding of organizational sto-
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This approach to organizational dynamics has its origins in Carl Jung’s recognition of the power of cultural symbols as a means of understanding psychodynamics. Though relevant material can be found in many places in his work, Essays on u Science of Mythology, which he co-authored with C. Kerenyi (Princeton, 1949), is the most focused of his works on the interpretation of myth. Mircea Eliade contributed further to this tradition in Myth and Reality (Harper & Row, 1968). But it has been the work of Joseph Campbell that has made this material available to the American public and, in turn, Paul Moyer’s illustrated television interviews with Campbell (done shortly before Campbell’s death in 1987) that have brought that work to popular attention. The text of these interviews has been published as The Power of Myth (Doubleday, 1988). Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchuntment (Alfred E. Knopf, 1975) provides background for understanding the child’s use of myth, akin to the general methods underlying the use of myth in organizational revitalization. The epigraph at the beginning of the article is from an essay by Thomas Mann (Essays of Three Decades, Alfred E. Knopf, 1937) reflecting on Mann’s own sense of the mythic. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is one of the great archetypal mythic writings of the twentieth century. The basis for the role of myth in Caribbean culture follows a tradition that is best represented in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. The
ries by laying bare the ethical and social issues that are hidden under our expurgated and rationalized stories. So it’s not just that old myths can be revived; more to the point is that their examination can lead to a return for LZbetter start and, ultimately, to the founding of new organizations for a new age.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
source work is his three volumes of Mythologiques. Volume I has been translated into English as The Raw and the Cooked: introduction to a Science of Mythology by John and Noreen Weightman, 1969. In the past five years there has been renewed interest in myth and symbols in the corporate setting, leading to a number of seminal collections of articles. For example, see Peter Frost, Larry Moor, Meryl Lewis, Craig Lundberg, and John Martin, Organizational Culture (Sage, 1985). Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 1985) provides a good critique of the extension of these methods into the everyday corporate culture. The specific use of myth in Walt Disney’s work is well discussed in Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version (Simon & Schuster, 1985). Readers who may wish to understand the dynamics of the current Disney culture may enjoy Storming the Magic Kingdom (Alfred E. Knopf, 1987), John Taylor’s report on the takeover and revitalization of the Disney empire by Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.
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