Navigating
One of the many skills important in life is navigating change. It’s called on from a very young age, especially with a sibling appearing, as you suddenly find you’re in a household with a new family member. Equally confusing, for some a parent may stop being around, or reappear. If changes inside the family aren’t enough to address, next you arrive at a pre-school or school, having to get along with other children, some close in age, some rather older. Most parents work hard to make transitions like these easy to manage. However, whatever’s done, they leave their mark, both in terms of family relationships and in terms of a broader capacity to deal with others. Considerable research shows that the first five years of life are fateful in many ways, often remaining so throughout an individual’s subsequent life.
Another critical period comes in the teenage years. Most young people become aware of themselves in a way that hadn’t been so evident before. Struggling with the effects of a changing body, hormones do a lot to wreak havoc with self-identity. You become aware of yourself as a sexual being and begin to become more concerned about how you appear to others. Always a challenging life stage, today young people are subjected to an avalanche of media images and social expectations. Some might seem trivial, like outbreaks of pimples, but others are not, and can be the source of continuing personal worries, going from a range of worrying issues about body image, appearance, and clothing, to becoming the subject of scrutiny by others, all this resulting in many children worrying even more about themselves.
I’m not a psychologist, and don’t want to spend more time on an area about which I know so little. Rather, I want to focus on navigating as an adult. Why use the word ‘navigating’? As I see it, as adults we are constantly managing interactions, changes, and challenges. As we grow older, we try to sustain a sense of who we are, only to find ourselves in a new situation, having to define and sometimes redefine how we relate to the people around us. For a long time, I have thought that this was one of the advantages of changing where you lived, or your workplace. Such shifts give you the chance to be different, even if it’s a rather short window of opportunity, because within a few weeks you become committed to the person others have now come to know, and from then on change becomes much harder, until you move again.
I don’t want to imply that we don’t or can’t navigate changes within an existing job, home location or network of friends. We can. However, it is often a slow and frequently hard task. We aren’t facing a new area within which our broader navigational skills are being called on, but rather trying to find new directions in a familiar environment, with most paths already laid down. There are two areas where this is especially demanding – and familiar.
The first is in relation to our parents. Adolescence often leaves the parent-child link significantly changed. Some families seem to travel through this time with relationships and feelings largely unaltered, but many don’t. A teenager lashing out at his or her parents is a common occurrence. Both sides can be baffled, angry, or accepting. Is this unpredictable, or perhaps the outcome had already been shaped by those first five years of childhood? Again, psychologists often point to specific moments when actions or words have really massive consequences: some things said or done can’t be undone, and their impact lingers. Many people I’ve met over the years can recall, with embarrassing clarity, a significant moment in their relationship with a father, mother, sister or brother. I remember one such moment with my parents, one that was to impact on our relationship for more than twenty years.
I’m slipping back into territory I’m not informed enough to cover, so let me move on to an area where I might have a more useful perspective, navigating at work. Among the well-documented challenges is the one experienced when someone, perhaps you, changes role inside an organisation. There is an extensive and insightful literature about the shift from being a worker to becoming a supervisor. I have used the word navigation, and it’s an apt term when you consider the maelstrom in which some find themselves when, overnight, former friends and colleagues become staff, now reporting to you. The people you would joke with about the boss’s behaviour are the people you will have to counsel, for whom you have to set performance targets, and even carry out disciplinary interviews. It’s much easier to become a supervisor in a new organisation, or in an area where you aren’t well known!
If only that was all. You might have learnt some aspects of responsibility in dealing with your child, at around the same time you moved into a managerial role. However, dealing with children and with staff are far from being equivalent. Bringing up a child goes through a slow process of change over years, although, as I have already mentioned, there can be some dramatic periods! However, as a manager, you are taking on a role where interpersonal behaviour and values can suddenly change, and relationships turn instantly tricky.
In part, this is because we try to ‘de-humanise’ management. Countless books and training courses talk about the importance of staff planning, clear management controls, organising work activities and exercising leadership. The first three are easy. This is thinking of people as resources, albeit human resources. How should you deploy these resources? What delegations and authorities should they be given, and how will you monitor their performance against these responsibilities? What should you do when someone ‘deviates’ from what is seen as appropriate, sensible or fair? What should you do to ‘manage’ these resources, by encouraging, disclosing, and simply checking? Once identified by the acronym ‘ploc’ (planning, leading, organising and controlling) there are many guides to assist you, even if referring to these skills in that ploc terminology is no longer acceptable, and we are encouraged to use terms like strategic thinking, enabling, monitoring, and supporting.
The area where most management theorists get tangled up has to do with that familiar area of ‘leadership’. Should you be bored at work one day, why not use your experience to write a book about leadership, to add to the many thousands already available. You can explore the importance of vision, and even get into the exciting territory of talking about future horizons and scenarios. You can discus motivation, and the importance of clarity in communication, active listening, and ensuring feedback. You can consider the issues in being supportive, in behaving ethically and fairly, and in treating all your staff with the same level of concern and consideration. If you are adventurous, you can suggest that there are some better, even new models of leadership that could do a better job. I know about that: I’ve fallen into that trap on more than one occasion, writing about ‘servant leadership’, ‘adaptive leadership’ and, I am somewhat uncomfortable to admit, ‘participative leadership’.
Whoever is writing, one thing is clear. When we talk about leadership in organisations, the topic is about leading! What I mean by that is leaders are appointed to take people down a path, and however much we talk about support, enablement and consideration, leadership expects and is predicated on having followers. However much we weasel around the word, leadership is concerned with having and exercising influence and even authority over others. It is an asymmetrical relationship. Leaders exercise power, followers are subordinate. As a manager, you are having to navigate tricky territory, because you are exercising some form of control over other people.
It is more than exercising control. In organisations, relationships are defined against organisational priorities, and people are just one of the resources that are deployed to achieve those priorities, along with finance, investments in capital resources, equipment, facilities, and technical systems. When we work in an organisation, we are not free agents. We are working for the organisation, at the direction of those who manage us. If you normally prefer to see people as unique individuals with aspirations, capabilities, feelings, and expectations, then, inevitably, you will have to come to terms with the fact that organisations are dehumanising. For everyone of us, working requires navigational skills in allowing us to find some space to ‘be ourselves’ in a context where we are largely treated as a resource. Most organisations have been adept in providing spaces in which the people of the organisation can feel fully human, whether they do so in informal activities, in rest periods or in breaks for food (and smoking). It is tough to navigate organisational life and still feel we have some degree of control, given the reality that we really don’t.
Over the years I have been intrigued by books that address power and control in organisations. The ones I prefer admit this is an issue, and an inevitable concomitant of creating an enterprise. Others seek to identify and then sweep away this aspect of work. Some attempts are fascinating to read. I enjoyed Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick, which set out an exciting approach to industrial democracy. A little more jaundiced now, I would suggest that he was a dab hand at allocating responsibility to staff, but they still succeeded or failed to the extent they and their staff met organisational targets. More persuasive are those writers, mainly women, who have placed more emphasis on the management of the ‘network of relationships’ in an organisation, a great improvement on the rigid, confusing and quite awful systems of matrix management some companies tried to introduce. However well interpersonal relationships are managed, it remains the case that company targets are the key metric, informing practice while only superficially masking the exercise of power and control
Contrary to how we feel on a bad day, there is more to life than working in an organisation, of course! Indeed, there is one further and rather different aspect of life which also requires navigational skills, and that is the process of physical change. Past adolescence, there is a long period of time when we work, to some degree at least, to deny physical change. We eat healthily. We exercise. We take part in sporting activities. We stimulate our brains through reading, solving (or failing to solve) puzzles, and enjoying travel and other novel experiences. Inevitably, during that same long period of time, we also allow ourselves to age: we watch television, sometimes eat less healthily, and drink alcohol, some even using other stimulants and drugs. Whatever we do and however hard we work to stave it off, for most of us, our genetics and early childhood development eventually catch up with us. We begin to age more noticeably and discover we can’t do what we always did.
Ageing is the last, great navigational challenge. As muscles begin to lose their capability, as the nervous system begins to deteriorate, as our biochemistry begins to face diminished responsiveness and effectiveness, we have to deal with this inability to do what we always did. Some changes are trivial, if annoying, like my facing osteo-arthritis, now clearly affecting some fingers (too much typing!). Others are more concerning. Many face less steadiness in walking, with occasional periods when our sense of balance is compromised. Navigating our diminishing physical bodies is a necessary and at times a somewhat chastening, if not actually depressing, activity. The bad news? We all end up there!
It is not just physical changes. There is another area of change as we get older. Brain processes are not as fast as they used to be. Short term memory is less well encoded, we realise, as we can’t find where we left the front door keys, or the name of the person who called earlier in the day. Slightly more discomforting is the realisation that long-term memory is beginning to deteriorate, too. If you are like me, each time you can’t recall something from the past, you will work hard to find the missing datum, practice remembering it, and attempt to rebuild that bit of the memory bank. Some find the physical changes the worst, and exercise continuously, in the hope they can stave off inevitable; changes – for at least a little longer. For others, it is the emerging evidence that the brain isn’t the same as it used to be. We try the daily crosswords or a logical brain-twister, keep on reading, doing anything we can that gives us the illusion all is really working as normal.
Eventually, we realise the scope for navigation is reducing. No longer working full-time, our world is subtly becoming smaller. We can draw on our experiences and enjoy what we remember, but there is no escaping the fact that slow decline in unstoppable. If in the past we had a vast territory in which to navigate, now we are travelling down a smaller number of increasingly familiar roads and tracks. For me, this seems to be a time many live somewhat vicariously. Since we can’t do what we used to, why not offer our experience to others, mentoring younger people, and enjoying seeing them grow and change. Volunteer to be an advisor to a not-for-profit organisation. Become a fund-raiser. Run a discussion group.
One practice from the past can take up more time: gossip fills the space available! Perhaps this is a way to help us confront an aspect of navigating what we hadn’t addressed before. For a long time, we navigated in order to get somewhere, to achieve something. Isn’t that what navigating means? The dictionary offers us some interesting explanations. To navigate is “to direct that way that a ship, aircraft, etc. will travel, or find a direction across, along, or over an area of water or land, often by using a map”. More recently it has taken on another meaning, “to lead a company, activity, etc. in a particular direction, or deal effectively with a difficult situation.” Possibly even more contemporary, in a world of computers it also means, “to move around a website or computer screen, or between websites or screens”. All of these definitions (which come from the Cambridge Dictionary) suggest navigation is purposive, dealing with a desired outcome.
Does navigation have to be purposive? Surely it is possible to navigate aimlessly, avoiding disasters, rather than seeking to end up in a particular place. I rather like the idea that we learn how to navigate in circles, not getting anywhere in particular, and certainly not arriving somewhere. Rather, we are having fun in simply travelling along, enjoying the view, while sharing anecdotes, telling stories, and enjoying an ‘un-driven’ life.
There is something rather paradoxical about this. When you no longer have to navigate in order to arrive at a predetermined place, to achieve a goal that’s been set, or work your way through a roadblock, at that point navigating is fun. When there is no need to arrive at a particular place or result, you are free to navigate for the enjoyment of the journey. What was that observation? Enjoy the journey, rather than focus on the destination. If that’s true, I think I might run a course for people who are interested in navigating life to end up nowhere in particular. Living in the moment, enjoying serendipity. It sounds like fun. Just a minute! Am I really contemplating running a course on this topic? It sounds like slipping back into a life driven by an external purpose. Even worse, it also sounds like a practice only available to a privileged few, while everyone else has to work. Can I navigate my way around that?
