As Edgar Schein (1992, 1999) noted, this often means creating, maintaining or modifying existing organizational narratives. This is a critical and quite tangible form of metabolism, for organizations are, in a very real sense, nothing more (or less) than sustained narratives. As the founders of appreciative inquiry (AI) (Cooperrider, 1990; Copperrider and Whitney, 2005) have noted, the shift in an organization’s narrative might be one of the most powerful ways in which to bring about change and improvement in the functioning of an organization. Schon suggests that an organizational culture should be built on the narratives of past successes. The AI practitioners would agree to the narrative and I would suggest that this focus on an organization’s real (not imagined) strengths and successes can be a highly effective mode of metabolism.
The fundamental interplay between the containment of anxiety and the formation of organizational cultures was carefully and persuasively documented by Isabel Menzies Lyth (1988). She describes ways in which nurses in an English hospital cope with the anxiety that is inevitably associated with issues of health, life and death. Menzies Lyth notes how the hospital in which nurses work help to ameliorate or at least protect the nurses from anxiety. She suggests that a health care organization is primarily in the business of reducing this anxiety. On a daily basis, all other functions of the organization are secondary to this anxiety-reduction function.
It is specifically the culture of the organization that serves as the primary vehicle for addressing anxiety and stress. The culture of an organization is highly resistant to change precisely because change directly threatens the informal system that has been established in the organization to help those working in it to confront and make sense of the anxiety inherent in the operations of the organization. Menzies Lyth’s observations have been reaffirmed in many other organizational settings. Anxiety is to be found in most contemporary organizations and efforts to reduce this anxiety are of prominent importance. Somehow an organization that is inclined to evoke anxiety among its employees must discover or construct a buffer that both isolates (contains) the anxiety and addresses the realistic, daily needs of its employees.
Containing the Anxiety
In our brief reflection on the diverse containers of anxiety, we begin to discover the answer to my first question: how is anxiety contained? My identification of sanctuaries as containers of anxiety suggests that a protective function is critical. A sanctuary isolated or protects us for at least a short period of time from the anxiety (or perhaps even the source of the anxiety). As I shall note soon, in this protected state we can do something with the anxiety while it is not engulfing us. We can for a specific period of time not be anxious about our anxiety – and can metabolize it (as I will describe in the next essay in this series).
