A philosophical approach to joining organisations

Ambiguiti.es epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, ontology, organisations, philosophy

Consultants like me are sometimes engaged by clients on a very short-term basis, and sometimes embedded inside organisations for much longer periods of time. In this post I want to consider what it's like to start working with a new organisation from a philosophical perspective.

Philosophical Framework

The areas of enquiry represented by what we call 'Philosophy' can be sub-divided in many ways. I tend to use the following buckets:

  • Epistemology – what can we know?
  • Ethics – how should we act/behave?
  • Ontology – what exists in the world?
  • Metaphysics – what else exists?

Onboarding and Ontology

When a person joins a new organisation, there's often a mad rush to get them 'up-to-speed' as quickly as possible. Not one minute should be wasted to ensure that they can reach full operating efficiency as soon as possible. Taken to its logical conclusion, I'm sure there are plenty of organisations that would like to be able to send the required knowledge directly into a new employee's brain, Matrix-style.

The ontology of the organisation as it sees itself is a hugely valuable thing to share. After all, the inverse of this — finding out about things in a piecemeal way — can be rather anxiety-inducing. In the past, I've joined organisations that explicitly don't share things like org charts and what technologies they use. The reason given for this is often that such documents would be 'out of date as soon as they're created', but in reality it's usually because there's a huge disconnect between different parts of the organisation. There is no map or shared reality.

Ethics, Epistemology, and Metaphysics

Ontology is an easy one for organisations to focus upon. They can point to things and draw employees' attention to them. What's harder is getting to the other three: the epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics of an organisation.

In an organisational context, the question of ethics isn't solved simply by having a mission or a values statement. It has to be lived and demonstrated. These also include the way in which members of the organisation interact with one another. A lot of this would perhaps traditionally go under 'culture' or perhaps 'etiquette' but, actually, I think considering this as part of the wider ethics of an organisation is a better way to think about it.

It obviously takes time to figure out the lived reality of ethics within an organisation. The same is even more true of its epistemology and metaphysics. When organisations ask 'what can we know?' it's a collection of individuals with hopes, dreams, and inbuilt biases making value judgements.

Metaphysics is a harder thing to pin down, and perhaps the most difficult thing for an organisation to access directly. If we conceptualise metaphysics as asking the question what else exists? then we can see that this is the kind of question that can drive organisations forward and help them to improve.

Conclusion

The important thing for me is to realise that when you're joining an organisation, what you're doing is plugging yourself (a complex mixture of thoughts, emotions, and biases) into something that isn't necessarily an easy thing to understand. To hurry and try and 'get-up-to-speed' quickly, therefore, might actually waste more time than it saves.