THE ETERNAL CHILD

Archetypes in Organizations

Self

Shadow

Anima and Animus

Persona

Sage

King

Adventurer

Trickster

Eternal Child

Gaia

Cosmogony

Soteriology

Eternal Child

• puer aeternus

• puella aeterna

• gender not crucial in my organizational reading of this archetype

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4qbtb_krtecek-7_shortfilms

Eternal Child

• Innocence

• Energy, enthusiasm

• Beginner’s luck

• Potential

• No memories

• No prejudices

• Hope and rebirth

The Lady and the Unicorn, the Cluny Museum, Paris

‘I have no name; I am but two days old.’ What shall I call thee? ‘I happy am, Joy is my name.’ Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy! Sweet joy, but two days old. Sweet joy I call thee: Thou dost smile, I sing the while; Sweet joy befall thee!

(William Blake, from Songs of Innocence)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtFEzhaNrT4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2mYtkrF3No

Handtke

Dark Side: Triumfant foolishness

• Irresponsible

• Immature

• Arrogant

• Unable to commit

• Narcissistic

Narcissus by Caravaggio

Examples

• Ganymede

• Kore

• Iacchus, the child Dionysus

• Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking

• Peter Pan

Inger Nilsson as Pippi Longstocking

Autopoiesis

Niklas Luhmann: organizations are systems capable of continuous regeneration

They reproduce their elements on the basis of its own elements

Social systems of communication that process and create divisions that draw the boundaries

Samorost by Amanita Design

Organizations as autopoietic systems

As they cannot be characterized by permanence, organizations are forced to constantly produce new elements. Antonio Gaudi’s Casa Mila in

Barcelona

Organizations as autopoietic systems

The basic logic of survival is complexity reduction and uncertainty absorption (through management)

The basic logic of renewal is diversity and difference.

Paradoxically, the more an organization is capable of such constant transformation, the more permanent it is.

Reborn Fenix rising from its ashes

Socialization

William Hollingsworth Whyte The Organization Man (1956)

Corporate employee as a devoid of personality, pawn in the corporate game, with no will and no opinions of his/her own

Organizations suppress ingenuity

We learn to be nobodies Golkonda by René Magritte

Conformity

…does not produce maturity, but permanent prematurity, a childishness without the spontaneity and innocence (William Whyte )

The Solomon Asch conformity experiments

Socialization

Socialization has potential for providing renewal but this potential is being unused (John Van Maanen)

Obiedience instead of maturity – curbing enthusiasm

Jacob Gerritszoon Cuyp, Portrait of a Child with a Flower

Socialization as production of permanent immaturity

• Management’s expectations do not always match group standards so it does not have to lead to vertical conformism (higher in hierarchy)

• Serial socialization (older role models) leads to homogenization

• Disjunctive socialization (training) leads to insecurity

Pink Floyd, The Wall

Play

Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: the role of play in culture.

Creative adults can, like children, let themselves be carried away by play.

Play is freedom.

Play happens outside ordinary reality.

Play cannot have material goals.

Bolek i Lolek na Dzikim Zachodzie

Culture arises in the form of play, […] it is played from the very beginning. Even those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs – hunting, for instance – tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value (Johan Huizinga)

Work or Play?

• Managed play?

• Play at work

• Play and games are used to motivate people to work, as encouragement for people to share their knowledge.

• Some corporations use it to manage organizational knowledge.

Robin Williams as Peter Pan in Hook (directed by Steven Speilberg)

The new ethos of work finds a central place for “having fun” (leading, by implication, to new levels of liberation). Perhaps, more fundamental is the indication contained in these uses of play that a new understanding of the horizon of life is on the brink of emergence: the anticipation of life with no foreseeable end, or, at least, promising endless youth through a perpetually preserved and active “inner child” (Bogdan Costea)

Happy-Go-Lucky Management

• The dot-com bubble

• Rapid growth

• Profitability

• Absorption of investment funds in the 1990s

• Internet

• Hollowness, lack of content

• Crash

Théodore Géricault, La Monomane du jeu

Good Luck

Robert Merton and Elinor Barber The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (1958):

Serendipity as encounters with sudden enlightenment

The Three Princes of Serendip from an old Persian manuscript

Organizational serendipity

• Entrepreneurial intuition

• Experience and common sense are also more important.

• Contingency has to be seen and grasped.

• Adventurous Eternal Child

Scene from Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire

Enduring entrepreneurial firms are often products of contingencies. Their structure, culture, core competence and endurance are all residuals of particular human beings striving to forge and fulfill particular aspirations through interactions with the space, time and technologies they live in (Saras Sarasvathy, 2008,).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XzKZzhrK-E