How do lifeworlds live in organisations? Does the CEO of BMW know what ‘fahrvergnügen’ is about? Do managers at NIKE play tennis or football? Do sales people actually believe in the products that they sell? Do civil servants know how it feels to not know where their next meal will come from? Do professionals know what their services really mean for people? Does everyone involved ‘understand’ what plays out in different internal or external lifeworlds? Do they ‘feel’ it?
How can we give different lifeworlds—with their values and emotions—a salient presence in private companies or public organisations that goes beyond lip service, focus groups or abstracted customer journeys?
An important aspect of the lifeworlds of real people is that values never come alone. They always live in a field of values and meanings where trade-offs are the norm: ‘quality’ is ‘expensive’, ‘convenience’ can be ‘bad for the environment’, ‘health’ can be at odds with ‘quality of life’, etc. Every lifeworld is literally filled with trade-offs between different values. Whereas policy makers and market analysts may think about value trade-offs at very abstract levels in order to create policies, protocols, and procedures, the reality is invariably more messy than these abstractions can handle.
Trying to balance these values at an abstract policy is hard and often leads to frustrating bureaucracy with tons of procedures, protocols, rules, regulations, and even exceptions to those to complicate things even further, that make life miserable for everyone involved. It’s often easier and more meaningful to create room for dealing with these values in specific situations—in the lifeworlds of the people involved.
Another problem is that not all values are created equal. Some values function as goals to be achieved: health, convenience, helping a friend. Others are conditional for different reasons: efficiency, accountability, safety. Some relate to general principles about how we want to live together: equality, fairness. And even others can function as preconditions, having no conceptual relationship with goal values at all. And (the name even implies it), they literally precede everything else: affordability, legality.
The bad news is that all these different kinds of values interfere with each other, often causing conditions or preconditions to seriously hamper or even completely prevent the expression of a goal value. When professionals spend more time on writing reports about what they have done (accountability) than doing what it is that they are supposed to do (effectiveness), something has gone wrong.
The lifeworld of a care worker should revolve around expressing ‘humaneness’, with everything else being secondary—it is simply the essence of that field. The lifeworld of a teacher should revolve around ‘inspiration’ of children or students, and not be tainted by complicated bureaucracy that is meaningless for them, and ultimately destroys the essence of their professional practice.
Understanding and empathising with lifeworlds is a potent medicine to ensure the blossoming of goal values. Are we still making the difference we want to make? Do we still add the value we set out to deliver? If not, what can be done? Lifeworlds provide the benchmarks for these questions.
But how and where do lifeworlds live in organisations? How can this be organised in the different layers and departments of complex organisations or—as we increasingly see—networks of organisations? Lifeworlds are the focal points of feedback loops back into an operational organisation: are we still doing the right things and does anything need adjusting? This requires a permanent dialogue about (the different kinds of) values and how they are handled at different levels of management. But how is that done? Who talks to who? And how does that happen? How do we create a vibrant dialogue about values and lifeworlds?
This involves all layers of management. Top managers need to design processes and organisational cultures that ensure that feedback loops are fluid and effective. Middle managers are responsible for making these feedback loops and different dialogues vibrant and salient in all departments. Professionals need to know why they are doing what they are doing, they need to personally believe in it and feel empowered to do what they think is necessary to make values live and report back when a value is structurally compromised.
These organisational issues are explicitly addressed in our educational approach where personal discovery is favoured over theoretical teaching, and participants are challenged to create different kinds of ‘portraits’ (of people, lifeworlds, and ideas) that can be exhibited or used in other ways to communicate insights that go beyond abstract analyses and cognitive understanding. Also, we explicitly invites organisations to send teams that span different layers of management of organisations.