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In the Tavistock tradition, we understand an organization by first identifying its primary task. We ask, what is this organization set up to do, how is it organized to accomplish this objective, and what unconscious dynamics limit or distort its members' ability to do their work? This approach while powerful, does not help us understand organizations that live at strategic junctures in their life cycles. In these situations, the task is to choose a task. We need a conceptual framework to help us understand the psychodynamics of organizing and deciding in these situations. The following article develops the concept of the "primary risk" to explain how organizations behave in these situations. It links the primary risk to the psychoanalytic idea of ambivalence and the gestalt idea of the figure/ground relationship. It draws on case material to illuminate its concepts.
KEY WORDS: risk; strategy; psychodynamics; consulting; Tavistock; planning.
INTRODUCTION
Organizations increasingly face significant strategic dilemmas; yet thinkers and practitioners in the psychoanalytic theory of organizations, particularly those like myself who have been deeply influenced by the Tavistock tradition have not kept apace. The Tavistock tradition of organizational diagnosis and consulting, particularly as it was articulated by Eric Miller and A. Kenneth Rice (Miller & Rice, 1990), was developed in response to problems of organizational design, functioning, and relationships of authority, rather than to issues of strategy. The consultant working within this tradition would typically ask the following set of questions.
Is this organization appropriately designed to accomplish this work? Where are the relevant boundaries that determine where one unit ends and another begins? Are there indications that these boundaries exist primarily as social defenses, to contain anxiety, rather than to accomplish work? If so, can we trace the organization's failure to perform to these social defenses? What is the source of this anxiety-in the task itself, and/or in the way leaders contain this anxiety?
Note however that these questions presume that we can locate and define the organization's primary task. The primary task we presume, should be evident from what the enterprise does day-to-day to garner resources from its environment. The restaurant serves food to customers, the architect's office prepares building plans, the bakery makes donuts, etc. With this knowledge of the task in...