I’m doing a lot of thinking about these things. Starting up a not for profit like the DI throws you into this world of systems, policy, organisations. Small orgs like ours are often friendship based, very informal, sitting around dining tables. They happen in homes, spare rooms, basements, the local pub. They are relational. People come and go as relationships and life circumstances change. There’s a flexibility and vagueness of roles that is closer to our family structures. People do stuff, they harangue each other about the stuff they’re doing or not doing, they gravitate to roles they like and are most skilled at. Those with the least popularity or power do the jobs no one else likes. Success – and money – often transforms this process. What was a community or a loose organisation becomes a corporation. Every part of the process is systemised. Roles are defined and assigned by management. People rise through a hierarchy to better paid and more respected jobs until they reach the limit of their skills, or their position of incompetence. Relationships are controlled by the organisation and often arrange themselves in a class system where people are only permitted to befriend those in their own pay grade, rather than those above or below their position, and often not the clients, at least within the ‘helping people’ professions.

There’s upsides to the corporate structure. Systems can be highly useful. Little beats the sheer efficiency of a good system. Sound emergency response systems save lives. The efficient distribution of aid in the wake of disasters are often a reflection upon the quality of the system in place to anticipate and manage such needs. Fairness is another benefit, where resources are allocated and people are supported according to need rather than who they know. A third benefit can be transparency – systems are often far easier to examine and assess than are loose collections of relationships in communities. When you’re asking a question about what works and why, or if a group is efficient or fair, systems where everyone operates the same way are far easier to explore.

Where we hit problems are when we implement the wrong systems for the situation, where a system based response is inappropriate and a poor fit to the situation, or when the systems have been constructed on the basis of values or assumptions that cause problems.

There’s a lot of talk in mental health about ‘the system’ and the flaws in it. Often such talk is rapidly derailed into suggestions about why it is so flawed, and who’s fault that is. Our entire psychological services, community sector, and to some extent, our non-clinical support services such as churches, support groups and so on, are all based around systems. The process is often highly mechanistic in that each member or employee, functions as a cog in a machine. If the cog breaks or goes away, you replace it with another cog. Cogs are interchangeable. Cogs have limited control over their roles and tasks. They are moved around and assigned projects by management, who are also cogs. There are assumptions about power and safety that drive common practices such as professional distance. Relationships are either ignored or forced through team-building exercises. These kinds of systems tend to naturally degrade over time into highly complex bureaucratic processes. They consume a lot of resources to function. They often become inflexible and highly inefficient at taking up new technologies, approaches, or research. Communities that are successful at raising money and awareness tend to evolve into organisations, and organisations tend to evolve (I would argue degrade) into corporations with all the legal and social responsibilities and inherited ideas that come with that.

I find the corporate structure deeply unpalatable for many reasons. The astonishing inefficiency of resources is a big one. Where three people in a room will often constantly be seeking for cost effective methods to reach their goals, corporations routinely completely overlook new technologies or methods. They gear towards stability. Having figured out a way to operate, they stick with it. They keep paying massive phone bills despite advances in VOIP technology. They print masses of paperwork needlessly. They attach money to respect and create expensive norms, such as putting visiting guests up in hotels, where the small community would house them in spare bedrooms. They consume. Over time the organisational goals become less about their aims or mission statement, and more about self preservation.

Another problematic aspect of the corporate structure is that it is often very controlling and hierarchical. People at the top tell everyone else what their job is, the best way to do it, how they should dress, interact, and function. We tear down divisive and dehumanising class structures in other aspects of our societies, and rebuild them within corporations. When groups of people are clustered together like this, we often see a loss of diversity, and a loss of individuality. With those losses, other losses are predictable – such as innovation. We also see huge challenges in the area of ethics.

The Neuremberg defence, I was just following orders, nauseates us. We tend to expect and demand that all people are responsible for their individual actions, and answer to a moral as well as a legal code. This is a whole lot more problematic than it sounds at first. Corporations tend to subsume the identity of those involved with them, they set codes of dress and conduct. People are told not only what they are allowed to say, but instructed on what they must believe or value. Obedience is insufficient. An employee who obeys a rule – such as confidentiality, or equal access for GLBTIQ people, or to deny assistance to a person in distress – but who clearly does not believe in this rule is unlikely to remain for long unless a shortage of other workers in that region keeps their position safe. No individual within a corporation is permitted independent moral action, but must instead come into line with the policies and procedures of the organisation or risk being fired. However, no member of the corporation is assigned responsibility for assessing the morality of the organisation as a whole. It is assumed that ethics, and the translation of values into policies (which is a hell of a lot trickier than it sounds) will be key parts of the processes of those few who have the responsibility for writing them.

So we have a diffusion of responsibility for ethics, between a small handful of people in managerial and board roles, enforced across an entire organisation. Many of those people arrive in their positions having first spent years working as regular members of an organisation where their opinions about ethics were specifically prohibited from their work life. Employees in the mental health sector, for instance, are routinely forced into the bystander role where they must watch harm being done, or help not being offered, to someone in need. Sometimes they are forced to be the person who does the harm or withholds the help in order to keep their jobs. Organisations who are fortunate to have highly ethical, insightful, reflective people with excellent management skills and a deep understanding of the complex relationship between values and policy in the management and board will tend towards better practices as a whole. Those who lack either the will or the capacity to create highly ethical practices will not. Groups have a natural tipping point at which the number of people who care – or do not care – about something becomes the dominant organisational culture. Authority also dramatically influences our capacity to think or act otherwise, so the influence of the beliefs of those in such positions upon the workforce as a whole can be significant. The alternative is a fractured organisational culture where the management and workers operate semi independently of each other in a kind of chronic low grade class war.

This adds up to a training ground for management that starts by spending years employed not being allowed to consider ethics in their work life, and ends in positions of high responsibility, little or no attention to work relationships, and the requirement to ensure that every member of the organisation adheres to the policies and procedures to protect everyone from risks of litigation, bad press, and loss of funding. Corporations naturally decay into behaviour that in individuals we call psychopathic and narcissistic, unless a lot of effort goes into protecting them from that outcome. They often operate in dysfunctional ways. When a system subsumes individual identities behind roles, and replaces relationships with mechanical structures (cogs in a machine), they also tend to replace values with rules, and to confuse obedience to these rules as being the same thing as ethical behaviour and as loyalty to the system or organisation as a whole. The idea that one can be loyal and devoted to the organisational aims but have sidedness of opinion about the ethics of how those aims are meet is not one most corporate structures entertain.

This cog in a machine structure is extremely problematic in mental health because relationships are so key to support. It’s not enough to see a social worker every month, is far better if it’s the same social worker we’ve built trust with. Case notes do not replace a history and connection between two people. ‘Cogs’ are dehumanised by this model, and tend to be further alienated from the people they are supposed to be ‘fixing’ and moving on as quickly and cheaply as possible without making friends with them. Friendships are the primary model for support in our culture and yet are infrequent or expressly forbidden within corporate structure and mental health especially.

There’s tremendous tensions between the organisation and the individual. If we think of corporations as multiples, where the corporation is a person, and the people that make it up are parts, these parts often lack voice, power, validation, and the right to be diverse. Dictated to by a dominant part or groups of parts, the rest are hostages who are managed or exploited. The corporation as a whole had a name and logo (face) presented to the world, and the parts must be brought into line with, present consistently the same, and hide diversity or division. I personally do not function at all well in corporate structures for precisely this reason: my system does not cope with a model of authority so completely at odds with our own, and we not accept the idea that ethical behaviour is the responsibility of someone else in the workplace.

If we think of a corporation as a tribe, being a member of that tribe carries a very high price in terms of individual identity and freedom. Perhaps this is simply more difficult to see in corporations because we are accustomed to them and accept them as normal, in the same way that we accept as normal that most people hate their job, find their boss very stressful, and hate their bodies. We in the west tend to be highly sensitive to incursions on the rights of individuals in other cultures, and yet oddly blind to the same dynamics in our own. One of the simplest and most obvious examples is that of our widespread exclusion of people with disabilities from the workforce for the simplest of reasons – lack of access, and our inability to work predictable hours when illness interferes. Tribal cultures are frequently organised on more flexible principles, where those who work do so, and those who are sick or injured contribute what they can, as they can. This simple conflict of structure in what we have created in our highly mechanical post-industrialist society, and the needs of those of us with sickness or disability underlies a massive problem of social justice, inclusion, welfare, discrimination, and invisibility. It is one more aspect of the loss of diversity.

So, what are our options? How do we navigate this? I would argue that systems have value. Patterns and routines can save us from being paralysed by the requirement to discuss and examine every action at length. They help us to function in groups, to take care of vulnerable people, to act quickly. Maybe a lot of our issues are not with having systems, but with having mechanical systems. I often draw inspiration from ecosystems when I’m trying to better support a family or group. The ideal is a balance of flow of energy, no one at the bottom, exhausted and neglected, no one at the top, consuming without giving back. Everyone connected but separate, giving and receiving. There’s many ‘natural systems’ I’ve no interest in replicating, such as the dynamics of a termite mound. But there are principles of connection and freedom that may help to inform systems that are a better fit for the people within them and the people they serve. Here’s a few thoughts about these kinds of systems via Communities as Living Systems (how nature can inspire fresh perspectives on complex problems) | joannahubbard.

• Living systems experiment-they don’t seek a perfect solution, just a workable solution.
• Within a living system something is always working.
• Nature seeks diversity – new connections open up new possibilities for the system’s survival.
• A living system cannot be steered or controlled – only teased, nudged and titillated.

We’ve done so much talking in mental health about how destructive the system can be, not only to clients/patients, but often to those compassionate people trying to work within them. We often treat relationships and systems as being at opposite ends of a spectrum, and yet our culture organises relationships into family structures and expects the protection of vulnerable members. On one level, families and friendship networks operate as a socialist sub-set within a capitalist culture. The wheels are oiled by a massive number of volunteers and unofficial support between people. This is still a form of system, a pattern of organising a community. (It’s also one that doesn’t fit everyone, as minorities such as the GLBTIQ community seek access to legal and social recognition for their relationships) We cannot build a perfect system or utopia, but we can build something more in line with the needs people are communicating and what we are learning helps people to recover from crises and distress, such as relationships.

Systems are not inherently destructive, nor are they inherently devoid of ‘natural’ relationships. They can be extraordinarily complex and difficult to set up, and often have unintended outcomes. They can fail in a myriad of ways, and funding success can destroy their capacity to function well just as spectacularly as financial ruin. Systems must operate according to (or at least, interact with, even if intending to disregard) the legal requirements of the countries they are set up within. This can necessitate a high level of creativity, innovation, and courage, because the easiest path is simply to recreate the structures we are familiar with, however appalling. Great intentions are insufficient – the mental health system has undergone many reforms and each was driven by people with excellent intentions. The asylums from which we are rescuing people were built by those distraught by the fate of madmen who were starving in the streets. I don’t have an answer or a solution. What I do have is some experiences about what does and doesn’t work – in my own life, and in the groups I have created. I have some values about human rights and dignity. I have some hope that we can – all of us who are wrestling with this complex challenge – creativity engage and inspire each other to create organic, living systems that change and grow with us and with our cultures. I think some key aspects to this in mental health are:

• Transparency
• Freedom
• Mutual Relationships

How these translates into systems and policies is something many people are exploring. Some groups are trying to set up suicide services that are ‘self check in’ to remove the barrier of having to prove you need help before you can access it. Other countries are running mental health services on the principles of Open Dialogue where patients are part of every conversation and always have access to their own records. None of us are going to come up with a single, perfect answer. A big part of what we need to move forwards is safe, respectful places to have conversations and share ideas, so that we can pool our experiences and wisdom and create something better.