What to do? – Facing the future!
Contents
What to do? – Facing the future!
A possible way out of the outlined conceptual constrictions in the consideration of organisational processes and their counselling should be developed in an approach in which human behaviour and social phenomena are understood from a perspective that fully encompasses the temporality of human beings. Such an approach simultaneously integrates the questions of ›wherefore‹ and ›whereupon‹ together with the ›why‹ the ›where from‹. A conception that follows an existential view of ›things‹ can fulfil this claim.
Modern social and organisational psychology focuses on explanation, i.e., the causal structure of human behaviour, whereas existential thinking is primarily concerned with understanding, whereupon people grapple with questions about themselves and life within their structures of existence. (Pyzczynski et al., 2004). In sociality with others, people struggle to wrest something like a meaning and a design for the future from their existence in a world that appears to them to be per se brittle, anxious, non‐linear and incomprehensible, i.e., BANI, or simply an oppressive ’nothingness‹. Jürgen Kriz (2017, 210) emphasises the simultaneity of all three time‐modes, which is inescapable for human experience: »In a purely chaotic, meaningless world of life, we would not only be scared to death, but such a world is literally unthinkable for us. For thinking always contains elements that already contain meaning and stand in meaningful relations to other elements.« So, in the ›here and now‹ we can only exist by constantly designing ourselves against the background of a sufficiently meaningful past towards an equally sufficiently meaningful future.
Existential thinking is an important approach to understanding human behaviour in general. Conseqently, an existential perspective can also open up a dimension for the study of organisational behaviour made up by humans. Accordingly, we need to look from the existential view of the human being as a meaning‐searching person. Thus, anchoring in an existential view of the human being opens up a broader understanding within the structures of organisations. The addition of this dimension is complementary to social constructivist approaches. Weick, for example, highlights how the ’sensemaking‹ process, the creation of reality, takes shape as an ongoing performance when people retrospectively give meaning to the situation they find themselves in and how this shapes organisational structure and behaviour. In a conception broadened to include the existential perspective organisations, their structures, their specific institutions and cultures, and not least their sense of leadership, can be understood as collectively generated responses and constructs that ›here and now‹ simultaneously contain a design for the future. This can be understood as a blueprint that people hold up to a world that presents itself to them through volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, i.e., VUCA. Such an – existential – perspective spans a constructive space into which human beings can enter as actors with their existential strivings, intensions and fundamental motives.
Existential thinking – not least because of its genesis in contemporary history – is virtually ›made‹ for human beings to understand themselves in a world without orientation and meaning and to be able to act in it. And as Existential Philosophy is regarded an essential source of existential thinking we should refer to this. Otto Bollnow (1955, 12) describes this movement as follows: »Existential philosophy … sought to regain a firm footing in the face of … dissolution and decomposition … [i]t was a time when all firm orders threatened to dissolve and all values otherwise regarded as unbreakable proved doubtful … And after man had been disappointed in every objective faith and everything had become doubtful to him, after all the meanings of life … had been called into question, the only thing left to do was to fall back on one’s own inner self, in order to gain that support here, in a final depth that already precedes all content‐related determinations, which could no longer be found in an objective world order. This last, innermost core of the human being was designated by the concept of existence adopted from Kierkegaard.«
The world’s lack of stability and meaning, finiteness and fear thus conceptually represent the ’normal case‹, so to speak, or the starting point of existential considerations, analyses and cognition. And the obvious parallels to chronically thawed organisations are here not chosen by chance. Organisations can be understood as social systems within which people interact with each other and jointly create structures. Their common struggle emerges cultural rules and creates institutional answers that can be interpreted from an existential perspective as been given to the impositions of existence in a world which appears uncertain per se.
Especially the current tendency towards the dissolution of boundaries and its extension to the ›whole‹ human being, which can be observed in the face of unsustainable organisational structures, makes this aspect appear significant. – For not least, Kierkegaard’s existential ›leap of faith‹ and his proclamation of the ›existing thinker‹ is a quasi ’sky‐scraping‹ act of the individual’s self‐assertion, »a concept of struggle« in »opposition to all objective‐systematic philosophy«[ (op. cit., 20) and thus directed against any appropriation of the individual by an idealistic system of whatever kind.
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