I received a call some time ago from a CEO I have worked for in the last two years. He was worried; everything in his organization seems to be going on too smoothly for his liking!

The leadership team put together some 17 years ago has chalked sterling success. The leadership team sees itself as a perfect fit regarding temperament, likability, trust and consensus building. As the CEO puts it, “we have mastered how to work with each other to achieve best results.” Thus, when it comes to the subject of group think, this leadership team conforms to each other in ideas, processes, and organization and hardly deviates from each other.

On conflict resolution and keeping the peace, nobody rocks the boat. Another Executive told me “we know each other and what buttons not to push in our professional relationship” Each Executive holds the other highly and sees them as experts in their field of expertise. In discussion with the team individually and as a focus group, my conclusions were that the organization has always promoted from within which has helped maintain their organizational culture. They have also produced time-tested processes and procedures of doing things such that any introduction of anything new is met with “that is not our practice.”

Management reorganization has become necessary due to the need for a new CFO. The former CFO has seamlessly moved on to another project. My biggest challenge as a Management Consultant at that point was two- fold: to effect organizational change in this group to be able to maximize their resources and potential and secondly, to orient their new culture to current and anticipated industry and other external competition and changes. It is an organization with a set philosophy, models, leadership team, process and procedures which have worked for them. To me, this is a classic example of a Psychic Prison.

To be able to improve the workplace environment of such an organization, there is the need to dwell on their strength as a springboard to point out their weaknesses. There is also the need to work on their consciousness to the issue. It became apparent during my interaction with the leadership team that they were not aware of their present state of psychic incarceration. The reason why they kick against any system of change is not to prevent anything new per say, to them they are protecting a proven working system against uncertainties and what they have not tried or tested before. Hence the need to systematically and gradually educate them to try what is on the “other side” too.

To me, the purpose of the “psychic prison” metaphor as propounded by Morgan, (2006) is to illustrate how an organization can become trapped in a favored and preferred way of thinking and culture. The essence is to keep the “peace”, which restricts creativity, prohibits change and limits its ability to progress and thus become competitive.

It is not always that the metaphor connotes negativity. What happens is that most of the time, after struggling and experimenting to discover suitable structures, modalities, processes, human capital, and institutions which work perfect for them, Organizations find it difficult to alter the status quo, at that point, that organization is in a psychic prison.

Dr. Ken Barnes is a Management Consultant with Specializations in Entrepreneurship and Business Management, Marketing and Human Capital Development.