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Part 2: The Changes model of organization
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Part 2: The Changes model of organization
Changes involves a number of organizational innovations that are in line with the preceding discussion. They are very specific. They do much more than illustrate what I have said. They introduce a new organizational model.
One example is that Changes uses neither the usual small executive clique which runs everything, nor participative democracy with its endless, boring, acrimonious decision-making meetings. Changes has a small group making decisions, but everyone is invited to come to it, and knows where and when it meets. Most people are glad, most of the time, to leave the house-keeping to those willing to do it. If something important to them comes up, they may come. Or for a while they may want to participate more. This leaves the big meetings free of “business. " Imagine! An organization whose meetings concern what the organization is really there for! Most organizations, old and new, spend their meeting time on “business" decisions and house-keeping, and it is often bad time. People cannot welcome each other and care for each other; they need to be concerned with the positions they take, the obstructions they seem to want to be, the trouble they seem to make for each other.
I date the success of Changes as an organization from the day we decided to have the business meeting consist of those who wanted to be part of it, and to have it separately. So, the big meeting can consist of the activities we most value and want.
On the one hand, everyone can participate in every decision, but on the other, the time of the whole group is not taken up with that. This gives much more efficiency than the old closed clique form had, because all contributions are welcome and the " clique" is not closed to anyone. More on this later.
The Changes person
Before I go further into the model, I want to discuss at length one aspect of how Changes functions. I want to look at it from the question of " roles" which I have been discussing. What sort of " role" does a Changes person have?
What kind of mental health role is it to be a Changes person? It is not the role of a mental health professional. Nor is it the role of a " sub-professional" who practices like a professional but without the credentials, or under supervision. It is not a new kind of helping person either. I see it as an example of what I have been saying. Let me explain why.
Changes' starting function was " clinical" service - but from the start we did not limit ourselves to helping people with " head" or emotional problems. People have problems, their life is stuck some way, it doesn’t work to split this up into psychological and other problems. So, at times we have fixed cars, got people welfare money, found crash places, helped people move, or formed a team around a problem or tough time somebody had, if we could.
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In the old institutional structure of " therapy" the " professional" is not supposed to life-relate. The " patient" is supposed to get " cured" (a notion that involves some kind of pattern of what’s " well" and not " sick" ) so as to relate to real life people better, not to the " therapist. " If the " patient" relates to the " therapist" for real, that's " dependence" or " transference" or something that has to be " worked out. "
It was even worse, according to the old structure, if the therapist found the " work" becoming real living, instead of " just" work. That was called " counter-transference, " transferring the " therapist's" life needs onto the " patient. " The old idea was that it isn't " work" unless it's alienated. The idea was that a therapist uses " techniques" and when the real person of the therapist enters in, then that must obstruct the supposedly medical or scientific objectivity. (But this view is going out even in “professional" therapy, where it is being learned that what is therapeutically effective is people relating personally, not technically. ) In our group, we threw that whole structure out, eliminating these walls and splits.
Even most " hot-lines" and youth networks are " services, " that is to say, only for those who come for help. The old way of being in roles is still there, even though the role-patterns are new. Sure, the members of the hot-line enjoy their work, but so does the professional therapist. The members of the usual hot-line group are not there to live their own needs forward into some life-developing steps, but only to help others. And those who come are viewed only as to be helped, unless some time later they might join the hot-line. We differ from this old way.
For us, instead, it quickly developed that those who came to serve and help needed each other’s help as much as anybody needed it - and also, that those who came for help often could do more than those who began the group. From almost the beginning, we don’t differentiate who was there to help and who to get help and it has turned out that sooner or later most have done both. Of course, lots of people come for what they want and then leave, but while they are here they become part of the ongoing little group every evening, or big group on Sundays. They get to know a few people (which is often more help than what they came for).
In other places in this book we tell about the problems peculiar to this form of organization. Here we want to illustrate the principles of that form. So far, we have said that the function we began with (psychological help) is combined with other functions, so that we can live together and with those who come. We said, secondly, that our role-definitions are mutual, giving and getting help are both part of the role. Thirdly, we said that anyone who comes is considered as part of our organization already, as a member just by being there. Fourthly, we don’t select or delegate certain people to do certain things, and prohibit others from doing it. As each thing comes up those who want to do it take it on. (There is a problem when people take on tasks they don’t know how to do. We handle it by forming a team, so that at least some know how to do what needs to be done. The others can learn. It is better than " selecting" those who know - as in the old-type institutions. That way does not usually select the best. )
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Another aspect of the old roles, including the therapist role, had to do with time and place. We still find that having a certain time and a certain place enables something to happen. If no one knows where and when, they cannot be there, or have to depend on luck to meet. But the role does not need to specify the times and places as the same for all, as the therapist role used to do (twice a week, in an office. )
Old roles specify all the content. The new type role specifies how the contents will be made, as one goes along. For example, the therapist role used to specify what was to be done and said, and what was not to be done and said, as well as where and when. A therapist does not visit a patient’s home, nor invite the patient home. A therapist does not share the life places of the person, not even the street or going for a walk. But a therapist who would invariably visit your home is just another role, different but the same in kind. (It's called a " social worker… “). Yet if we threw all roles out, there wouldn’t be anyone designated to help you get into yourself when you're stuck and feel terrible.
We invent a role called " Changes Person" which defines not a friend nor a stranger. It leaves you free to have an office and also invite people home, or go with them where they go, but it isn't just the variety that matters here. How in such a role will you decide whether to visit the person at home, or not? The role is of such a kind that you determine that from your sense of the whole situation up to that point, and not alone but in interaction with the person. This role is not the same as the " close relationship" role we discussed earlier. You could take the person home or not without becoming close. The person may, for example, be so " freaked out" as not to be able to become close, or you may sense that this isn't, so far, the kind of person with whom you choose to be close. Even so you may want to take the person home rather than arrange another place, if that fits with where both of you are at that time.
Such a role still serves the purpose of saying how you function. It's not as a pretended friend, which you aren't just then for this person, nor as a stranger who is being bothered, but as a person who has a function. You are a person with whom it is appropriate to take up the problem of being freaked out and also of having no place to go. And that is what a " role" does for you, and yet you can make the role be a sentience-form-sentience process of how you are in the role.
What sort of role-definition is it, to be what we call " Changes persons? " A Changes Person is a role. How else could it be appropriate to ask for help from one of these people, to ask to be listened and responded to on very personal problems when perhaps you hardly know them? Or, the other way around: it is a role to offer listening to a person who just walked in. How would a " team" run, or be run, if it weren’t implicit in the roles that each does as much as possible, no one orders anyone around, and anyone can ask others to help. It's quite a subtle role, it might have more detail to it, than the older therapist role. Yet it is a role. It developed to enable living and variety, rather than just always certain behaviors.
Of course, " therapy, " if done for real, would lead to this kind of openness, you might say. It may seem that the therapy area is an easy instance for this kind of change in role patterns. But on the other hand, the professional skills involved, the social halo around them, and the responsibility that seemed involved with freaky and suicidal people, made it especially hard too. Also, would you not say that other roles and institutions in the society would lead in this direction if done for real? We think they would.
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If by " role" we mean some way to know what to expect, and what can be relied on not to occur, then close relating is a role. In a sense, it is more reliable as to expectations than most roles, because it isn't the content you can predict (that's unpredictable) but the kind of living it will be. With most current roles, it's the other way around, you can know the content in advance, but not the kind of living it will be. The store clerk will sell you things and make certain expected responses to what you expectedly do, but what kind of living it will be can vary very greatly. Only in a close relationship do you not know what will happen next, but you do know the kind of quality it will have, the kind of process it will be.
New roles would not be forced on oneself from the top down, from the outside onto oneself, or from one's head onto one's feelings. Rather, they would be a making of specifics from one's feelings. Even if got from outside, they would fit one's felt living and allow it to live further in that form than without it.
Without this touchstone, a new role you invent might seem attractive to your abstract values, but might not let you live, really, in the role. Even if it does carry your living further, if you push it on others, it might leave their living stuck, despite their affirming the abstract value principles in it. Then the role would be new, the old bad roles would have been changed, and yet people would be in the new ones, in no better way than they were in the old ones.
There aren't any times and places cut out of our life and not part of it, and cut out of somebody else’s life and not part of theirs. When someone calls we don't hold them off into some distance pattern, but ask them to come to our big meetings. Then they are just a " new person, " one of us. Or the caller should not wait till Sunday. We might ask the person to come now if they need it. Or some of us will go and meet them there. (That can be difficult, like walking around some locked house in the dark, with somebody who called us inside too scared or confused to open up, for instance. )
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