Briskin:     I should say that, in some ways, I tried not to write it. I had done the research on it in the early '80s. I had put it aside but a number of people had come back to me to encourage me to do something with it, I avoided it for as long as I could and then I began feeling that I really needed to put this out in the world. And I think it was my way of saying that there was a lot of woundedness in people and in organizations. And we were not getting at that by trying to create new programs to get everyone motivated and to treat human relations as if it was outside the actual experience of our work. And some of this, I think, came from my early work in prisons and working with young kids who would have been in reform schools if they weren't in the alternative homes that I was part of working with.

Another part came from my corporate consulting, seeing the ways we operated as a system that really created a climate of frenzy. This frenzy translated to people feeling unable to work with each other, internalizing the problems, becoming sick, and that I wanted to try to set out a history and a way of looking at this that we might be able to make some different choices about how we organize work.

Bowen:     The title, "The Stirring of Soul," how should we think of soul and why should we even care about soul in organization?

Briskin:     I think partly I chose that title because of the association, not a creature is stirring. That this was not saying that there was a lot of soul in evidence in the workplace but that there was a movement afoot that we needed to cultivate of something beginning to stir. And in part it was beginning to stir because we couldn't avoid the kinds of problems that occur when we ignore soul.

I use the word soul different, I think, than some might in that soul includes the body and it includes the network of relationships that make up our communities. Rather than saying soul is inside one and one should go look for it, I turn it around and say looking at our soul in the rubble of the world around us will not do us any good. And soul becomes a relationship between an inner life and the world we participate in.

Bowen:     Making the connection with anger, organizations reflect and, as you say, even refract the light of our larger society - the loss of core values, scapegoating, panic for solutions. The challenge seems to be to create settings that take account of the whole human being.

Briskin:     Yes. If we don't have some appreciation for inner life and its importance, then there is no reason not to treat each other and ourselves as property, as just things. And so it really begins with an appreciation that an inner life matters and that this inner life has to be in relationship to the world we live in. When we ignore inner life, which includes our emotions, we are in jeopardy and I think that there is now ample evidence for the kinds of jeopardy we're in.

There's a recent study in which nearly 50-percent of the Californians interviewed noted serious job-related problems - the largest being absence of medical insurance. And beyond that nearly 50-percent of people surveyed also had serious health concerns - back pains, smoking, depression, loss of focus.

We know from a study by the American Medical Association that 70-percent of what is coming to primary care is related to stress or aggravated by stress - musculoskeletal problems, depression, digestive problems, sleeplessness.

So the effect of ignoring our emotional life is translating to both enormous pain and enormous cost. And I think that people find themselves often feeling quite alone with this, as if they're the only ones.

Bowen:    How does spirit differ from soul?

Briskin:    I have a colleague, Carol Franear. She lives in Vermont. I used to live in Vermont. And she's written about the subject as well. And she was trying to write about this difference between spirit and soul and instead of trying to put language to it, at first, she took a walk out. And I used to live on a hill called Maple Hill, so it gives you an idea that you can walk out and be in the middle of a forest. And she listened to the wind moving through the trees and she thought that the wind was the spirit. And that's actually quite consistent with the origins of the word. In Hebrew, spirit comes from the word, Rurahk, which is the divine breath. In American Indian traditions, the image of the thunderbird or great eagle brings the different weather patterns, that spirit is the wind.

But soul she thought was more like the trees because they were rooted in the earth and that soul is something that is more rooted down into the material world, into the reality. And it's the movement of the wind of spirit through the trees that creates a sense of spirit and soul acting together. This is again very consistent with some of the origins of the word.

So in the workplace, there are many people who wish for people to be spirited, to have a good attitude, to have wonderful teamwork, this is wonderful that this is a wish and a need, it certainly is a need. But if it's not grounded in the material realities of that organization, in the resource allocations, in the nature of supervision, in the way people deal with the real challenges they face together, it becomes a spirit that is not moving through anything that is grounded.

And so when I use spirit and soul, I use that imagery to ask people to consider not only what they wish in terms of the vitality of their organization but how is that wish grounded in the reality of the true challenges that they face working together. Is that helpful to distinguish it that way?

Bowen:    You use the concept shadow in your writing. Are there shadow forces at work in the American workplace today and, if so, how would you describe them?

Briskin:    One way to think about shadow is that it's the part that we either don't see because it's in front of us all the time and it's like the elephant in the middle of the table that nobody wants to say is there. Often when there's a part of an organization that no one wants to talk about something that happened or that continuing is happening, that becomes the undiscussible. And that could be, even though everybody's quite aware of it, it could be thought of as the shadow because no one will speak to it.

In one organization I work with, they are revamping their entire way of delivering primary care and really with quite an excellent set of principles behind it. But the history of the organization has been they have never allocated the resources to adequately meet their own predictions of demand. And because no one knows how to talk about this, it just sits as an undiscussible. It's a kind of shadow that is always there in the organization.

There's another kind of shadow which is more what we might say is out of our awareness. And it's the drivers in our country. I think the instinct for crisis is one of those shadows. Everything is a crisis, no matter if you're doing well, no matter if you're not doing well. People act in a constant fight or flight response to events. And this is truly making us sick.

The other drivers that I think are not talked about is the way we deal with the bottom line. Every organization has to be able to demonstrate profitability. But it's really, we really don't know how to talk about the drive to greater and greater profit so, if you've doubled your revenue one year, you now have to show that you can repeat that year after year.

The shadow of our current workplace is we have no way of asking what is enough. And when we talk about greed, I don't think people are doing anything wrong. I think they're just trying to do what they think they are trying to achieve.

And the other question that doesn't get involved is what's the price of setting these markers? What's the human price and what's the price of our effectiveness of working together? Because I think it shows up that we actually are less effective when we're not treating each other as whole persons. That's not a luxury for me, that is an absolute minimum requirement to be effective in a work group.

Bowen:    Are these the elements that contribute to people's feelings of frustration and anxiety and anger in the workplace?

Briskin:    Yes, because you're wrestling with the invisible. Increasingly I've come to believe that through the way we cultivate relationships, we create a field around ourselves. And I use field here in the way people might use gravitational field. These are forces that are operating. Things drop off the table because of gravity but we don't actually see gravity. It's functioning in the field.

How we cultivate relationships with each other interacts with the field of which we're part of and this field acts on us. The way you'd know this, if you walk into a room with two people who are bitterly fighting, you would immediately begin to feel that and be affected by that, even if you didn't hear the content of their words or actually saw them fighting.

Well, the opposite is true when we cultivate healthy relationships we are also creating an environment that invites the best of us out. So the shadow is a way of describing what is being left out of the fields we are cultivating with each other. If there is no room to acknowledge one's feelings about things, then that environment that is cultivated is really basically saying, "Let's all lie. Let's all act as if nothing is going on here." And this is a tremendous toll on people's psyche. Psyche by the way is another language for the word soul.

Bowen:    How pervasive is this in American industry today do you think?

Briskin:    Constant. I mean it's our dirty little secret. And you could say it's part of the shadow. I want to be careful though in saying that not everyone is miserable and certainly not at the same time. People love work. I mean I think work is an essential part of being fully human and, despite all of the challenges, people in this country continue to say that they gain more from working than from the problems it creates. So in that sense, it's a very positive picture. People really do value contributing and being part of something larger than themselves. There's no doubt in my mind. But we also know that something else is going on.

There was one study I saw that suggested one out of four people experience anger sometimes or constantly in the workplace. That's an extraordinary figure if you consider that work now increasingly occurs in teams. That any time you have more than four people together, someone in that group is likely to be angry some or all the time. That has a tremendous affect on a group's effective.

Bowen:     How different is this today than say 10, 15, 20 years ago?

Briskin:    I think, the adjustments in the workplace today are fundamentally different than in the past 50 years. And I suspect that again, if you surveyed people, you would find people split between the reality that there's always adjustments in the labor force and this is another one and those who feel that there is something both subtle and insidious about the changes taking place now.

I think the good news is that we can no longer hide behind a dependency on our organizations to take care of us. I think one of the ways back toward health is to realize that no system was created with us as an individual in mind. And that we must be responsible for our own emotional health and beyond that we need to be responsible for cultivating relationships that create emotional health around us. And I think the changes in the workplace have really made that abundantly clear that that is the task of the next century, to be mindful of both of ourselves and how we attend to others.

The danger is that we're creating workplaces of free agents with very new visions of what loyalty means, very little connections to each other that matter. This could really account for people just sheering off like a wing on a plane sheering off, people just feeling cut out and alone and that's a very dangerous recipe.

Bowen:    Alan, we seem to have come through a long history, if you will, of management theory around work. From the point of man being machines within the system to the next evolution in terms of sort of touchy, feely man, woman does have emotions after all, it'd be helpful if you could just course that evolution.

Briskin:    Ideas about managing people do not emanate out of theory but out of the social conditions that exist at the time. And so a quick trip through the history of management, I think would show that in the early 1800s when people were still primarily living on farms that the early industry required people to begin to pay attention to clocks, to do what they were told, to not talk back. And that the image of this kind of management structure was really drawn from the family and it was a form of paternalism that the owners knew best, that they could take care of their workers. Some were quite harsh; others were quite benevolent. But in either case, it was a one-way relationship. That of paternalistic vision of what was best for workers.

As industry became more complex, this singular paternal leader could not survive the new kinds of social conditions in the late 1800s. And, then, becomes really the era of the titan. No longer is it the father but it's the mythic gods who wield their power with maybe very little consideration for the people actually doing the work but they are building empires. And what we begin to believe is that the empire-building allows each of us to take part in it and therefore profit from it. But to do that we have to give away our power to those who know better.

In the early 1900s, it was no longer possible to increase productivity and decrease unit cost through this kind of, through the simple introduction of new forms of technology. And this is the period of introduction of scientific management, where work processes are broken down. Everything is broken down into its discrete pieces and what you referred to earlier. This is the great machine metaphor and that people are resources and part of this machinery.

This led by really as early as the early 1920s, but it gets a whole new life after World War II, to studies about fatigue and monotony because the result of the machine metaphor is that we no longer allowed people to use their whole selves. And it's showing up in sickness and in distraction and loss of focus.

And out of these studies grows a new idea, that of human relations, that people lack community and better interpersonal relationships. And this is now patched onto the machine metaphor model. And while it has some healthy results, in some ways it creates another shadow in the sense of that it's a false love. The emphasis on the values of organization development in human relations doesn't really penetrate and speak to the drivers of the businesses and the operations of the business. It becomes an addendum to operations; it doesn't change operations. And I think that brought us in the '80s and the '90s to some new experiments.

The quality movement that began in the '80s was actually, I think, a very good movement that tried to address, that quality in part, Deming said this, was driving fear out of the workplace so that people could really again bring more of themselves into the work. Instead, it became too much of a technical set of procedures, quality processes, and every time you had to create a new form. It became a month long breaking down of the processes within the processes.

Following that was re-engineering. And re-engineering, similar to scientific management, was a study of work processes at a different level of system and it was never meant to be the reason for downsizing. But it quickly became a rationale for downsizing and that gave birth, of course, to Dilbert and his ability to satirize this mishmash of human relations gibberish with the more insidious parts of operations not being managed well.

In some ways the loss of credibility in these programs, I think has begun a new social movement and I think it does organize itself around an idea of spirituality. And I think it brings together a very diverse group - people from business for social responsibility; people who've done what could be considered inner work, meditation, various types of psycho-therapeutic, psychological work, and they know more of who they are now and they want that reflected now, people work together. So I do think that there is just the beginnings of a new social movement that is trying to think more holistically about the relationships of people and profit and operations. And I think that should be welcomed. I think we're a long way from understanding it's effects and it certainly has the danger of his own shadow, being kind of a new age, let's be soft with each other gibberish but I think it also has great promise.

Bowen:    And in the midst of this, the reality is that there appears to be a tremendous disenfranchisement of people through downsizing and outsourcing and re-engineering and a corresponding disenchantment with organization. Talk a little bit about disenchantment versus enchantment.

Briskin:    Well when I talk about it in the book, I talk about a false enchantment, that we keep selling people a bill of goods that turns out not to be the case and it just furthers the disenfranchisement. And I think in organizations it really calls on all of us, and that includes leadership, to try to speak in a language that is both hopeful and realistic and not to split that off. Not on the one hand to paint rosy pictures that aren't true or on the other hand to completely be overwhelmed by the overwhelming nature of the organizations we've created for ourselves to work in.

I had a client the other day who was genuinely, I think, feeling hopeless. Hopelessness is a by-product of not telling each other the truth. And I believe that there is in the human spirit great resiliency and it will call for us to find a way to talk about what's true.

What you're describing is a trend that will only make the conditions that we're talking about worse, which is, as organizations no longer have any commitment to the local areas of which they house themselves, they no longer see people as anything, as cost centers, there will be no reason why we treat people differently until our organizations collapse around us.

I think one hopeful sign could be found in a columnist who writes for Fortune, who talks about changing our thinking from people in organizations as resources (I used to say that to me that just left open the door to strip-mine human resources, which is exactly what we've done in many case) to begin thinking as the people who work in our organizations as investors because they invest their time and themselves into this work and they're investors just as financial investors. And how would we create organizations if we took seriously that the people involved in doing the work are investing themselves and they are owed something besides simply a paycheck.

What you're describing needs to be carefully thought through because if we think of our organizations as coreless, meaning that there's really no people connected to them, then we stop having any reason to be concerned how people interact with each other and the result will be a fracturing of the bottom line.

Bowen:    How can workers affirm their experience at work given all of these contradictory developments?

Briskin:    Well, it has to start with each individual making a commitment to respecting their own inner life and their own health. And that that is done not purely for oneself but in order to be present with others and to be aiding others. In other words, if we're all in this jam together, and I think we all are, I think the CEOs are in this jam as much as people at every level of the organization, that we start treating each other with some regard for the jam we've all created. So that taking care of yourself becomes a central element and how we cultivate relationships with each other becomes a second element.

Beyond that, at a system level, how do we think about the whole? And I have said, in some of my recent talks, that some of that is we're going to have to be able to assume contradictory impulses within the organizations we're part of. Rather than saying, "Gee, they told me this was about empowerment and then they screwed with me." I think we have to appreciate the shadow right from the get-go. We have to stop being as innocent about what's being promised to us, which does not mean cynicism or despondency or hopelessness. It means going in with an open mind and open eyes to the contradictory impulses. So just as the organization says they value us, we have to also know that their financial people are suggesting it would be more profitable to do their business somewhere else. How are we going to address that together? And I think it's a collective problem at every level. At political and legislative levels and also within the organizations we operate in.

Bowen:    Is there a new way that we should be looking at the role of organizations in work life today?

Briskin:    Well, I think there is a vision and in some ways it's an old vision. I was listening to the President of Malden Mills, who you may remember was, gained national fame for his factories burning down near Lawrence, Massachusetts and he made the commitment to rebuild them even as all the other garment people were leaving the area. And his belief of why he did that was a really deep sense of reciprocity that exists between people who operate businesses and the people who work for them. And he absolutely understands that to be able to be profitable he has to invest in his people. And even when he's challenged, which is currently going on, one of his divisions is losing money, he's had to tell people that, if the division continues to lose money, he will not be able to continue running that division.

But what he is doing is making this very clear, trying as best he can to give people options to retrain themselves and also investing in technology and in workers who might be able to turn the situation around. And I think that's a legitimate real vision. He's not simply promising, as they did in Silicon Valley during their heyday, life-term employment. That's not a reality anymore. But he is living his talk about the reciprocity that exists between people who run businesses and the people who work in them.

Bowen:     If the current trends go on indefinitely, what predictions do you have for us?

Briskin:    I think there will be increasing job growth in the prison industries and in the therapeutic industries. I think that there will be, we are trying to contain costs in the medical area by actually increasing the number of patients that doctors have to see in HMOs. All those strategies will fail because the costs will continue to skyrocket as people become less and less healed by being involved in work that. So pay attention to the Labor Department predicting that the largest area of job growth is cashiers with janitorial work not far behind. And I think the other areas that will grow is investment in prisons and in dealing with depression and various health-related problems. That's a very dark vision.

It will also suggest that our organizations as they are presently constructed and the trends that they're moving will not be able to retain the efficiencies or the levels of productivity they've been able to gain. And so more ratcheting up of crisis will be in store. We will continue to try to alleviate that by emphasizing things that we can buy. And this will continue to use more and more resources and provide less and less satisfaction to the people buying these things. That is the darker vision that I think has to be in front of us if we are going to take seriously how dramatically and fundamentally we have to change the way we do business with each other.

Bowen:     And what connection does that picture have with the concept of soul?

Briskin:    Well, I think that I discovered in writing this book, that soul can never be left out of the equation. It is part of who we are. But it can be ignored. And when the soul is ignored, it rebels. It rebels through health problems. It rebels through emotional angst. It rebels through a disregard for nature. That soul, that there is a catch to ignoring that we have an inner life and that we are all connected with each other and that we inhabit this earth together. I don't think we can eliminate soul. I think it will show itself through our woundedness, through our crises in our urban areas, in our schools, in how we try to take care of each other through health.

And I think it will also inspire growing numbers of people to make choices about how they want to be with each other because we will be aware of the threat that exists if we don't do that. And I am seeing that. I am seeing that through many different venues. In the business world, it may be voiced best by Tom, the co-owner of Tom's of Maine. He believes that as consumer products flood the market, the nature of the organization itself, it's brand, if you will, will be judged partly by, what it is doing for its workers and its community. I think it's a foot race, who's going to win out. But I think it's worthy of our efforts to try to create sustainable communities and sustainable economies because we're not going to get rid of the soul. It just isn't going to happen. It's going to show up in how we are wounded.

Bowen:    Alan, in the minute we have left, how will the holistic approach you mentioned provide tangible solutions to addressing anger in the workplace?