PART III HOW UNTAPPED POTENTIAL IS REALIZED IN METATHEATRE INTERVENTION
Chapter 3 What is Untapped Potential in Metatheatre of SEAM?
3.1 Brief presentation of Metascript
Defining Metascript – Metascript can be defined as a multiplicity of contending scripts, and on going attempts to re-script current scripts, and identify emerging scripts.
SEAM assumes that over time the organization’s script becomes overlayered and fragmented with the many scriptwriters and script editors in organizations. Further, as in TAMARA (Boje, 1995, TAMARA Journal, 2001) the organization is assumed to be a multiplicity of stages on which different plays are acted out by organizational members (actors) simultaneously. Since organizational theatre is multiple and simultaneous, actors in one part of the organization do not see the performance of other groups of players first-hand. Rather, they hear stories of performances at meetings, and experience various other presentations and stagings of events they did not attend. The actors of the organization therefore pursue stories of theatric performances from room to room, office to office, branch to headquarters, in a TAMARA-esque networking.
SEAM assumes organization is theatre. We do not approach theatre as a metaphor. Rather, the purpose of the ‘Metatheatre diagnosis stage’ of this intervention is to research the “metascript”[1] of the organization. Many different scripts populate an organization simultaneously; these multiple scripts collectively constitute its metascript.
SEAM consultants meticulously record comments of executives and non-executives in individual and group interviews that we (the authors) believe constitute fragments of the metascript. Scribing and translating the metascript is the starting point for SEAM. And a co-reading of the collected fragments of metascript is the point of the Mirror Effect event (Mirror Effect is the effect of Mirroring back the Metascript at a plenary meeting).
Scripts control behavior, but only to a degree.
Two bread makers can use the same recipe (script) for bread, make it in the same oven, use the same ingredients, and come up with entirely different tasting and looking loafs. The bakers will fold the dough differently, refold it at slightly different times, and knead it a bit differently. My friend Phillip is a boulongerie owner/baker in Lyon France. Among French bread makers, they joke about bread machines housewives use; that is not bread making.
Two clerks at a McDonalds franchise will memorize the same scripted lines to say to customers, “Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order please? Would you like to try the new McSalad?” They speak the same dialog, but with a facial gesture, and change in inflection in one word, one customer feels they have ordered from a robot, and another believes they have received personalized and professional service.
Call center supervisors listen to a random set of dialogs made between workers and customers, assessing conformity to the script; deviations are not appropriate.
Organizations have official strategic planning scripts; some executives believe everyone understands the plan; three division managers may apply the plan quite differently; some workers may never have noticed there was a new plan.
A complex organization is a multiplicity of official and unofficial scripts. Executives spend a good deal of their time trying to get managers and workers to change their scripts, learn new dialog, present a different frame to the customer. Focus groups are conducted to test script variations.
Older firms collect thousands of scripts, but many are adhered to even when the situation and the market shifts. It is harder to unlearn a script and implement a new version than it is to train new people in a new script.
“Its all explained in the manual” says the trainer. But when you read the manual, “You find it’s out of date.” “Right” says the trainer, “We used to do it that way, but now we do it differently. Some day we’ll get around to changing the manual.”
Highly scripted jobs pay less than ones that require improvisation and the invention of new scripts, based upon professional training. Yet even executives are con-scripted by the expectations of everyone else in the organization.
3.2 Brief presentation of Metatheatre
Defining Metatheatre - The Metatheatre can be defined as a network of simultaneous, TAMARA-esque stage performances. In your organization you can never see all the theatre performed; it is occurring simultaneously on different stages; some you see and perform, but other acts you hear about from colleagues, vendors, and customers.
Metatheatre is all around us. We see obvious theatre examples of the shareholders meeting, the annual team awards banquet, the showy presentation to inaugurate a corporate vision revision, a skit put on by a vendor to keep company sales people interested in a new product – these are all theatrical examples.
There is a deeper sense of Metatheatre that is also all around us. For example, Saval told us (Boje & Rosile, 2002a interview), “There are people who are the stars of organizational theatre. There is an off stage and an on stage, and those who work to perfect what takes place on the stage. There is a director, and there are people who think they can be better directors. There are people on the sidelines who want to replace the stars, who think they can do a better job. With so many directors and also spectators seeking to displace actors and become the new stars, the metascript becomes increasingly chaotic.”
On the shop floor (and elsewhere) there are those “banana time” games that Dennis Roy wrote about long ago. Workers steal co-worker Harry’s banana from his lunchbox. Harry fumes, trying to retrieve his banana. There are thousands of this little moments of theatre, all day long.
There is the official there of corporate executives, and their entourages, as they create the concentrated spectacle, the scripted roles, they how will impress customers with efficiency, and control employees who would otherwise improvises and might dare say unprofessional lines. Recruiters say such scripted lines, but so do recruits who have studied the company website or know someone who works in another division.
There are two types of off-the-official-stage theatre:
· One is the backstage theatre, the more or less Machiavellian power games, played by a Jeff Skilling at Enron, known by his friends and enemies as “Darth Vader,” a character image he cultivated. Read the Prince, counseled old timers to a new Enronite, “then you will know how the game is played around here.” Those around her knew Rebecca Mark, as “Mark the Shark.” She used a combination of famine charm (short tight fitting skirts and high heels) and direct MBA hard-nosed negotiation tactics to wow and intimidate the clients.
· Second, there is the informal theatre, the backstage rivalry between “Skilling the Vader” and “Mark the Shark.” Workers off the main stage, who do not want to go along with script changes that they see risky to their own interests, can resist the official theatre of the executives. At Enron, new cast members replaced those who resisted.
3.3 Effects of Poor Metatheatre Management
As in TAMARA, SEAM’s postmodern perspective of organizations recognize the modernist false dualism in the distinction between actor and audience (see also Boal’s 1979 concept of “spect-actor”).[2] Actors may choose not to behave (to become part of the audience of spectators), or to behave differently (to improvise), to slant their interpretation and even resist the script. SEAM’s extensive interview process collects the lines of dialog, which reveals the hidden conflicts, taboo topics, and dysfunctional dynamics in mostly unwritten (and often conflicting) scripts. In these ways SEAM acknowledges that the organization is not only metatheatre, the organization is also metascript.
3.4 Leadership of Metatheatre
Leadership is theatre. Effective leaders do stage craft; Executives are directors who line up characters (human and non-human alike), in an antenarrative (Boje, 2001a). An antenarrative is a pre-narrative bet that a story can be told that will enroll stakeholders in ways that transform the world of action.
Effective leaders are scriptwriters and editors, theatre stars, producers and directors who change discourse and model discourse they want repeated and real-ized in others’ daily actions. Corporate directors, managers and other script-creators mobilize plot-scenarios in the course of which theatre emerges on multiple, real corporate stages (as in Tamara, Boje, 1995). Indeed many directors offer characters roles, themes, dialog, and ways of playing (paraphrase of Latour, 1996: 172).
Leaders make many entrances and exits (to paraphrase Shakespeare); they play many parts on a plethora of stages, every day of their corporate life. Leaders performances in metatheatre are, as character, as spectator, and as spect-actor. Some leaders prefer more starring roles; others play more script-writing roles, helping others to learn their lines. Many off stage roles support executive performances. Some people off stage wonder when it will be their turn, and dare to wonder if they could be better stars and directors.
3.5 Metatheatre Management tools
Managers organize, influence, lead, control, and plan. Each function is related in Table 2 to various elements of SEAM and SEPTET. While the display presents row relationships that line up, the various SEPTET elements are involved in each of the SEAM dysfunction areas and in each managing function.
Table 2: Comparison Chart of SEAM, SEPTET, & Managing
SEAM
/SEPTET
/MANAGING
1. Work Organization / 1. Frames /Organizing
2. Working Condition / 2. Themes3. 3Cs / 3. Dialogs / Influencing
4. Training / 4. Characters / Leading
5. Timing / 5. Rhythms / Controlling
6. Strategic / 6. Plots / Planning
SPECTACLES:
1. Concentrated2. Diffused
3. Integrated
4. Mega
We learned from Mintzberg’s (1973) study of “what do managers and leaders do?” that the managing functions are not discrete functions. Rather, in a few moments the overworked manager, jumps from one to the other; a phone call to plan, a bit of influencing of someone who stops by, wandering about to lead whoever is available on a new project, and dashing off to a meeting to get things under control again. The rhythm of the managers’ day is hectic, full of interruptions, biased towards oral events, and precious little time to read a report or answer the accumulating email.
Metatheatre tools for management have never been attempted. Ironically, much of what goes on in the organization is managing its theater in ways that will improve productivity, attract clients and investor, and make for a sane place to work. We offer tools that can help executives, managers, and workers be more conscious and deliberate about the metatheatre they enact. The tools in this manual are divided between diagnosis and intervention (while recognizing that to diagnose is already to intervene). It takes theatre to change theatre (fight fire with fire). After the diagnosis, to change the metatheatre, to rescript and restory is done by trying out new scripts and storylines.
Most important to us, is that our tools achieve Socio-Economic impact. After some more precise definitions, we begin to work of translating metatheatre (SEPTET elements) into the hidden costs and untapped revenue that is SEAM.
METATHEATRE INTERVENTION MANUAL page 11
[1] During our 2001 interview with Henri Savall at the EGOS conference in Lyon France was the first mention of the term “metascript.” We continued our interview with Savall about metascript at the June 22 2002 session at ISEOR institute in France. Metascript, is a concept he uses, but has not written about.
[2] In modern theatre, the percenial arch is a sacred boundary between actors authorized to be on the stage, and the spectators who, are imprisoned in their theatre seats. In postmodern theatres, such as the Tamara play (Boje, 1995), actors invade the space of spectators, and vice versa. The spectators become spect-actors (Boal’s spectators and actors), and since there are a multiplicity of simultaneous plays going on simultaneously in up to a dozen rooms, the audience literally fragments, chasing actors and the many stories, from room to room. This is Boje’s image of what arganizations are, quite theatrical, with a networking of many simultaneous stages of theatrical action.