The Wholeness Ledger

The organisational theorists Chris Argyris and Donald Schön drew the distinction between espoused theory and theory in use in their 1974 book Theory in Practice, and every framework that compares stated values with lived ones is in their debt, this one included. They located the gap in how people reason and defend themselves, and their remedy was a different kind of learning. I follow the gap further, into the body on one side and into pay and governance on the other.

In 1975 the management scholar Steven Kerr argued, with examples from politics, war, medicine and business, that reward systems often pay for the very behaviour an organisation says it doesn’t want. His paper is the ancestor of the Structure layer and of the name of my research study. Kerr’s subject was the incentive, and mine is what the incentive does to the people who believe in the mission anyway.

The organisational development firm Mutomorro tests stated values against the record in its Enacted Culture lens, asking what behaviour an organisation’s last five promotions rewarded, and I think that is the right instinct. It looks at what can be observed from outside a person. The ledger sets the same record beside the state of the people living with it, and beside the question of whose commitment is covering the gap.

The philosopher Ken Wilber maps reality into quadrants that include the interior of the individual, the shared culture and the social system, and state, story and structure will look familiar to anyone trained in his integral theory. His is a map of everything, and it takes no side between its quadrants. The Wholeness Ledger is a narrow diagnostic with a position, which is that structure decides.

Frederic Laloux made wholeness one of the three breakthroughs of the organisations he studied in Reinventing Organizations, alongside self-management and evolutionary purpose. He describes what a small number of pioneering organisations have built. I use wholeness as the standard any organisation can be read against, and I define it by what people have had to give up in order to belong.

In The Water of Systems Change, John Kania, Mark Kramer and Peter Senge set out six conditions that hold a problem in place, running from policies and resource flows through relationships and power to mental models. It is the closest relative of the three layers here. It was written for funders working on change across a whole field, though it asks them to look at their own organisations too. Mine is built for use inside a single organisation and adds the inner state of the people in it, which is not one of the six conditions. The ordering of my layers comes from Donella Meadows, whose leverage points rank the paradigm a system grows from above its rules and goals, which is why Story sits beneath Structure.

The librarian and scholar Fobazi Ettarh coined the term vocational awe in 2017 and set it out in full in 2018. She was writing about librarianship, and the belief that libraries are inherently good and sacred, and so beyond critique, which is easily turned against the people who work in them. I think it travels well beyond libraries. Research led by Jae Yun Kim, then at Duke University, found that people consider it more acceptable to ask passionate workers for unpaid and demeaning work. Their work is the strongest support I know for what my own conversations keep returning to. Neither gives an organisation a way to check whether it is doing this, and that is what the ledger is for.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter argued, and have gone on to gather a good deal of evidence, that burnout grows from a mismatch between a person and six areas of their working life, one of which is values. I take that as my starting point, and add the case their model doesn’t cover, where the match is close and the closeness is what gets exploited.

The congruence model of David Nadler and Michael Tushman and the McKinsey 7S framework both hold that an organisation performs when its parts fit together, and they are right about performance. This framework asks what the fit is in service of.

Tools such as the Barrett Values Centre’s Cultural Values Assessment measure the distance between the values people hold and the culture they experience, with decades of data behind them. They report what people perceive. The ledger also reads what the organisation’s structures reward.

The Pocket Project, co-founded by Thomas Hübl and Yehudit Sasportas, works with collective trauma, including inside organisations, and uses the language of coherence and the nervous system as I do. Its ground is healing, and mine is the incentive structure that keeps producing the injury.

The names of the first two layers echo Tony Robbins’ strategy, story and state, a model for personal change in which strategy means the individual’s own way of going after a goal. Where he has strategy, I have structure, the institution’s governance and incentives, and the distance between those two words is the argument of this framework.

Coherence, the measure inside this framework, is a word others use differently. Harvard’s Public Education Leadership Project, Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn and the Coherence Lab run by Education First and the Aspen Institute each use it for getting a school system pulling in one direction, and the HeartMath Institute uses it for a measurable pattern in heart rhythm. Here it means the alignment between what an organisation says, what its people can sustain and what its structures reward, and it has no connection to those bodies of work.