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the archetypes of instrumentality and desire.         Carl Jung was a psychologist who had a profound influence on our thinking about personality and behavior. He developed the concept of the collective unconscious. He understood that our way of moving through life is affected as much by the common images held by a culture as it is by individual personality and personal and family history. Central to his thinking about what drives our behavior is the existence of certain archetypes.

An archetype is an inherited way of thinking, a mythic image that exists for all members of a culture. Within the image of an archetype is collected a whole series of possibilities and qualities that helps explain who we are and who we might become. I want to use this concept of archetypes to explore a range of possibilities and qualities that help us understand our place in today’s industrial-turned-information age. The instrumental aspect of the culture discussed in the last chapter is primarily given form through the archetypes of the engineer and economist.

I want to explore four archetypal images to understand what it takes for us to act on what matters: the engineer, the economist, the artist, and the architect. Each represents a strategic stance, a way of thinking, and a way of acting that brings a set of beliefs into the world. The challenge is to integrate the qualities of the engineer, the economist, the artist, and the architect into our own strategy for acting on what matters.

Let’s begin with the engineer and the economist. They have forged a partnership that defines many of the beliefs that support the instrumental aspects of our culture. The dominant organizational strategies for action that we now have resulted because we turned to them to set the stage for us.

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The Engineer Archetype

The engineer is the prototype of the pragmatic life. The heart and soul of an engineering strategy is to control, predict, automate, and measure the world. The engineer conceived, nurtured, and gave birth to the industrial age. The production of Gutenberg’s Bible is one example of an engineering triumph that led to major social transformation.

Engineers exist to solve problems and so they care deeply about methodology and how to do it. The engineer treats every challenge as though it were amenable to a logical solution. An engineer’s dream is to be dropped into a jungle with an axe and a shovel and told to create an airstrip that a plane can land on in two months. This is the engineer’s idea of ecstasy.

If you can, for just a moment, imagine yourself as an engineer. What do you suppose you believe about what is important? Utility is what matters to an engineer. The engineer wants to know how things work. It was an engineer who first asked the question How? The engineer speaks in the language of installation, implementation, measurement, tools, and milestones. To be an engineer is to fall in love with your tools. To be a Zen engineer is to become your tools.

To the rest of the world a problem is something to get beyond; to the engineer, a concrete, tangible mechanical, electronic, or design problem is heaven. The engineer solves problems as a form of relaxation. Their domicile of choice is the workshop. The art form of the engineer is the blueprint. It symbolizes a commitment to what is concrete. (A foundational course in engineering education is called “Strength of Materials.”) It represents a form of worship, of faith in the strength of the material world.

If you are ever angry with an engineer, discuss philosophy with them. Take them to a concert or a museum and then spend hours with them talking about their feelings and experience. Engineering is not about the world of relationships, emotions, or abstraction. Relationships, to an engineer, are something to be endured, they are at best a means to an end. A cornerstone to their strategy of change is their belief in objectivity. This is a twin desire to be right and also to circumvent what is personal and emotional. The personal is too unreliable, too easily subject to whim and fancy. It is the cause of variability and all that is out of control. This is not to say that engineers are impersonal or unemotional, just that emotions are not a domain that they wish to enter. And it is not what we want from them.

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Engineering focuses on the material world and schools us in how to construct a world that can safely carry the weight of all that might stand upon it. Ask engineers about stress and they will not know you are talking about their emotional state. They will wonder how to design and construct something so that it will safely sustain two times the largest possible burden. Engineers hate risks and treat them as dangers, not as opportunities. And we should be grateful for that.

Engineers R Us

The engineer lives in each of us. It is not a job title, nor is it something we studied in college. It is an archetype, a way of thinking about the world. Engineers built the world in which we live, and so they live within us. The belief system that embraces the practical and material world embraces all the deep personal values that characterize each of us; the engineer simply represents a particular way of acting on them.

There is obviously much to recommend the field of engineering and its engineers. In fact, I’ve studied engineering and so hold a special affection for the engineering world. Unfortunately I studied engineering for the wrong reasons. When I entered college there was a shortage of engineers and so my family and my guidance counselor suggested this would be a field that would assure me constant employment. Sounded good to me. Engineering also offered an escape from the chaotic world of feelings and relationships. I needed a world dominated by rationality and stability. Off I went on my instrumental way and actually liked it until I got distracted by a feeling.

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There is no question that an engineering strategy is indispensable to our lives. We depend on the engineer to construct the world and to make it work well and safely. Thus, the engineer is embraced as a positive and powerful image into our society and institutions.

Management as Engineer

Many of our ideas about management are an extension of the engineering point of view. Like engineering, management is about control and predictability. If you accuse an engineer of being out of control, it is an indictment, and the same is true of a manager. We expect good managers to know what is going on, to be on top of every project. There was a time when I worked for Exxon when managers were told that they should be able to answer 90% of the questions asked of them, without having to ask anyone else for an update. Managers hate surprises. The mantra of management is, “Do what you think is best, just don’t surprise me.” There is a downside to the no-surprise world: It makes the cultivation of discovery, learning, and risk more difficult.

Change management to an engineer-turned-manager is about clear goals, consistent practices, predictable results, and accurate measurements. This demands a clear objective, a concrete definition of the process, and a reliable tracking system. It matters less what the plan is, whether it has any larger meaning or, in the extreme, is even worth doing. They just need a plan and need to know how they are going to measure what they do. A core management-as-engineer belief is that if you cannot measure something, either it should not be undertaken or it does not exist.

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The Engineering Way

Here are some highlights of the engineering archetype for achieving change and acting on what matters:

1. Leadership articulates a clear objective. Clear means it is about the material world. It is best when supported by people in power, for the chain of command gives needed order to the vagaries of a human, social system.
2. Define roles and responsibilities clearly. The engineer likes clear boundaries and wants each person’s property line defined by a fence. Each job should be well defined and discrete from all others. A cross-functional world is frustrating to the engineer. Their approach to collaboration is to carefully stage the sequence of each person’s involvement.
3. Prescribe the behavior that you want. Have a clear competency model for each job. Define the new behavior and train to those definitions. Every training event needs a clear outcome and should be able to tell the participants exactly what new tools they will leave with.
4. Assess often and give good feedback. Engineers invented the idea of feedback mechanisms and like to apply them to people as well as processes. The performance appraisal is a reasonable tool to the engineer, and they can see no reason why anyone would question it. The engineer is committed to the elimination of problems and so, in people matters, focuses on weaknesses and their elimination. If we want to improve quality, we need better statistically based tools.
5. 154Control the emotional side of work. An ea154rly lesson in becoming a manager is not to get too personal. “This isn’t personal, this is business.” For years there was a widespread belief that it was a mistake for managers to get too close to the people they managed. If we develop close relationships we may lose our objectivity, it may cloud our judgment. We keep our distance for that possible future moment when we may have to reprimand or fire someone. If we have become friends, we fear we will be unable to make that call. So we stay distant and isolated.
6. Think of employees as one more asset. The engineering viewpoint transforms human beings into human assets and human resources. Managers manage many assets and resources—money, technology, animals, minerals, and vegetables— and now we include people as part of this inventory. And, in case the point is not clear enough, we also talk of people as FTEs, or full-time equivalents. How many FTEs work in that department? People have joined the virtual world and are no longer the real thing, they are now equivalents.

The Limitations of Engineering

There is a price for everything, and so, too, with the engineer’s view of the world. If we believe something does not exist unless we can measure it, then certain things must be put aside: love, feeling, intuition, art, philosophy. The engineer in us gets trapped by the feeling that all we are is an engineer. When you have made your way in the world as a person of practicality and reason, it is hard to put logic aside for the sake of love, feeling, and doing something for the pure experience of it, rather than its utility.

This is a characterization of the engineer as cultural archetype, not the individual engineer you may know. It is the engineer archetype that has guided our passion for what works. When we want to change or improve our world, it leads us into strategies of control and installation and is indifferent to any discussion of subjective experience. We have embraced the engineering genius and brought it into all aspects of our lives, especially our institutions. Thus, the engineering mind is key to our materialism. It does not create it, but reinforces it through valuing all that is practical and useful, and this is exactly what matters to an engineer.

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The Economist Archetype

The ally of the engineer is the economist, for engineering justifies its way of thinking on the basis of cost, as well as safety, control, and predictability. We should really view the engineer and economist as a couple, joining forces to bring the values of instrumentality to bear. Where the engineer installs and measures change, the economist negotiates it on the basis of an exchange of currency. The currency can be money, or material goods; it can also be comprised of intangibles such as recognition, affection, and safety.

For our institutions, the economist creates a world where the sole purpose of a firm is to return money to its shareholders. Everything must be justified in terms of its economic return. How much does it cost? How long will it take? What will we get for it? These are the defining questions. The economist is the social scientist who creates commerce and designs financial models for everything from an individual to a business to a national economy. The economist’s aptitude for model-building is of great use to us, as is the engineer’s material-building capacity. What is of concern here is the economist’s view of the human being. It is in this arena that we have taken their insights far beyond the pure province of economics.

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The essence of the economist stance on people is that the exchange of tangible value explains human motivation and defines organizational purpose. It is the belief that barter is the means by which we get things done, deliver service, and even find love. At the simplest level, the economist believes that we are all for sale or rent, for this is the dynamic of exchangable self-interest.

If you want to act on what matters, says the economist, discover the interests of the active parties and design a plan to satisfy them accordingly. The economist believes that money, tangible rewards, or other incentives is what causes us to do what we do. My willingness to change my behavior, to support an institution, or to engage in a relationship is, fundamentally, a negotiation between what I am asked to give and what I think I can get. And I am willing to place most anything on the table if the offer is attractive enough. And if there is nothing on the table, no money, no currency, why would I sit down to begin with?

It is significant that among social scientists, economists consistently rank the lowest in any measure of altruism and social cooperation and highest in narrow self-interest and willingness to be a free rider on other people’s commitments (Frank, Gilovich, and Regan, 1993). How the economists manage their personal affairs is of little interest here. What is of interest is that our culture has generally adopted the economist view of human motivation. We use an economic model to explain why people do what they do. We define for-profit organizations as primarily economic entities, and anything that does not clearly offer a return on an investment undergoes close scrutiny. We also view relationships in terms of transaction and exchange. Pure acts of charity and goodwill are viewed with skepticism, and the economist believes that the original good samaritan probably wanted something in return. Perhaps not money, but he did become rather famous.

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The Economist’s Way

The economist view of acting on what matters or initiating change centers on incentives:

1. Refocus the reward system. Begin by rewarding people for the new desired behavior. Invite the engineer to prescribe the behaviors that you want, and then put money on them. This will drive the change, for what is rewarded is the behavior that you get. People will only do what they are rewarded for. And, conversely, people will not do what is not rewarded. This leads us to change the reward system early and often. It also treats the reward system as if it is were important and vital. It affirms the belief that the priority of self-interest is in the nature of the human being.
2. Competition is essential to success. Whether it is students, employees, companies, or national economies, only the strong should survive. This notion is a distortion of Darwin, who found that the most adaptive creatures survive, not the strongest or the most aggressive. Our belief in competition leads us to offer large rewards for the highest performers and no rewards for low performers. The economist believes that the people who rise to the top should get the lion’s share of the return. This is sometimes expressed as 20% of the people doing 80% of the work. The economist bets on the creative and entrepreneurial contribution of a small group of people who lead and direct the majority of the rest of us. The economic mindset places a premium on the act of risking capital. The major rewards go to those who put their money on the line (investors) while secondary rewards go to those who have no capital invested and who “only” do the work (wage earners). The result is to make shareholder return the number one goal.
3. 158Barter is a major basis for motivation and action. Another way of saying this is that the marketplace is the final arbiter of value. What is in demand, and the value assigned to it, is established by customers who vote with their money. This view leads us to be customer focused. It aims our efforts where there is demand and says that other-directedness is a sign of maturity and realism. It values an outside-in orientation. It questions actions that are undertaken for their own sake or investments in lost causes. It frames our actions, even our love, as a reciprocal exchange of value. The economist would never fall victim to unrequited love. It would be considered a strategic error.
4. Apply a cost-benefit analysis to every action. Every action should justify itself on the basis of its leverage, which is the impact it has when divided by its costs. Decisions about human values fall within this domain. We decide on levels of safety and service based, in part, on their cost structure. Institutional philanthropy becomes a marketing strategy, community development becomes a real estate decision, employee development is a business decision based on demonstrated financial returns.
5. Grow or die. Size matters. The larger the better. This is called progress. And it leads to the question, “How do you take it to scale?” If something cannot be replicated on a large scale, then we question whether it is worth doing at all. This places the burden of measurement on passion and desire. It also discourages us from conducting local experiments that might not apply elsewhere. The act of introducing scale into our thinking precludes many things we might otherwise choose to undertake for their own sake.

These strategies are at the core of the economist archetype. They are the elements of the way the economist thinks about change. If you do not believe in competition, rewards, growth, leverage, and barter, you are naïve and out of touch with the real world. The final argument of the economist against pursuing meaning, freedom, and personally held values is that we should “get real.” They have cornered the market on defining what is real and have convinced us that reality is instrumental.

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Management as Economist

Management, according to the economist archetype, becomes an exercise in budget control, and this is the basis of power. Top level managers must have financial skills. They operate as bankers, holding us accountable for the financial promises we make. How long will it take? and How much will it cost? are the core economist-manager questions. It is not by accident that some of our most successful publications are titled Fortune, Time, and recently Fast Company. Nor is it by accident that magazines such as Life and Look have virtually disappeared. The economist questions are important, but they limit us when they become the primary questions. In recent years, high-tech companies aside, most organizations have increased their profitability through cost control. When cost and time become the very first questions, instead of just important ones, they create a culture of constraint, one in which the future is much like the past, only more efficient. Instead of creating a future, the economist, along with the engineer, focuses on predicting and controlling it.

Economists-as-managers have a great impact on human resources. Finding and retaining the best people is thought to be a financial transaction, a pricing problem. We use signing bonuses, incentive plans, and retention bonuses as our core human resources strategies. The belief that people are for sale or for rent creates a self-perpetuating cycle, wherein the more economic incentives are dangled in front of them, the more they feel entitled to them. This mindset has spread to the public sector, where we attempt to use financial incentives for educational administrators to increase student learning.

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The impact of the economist-as-manager is that relationships between organizations and their members become increasingly commercialized. Employees become free agents as well as vendors, seeking the highest bidder. Employers become buyers, scanning the marketplace for independent suppliers, formerly called employees, to meet short-term requirements while offering as little commitment from the organization as possible. It happens in the name of agility, shifting marketplaces, obsolete skills, and what is required to compete in the information age.

The Cost

The economic model of the person has become so ingrained that the economist in us treads the instrumental path without really questioning it. We expect ourselves and others to operate out of self-interest. We become cynical about our institutions, and therefore about ourselves. Business school graduates focus on exit strategies as they enter the workplace. The economist mentality is not so much wrong, as it is narrow. It is this limited view of what is possible that brings into question the potential of calling, commitment, care, passion, and all the values that grow out of idealism, intimacy, and depth.

The Artist Archetype

The artist is conceived to focus on matters of the heart and is brought into the world as ballast for the engineer and the economist. I am using the term artist in a broad sense—I do not mean only traditional artists, such as writers, musicians, dancers, actors, painters. I want to encompass people who spend their days in the world of feelings, intuition, and the “softer” disciplines: social scientists, philosophers, therapists, social workers, educators, spiritual advisors. These are the vocations of the artist archetype.

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The artist’s world view ranges from indifference to contempt for utility and practicality. The artist does not really want to be accountable for the use or value of what they create. The artist can fall in love with a great idea and find meaning in the abstraction of an emotion. The artist is attracted to some things simply because they are not measurable or predictable. The artist not only refuses to seek order, but is afraid of it. Where the engineer becomes short of breath in the midst of chaos, the artist feels panic in the midst of order.

The essence of the artist is the ability to give universal meaning and depth to everyday objects in everyday life. What we consider ordinary, the artist sees with fresh eyes. Cezanne showed us that a bowl of fruit is worthy of the most detailed attention and that within that bowl of fruit was contained the landscape and form and shading of all material objects. His painting declares that our feelings, our perception—our impressions of it—are every bit as accurate and valid a statement of reality as the bowl of fruit itself. Thus, we call his art impressionism. Affirming an emotional world that the engineer might consider irrational or even bizarre, the artist treats intuition and nuance with respect and reminds us that a little bit of madness resides in each of us. Artists give voice to feelings, to conflict, to the prism of human experience. They ennoble uncertainty and paradox and, instead of seeing these as problems, they see them as inherent in the human condition.

The Artist’s Way

The artist’s pursuit of what matters centers around feeling and experience:

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1. Artists love surprise, in fact they call it creativity. When something doesn’t work, they find it somewhat interesting, much like scientists. Artists love what is unique and hope that what they create will never be replicated. The artist views predictability as a limitation and feels trapped when the world calls for repetition.
2. Artists nurture emotion and make it the subject of their study. Understanding what is personal and emotional is how artists do their work. The variability and nuances of life are the data of an artist’s existence. An engineer sees a field and wants to do something useful with it; the artist sees a blade of grass and mourns its beauty and mortality.
3. The artist is a permanent outsider. The painter and the social scientist count on their ability to observe and then capture that observation in an image or in words. So they stand apart for a better view. This makes it difficult for the artist to join an organization and endure supervision. Organizations are about joint, cooperative effort. Management values team players; they put an emphasis on the rules of membership, on the willingness to sacrifice individual needs for the common good. The manager mind thinks loyalty is a very big thing. The artist sees this and stands at a distance.
4. The artist views commerce with suspicion. Where the economist sees commerce as our lifeblood, the artist endures the process of pricing, marketing, and commercialization. Commerce is strictly a means to an end, not purpose in itself. Artists look for others to understand and exploit the marketplace. If they become too successful too quickly, they think there must be something wrong and they need to begin again.

Thus, the strategy for the artist to act on what matters rests on the belief that if something can be clearly pictured, vividly described and shown to a waiting world, enough has been done. Transformation in an artist’s mind comes from understanding and interpreting the emotional landscape, not avoiding it. Installation, a keyword to the engineer, means to the artist the process of hanging paintings in a gallery. The artist as social scientist believes that awareness leads to change, not a booby prize, unlike James Hillman, who co-authored We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse. The artist would look back on those hundred years and exclaim, “What a great ride!” The artist’s strategy of change is noticeably lacking in timetables, yardsticks, and cost controls, and this is by design, not from indifference.

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Management as Artist

It is interesting to witness what happens when an artist does create or join an organization. What you have is someone who dislikes authority, who is wary of leadership and anyone who tries to exercise it. One of my first clients was the staff of a mental health clinic. Watching them agonize and complain about bosses, subordinates, and each other made me wonder whether they were in the business of curing madness or creating it. I particularly empathized with the therapist managers, for they were people who mostly saw power and authority as the root of all human suffering—and they had the power. They were ambivalent, incongruent, more cynical than their subordinates, and generally quite miserable. They wanted to be the flower and were required to be the root.

People who are ambivalent about power have a hard time using it. Some are warm and intimate tyrants, while others will not make a decision for fear of hurting someone. What redeems artists in power is that they absolutely love the drama. Most organizations composed of artists, social scientists, or academics are political nightmares. The only time there is any agreement is when someone tries to bring resolution and order to the scene— they shoot them. Artists embrace social pathology as a source of their creativity, so the dysfunctional institution is simply reaffirming grist for the mill. If you don’t believe this, find me one social service agency with well-satisfied, well-managed employees, or one artists’ cooperative that has made a good business decision, and I will send you a dollar. Of course, if you look and don’t find one, you owe me a dollar.

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For all these reasons and more, modern culture has chosen the engineer and economist archetypes over the artist. If there ever was a struggle between engineer-economist and the artist, the struggle is now over. The engineer-economist has won. Even in the not-for-profit world including government, health care, and education.

A More Perfect Union

If the doorway to acting on what matters is framed by idealism, intimacy, and depth, and the freedom these bring with them, then as much is required from the artist as from the engineer and economist. If we lose the artist, we lose a force for the reflection, doubt, surprise, and discovery that will foster what matters, even at the expense of what works. If we decide, again and again, as we must, to act on what means the most to us, then we will carry the same burden that the artist carries. The artist is marginalized by the instrumental culture, as the engineer and economist would be marginalized by an artist-dominant culture.

The tension between the engineer and artist is one reason why individual personal development rarely leads to organizational change. Personal development is about freedom, intimacy, depth, and engagement, and even though we embrace them, once we return to the marketplace, we run directly into the engineer and economist archetypes, whose basis for action is quite different. And it is the engineering belief system that is in charge. Not to say there are no exceptions, for there are, and your workplace may be one of them. But seeing clearly the engineer-artist dilemma gives us respect for the larger drama that is being played out. And remember, what takes place in the culture is a projection of what is taking place in our own hearts.

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The Architect Archetype

Having polarized the engineer-economist and the artist, let me suggest an image that integrates both worlds: the architect. Architects learn both the strength of their materials as well as what shape they might take to be aesthetically appealing. The architect in us cares as much about the beauty of things as their more practical properties and how to make them work. The architect does not have the luxury of the engineer to focus almost exclusively on the practical construction of the physical world. Neither does the architect have the luxury of the artist in focusing exclusively on form and the subjective aspects of the world. Architecture brings aesthetics and utility into harmony, even if reluctantly, with one another.

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The goal of the architect is to begin with the engineer’s question: What function or use will this serve? The design of a home, an office, a public space, or a building begins with a discussion of utility. Given this consideration, the questions then turn to feeling, ambiance, taste, and personal values. These qualities will make the place habitable to its occupants. If we create a world we do not want to inhabit, then perhaps it is because the artist was missing in its design and construction. The strategy of the architect is to bring the engineer and the artist together. The schedule, the practicality, the simplified use of a space are essential to the architect. The cost is also critical. But these are not the only points, and this is where the architect embodies the artist. The architect cares as much about the sight lines and the perspective of the future occupant. The feeling of a place is part of the language of design. The way that a building fits with its environment is another primary consideration. Color, texture, light, and other aspects of the intimate relationship between human and habitat are treated as important.

Christopher Alexander

A person who embodies the integration of structure with the experience of its inhabitants is architect Christopher Alexander. In his work, freedom and care for what animates our experience are essential elements in the construction of a building. He is the author of a series of books that create a new language— he calls it a pattern language—designed to bring life into structures. If you want to understand the possibilities of integrating art, engineering, and economics, read any of his books. In A Timeless Way of Building, his concern for building mirrors our concerns for institutions:

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What Alexander calls a “quality without a name” echoes our concern for what matters—the sense of value and purpose that we bring to whatever we touch, that defines what is worth doing. His is the voice of an architect, one who is concerned with the construction of the material world. In his writing he has committed himself to create a new language for his profession. He has all the training of an engineer and has brought to that training the sensibilities of an artist. He has the qualities of all great architects, but what is more significant is that he also has given his energy to transform his profession. This is possible for each of us: To act on what matters requires us to find our unique voice and use it to summon life to the unit, the work, the institution in which we reside.

What makes Alexander an appealing embodiment of engineer-economist-artist integration is that he:

1. Cares deeply about the experience of the inhabitants of a structure, right from the first moment of design. For example, for a public housing project, which in most cities has become either an eyesore or a ghetto, he engages the occupants in the design and construction of their own homes.
2. Deems that the life- and spirit-granting properties of a building are its most important features. He declares that the experience of feelings and harmony in a room, or a building, or a neighborhood is the number one design criterion. Efficiency, mass producibility, and simplicity of construction are secondary concerns.
3. 168Recognizes tha168t a building continues to grow long after it is constructed. He does not try to design monuments to immortality. Even a room expects imperfections, curves, shifts in the door and ceiling lines. Imperfection and decay are signs of life, not weaknesses in the engineering. He strives for what he calls a “quality without a name,” which to some is the experience of God.
4. Has created a “pattern language,” which describes the quality of a space, not just its use or dimensions. This language details the combination of elements required to bring harmony to that space. When Alexander writes about how some spaces leave us with a feeling of inner conflict because they are built of unresolved elements, elements that do not work together to create inner security, he might as well be writing about our institutions.
5. And he does this all in the context of constructing the physical world of rooms, buildings, neighborhoods, and communities. He brings his values, what matters most to him, directly into the instrumental world.

Here is a quote from another book by Alexander, A Pattern Language, which gives us a sense of how an architect can represent the communion between the engineer and artist. He is discussing the satisfying elements of design which he calls patterns:

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