Page 131 - The Resilient Organization

118 Part Three: Step 2. Building Resilience into the Organization

CORPORATE JESTERS

One of the factors aiding (and perhaps also testing) sisu and hence
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resilience is humor. A corporate jester is one way to exercise extreme
innovation with humor. A jester may challenge the orthodoxy, ridicule
convention, and test the ultimate faith of people and their (perhaps mis-
taken or otherwise self-important) ideas. Jesters may thus act as important
messengers for resilience in particular when we are overly obsessed with an
idea “that refuses to leave us” or we are overcome with our own power.

A NOTE ON JESTERS AND THE ROLE OF HUMOR
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In “Of Managers, Ideas, and Jesters,” Guje Sevón and I argue that
ideas are very resilient—indeed more so than people who often succumb
to their persuasion. Humor is important to combat bad ideas that do
not go away or that reappear in history again and again.

Managers, and humans more generally, occasionally become imprisoned
by the idea of personal success—for example, exhibiting strong cognitive
inertia even when faced with the necessity of change (Kets de Vries, 1990;
Tripsas & Giovanni, 2000). Signs of ideas ruling over managers include
persistence with obsolete strategies or competitive notions (Barr, Stimpert,
& Huff, 1992); an obsession with a particular (faddish) management tech-
nique, such as total quality management (TQM) (Backstrom, 1999); and
the act of engaging in gross misbehavior or brutality in the name of an idea
or a cause (see, for example, Huntington, 1996).
We suggest that a jester is a unique social institution that evolved to help
humans cope with the ideas that refuse to leave them. A jester is a tradition
dating back to medieval times that counterbalances, as one of its important
functions, the power that ideas hold over us through a unique privilege, the
freedom of (humorous and witty) speech. Anything that a jester would say was
“in jest” or an “utterance of a fool,” thus seemingly discounted (yet still effec-
tive). A fool has many names: buffoon, clown, minstrel. Klapp wrote in 1949:
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The fool is a symbol of fundamental importance, representing a role
especially valued by the group. The fool is a social type found widely
in folklore, literature, and drama (p. 157).