Page 133 - The Resilient Organization

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

A jester’s ability to mediate between ideas and humans stems from the
privileges of being a fool (Otto, 2001). Only fools (and perhaps children as
in emperor’s missing clothes) can be forgiven the unique privilege, without
demolishing the social order, to point out the (too) obvious, the forbidden,
and the partially hidden. Jesters can make the ideas that embody us and that
we perform, sometimes unknowingly, visible. A jester facilitates the undress-
ing of such masquerades. A good jester’s wit then also serves as a lubricant
to the reckoning. The nakedness that would be rejected offhand, were it not
coated with humor, now becomes more palatable. There is less denial. And
the hold of ideas on us diminishes with our laughing at ourselves.
The humorous absurdity or incongruity of it all eventually shifts percep-
tions (Polimeni & Reiss, 2006). “The fool breaks down the boundary
between chaos and order, but he also violates our assumptions that the
boundary was where we thought it was and that it had the character we
thought it had” (Willeford, 1969: 39). The jester may thus aid the accom-
plishment of cognitive innovation—a breakthrough or a breakout of the
ideas that normally characterize or dominate our thinking. This breaking
out of ideas can be collective too: the use of humor has been found helpful
in navigating contentious situations in corporations (Hatch, 1997) while
shared laughter communicates ease or nonthreat (Ramachandran, 1998).
A jester can be a potentially powerful agent of change, enhancing the
organizational ability to escape obsolete or misguided ideas and absurd
orthodoxies. Of course, jesters can also work toward maintaining the sta-
tus quo. A jester can act as a social controller, by ridiculing those who pro-
fess heresy or are outsiders (Klapp, 1962). So choose your jesters carefully,
so that they too will not become possessed by the undue persuasions of too
powerful ideas. Humanity’s actions can sometimes be inexplicable in their
dark consequences—perhaps ideas then rule over humans. Jesters can help
build resilience against such ideas.