Thanks to Etienne Laliberté of the Contrarian Thinking blog for including me among a list of favorite blog posts–not only because it was nice and might have diverted a few more people to my Strategy in Four Words or Less Post, but because it diverted ME to a cool blog by Dan Oestreich called Unfolding Leadership. The specific post was about the term "touchy feely," and Dan's frustration with the general distaste of things touchy-feely in the business world. That is, distaste for consciously confronting the fact that organizations are made up of human beings, all of whom have emotions and relationships and baggage, etc.

I know the feeling. I often almost apologize for dealing with these human aspects in my work. I try to relax people by joking that not once in any of my sessions has anyone sung kumbayah. But then I go right to the human factors, because they are there and they (usually) need to be confronted. Not everyone will confront those things in the same way. Not everyone, as he points out, is going to want to use a "talking stick" during a facilitation. There are plenty of ways to get at these things, some that would be described as more touchy-feely than others. But we're doing our organizations a disservice by looking the other way, and I feel the costs are becoming increasingly larger.

Dan lays it out quite clearly:

At fifty-eight, I find myself getting really tired of the smugness of business people who want people like me to figure out how to help them solve their human problems without direct human means — and then ridicule my profession. What clever strategy can I come up with to deal with a problem of leadership or team dynamics without actually dealing with the problem of leadership or team dynamics? Please, they might as well say, don’t take us anyplace we don’t feel good, anyplace we are scared and vulnerable as individuals or as a group. Please don’t make us share our subjective stuff so somebody else can see how incomplete and untogether we are, where we have to show up as ourselves with actual feelings, actual anger, actual anxiety! In this sense, those who complain the loudest about not wanting to do something too touchy-feely often really just want to maintain the power of their personal feel-good mask. God knows, we shouldn’t disturb that.

This is the damage, the real, tangible human damage in the business world. By business world, I certainly also include other sectors, non-profits, academic and research organizations, etc. I don’t think we’ve changed the business culture much over time — some, but not nearly enough if we don’t start examining and dealing with the “touchy-feely,” undiscussable stuff that causes our enterprises to be woefully inefficient and sometimes really inhumane places to work. Because if you want to know what “touchy-feely” is code for that absolutely scares the crap out of people, it’s really simple. It’s just this: the truth.