As happened in the days of the Enlightenment-rationalism, where the concept of intuition was strongly questioned (understanding testimony of the senses as such), and with some engines itching like Kant and Descartes, it can be said that the path of many SMEs have certain similarities with such a historical moment.
The much-mentioned development towards professionalization is a successful euphemism to avoid the phrase "it takes more reason and less intuition to handle this."
This being the case, there are countless examples of organizations that, either by choice or by discard, began a gradual process of rationalization (sometimes bureaucratization) of their working methods. We proceeded to corner the founder, who is occasionally heard nostalgically lamenting those days when he could speak to each of his employees. Or that he bought from his suppliers according to the offers, but more than anything considering how the seller liked him.
Certification of management systems in the format of international ISO standards is used as one of the princeps tools for this purpose. The processes are no longer trial and error to standardize and ensure that things are always done in the same way and thus ensure customer satisfaction.
These days, and after many years under this conceptual umbrella, changes, modifications or rather symptoms of the corset begin to appear. This is clear. When someone tries to narrow the general decision paths, the path shows more sharply its shoulders, intervals and potholes.
From psychoanalysis, we understand the formations that try to channel the strictly drive (or the worth everything) as necessary and healthy. But it is also made clear that there will always be a rest on the outside.
Our subjective constitution as human beings implies that at some point in our history, there was someone who said "no" to us. Who taught us not only that "that is not done" but also that "that cannot be done". In this way, a demarcation line is established in our unconscious that establishes the limits between the possible things to be done and the others, prohibited / impossible. Taboos.
Following Freud, I say that in this way we humanize ourselves, scoring ourselves as one more within the social collective. Living with others implies clear limitations to what would be a misunderstood absolute freedom or the realm of pure passions.
However, there is something of the original, which is sometimes expressed in a condition, discomfort and in other times it can also be the creative energy capable of sublimating such drives and transforming them into something valuable for others.
The parallelism with the organizations that I am trying to describe here is given because in all of them, at some point, someone is required to write the ban, leaving a rest. The passage of the original companies, guided by the whims of one, ceases to have positive results and a third party is used, such as Quality Management Systems, called to set limits.
But it should also be noted that the idea of equalizing work processes and methods leads at times to forget about the subjects, who constitute and give life to companies. They cannot be matched. And that the old notion, so well reflected in Chaplin's “Modern Times”, in which a worker must deal with productive times, prioritizing them over his emotions, has ceased to make sense today.
We need to understand the need to situate ourselves in this new paradigm, taking the advances of standardization and including the fundamental role of people in it.
What he said above regarding “what is left out” (in one case due to parental prohibition and in another due to the normalization process) is liable to be taken up and capitalized by companies. What is on the margin is the individual contribution that each one makes from his space. The dynamism of ideas and creativity cannot and should not be limited.
On the contrary, management today is responsible for giving the subject a place that belongs to him in his own right: that of someone who feels, who is excited and who is capable of inventing that outside of the obvious and routine.
