The corporatization of belonging

I recently attended a conference session that made me uneasy, and not in a constructive way. I won’t name names, but the session was centered around a specific program to increase “belonging” in organizations and included statistics such as:

“Only 13% of organizations are ready to actually implement belonging as a practice.”

“47% of our audiences are lonely.”

When the presenter said increasing belonging would be beneficial, I asked: “To whom, the organization or the employees?” The answer, after a pause, was “Both”.

While I hope this is genuinely the case, my doubts persist.

Why I’m suspicious of programs to increase organizational belonging

First of all, what is belonging? Curiously, Wikipedia lacks a direct entry for the term ‘belonging’! Instead, it includes a long article on “belongingness” that provides a nebulous introduction, including a short section on belonging in the workplace (see below).

Lewis Carroll’s famous quip, “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean,” comes to mind here.

I worry that some people are corporatizing “belonging” to make a buck.

Here are four reasons I’m suspicious of the presenter’s program to increase organizational belonging.

1. What does successful belonging look like?

A great technique for looking at ideas from a fresh perspective is reverse brainstorming, aka “Let’s make it suck.”

When I applied this approach to “implementing belonging as a practice”, guess what first came to mind?

The most successful example of belonging is a cult!

This is not the kind of belonging that appeals to most people. Except for cult members.

In addition, a short section of the belongingness Wikipedia article covers belonging in the workplace. It includes this slightly ominous sentence:

“Charismatic leaders influence followers by bringing awareness to the collective unit and strengthening the feeling of belonging, and that enhances employees’ compliance.”

Enhancing compliance via “strengthening the feeling of belonging” is advantageous for an organization led by a charismatic leader. But what’s the benefit for the employees?

2. “Belonging” is a binary concept

“Belonging” is a binary concept. You belong or you don’t.

However, except in extreme situations—like cults—our relationships with peers and organizations are much more nuanced. You can be a member of an organization without feeling you belong to it. At times, you may feel strongly or weakly connected to your peers. Over time, your peer groups change. These days, belonging to an organization, if even possible, is unlikely to consist of forty years of devotion with an engraved watch on retirement.

This is why my ikigai is about facilitating connection, rather than attempting to force belonging.

“Implementing belonging” is trying to force an employee’s time-dependent experiences of connection into a yes/no box.

3. We can improve organizations without programs to increase belonging

The session presenter began talking about how they use stories to implement belonging. I asked whether they were familiar with Appreciative Inquiry, (the original AI 😀) a pioneering approach from the 1980s, and how their method was different.

After another pause, the presenter said they did know of Appreciative Inquiry.

They did not answer my second question.

From the Wikipedia article on Appreciative Inquiry:

“AI revolutionized the field of organization development and was a precursor to the rise of positive organization studies and the strengths based movement in American management.”

“AI advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.”
—Gervase Bushe, professor of leadership and organization development at the Beedie School of Business

Although I’m not trained in AI, the approach is simple enough that I’ve often used it with clients to build a positive environment before moving into the “problems” they’ve hired me to solve. It strengthens connections between employees and their organization by uncovering and sharing good experiences and expertise that live in the culture of all but the most dysfunctional organizations.

Tip: (A good and inexpensive introduction to the simplicity of Appreciative Inquiry is The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry by Sue Annis Hammond.)

4. Let’s add a computer and make money!

The presenter explained that their approach involved recording stories and feeding them into a computer which analyzed the words used and classified the sharer’s type of belonging. They did not go into detail, because the whole process, including opaque computer intermediation, is the secret sauce they’re selling.

Using a computer to quantify “belonging”, in some unknown and likely unscientific way, is a classic example of building an unverified model of a system and then believing in its pronostications. Until this approach has a verifiable scientific basis, from my (50+ years) experience of model building it should be treated with extreme skepticism.

I wouldn’t pay for it.

An alternative

We already have at least one well-established method, Appreciative Inquiry, that uses positive human-mediated processes to meaningfully transform organizations. There may be others I’m unaware of.

Enticing organizations with the promise of quantifying ‘belonging’—a concept that may not lend itself to such reduction—seems, at best, to be overhyped, and at worst, misleading.

Scientology’s “SeaOrg” image attribution: Flickr user anonymous9000 [License]