Edgy Ideas 110: Authority Without Hierarchy: Leadership and the Emotional Life of Organisations
What happens to authority when hierarchy begins to disappear? And why might leaders themselves be part of the problems they are trying to solve?
In this episode of Edgy Ideas, Simon Western is joined by Dr Larry Hirschhorn - founder and Principal Emeritus of CFAR and a leading thinker in systems psychodynamics and organisational consulting.
Drawing on a lifetime of working with organisations, Larry discusses the tension between the independence leaders need and the danger of becoming caught in an idealised image of themselves. Challenging the notion that authority disappears in flatter organisations, Larry shares how it actually becomes more personal, relational and political.
Larry introduces his idea of 'Primary Risk' - asking what we foreground and what we fail to notice when making strategic decisions. He also shares his most interesting emerging work with Reversal Theory, offering a less pathologising way of understanding how groups actually work.
Simon and Larry also reflect on why systems psychodynamics remains at the margins of organisational life. The conversation ends with a refelction on how might we create a good life that holds together our desire for individual freedom and our yearning for collective life.
Key Reflections
- Leadership requires separateness, but this can easily slip into self-idealisation.
- Less hierarchy does not mean less authority; it makes authority more relational, personal and political.
- Primary Risk asks us to notice what our strategies push into the background.
- Groups need to move between challenge and consensus, purpose and playfulness.
- Leaders are part of the systems they are trying to understand and change.
- Psychodynamic thinking may be most useful when the theory stays in the background and the organisation’s real challenges stay in the foreground.
- The good life requires finding ways to hold individual freedom and collective belonging together.
Keywords
Leadership; Authority; Systems Psychodynamics; Primary Risk; Reversal Theory; Group Dynamics; Distributed Leadership; Organisational Politics; Strategy; Collective Life
Brief Bio
Dr. Larry Hirschhorn is a founder and Principal Emeritus at CFAR, a management consulting firm specialising in organisational development, strategy, change implementation, collaboration and leadership transition. With over four decades of experience as an organisational consultant, scholar and thought leader, Larry has worked extensively with leaders and organisations on strategy formulation and execution, organisational diagnosis and organisational design.
He is the Director of CFAR’s Dynamics of Consulting Program, an advanced programme for experienced consultants and coaches that explores the intersections between business dynamics and psychodynamics.
Trained as an economist, with a PhD from MIT, and later as a psychoanalytically informed organisational consultant, Larry is widely recognised for his work on the psychodynamics of organisations and for connecting the deeper dynamics of groups, relationships and decision-making with the practical realities of strategy and organisational performance.
Larry is also a founding member and former President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO). A prolific writer, he has received several awards for his work, including the Eliot Jaques Award from the Society of Consulting Psychology, as well as journal awards for his writing on organisational life, leadership and moral purpose. He has also held faculty and teaching roles at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, Fielding Graduate University and the William Alanson White Institute.