When the Organisation Encounters Itself: Hosting Conversations Around Undecidable Premises

Reflexive Spaces, Containment, and the Work with Culture

Part 3 of a series on narrative inquiry, organisational culture, and conversations for change.

In the previous articles, we explored how organisational culture operates through undecidable decision premises—historical distinctions that cannot simply be changed by decree—and how narrative inquiry offers situational indicators that allow us to observe how people observe.

Yet having narrative patterns, catalytic questions, or a collection of vivid lived experiences in hand is not the complete intervention, but only the threshold.

The temptation at this stage is to believe that because patterns have been identified, action will naturally follow: “Now that we see what is going on, we can fix it.” But the ongoing process of organising does not automatically reconfigure itself just because a hidden dynamic has surfaced. In fact, pointing it out often triggers the system’s immune response, making “sitting on the threshold” one of the practitioner’s most important invitations.

When the system encounters itself

The central idea is not to persuade an organisation to rush from pattern to action. It is to host a conversation around a theme that may touch on its undecidable decision premises, and to create enough of a holding environment for the inquiry to continue.

This does not mean making the conversation comfortable, securing agreement, or treating every discomfort as a sign that something has gone wrong. It means creating conditions in which people can remain in contact with a difficult theme long enough to think and speak about it, rather than immediately dismissing it, personalising it, turning it into blame, or closing it down.

Recognition, disagreement, hesitation, discomfort, and defensiveness can all become part of the work. The question is not whether participants welcome a hypothesis or interpretation. It is whether the group can stay with the theme, connect it to experience, offer counterexamples, challenge its framing, and continue in inquiry.

In social systems theory, an organization reproduces itself through continuity and predictability. When an inquiry touches upon undecidable decision premises, it threatens the very shortcuts the system relies on to operate without existential paralysis. Discomfort is not evidence that the intervention has gone astray; it is, more likely, evidence of the contrary: that the inquiry has actually arrived at something consequential.

The difference between a productive and counterproductive conversation is not shown by the patterns alone. It becomes apparent in the responses given when the organisation encounters the themes raised from the data.

Those responses—or the lack of response—matter. In practice, we may encounter humour, silence, defensiveness, relief, anger, or a quick change of subject. We should not treat a response simply as confirmation or dismissal. They may challenge our hypothesis as much as deepen it. But they can also show what is at stake in bringing a theme into communication.

Power, presence, and containment

We also need to ask whose responses we are able to hear. Silence is not one thing, and neither is agreement. The consequences of speaking differ by role, tenure, status, employment relationship, identity, and proximity to authority. A hosted conversation is deeply embedded in this dynamic. The work includes reflecting on who can participate, who is absent, who can safely disagree, and whose interpretation is likely to become consequential.

Hosting space in this context means helping contain what becomes difficult in the conversation: the anxiety, ambiguity, conflict, and uncertainty that arise when established premises become available for reflection. There are other forces acting on containment in any group, but it is usually the host who takes up the explicit role of paying attention to it, bringing it forward when needed.

This notion of a holding environment—drawn from psychodynamic traditions—establishes a temporary space where we hold the collective boundaries of time, focus, and curiosity firmly enough that the group can tolerate anxiety in the face of unanswerable questions.

Every intervention by the host is contingent and relational. A rush to resolve tension may simply be the host’s own anxiety at play; offering a tidy framework might provide a temporary scaffold, but it can also become a subtle control mechanism. In the work of change, the host’s primary task is to tune in to what is showing up in the room and offer their contribution to sustain the tension needed for new distinctions to be explored.

Thematizing the conversation itself

As we’ve mentioned, the sensibility for what themes or tensions can or should be explored is never exclusively in the hands of the host or change agent. It can become one of the themes of the conversation itself: What can we talk about here? How can we talk about it? And what happens when we do?

As Jesper Tække writes in his Luhmannian analysis of organisational culture:(1)

“Reflexively, thematization itself can be thematized.”

We can discuss a theme, but we can also discuss how that theme is being introduced and what meanings we are giving it. We can ask not only what “accountability” means, for example, but what happens in our conversations when someone invokes accountability.

It is often the role of the change agent to lead or influence the creation of such reflexive spaces: spaces where an organisation can communicate about its own communication.

Tække describes reflexivity as vital for the development of semantics—the ongoing negotiation of shared meanings—and for working with decision premises. At the same time, culture can constrain whether reflexive communication is possible at all.

That tension is familiar in practice. We are attempting to create a space for reflection using the very premises that may limit reflection. You are always inside the room, speaking with words that carry sedimented organizational meanings, subject to the same anxieties about status and belonging. Stepping into reflexivity means acknowledging this circularity rather than pretending we have escaped it.

Beyond the room: Returning to lived experience

When we sit with a group and narrative data, we may have more situational indicators at hand. That does not mean there will be less anxiety, less defensiveness, or less risk for those participating in the inquiry.

As Tække cautions:

“Challenging cultural values, articulating contradictions, or even defining the values themselves risks alienation and reputational harm.”

Having indicators that support novel conversations is an affordance. It is not enough on its own.

A hosted conversation is not yet a changed organisational pattern. Its significance depends on what happens afterwards: whether a distinction is taken up again, whether a different action becomes possible, and how that action is received in subsequent communication.

Consider how an act as simple as asking for help can mean completely different things across an organisation: in one team, asking early is treated as responsible collaboration; in another, it is judged as incompetence or personal weakness. If a hosted conversation brings that implicit tension into view, it makes a new distinction available for people to use in subsequent everyday situations. Someone might dare to ask earlier, respond with less irritation to a colleague’s request, or question an unwritten rule about what competence requires. Whether that becomes a different way of organising depends on what follows—not only on what was said in the room.

The work is to return to lived experience: to create spaces, invitations, and opportunities for reflection that can hold the tension between stability and unpredictability, inquiry and anxiety.

For me, this is what reading Tække alongside narrative practice brings into focus. It protects us from two equal and opposite illusions: the managerial illusion that culture is a set of dials you can adjust by executive mandate, and the diagnostic illusion that uncovering data is sufficient to change how people relate to one another.

We are not deciding what the culture should be and then installing it. We are listening to how people make organisation, making some of those patterns available for reflection, and hosting conversations in which different meanings and actions may become possible.

We have answers to questions that we’ve never asked ourselves.

Sometimes the work is to make room for the question again.

Reference

(1) Tække, Jesper. “Luhmann and Organization Culture: A Systems Theoretical Analytical Strategy.” Paper presented at the EURAM 2025 Annual Conference, University of Florence, Florence, Italy, June 22–25, 2025.