By Jacob Storch and Morten Ziethen
How do people start claiming that something else is the case instead of that what earlier counted as self-evident in the local language-community? Rorty’s answer to that question is that new insights do not come because people discover new facts about the world. Instead, new insights emerge when new ways of talking are created.
At the time of the general economic downturn in 2008/9, Storch (one of the authors of this article) was asked (due to his position as director and founder) to give his account of the market outlook at a staff meeting in our company, a Scandinavian consulting firm whose OD Practice is based on the systemic tradition (Bateson, Maturana, and Varela, the Milano School, etc.) and social constructionism (Gergen, Cooperrider, etc.). Storch’s immediate concern at the time was with how media and politicians were continuously talking about a recession and with it all the numbers and statistics that supported that label. He was concerned about how the cacophony of worried voices could result in a foggy, anxiety-provoking experience of the situation and the impact that would have on his employees and the firm.
In this article we will describe an approach to leadership and organization development that turned that situation from one of depressed anxiety to one of energized optimism. We will describe a source of generativity in OD (Bushe, 2007; 2013), called re-description, which is performed through the combined use of irony and metaphors, based on the philosophy of Richard Rorty (1979, 1989, 1991, 1999). Despite the fact that Rorty has had a heavy impact on the so-called “postmodern turn” within humanities and social sciences, it is uncommon to use him in OD (with a few exceptions such as Tsoukas & Chia, 2002).
For that reason this article is divided into four parts: Part one introduces Rorty and his considerations concerning transformational change; part two works out the inner relation between irony and metaphor; part three reports on a case where Rorty was used for OD; while part four discusses both possibilities and challenges when carrying out this Rortyrian approach in the field of OD.
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