The soft skills of organizations, a benefit for collective learning

"When gentleness and cruelty contend for a kingdom, it is gentleness that wins the prize." 

William Shakespeare; Henry V (1599)

Invisible knowledges

The knowledges that make the difference between individuals or organizations are invisible. They take place in the shelter of the inner fort. For employees are referred to as "soft-skills". The soft skills are often attributed to employees. According to international bodies, the proposed reference systems include the ability to communicate, create, imagine,   position one's skills in a digital world. UNESCO, the World Bank, the EEC have made them issues of adaptation in a knowledge society.

Researchers in management sciences identify for their part "organizational behaviors" useful to understand to anticipate the reactions of organizations to change. A behavior is defined as an observable reaction on the part of a subject. Organizations also adopt behaviors. For example, a multinational company caught in a scandal will systematically use "language" to justify itself in order to protect its reputation. A crisis unit will set up and deliver speeches and take action.

Another example facing a difficult economic context an organization will exercise its specific way of being in the world. Thus an administration will seek to reassure and control the uncertainties for its constituents, a company will adapt its communication towards its customers, a university will wonder about the needs of its students. Each entity according to its own mission implements predictable reactions to situations, which is called organizational behavior.

Organizational behavior

Organizational behavior is studied in management science to understand how organizations react and help them evolve according to contexts, or even to change routines and beliefs. Several disciplines are mobilized to unravel the web of causes and effects that govern organizational choices. Psychosociology, psychology, history, educational sciences and of course management sciences.

These disciplines  are combined to understand the evolution of complex systems and the mechanisms of adaptations, innovations or even the perishing of the company. Human resource management is particularly interested in the issue to improve organizational justice, recognition processes, career and promotion dynamics and training dynamics.

The softness of organizational behaviors

Organizations too have soft skills. There are four essential ones

• Organizational creativity which is defined by Durand (2006) as a "process by which an organization modifies its constitution with the aim of both acting on the behavior of individuals in relation to the resources made available by the organization and sustaining its action over time" and the ability to create transformative "organizational objects." through new participatory practices (design, facilitation, new project, creation of "professional dispute", dialogue space)
  
  
• Learning to learn together : in this respect, all pedagogical methods that promote the energy to carry out collective projects, to take up challenges, to protect the right to make mistakes and to experiment, to create reflexivity loops participate in this organizational know-how.
  
  
• Freely consensual cooperation that benefits group action versus individual action, the logic of the collective intelligence of swarms of birds or fish capable of producing powerful system effects for the benefit of each of its members.
  
  
• "Critical sense" continuous search of all to move from a complexity that inhibits us to a simplexity that goes to the essential  and  that takes us into action. This critical sense is present in all critical studies in management, sociology, history, etc. and seeks to get out of simplistic solutions by striving to deconstruct a reality that would be immutable

The acquisition of new organizational behaviors requires more imagination. In order to have more imagination we need to found new imaginations, to allow ourselves time to daydream, so that our minds are less constrained by immediate productivity. Indeed, if our schedules and our minds are filled with things to do or to think about, there is hardly any space available for new ideas to emerge. If the critical sense is prohibited no favorable divergence will be possible.

Sweet organizational skills know how to allow time for loitering, to leave room for play in the oiled mechanisms of processes to allow teams, collectives to individuals to evolve their actions to create new reference points and new values.

Sources

Delobbe, N., Herrbach, O., & Lacaze, D. (2005). Organizational behavior -Vol. 1: Psychological contract, emotions at work, organizational socialization (Vol. 1). De Boeck Supérieur.

El Akremi, A., Guerrero, S., & Neveu, J. P. (2006). Organizational behavior-Vol. 2: Organizational justice, career issues and burnout (Vol. 2). De Boeck Supérieur.

Allali, B. (2004). For a typology of organizational behaviors in the face of innovation. Gestion, 29(4), 23-30.

Thot cursus edu. Denis Cristol. The 21st century skills limit https://cursus.edu/fr/12182/la-limite-des-competences-du-xxieme-siecle  

Durand, R. (2006). Organizational creativity. Revue française de gestion, no<(sup> 161), 91-94. https://doi.org/ 

Thot Cursus edu Cristol Denis - Learning to Learn Together https://cursus.edu/fr/22378/apprendre-a-apprendre-ensemble  

Thurler, M. G. (1994). Professional relations and school culture: beyond the cult of individualism? Revue française de pédagogie, 19-39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41200478  

Berthoz, A., & Petit, J. L. (2014). Complexity-simplexity. Paris: Collège de France. https://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/files/PhilosophyAndCognition/IncompressReel.pdf