Be the change
Spoiler alert: it is somehow possible
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about intrapreneurship and what it takes to drive and embody a transformational force that can shape how we build whatever we do. Products, services, experiences, but especially and at the very core of what we do, relationships.
Let’s start by an approximation of the definition of entre and intrapreneurship before we go a little bit further.
An entrepreneur is someone who sets off to build their own business from scratch. (…) an intrapreneur is an employee responsible for innovating change at an existing company. A sort of entrepreneur within the business.
I’d like to stress and dig a little bit deeper into what is at the very core of the making. No matter how obvious it may be or how invisible and forgotten this aspect might have gotten in the everyday of the product management and design concerns, relationships shape both what we do and who we are as part of complex and dynamic structures such as culture, society, language, etc.
Understanding and driving our actions by committing to building meaningful relationships is at the heart of the making and the reproduction of any human activity. I’m saying this since it can be really easy drowning in the vortex of bureaucracy, processes, and resorting to AI for magical, instant solutions to cope with misunderstanding and uncertainty, some real life unavoidable conditions. I don’t think is necessary to explain how deeply dangerous this can get among the professionals that are designing the now-ish and tomorrow’s world.
But, in the spirit of illustrating how this plays out in entre and intrapreneurship, I’m going to invoke the sociological concepts of agency and structure. Agency reflects intentional activities whereby individuals seek to satisfy their needs and goals while structure refers to the already-existing rules and resources employed in such actions. Of course, this, like any other social analysis category, is constrained as per social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc. that determine or limit agents and their decisions.
In the words of Anthony Giddens (British sociologist born in 1938): “Social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constitution.” This dialectical relation is key to understanding that all actions we take are determined by social phenomena and contexts.
The idea of agency goes hand in hand with the concept of performance. Which states that communication is not simply the transmission of information from one subject to another; instead, it should be approached as an interactive process whereby meanings are co-created by participants in a particular social setting; this has important implications for our understanding of who we are as subjects and how we interact with others.
In anthropology, performance theory is the study of how humans interact with each other through performing a diverse set of actions. It can be used to explore everything from ritualised practices to the way people present themselves in social contexts. Anthropologists use performance theory to research topics like identity formation, gender roles, and sexuality. It can be useful for understanding how people use performance to create and reinforce social norms.
So, makers and doers such as entre and intrapreneurs, should be very much aware of this dialectical dynamic and social constraints when making decisions in order to build better relationships, which are driven by what makes us human in every aspect: language. Which is performed.
Words, among other linguistic resources, are the means from and through which we communicate and navigate relationships. At a speech level, following Walter Ong’s Speech Act we can evoke what Iván Chausovsky, Argentinian psychoanalyst, states:
“Treat words with respect and people with words”.
We tend to project outwards how we’ve been treated and spoken to. If we don’t reflect and gain awareness on this, how can we communicate better with others to facilitate all necessary actions to drive the decision making that’s in the best interest of people and their circumstances?
We often find this idea in the conceptual form of “bias” but the term doesn’t enable much accountability in the reflection of how responsible we are in minding how we communicate and the quality of relationships we establish with others.
To gain awareness on oneself’s preconceptions and assumptions, it is necessary exposing to situations to develop sensibility towards others and their circumstances. If we are not in contact with diversity and haven’t experienced situations that involve some sort of otherness, we run the risk of being numb and insensitive, self-centred in our own and known world, leading to psychosocial impoverishment and ultimately to authoritarianism and radicalisation of oneself thoughts and beliefs.
In anthropology, ethnocentrism is how we refer to the limitations to understand the otherness represented in sociocultural expressions that are strange to the observer’s own representation by projecting the views of the world from the perspective of the own group, establishing the in-group as archetypal and rating all other groups with reference to this ideal.
In other words, to “interpret” other culture expressions by assigning our own meanings is a form of projection that replicates the very first violent act: speaking on someone else’s behalf. Imposing and reassuring our own views on the others’ experience in our own terms and structure, far from really listening openly and let the other assign their own meanings in their own terms following their own structure, no matter how weird it might seem from our own perspective.
Meaning, that there’s a sociocultural dissociation dynamic we need to apply to approximate that otherness. When conducting fieldwork, for example, anthropologists take notes of whatever is relevant about the environment, the speech and discourse elements, the social behaviour, etc. but also, we take note of our own feelings, perceptions, and prejudices since we work with our subjectivity. So when trying to make sense of it, we take our emotions into consideration to depict how we faced that otherness.
So how does sensibility and openness play out in entre/intrapreneurship?
By building respectful and meaningful relationships, since being an entre/intrapreneur is more about creating the social and material conditions to develop a project by driving constructive relationships and truly empowering people so they are enabled to become agents of change. Because if theres any warranty, is that change implies the introduction of something new and unknown, which can only be approached by the openness to otherness and common understanding.
This is mainly why social sciences and humanities are strategic — and indispensable — to drive innovation.
