By Katia Del Rivero
· 3 cups of complaints
· A pinch of “listening complains”, don’t put too much, it could be bad for you!
· 2 teaspoons of “complain about stuff together”
And if you add a little bit of “old memories”, looking at “better times”, you will not only contribute for the company to stay static, you will make them cherish something that will probably do no good.
They’re two different propositions on the etymology of the word complain.
The first one comes from the Latin verb “coaxare”, which means croak. It seems that the sustenance of this proposition is that humans make a similar sound when we express pain, nuisance, grief is phonetically similar.
The second one places the etymological origin in the Latin word “quassare” which means “hit aggressively, shatter”, talking about something that troubles us, that attacks us.
In both cases the origin refers to a passive expression about something that bothers me, makes me uncomfortable, where the onomatopoeia express and doesn’t invite to action, movement, or change.
Funny thing is this also tends to happen in the social system called business.
When Change is not Enough Anymore
In today’s organizations, change is not enough anymore. According with the new trends, now we don’t talk anymore about changing organizations, but about transforming organizations. What’s the difference? Even though in both cases we are talking about movement, when we talk about change we give something in order to get something new. We make a barter giving what we have in exchange for what we want. In the case of the word transformation, there’s no barter but a modification in the form, taking what’s useful of the previous form for generating a new one.
Some affirm that in change you can lose the positive that was there before, instead of adding the necessary adjustments for minimizing what’s negative and that in transformation the process is more oriented to modify or correct, giving value to what was positive before.
What seems true is that both of them are processes, movements, and they cannot be achieved from passiveness.
If complaining is a passive expression of something that troubles us, then it seems opposite to the need of movement, of change, of transformation that requires letting out that which “hits us aggressively” or simply “attacks us”.
How is it that Complaint Keeps Us Passive?
Because we get confused. We believe that by expressing what we don’t like, what bothers us, what causes us trouble “we are making something” and we don’t realize that we are making onomatopoeias whitout action.
In order to change or transform, you need action!
As we’ve already say, from the perspective of the Blumenstein Theory an organization is a social system and social systems are made from our contributions. If we don’t like what we have today, is only the result of our contributions. If we want something different we have to change our contributions.
And contributions are behaviors, therefore what we must change is our behavior, our agreements, our decisions, what we do.
Finally, the complaint talks about something that already happened, not about what we want to happen. And as we’ve explored in other articles, understanding or talking about what happened before doesn’t mean that we know “what we need to happen” in order to achieve the purpose we want to achieve.
So less complaints and more action, less past and more future, less magic recipes and more co-responsible, shared and autonomous social construction processes.
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