مشاوره و تحمل پیچیدگی

This paper explores mentoring in the light of complexity theory and the premium placed upon knowledge in organisational viability. A key question is “what is the role of mentoring, as a developmental and knowledge creating process, in a complex environment?” There are two parts to the discussion. First, we explore complexity at work, and what it means for the individual. We link the central ideas of complexity theory with the notion of a ‘corporate curriculum’, an inclusive concept intended to capture the complex nature of learning at work, in all its variants. Secondly, we speculate on the contribution mentoring can make in complex organisations where employees are part of a knowledge economy by virtue of being knowledge producers and being engaged in learning at work. The environments in which we work are becoming more complex and mentoring is also complex. There is a synergy here. For people living in complexity where there are few rules, no right answers and no predictable outcomes, we suggest that mentoring can play a distinctive role in helping people to ‘tolerate’ complexity and remain effective.

Kessels [1] argues that “organisations have a direct stake in the personal enrichment of employees because excellence on the job requires employees who are comfortable with their work and who have strong and stable personalities. Personal enrichment is thus less an employee privilege than a condition for good performance.” His may be a challenging statement for people working within a capitalist society as it suggests that economic progress, is strongly associated with social conditions, learning and a sense of morality. Mentoring is becoming increasingly employed in a range of occupational settings [2]. We speculate that this is because mentoring activity encourages and facilitates informal or ‘open’ learning (see page 11). More traditional formal or ‘closed’ approaches to learning are increasingly being criticised for not delivering enhanced capability and performance to organisations [3]. Against this background it becomes inevitable that alternatives to the ‘formal’ are investigated by organisations. In the context of workplace learning concepts such as “situated learning” [4] and the “zone of proximal development” [5] take on particular significance for there can be little doubt that the message in these theories is very clear — learning is a social activity. Workplace mentoring (as we conceive it, see page 5) because it is social, situated in the “zone of proximal development” [6] and involves both the cognitive and the meta-cognitive is all-engaging and is therefore learning of a higher mental order. Gladstone [7] cites Bolles [8] as stating that “a mentor is the highest level educator” (8: 10). And, Vygotsky [6] would agree Any higher mental function necessarily goes through an external stage in its development because it is initially a social function…Any higher mental function was external because it was social at some point before becoming an internal, truly mental function. (p. 162) Mentoring is related to and associated with reconceptualisations of organisations, such as the “knowledge-creating company” [9].

We have highlighted that rather than the mentor helping the mentee do the job in hand, the role is to help the mentee ask — what is the job in a complex environment? — a central question in a developing knowledge productive organisation. However, if the role were only that, the mentee would sooner or later not have a job to do! The task is also to discover what the mentee needs to do a job that is ever changing and subject to multiple influences in unpredictable ways. It is to explore the mentee's need to be true to themselves and to thrive in a state of bounded instability — a state, we have argued, in which organisations will increasingly find themselves in the future. There is a challenge here for all people in the work place. Mentoring, located within a rich landscape of a corporate curriculum, has the potential to help people tolerate the increasing complexity of their lives. However, mentoring, being complex, is not always readily accepted or understood. It is often simplified [11] and thus its potential remains untapped. Therefore we suspect that were a connoisseur of wine to discuss “mentoring and the appreciation of complex wine”, their argument would have parallels with what we have sketched above. The connoisseur of wine may prefer the term ‘fine’, rather than ‘complex’, and they may describe the challenge of mentoring as the avoidance of yet one more coarsened and oversimplified palate.