I have been thinking lately that I am suffering from an affliction I suspect many others at my workplace are also attempting to cope with: for want of a better term, “analysis paralysis.”

Ever since I began my present work assignment, I have been confronted with one ambitious “to-do list” after another. We have produced many, many lists and attempted to prioritize the items at many, many meetings I have attended. Among the giant list of tasks is the recently-revised and distributed, overwhelming, intimidating, multi-page strategic-plan document.

I have to admit: in the face of so much to do, and so little guidance about what the priorities are, I tend to remain somewhat frozen. Because, everything is a priority, I’m told. And, what I know is that when everything is a priority, nothing is. And that when everybody is responsible, nobody can be.

The organization is attempting to change several dimensions of its collective being all at the same time. Stress is high. Communication is low. Ad hoc decisions abound. Everyone is off balance; or, at least I know I am.

Come to think of it, all of this is sounding amazingly familiar. Because…

My 1995 dissertation about alcohol use and socialization in a college fraternity, used the “addictive organization” paradigm of Anne Wilson Schaef (1988) as the guiding theoretical framework. This way of looking at workgroups (and, in my study, a social group) came about as a rather logical extension of the “dysfunctional family” literature, which sees family groups behaving as addicts. Schaef proposed that it is possible to “recognize that organizations themselves are addicts, and that they function corporately the same way any individual addict functions” (p. 137).

Some of the elements of an addictive organization, according to Schaef (see chapter 4, pp. 137-176), include:

• Communication that is indirect, vague, confused, and ineffective
• Lots of gossip and many secrets
• The expression of feelings is forbidden and outside of acceptable behavioral bounds
• Loss of corporate memory; forgetfulness; inability to learn from mistakes
• Dualistic thinking (limiting available options to yes/no, black/white, no room for gray area); setting up sides
• Denial and dishonesty (problems “don’t exist” and lies protect the status quo)
• Isolation (allows for one reality as the only reality) & self-centeredness (organization feels that it is the center of the universe)
• Judgmentalism (adds the element of “bad” to people’s choices, especially when views are expressed that are counter-cultural)
• Perfectionism (mistakes are not allowed)
• Confusion and crisis orientation (everyone is always trying to figure out what is going on)
• Manipulating consumers (covering up faulty products or faulty functioning)
• Control (including personnel practices that are built on punishment not reward, as well as the belief that the organization can control how it is seen by others), and
• Lots of time and attention working on structure (looking for cosmetic ways of addressing problems rather than attempting to discover root causes)

Whew! Now that’s a long list of symptoms! (Yet another list, sorry!) Yet, for the purposes of summarizing the model here, I’ve tried to be quite concise.

My question: I just wonder if there is anybody else who might be seeing and experiencing any of my current reality?