Social defences against anxiety (Menzies Lyth)
Organisations develop structures, procedures and cultural habits that protect members from the anxiety stirred by the work, often at the expense of the work itself. Menzies Lyth found nurses rotated between wards and split into task lists partly so that no one formed a relationship with a dying patient.
What drives it
It turns individual defences such as splitting, denial and depersonalisation into shared routines, so no one has to feel the anxiety of the core task: risk, death, failure, responsibility for others. It explains why some procedures persist even when everyone agrees they do not work.
How it shows
Work
In a leader: insisting on more sign-offs and process after each mistake, keeping layoffs abstract with spreadsheets and codes, avoiding contact with the customers or staff affected by decisions. In a team: checklists that diffuse responsibility (“I followed the process”), decisions pushed upward so no one owns them, rotating people to stop attachment, jargon that depersonalises (‘headcount’, ‘resources’), ritual meetings that settle nothing. As the leader: when you try to remove a pointless procedure and meet fierce resistance, the procedure is probably protecting people from something; find out what before you take it away.
Relationships
Families build the same defences: rigid routines around an ill parent, a business that keeps everyone too busy to grieve, rules about what can be discussed at family meetings. They protect but keep people from contact with what is happening.
Self
Relief when a rule lets you avoid a hard judgement, a preference for process over face-to-face contact with the people your decisions affect, and anxiety when a procedure is relaxed.
What tells it apart
Defensive routines (Argyris): Argyris’s routines protect people from embarrassment in conversation; Menzies Lyth’s defences protect from anxiety inherent in the work and are built into structure, rosters and procedures.
Basic assumption groups (Bion): Basic assumptions are temporary group moods; social defences are stable systems that new members inherit and that survive staff turnover.
Isolation of affect: Isolation of affect is one person’s defence; a social defence is shared and institutional, and newcomers are trained into it.
A test
Propose removing a procedure that seems useless and watch the reaction; disproportionate anxiety or anger shows the procedure is carrying emotional weight beyond its function.
Questions to carry
- When removing a useless procedure was proposed, how strong was the reaction, and what feeling seemed to sit under it?
- Which routine at my work spares me from feeling the hardest part of the job?
How strong the research is
clinical. Based on Menzies Lyth’s consulting study of hospital nursing and widely applied in organisational consulting since; supported by case studies rather than controlled research.
Where it comes from
Elliott Jaques, 1955; Isabel Menzies Lyth, 1959 and 1960 (study of nursing in a London teaching hospital)
Sources
- Anton Obholzer and Vega Zagier Roberts (eds), The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organizational Stress in the Human Services (1994)