Working with Defences Against Innovation: The Forensic Challenge

The paper explores the processes by which innovations that may be essential to the continuing survival and development of an enterprise within a turbulent environment can be unconsciously “murdered” in defence of the identifications supported by the present structures of the enterprise. It does this by using an example of institutional racism to examine three forms of defence against innovation. These defences are responses to behaviours that are felt by the members of the enterprise to threaten the way the enterprise supports their identities and are: first, a flight to the personal by seeking to blame individuals; second, ignoring what is going on by turning a blind eye; and third, betraying the “other” through dismissing and excluding engagement with the other's experience, the “other” being those whose identifications are not currently supported by the enterprise either in part or at all. The paper draws on a Lacanian reading of Freud in order to give a psychoanalytic account of all three forms of defence and of the way these defences are supported by the structures, workings, and culture of the enterprise. It concludes that one way of working with these defences is through forensic examination of how the structures of an enterprise are currently being used in support of its members' identifications. Such an examination provides a means of preventing repeated “murders” through understanding how these structures are being used to kill innovation by the way they insist on particular ways of holding the underlying dilemmas facing the enterprise.