Mudlarking through organisational culture

In this chapter, I explore how the metaphor, ontology and technique of mudlarking can shine a light on organisational culture providing us with more awareness, choice and agency on what organisation development (OD) practitioners can do. This chapter was developed through a series of foreshore excursions along the River Thames to record audio, video and photographs. The aim was to bring embodied and speculative methods to the practice of organisation developmentOD through a series of workshops that I ran. In doing so, I reflect on the experience in the context of Goethe’s notion of exact sensorial imagination, namely the importance of slowing down and noticing what is around us and the opportunities that this offers, something that is rarely discussed in the organisation developmentOD literature. Mudlarkers can often be seen on the foreshore of the river Thames in London looking for items from the past in the mud and gravel under their feet. A combination of an ancient port and capital city means that the tide continuingly churns the artefacts of the past. Over the centuries, destitute mudlarkers have slowly made their way along the foreshore at low tide eking out a meagre living. Nowadays mudlarking is for those who are keen to pursue their interest in history. Items discovered during mudlarking often include delicate Roman hairpins, fragments of medieval water jugs and Tudor buttons, and Victorian small change, ships’ nails and contemporary messages in a bottle. Mudlarking and what it reveals fascinates me, as does how we come to understand culture in organisations. In this chapter, I explore how mudlarking helps facilitate an understanding of organisational life and culture in terms of: (1) how we might refresh our worldview as to what counts for knowledge, (2) how we might develop techniques to notice, record and curate everyday items and encounters, and (3) how metaphor can be used to explore organisational culture. For you are an organisation development (OD) practitioners and consultants, the issue of culture is important, as it provides the backdrop that legitimises the norms, mores and behaviours of what is considered acceptable and not acceptable (Schein, 2004). In short, if you get the organisational culture right, then good things happen. However, more often than not in this field, we try to pin these ephemeral qualities down with surveys and questionnaires with rigid ‘yes/no’ questions that give judgement without context. The practical experience of walking on the foreshore creating film and audio enables the OD specialist to bring to the fore other ways of knowing as part of their practice. In this assertion, I am exploring interpretivism (Nickerson, 2022) whereby individuals recognise that they are integral to what is going on around them. Drawing inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in this chapter, I focus on one particular avenue, that of the nature and processes of exact sensorial imagination. I do this by drawing on the work of the physicist and philosopher Henri Bortoft (1996). By descending to, walking on and recording the foreshore via video and audio, I consider how engaging in a combination of ontology, technique and metaphor enables those with an interest in organisational life to see and develop their practice in new ways. The This chapter is organised around three main parts: an overview of mudlarking as a relevant interpretative practice; a set of practical exercises that draw upon this overview; and some concluding observations of the relevance of the mudlarking analogy to understanding and contributing to organisational culture.