Perhaps Edith Egger could contribute, notes taken from her book, The Choice:
Pg 174 At Auschwitz, at Mauthausen, on the death march, Edith survived by drawing on her inner world. She found hope and faith in life within her, even when she was surrounded by starvation and torture and death. After her first flashback, she began to believe that her inner world was where the demons existed. That there was a blight deep inside her. Her inner world was no longer sustaining, it became the source of her pain: unstoppable memories, loss, fear. She could be standing in a queue at the fish counter and when the clerk called her name she would see Mengles face transposed over his. Walking into the factory some mornings she would see her mother beside her as plain as day, she would see her turn her back and walk away . She tried to banish her memories of the past. She thought it was a matter of survival . Only after many years did she come to understand that running away does not heal pain. She made a cell of her dread and sealed the lock with silence.
In some way I am reminded of organisational change where an advocate of change would weigh up the positions of other stakeholders and when the time comes unlock the system, promote the change and once accepted, close the system back down with the change accepted as part of the normal business processes. But in the situation Edith describes, she had already accepted the new way of doing things, the economic environment and social conditions are the accepted norm. The old ways are not talked about or considered. Redundancies, bad debt, change of management team are all possible reasons why there has been a change from a bad situation. If the past cannot be discussed, there is a chance of repeating the mistakes again.
Risk management should have recorded the event for consequences and causes investigated, root cause analysis should have been applied. Yet these are rational tools for rational situations. What happens in the context of survival, if the events have been too horrific, embarrassing, or litigation costs too great, to document or disclose to other staff? For example the cases of Harold Shipman, The Stafford hospital, the Ian Paterson scandals, the Gosports? Didn’t these situation lead to secrecy, to a culture of guarded behavior, to shift the blame to others or fail to acknowledge what was going on? These events happened during relative prosperity within the system, imagine how much worse things could get when the economic hardship really tightens its grip.
What structures are most prone to guardedness, blame, secrecy and denial? A coercive hierarchical structure or one which is transparent, self organising, confederal? Where is it most likely that someone will thump the desk and say I am not supporting this form of abuse?
