Jakob Rømer Barfod

Until the fall of the Berlin Wall the Danish Defence was primarily trained in conducting symmetric military operations. With the change of Danish foreign politics and following participating in international operations, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, the patterns of operations changed. Suddenly, it was extremely important that the Danish Defence transformed to a more expeditionary force capable of conducting asymmetric operations in different environments far away from Denmark. This is not done overnight but demands a new situational awareness in proportion to the need for leadership. As tactics, doctrines, technologies and procedures had to be developed and changed, there was also a need for developing the approach to leadership. Suddenly the challenges in the operations were not only IEDs, ambushes, shootings and deprivation of families, but also leadership challenges in military staffs and units, which in many cases acted and commanded based on a mindset of linear and symmetric warfare with great emphasis on analysis of primarily cause and effect.On that basis, the Danish Defence around mid-2000 developed a new operational leadership concept with a changed and different leadership focus, which should help deploying units at battalion level to counter the increased complexity of leadership in asymmetric operations. Much attention is in this concept given to the preparation of teams performing these missions. The teams consist of leaders and personnel from very different organizational cultures and backgrounds who must work together under great pressure: if necessary, they must take the life of others and risk their own lives in order to achieve specific goals. An important part of the preparation is a process of creating a common language and shared concepts between team members.The presentation shows how this is achieved through the successful program called ‘Leadership with an operational effect’. The sum of the team members’ experiences with the program shows that it improves their decision making, coordination of actions, and fighting capability.The presenter is a reflective practitioner with an operational background as commanding officer of a reconnaissance squadron with first-hand experience with the concept from his work as a consultant in Afghanistan and at the Royal Danish Army Officers’ Academy and the Royal Danish Defence Academy.

Mergers between organisations are increasingly becoming a reality. One of the main reasons is the desire to achieve synergies. However, in the public life of Western societies there is a tendency in the name of ‘New Public Management’ to mainly focus on economical calcules and business strategies, while ‘softer’ aspects such as people and their feelings, values and culture are neglected.This thesis takes as its starting point an intensive case-study of xxx (confidential) and xxx (confidential)– two public educational institutions which are about to be merged. The focus in this thesis is on the abovementioned ‘soft’ aspects, as the merger is analyzed from a system theoretical and psychodynamics angle. As a result, the revolving point of the analysis is the narratives the schools have created about themselves and each other, and how the derived influence affects the way the change process is experienced and handled by the two schools. What kind of organisation-in-the-mind have the schools created, is in this regard interesting to analyze.The empirical foundation for this work is a combination of material from different sources, but primarily from four narrative interviews based on a drawing made by the persons interviewed. As Freud said: “Dreams are the Royal Road to the Unconscious”, and taking this quotation as our point of departure we allow ourselves to approach the narratives as manifest symptoms of unconscious processes.To add a theoretical perspective to the empirical material, the starting point is the psychodynamics theory inspired by theorists like Freud, Miller and Rice, Klein, Bion, Armstrong, Hirschhorn and Visholm who all – in a systems theoretically perspective – primarily ‘work below the surface’ in the psychodynamics area. To complement this line of thought, the traditional organizational thinking of e.g. John P. Kotter and Edgar Schein is incorporated. Based on this analysis using key notions from the psychodynamics theory the thesis reveals xxx and xxx to be two organisations regrediated to the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions due to the anxiety for the future driven by more or less unrealistic fantasies – organisation-in-the-mind. In general terms they seem to have difficulties in addressing the right primary task and thereby leaving what Bion called the workgroup finding themselves stocked wandering between basic assumption groups fight/flight and pairing. Hence, the managements have not been able to adequately contain the organisations’ anxiety and frustration and handle the task of corporate integration and have also lacked a sufficient understanding of creating a ‘holding environment’ for the employees.