Breaking the trance

Abstract

The father of hypnotherapy, Milton Erickson, insisted that trance was a fairly common state for individuals, one that we drop into many times a day without any help at all--not at all the sensational image we think of with the magician hypnotizing the audience volunteer, or the psychiatrist the patient. Trances have a number of things in common--they: (1) are an altered state of consciousness; (2) feel autonomous; (3) come packaged with any of a number of "Deep Trance Phenomena"; (4) tend to repeat; (5) are universal. Organizations have trances, too. They have autonomous states of mind, ways of thinking that seem to come from nowhere, that seem impossible to change. They have automatic behaviors--ways of meeting, building of bureaucratic structures, interactions between departments. If organizations had knees, we might call them "knee-jerk reactions." Or communal habits. Or organizational trances. If the trance is a harmful one, how can you loosen its grip? By building up parallel realities.