If he did not agree, then the Progress Officer had to decide whether the overall situation warranted further action, in which case he would have to refer it up to his own manager, or whether on balance it was unrealistic to try to fulfill the customer's need on this occasion and therefore he would drop the matter. My experience since that time has continued to be that if the organizational conditions are anti-requisite and obscure then people have a great potential for destructive conflict. Bad organization is paranoigenic. It stirs suspicion and mistrust and it is certainly the case that we all have substantial stores of paranoid anxiety ready and waiting to be aroused and spread into our personal working relationships. But it has also been my consistent experience that we all have an equally great potential for constructive collaboration if the organizational conditions are made requisite and clearly articulated for everyone involved.
Good organization unleashes mutual trust and confidence.
And the most striking finding for me has been the enormous store of such positive mutual feelings and of their availability for use in constructive action. Primal trust is as powerful as primal hate or greed, or envy, and awaits the organizational conditions for full and satisfying expression. These two experiences, plus related experience in the early days at Glacier, made me realize that there is no such thing in life as situations with free floating accountability and authority, in which something of the order of generalized group processes can occur. Even in specially constructed psychotherapy or group therapy situations, key accountabilities and authority obtain. The second and equally illuminating finding was that it is possible to bring far-reaching and rapid changes in behavior and in interpersonal relationships, without any change occurring in individual personality, simply by clarifying the nature of the required working relationships, or by clarifying and modifying them.