Is Frozen the Real Thief of Joy at Work?

Not whistling while you work? Could fairy tales warn of the perils of holding rigid beliefs in our workplaces?

How amazing is it to be an adult? You’ve sidestepped the perils of childhood ~ you know the ones ~ wolves on the path, ever-ready to eat you up, or adults who want to cook you in the oven, and (there’s a theme developing here) once again, eat you up. On the surface, fairy tales tell us, once we are through those tricky teen years and finally inhabiting our sovereign adulthood, nothing can eat us alive!

However, if we take a light-hearted systemic analysis 101 approach to characters and events in fairy tales, we might find that, even as adults, we still aren’t entirely impervious to being eaten alive. In fact, we can encounter an even worse fate: becoming self-consuming. Many tales seem to show us that becoming rigidly frozen in our thinking can lead us away from the joy that can be found at work and down the path of misery eating us alive!

Most of us pride ourselves in spotting and avoiding extremely rigid behaviours that would destabilize our place in the systems that, when working well, bring us the joy of service to an organisation. As children, we absorbed the fate of Rumpelstiltskin who simply can’t accept that he can’t always win. And he’s a pretty sore loser. He’s the guy that took losing so badly that his foot-stamping tantrum had him disappear in a puff of smoke ~ he literally blows himself up with rage. As kids, then, we noticed that NOT rolling with the punches is dangerous. Rumpelstiltskin’s fate serves as an excellent cautionary tale for what happens to our careers when someone in the workplace proves better at doing our job than we are and we simply aren’t prepared to give up a superior status that our egos are entangled with. But the lesson in that particular tale is fairly easy to put into place ~ let your ego sway with the breeze, keep the tantrums for the journey home in order to keep enjoying the pay packet each month.

If your conscious critical factors are arguing with the idea that adults in a workplace have anything at all to learn from a kid’s fairy tale, it’s worth remembering that according to Joseph Campbell’s A Hero with a Thousand Faces, we are ALL of the archetypal characters in stories and so we are capable of behaving in the myriad of ways they behave at any point in our own lives.

So, with our ever increasing interest in mental wealth, can we draw on wisdom we’ve internalised from fairy tales to avoid some of the more extreme pitfalls of the archetypal behaviours we embody? Can we re-learn why flexing and transforming actually engenders joy in our organisations?

Let’s explore one character’s frozen rigidity and see where the community she lives in is missing effective leverage to get things moving again, so to speak. We’ll see if a simple peek at the system helps to offer the answers to bring back the elixir for the good of the individual and the whole community.

Let’s take the Stepmother in Snow White. Her evolution has stalled. Having been, for a while, an inhabitant of a meat suit that just so happens to be a genetic match to the fashions in beauty when she reaches early womanhood (notice this is not a skill that she offers, merely a state of being), her face is now in an unwinnable race against time. She wants to be a frozen image in the mirror: the fairest of them all. Stepmother has no problem with Snow White until Snow White evolves into beauty’s pack leader. From that moment on, the step-mother begins to suffer from self-inflicted inflexibility and it’s this rigidity whose ripples affect the whole community to their detriment.

To be fair to Stepmother, she has faithfully absorbed the rules of her job role of being a woman in the patriarchal organisation of her workplace Palace Inc ~ that women are only valued if visually and sexually pleasing ~ and her actions from here on in are based around her need to continue to be valued. We can forgive her for this: wanting to be valued is a huge driver for human beings and, in the workplace, it’s often for employees the most sought after experience they desire from their workplaces.

If we take time to look closely at the skills she actually has ~ she is a great procurer of magical objects like the enchanted mirror and she has the ability to make up efficient sleeping drafts, something any pharmaceutical company might take a keen interest in, if they cared to consider she might be a skilled chemist ~ we begin to see that she has much to offer the village. What society doesn’t want finders and chemists? We begin to see that this society might have overlooked her skills, had it been more conscious of a right person, right job, right time cultural mentality. Alas, with only her beauty of value, her skills in these areas are left unused for the greater good. No elixirs here.

Alas, as it stands, her face is her only legitimate money-maker at Palace Inc. The rigid patriarchal culture creates the unfortunate rigidity in Stepmother. And the pertinent point is they are both poorer as a result. This rigidity in applying the rule of ‘beauty first’ for the women at the palace and its court means to have any further agency in that organisation, Stepmother has to solve the problem. Her initial solution, the point in the system where she believes she has the greatest leverage, is to wipe herself of conscience, sending her husband’s daughter to what she thinks is her death, put her husband through the agonies of having lost a child, smear the good conscience of the Huntsman by insisting he kills Snow White (luckily we can only influence a system not control it and his kind heart is moved by Snow White’s blind innocence, his heart being a bigger influence than the wrath of Stepmother) and attempt to deprive the organisation of whatever talents Snow White will grow to have beyond her beauty, because, it doesn’t really matter that Snow White is beautiful, just that she is coming to the age where she is able to offer her skills that might be of benefit in any manner of valuable ways to a conscious society. And this is the crux for Snow White. She was heading into the family firm on rail tracks up until her stepmother’s intervention and that family firm is an organisation that is unaware of itself or, and which is worse, is aware of itself and is making deliberate choices to maintain the status quo for the few who enjoy the fruits of the system at the expense of others.

As it turns out, Snow White, at this time, is an excellent facilitator, carer, cook, cleaner, house-keeper mother-figure who enables the dwarves to do what they in turn are best and useful at – mining ore. In the Grimm’s version, their cottage is described as already being in good order, it’s not like they need her to cook and clean and tidy but there is an innate understanding that to live in the house means to have a role in maintaining the prosperity of the whole community. Her beauty – the one prize she is celebrated for at the palace – is irrelevant to the dwarves as a ‘skill’. They are charmed by something that is more than skin deep – she cares for the good of all and advocates for the good of all. At the moment she meets them, though, she’s the right person to lead them in all things domestic at this point in time so that they can excel at mining ore. In their conscious organisation set-up, everyone is finding their niche within the moment. All is well with the mindset at Seven Dwarves Inc!

However, back at Palace Inc, the mirror is a faithful reflector of the truth of how the system is really operating. It’s a simple feedback loop she craves ~ Am I the fairest? Yes? Then all is well. Having tried a murderous leverage point and been forced to hear about its failure – Snow White is still the fairest of them all, she has to face the full force of a living embalmment. To preserve her ego, she must not fall into what she, and the palace community, perceives as decay. It’s really all the stress of this impossible task of remaining the same that creates the cortisol that eats her alive. The cortisol is the embalming fluid here. You’d think a woman with her knowledge about toxic chemicals would have known that cortisol destroys rather than preserves. Alas, no. Her lack of conscious awareness means this is a case of wrong tool for the wrong job at the wrong time. True stasis is stressful, the fairy tale shows us, if not utterly impossible.

Palace Inc staff have been been trained not to see any other value in a woman other than her beauty. While Stepmother’s shell is in tact, her status is in tact. Snow White’s father is sorrowful, not just for having lost Snow White and her beauty that was yet to come but all the other productivity that would have followed – a fruitful merger in Snow’s marriage to a wealthy competitor. Without the asset of Snow White, he too is stuck – the culture he has benefitted from has not taught him to flex and keep his plasticity either. Without a tool to bring him to greater consciousness, he can’t even work out where any leverage in the system might be. Besides, he’s very much absent for a lot of the tale. He’s the CEO sitting at the apex of his organisation who went out for a boozy lunch and was sleeping it off when the stock market crashed. There’s another character who is frozen on the job. The fairy tale screams at us Get conscious, wake up.

In the end, it is Snow White that wakes up, not because the Prince kisses her, but because in her catatonic state, she is doing Deep Work. Notice how that conscious group of dwarves used their intuition and just knew there was something that she still had to offer, even though she was off work long term sick! So, yes, she may be in a glass coffin, seemingly frozen as though in a block of ice, but she is about to use her greatest tool – her deepest consciousness. Something within her tells her that the system she was born into is out of whack and she is going to sort it out. She is young enough to not have had the balance between intuition and action educated out of her just yet. And, ok, so it’s an extreme form of Deep Work, she really has switched off from all worldly distractions, and is using those slower, more creative brainwaves and her subconscious mind that is not guided by the patriarchy she was born into, to employ her inner wisdoms, but Deep Work it is, nonetheless. The Prince is merely the timer that goes off at the end of the work when she can return to the ‘real world’ of her culture and bring back the new elixirs for the community and begin to influence new beginnings for the benefit of everyone. What that work is remains unexpressed within the story since to name it would be to crystalise it and our storytellers do not want that.

So, when this fairy tale leaves us seemingly at the bedroom door, while the Prince and Snow White seemingly go off to cook up some babies, what is really being incubated is a whole new systemic culture that storytellers do not want to commit to the rigidity of words. After all, the storyteller’s ultimate gift is to warn us that inflexibility is like sleeping on the job!

With special thanks to Andrew Smalley at https://www.systemic-creative.co.uk/ for introducing us here at Advent De Moi to the discipline of Systemic Analysis as a tool with which to build our own microbusiness as a conscious organisation that cherishes the potential of our colleagues and customers and community and as a tool for helping unlock the wisdoms we carry that are contained in story so that we can bring them to the consciousness of others in communities. We hope we did at least some justice to the ideas.

All the images here are from https://www.rawpixel.com/ with the exception of the shadowbox lit tunnel book of Snow White which is by our Artistic Director @lilymaycurwen