ABSTRACT
We were on the side of human nature, one might think—and we did not think that this positioned us as being against organizational change. The community mental health team was working very much with some of the more dysfunctional aspects of human nature. Fighting human nature rather than working through people to meet their objectives. There is so much of a continuing attempt at change in the National Health Service (NHS) because of an increasingly powerful tendency to move away from a spiritual or fatalistic acceptance of morbidity and death and, instead, to find fault with an incompetent management. We may even have the sense now also that the organizational change is introduced because of a basic mistrust of human nature, out of a mistrust of the ordinary dynamics of person on person, system on system, and their capacity in time to work things out.
