As the towns along the way got smaller the ‘award-winning’ signs and their competition began to disappear. One small town had nothing more than a pub that doubled as a post office – a default winner for my patronage. However, the experience of this small-town pub was in sharp contrast to the scones and jam of larger towns.

Entering pubs in a small town felt like stepping into a spaghetti western movie. You have seen it before, there is the outsider (me) approaching a buzzing bar through a pair of swinging saloon doors, the patrons cease their chatter and lift their eyes from their hands of poker (or phones) and fix their silent gaze on the stranger coming through the doors with an almost practiced precision.

Sure, my get-up, Fig. 16.1, and possibly the result of not having a towel and not showering as frequently as I should have may have contributed to the unsolicited attention. But I think it was the close-knit quality of small towns, where everyone knows everyone else, that made me stand out.

Fig. 16.1
figure 1

My Sunday-best pub attire

Full size image

Off the main tourist routes, the strong social cohesion in small country towns was palpable. I could see how people talked to others at nearby tables as if the table itself was being stretched by an invisible social bond that drew them together.

I sat alone and listened to Morricone’s iconic The good, the bad and the ugly [32] soundtrack playing in my mind and began to think about the good, bad and ugly sides of small-town dynamics. What is good about small towns is the way communities rally around those in need. In larger towns and cities it is easier to walk past, ignoring the misfortunes of those we don’t know.

The bad side is what I experienced, the us and them alienation. I attributed the patrons’ reactions to the common dislike of the unfamiliar and would like to believe that if I stayed longer that I too might be chatting across tables. If I went to the pub in my full gear every time, perhaps I might be accepted and deemed the ‘town eccentric’.

The ugly side is when ongoing coexistence leads to the further alienation of outsiders, or those who are not part of the small-town social bond, labelling them forever as an unwelcomed stranger. You are probably already one step ahead of me on the similarities of this and what many experience in workplaces.

Like many things, this is like a double-edged sword. A highly cohesive team reaps similar benefits of a small town, potentially leading to increased performance. But the same team might also suffer from stale ideas or lack the performance that comes from the input of new players who challenge the status quo. This challenge to both, teams and organisations, is highlighted in the next signpost:

figure a

As a workplace researcher I am a strong advocate for the use of Social Network Analysis (SNA), the offspring of an unlikely collaboration between mathematicians, anthropologists, and sociologists that allows us to visualise and explore the threads of the social fabric holding together an organisation [33].

To properly define SNA is necessary to introduce more terms in need of further definitions. To avoid such a lengthy explanation, I will explain SNA by way of an example. In a small organisation, or a country town, a SNA would validate the already known social structure understood by most good publicans. Who interacts with who, and who doesn’t. But as the organisation grows, SNA can also reveal surprises, including biases about peoples’ interactions. Since biases are part of the organisational culture, some organisations can be blind to them.

To illustrate, SNA revealed a marked gender bias in one organisation we studied. Women were under-represented in exchanging ideas below what would have been expected from the demographic split. We discovered the organisation’s employees were more inclined to discuss ideas with men than with women. Including the women.

In this situation, making the environment more social through the addition of places to connect and talk might not be the solution. As it turned out, women were over-represented in social interactions, but were still excluded from some idea-exchanging conversations. This in itself is an interesting signpost, suggesting increased socialisation does not guarantee involvement in organisational-shaping activities:

figure b

The need to understand the social fabric of organisations and the role that the environment plays in shaping it, is increasing as the nature of work (whatever we will end up doing) becomes more human, ergo more social.