informal coalitions

If you can't draw it...

A few months ago, in a post on LinkedIn, Donald Davies referred to one of the guiding principles offered by his mentor: "If you can't draw it," she told him, "You don't understand it".  I used to tell myself exactly the same thing, whenever I was trying to make sense of a specific aspect of organization and management practice, or speculating more broadly. And this has formed a central part of my writing and practice, throughout my in-house management career and latterly as a consultant.

Don't give clients what they want!

It's interesting how incidental remarks and observations about one field of activity can stimulate new ideas, fresh perspectives and useful insights in another. I was remined recently of one such incident that occurred several years ago.

The context

As I was driving to the local rail station one morning, on route to a client meeting in London, I happened to catch part of a radio 'phone-in programme. The topic centred on how best to raise children, given the concerns that had resurfaced in the previous day's news about the detrimental effects of youngsters' growing attraction to fast food, computer games and activities that offer instant gratification.  At one point, it struck me that a comment made by one of the listeners neatly encapsulated a key aspect of my view on how consultants need to operate, if they are to add real value through their work.

Organizational complexity – it’s not rocket science

When American astronauts first set foot on the Moon, in July 1969, tribute was quite rightly paid to the advances that NASA scientists had made in aerospace engineering and astrodynamics, which had enabled them to make the “giant leap for mankind”, as Commander Neil Armstrong described it. Landing on the Moon, and returning the crew safely to Earth was a complicated technical challenge of the highest order. It was enabled by multiple systems and procedures that were designed to facilitate the safe and effective organization and control of all aspects of the design, development and delivery of “the mission”. As such, success was seen as having arisen from the availability of appropriate scientific and technological expertise; coupled with the development and skilled application of structured approaches to direct and control the practice and performance of those involved. In short, this appeared to 'tick all of the boxes' of a well-designed, and expertly executed, response to a highly complicated management challenge.

Wiggle Room

In an article entitled, CEOs forced to ditch decades of forecasting habits (16 February 2023), The Financial Times’s  Companies Editor, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, wrote:

(…) Ikea has changed tack. Instead of setting out specific goals for the year, it has a set of “scenarios” to give the business wiggle room as the outlook changes. It means acknowledging that widely different outcomes are possible. “It’s teaching us agility in how we operate,(…)”

It’s good to see that the stated purpose is one of “giv[ing] the business wiggle room”. This is pivotal. Not only, as suggested here, in relation to high-level strategy, but also in the midst of people’s day-to-day practice. Scenario planning might well help to frame some aspects of what is happening, as well as provoking new insights, but organization doesn’t operate in the neatly packaged and predictable ways that conventional management prescriptions suggest that it does. It’s wiggly.

As such, it is continuously (re-)emerging - in predictably unpredictable ways - in the widespread interplay of people’s small-group and one-to-one interactions. This means that people also need “wiggle room” to enable them to anticipate and respond to whatever is emerging; not to what might have emerged, if the real world had been kind enough to comply with the planning assumptions.

So, first, we have The Times commenting on moves to “rewiggle rivers” (see previous blog post, Rewiggling Organization). Now the FT have reported a need for “wiggle room”, to accommodate changes in business outlook. What next? Recognizing the wiggly world of organization, perhaps!

Rewiggling Organization

Given my description of organization - and life more generally - as “wiggly”, I was attracted by an article in The Times (15 February, 2023) entitled, “Why ‘rewiggling’ rivers could solve Britain’s water crisis”.

Rather than meandering naturally across the land - in a self-organizing and emergent way, of course (!) - many rivers have been straightened out and deepened over the years, with the aim of releasing the surrounding marshland for grazing. This, though, has adversely affected water quality and wildlife habitats, and reduced the diversity and wellbeing of fish. It has also increased the risk of flooding, and had other detrimental effects on land- and water-management. Action is therefore being taken to “rewiggle” a number of rivers; allowing these to re-establish their natural pathways and flow patterns, and helping to deal with the “water crisis”.