informal coalitions

The Paradox of Immersion and Abstraction

In the excellent Complexity and Organizational Reality, Ralph Stacey argues that people are “simultaneously immersed in the experience of local interaction and abstracting from it at the same time”. That is to say, abstraction is fundamental to the ways in which people make sense of their own and others’ experience and take action.  This begs the question as to what extent, and in what ways, abstraction is congruent with the complex, self-organizing and emergent, dynamics of organization. And this is one of those very rare occasions in which my perspective differs, in one important respect, from that which he sets out in this book and elsewhere.

Contribution Statements and the 'Activity Trap'

When I was working as an in-house manager in the late-‘80s, I was co-opted onto a number of working parties relating to the impending privatisation of the UK electricity supply industry.

At one meeting, draft job descriptions were handed out by representatives of one of the leading consultancy firms, who had been engaged to support this review. These related to the roles of senior managers in the new company's major power plants.

I immediately challenged the worth of what I saw as little more than an anodyne list of task-related activities; arguing that these didn’t inspire me in any way. The Group Manager, who had been overseeing the work, argued that these weren’t meant to inspire people; with the lead consultant adding, that “nobody reads them anyway”!

I said that, as written, these bore little relationship to the role that I was performing day-to-day; and that, given the fundamental shift in the nature of the business that we were embarking on, I certainly wanted to be inspired by the changes that were coming along. At that point, the Director who was chairing the meeting signalled a break.

During the ‘interval’ he told me that he agreed with the comments I’d made but that he hadn't wanted to undermine his Group Manager by openly saying so. Instead, he asked me to write to him with my thoughts. In response, I sent him a short note relating to what I called “Contribution Statements"; together with draft examples of what these might look like for the senior management roles on each of the operating plants.

Starting with a ‘blank sheet of paper’

Some years back, I was facilitating an issue-based workshop with a senior management team. The focus was on the future shape and direction of the unit. At one point, the Unit Head said to the group that he was fed up with reflecting on the past and that he wanted to “start with a blank sheet of paper”, in their shaping of the desired future.

In response, I said that this was not credible way to proceed, given the complex social dynamics of organization and the implications of these for what is and isn't possible. To illustrate the point, I wrote the words “THE PAST” on the top sheet of a writing pad, tore off the page and threw it into the waste bin. This left what appeared to be a "blank sheet of paper" on top of the pad. A quick rub with a pencil, though, showed that an imprint of the words “THE PAST” remained.

Path-dependency

A short time before my Mother died, she said that she wanted to tell me something.

"Before I met your Dad", she confided, "I was engaged to someone else. But he was killed in a motorcycle accident." Why this was preying on her mind became clear when she said, "So, you nearly had a different Dad".

That's not the case at all, of course :-). If the accident hadn't have happened, or if her fiancé had survived and they'd married as planned, I wouldn't have existed at all. To my Mother, though, my being born was a given. A 'Big Dot', so to speak, in the story of her life.

As a manager, you can’t not be a role model

As the Chairman of one of my clients told his senior managers, in a workshop some years ago, “If you’ve decided that you don’t want to be a role model, you’ve just decided to be a bad one”.

A manager – at whatever ‘level’ – cannot not communicate. Everything that they say and do, as well as everything that the don’t say and don’t do, ‘sends messages’ to people about what is and isn’t important; how they should and shouldn’t behave; what they can and can’t do; and so on. The problem is that it isn’t the manager who decides what these ‘messages’ mean. It’s those who experience their words and actions who make sense of these and decide how to respond. And, crucially, they do this through their ongoing conversations with other people; most of which take place without the relevant manager(s) being present.