informal coalitions

Decoupling empowerment and complexity

I've noticed that many of the on-line conversations on organizational complexity tend to gravitate towards a discussion on the need for more empowered ways of working. At first sight, the two themes of empowerment and complexity seem to fit naturally together. After all, the former implies fewer formal controls, a shift towards more localized decision-making, and more direct cross-functional interactions.

However, it strikes me that this is not a helpful way of looking at the dynamics of complexity in an organizational context. Nor does it do justice to what I would see as the social desirability - as well as commercial necessity - of tapping into the vast wealth of talent that often lies dormant in organizations.

So what is the problem with coupling these two concepts together?

Managers' conceptions of time in organizational change

On a flight from Amsterdam to London last Saturday, I read an interesting paper by Elden Wiebe, which is published in Process, Sensemaking and Organizing, edited by Tor Hernes and Sally Maitlis (OUP 2010).

In the paper, Wiebe reports on his exploration of the relationship between time and organizational change. His insights are based on narrative analysis of the stories of a number of managers who were ostensibly involved in the 'same', formally imposed organizational change. He found that their conception of time and the change process differed in a number of important ways and also departed significantly from the notion of time as objective, linear (past-present-future), and a-contextual.

Conventionally, time tends to be spoken about in matter-of-fact terms (what Wiebe calls "clock time"). As such, it is thought to provide a seemingly objective measure of progress against a defined programme of work. The latter is typically presented as the means of 'closing the gap' between what's seen as today's "as is" reality and tomorrow's "to be" intentions - both as formally defined.

However, Wiebe's basic proposition is that, "... managers temporally make sense of their experiences of change, actively configuring the relationship between the past, present and future in different ways." As a result of this, he further suggests that managers also construct the change and their enactment of it in different ways. And, to illustrate this, he identifies five distinct 'worlds' of organizational change in managers' narratives that reflect these differences.