informal coalitions

Escaping the merry-go-round of management fads and fashions

Several years ago, as an in-company OD manager, I attended a series of inter-company meetings in central London. These had been set up to enable practitioners to share their experience of dealing with a range of common issues relating to organizational design, management development, leadership practice, and so on. 

Climbing aboard

We began each session by summarizing what we were doing in our own organizations to address the particular topic under review.  Without fail, and regardless of the theme being discussed, a picture emerged of people either doing, about to do, or having done and given up, what everyone else was doing, about to do, or had done and given up. 

Paint-by-numbers consultancy

I recently received an invitation to attend a seminar on the new European Standard for Management Consultancy Services (EN 16114). This standard came into being around three years ago, in response to the EU's Services Directive, which seeks to establish a common market in services in the same way that it has in goods – a way of weeding out ‘bent banana’ consultants, presumably! 

Its advocates see this as a common-sense – and hence self-evidently beneficial – approach towards the “professionalization” of consulting practice.  But is it?

The political dynamics of organizational change

It is rare to find the words “power” and “politics” listed on the index pages of mainstream management books. One might reasonably assume, therefore, that these have little or no part to play in the dynamics of organization and management. In contrast to this, I argued in Informal Coalitions  that acting politically is a central aspect of real-world management practice. That is to say,

“… organizations that succeed do so not only in spite of political behaviour but also because of it.” 

Ongoing process

Organization is an ongoing, political process. It is continuously (re-)enacted through the everyday, power-related interactions of people. People, that is, who have different – and potentially conflicting – intentions, interests, ideologies and identities. People who perceive, interpret, and value things differently. People who are, nevertheless, inter-dependent - enabling and constraining each other, as they seek to find their way through the individual and collective challenges they face.

What people come to see as ‘the established order’, ‘disorder’, and ‘new order’ emerge from these ongoing, conversational interactions. Some of these exchanges occur in line with the formally acknowledged, ‘legitimate’ themes and practices. Others reflect the hidden, messy, and informal, ‘shadow’ themes and ways of being that are characteristic of everyday human relations. Nothing happens, then, except through the political actions of real people.

Getting in a muddle over muddling through

In discussing the complex and uncertain nature of everyday organizational life, I have earlier suggested (here, for example) that what managers do in practice is that they “muddle through”. I was intrigued, therefore, when someone drew my attention to General Sir Richard Dannatt’s autobiography, “Leading from the Front”, in which he is very dismissive of the notion. Basically, he equates it with a lack of leadership - an approach that he considers to be “aimless”. In his most damning comment, he uses the term to attack what he sees as an unwillingness of politicians to properly resource the tasks that it demands of the armed forces:

“If you want to do it, you have to be prepared to pay for it – muddling through on the goodwill of our servicemen and women is immoral.”

And here, I think, we have a clue as to why he is so disdainful of the idea. It seems to me that he is using the term very much in an ‘everyday’ sense, in which it might well be taken to mean a lack of purpose coupled with muddled thinking.  But, as I’ve argued here and in other forums, managers have no option but to muddle through. And doing this with purpose, courage, and skill is the very best that they can do.

So why is Sir Richard so derisive in his comments?

Assigning complexity to the 'too difficult' box

A friend recently wondered whether,

"... a 'systems view' of organization might be easier for managers to go along with, feeling that they can pull ‘levers’, or follow seven steps. And whether a complexity view is too difficult for them to contemplate in terms of what they are supposed to ‘achieve’.

She further speculated on whether the technologies involved in organizational network mapping, sociometric badging¹, and the like might make the complex reality more obvious to people.

I agreed that managers might well find a systems view of organization easy to contemplate, given that it encourages them to think in terms of abstract entities, which they can (supposedly) act upon 'as a whole', to bring about the results that they are looking for. But we both recognized that this is an illusion - misleadingly built on assumptions of scientific rationality, predictability, and control. I suggested instead that the main barrier to progress is the ease with which this narrative is so readily taken up by people whenever they are called upon to account formally for their own or others' practice. It is the constant repetition of this narrative that makes such approaches appear natural and commonsensical, rather than unhelpful and contrived.