Catch(Up)-22 - Reflections on organization and management

 

Last Thursday, it was 22 years since I moved from in-house manager to management consultant.  Reflecting briefly on this at the time, I decided to set down some of the main themes relating to organization and management practice that I’ve explored with managers during that time. 22 seemed like a good number to aim for...

As a manager¹:

1. Start from a position that takes complexity seriously – that is, one which acknowledges the self-organizing, emergent, context-specific, path-dependent and ‘predictably unpredictable’ nature of the organizational process.
2. Understand that organizations don’t do things. People do.
3. Recognize that organization is enacted through conversation, and that paying attention to the patterning and content of people's everyday interactions - including your own - is at the core of leading and managing skilfully.  
4. Shift the emphasis from controlling 'the organization' to enabling people to perform.
5. Organize dynamically around individual and collective contributions, rather than falling into the ‘activity trap’² of rigid job descriptions.
6. Maintain high expectations of people’s willingness and ability to contribute.
7. Immerse people in ongoing conversations about the Whys, Whats and Hows of their practice; encouraging and enabling them to anticipate and respond to actual events, not those that might have occurred if the real world had been kind enough to comply with the planning assumptions!
8. Increase people’s response-ability – that is, their ability to anticipate and respond to emerging events without having to seek permission all of the time.
9. Work to unlock people’s talents; helping them to channel these in personally meaningful and organizationally beneficial ways.
10. Foster a climate in which people have the motive, means and opportunity to excel.
11. Reframe accountability as the ability of people to account for the Whys, Whats and Hows of their work (account-ability), rather than deploying it as a blame-seeking missile when things go wrong.
12. Mobilize active coalitions of support for important emerging themes and practices.
13. Cultivate collaborative self-management as the means of integrating people’s efforts …
14. ... coupled with ways of working that facilitate the open networking of knowledge, ideas and resources.
15. Pay attention to the deeply ingrained, cultural patterning of interactions that tends to channel sense-making down well-worn pathways - helping people to go on together whilst, at the same time, inhibiting pattern-shifting creativity and change.
16. Recognize that nothing happens in an organizational context - 'good' or 'bad' – other than through the dynamics of power and politics. Power is about inter-dependent people enabling and constraining each other through the interplay of their ongoing actions, inactions and interactions. Politics is the  playing out of differences arising from diverse interests, intentions, interpretations, ideologies, identities, personal idiosyncrasies, and so on.
17. Constructively manage the unavoidable tensions and contradictions that exist in all organizational contexts - working to make them liveable for people.
18. Treat everything as tentative and provisional - temporary and contingently useful ways of understanding and acting into the world that work for now but which are always subject to continuous adaptation and renewal.
19. Make sure that scorekeepers and commentators are not seen to be more important than the players.
20. Relentlessly pursue one target, namely “Get rid of targets”.

Overall...

21. Take seriously the complex social dynamics (“wiggliness”) of organization and the muddling-through nature of real-world management practice...
22. ... and, despite not knowing, strive to pursue this with purpose, courage and skill.

__________

NOTES

1. I’m deliberately not distinguishing here between leadership and management, in the Orwellian ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ way that has increasingly become the norm in recent years. As I said in Informal Coalitions (Palgrave, 2007), in relation to those in formal managerial positions (from CEO to the front line) leading and managing are complementary aspects of the one role. Two sides of the same coin. Kevin Flinn articulates this well in his book, Leadership Development (Routledge, 2018).
2. This term was coined by George Odiorne in his book, Management and the Activity Trap (Heinemann, 1974).