informal coalitions

The wiggly world of COVID-19

Most people view the COVID-19 pandemic as a rare outlier of normal events. An aberration. It is important to recognize, though, that the process through which it emerged as a pandemic was not extraordinary at all.  On the contrary, the direct and indirect transmission of the virus between people was a particularly vivid expression of the complex social process of everyday human interaction. For the most part, of course, this involves small-group and one-to-one conversations, rather than the exchange of potentially deadly, airborne particles!  However, if we were to take our own and others' experience seriously, we would recognise that the pandemic brought into sharp focus our inability to predict and control what happens as a result of the widespread interplay of people's interactions, both locally and across the world. It is through this continuous, interactional process that we are all perpetually creating the future together - in all of its richness and beauty; ugliness and poverty; hope and despair.

'Corridor conversations'

In the middle of a chat about all things organizational, a client once told me that the Company’s CEO had said to him and other senior colleagues, “We’ve got to stop the corridor conversations.”  Leaving aside the naivety of the CEO’s comment, in the pre-COVID days when the possibility of in-person exchanges was ever-present, his remark also betrayed a basic lack of understanding of how organization works. In particular, it failed to recognise the fundamental role that informal conversations such as these play in determining the overall nature and quality of people’s individual and collective perspectives, practices and performance.  Ironically, of course, informal conversations would have been just as much a part of the CEO’s own practice as they were of everyone else's.

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.

12Ps worth on the wiggly world of organization

Earlier, I posted a simple, "What does this make possible?" story about the wiggliness of organization and the muddling-through nature of real-world management practice.  Building on this, the 12 ‘P-words’ listed opposite describe key aspects of organization that are at play in all human contexts.

Each of these is summarized below, and the ideas discussed in depth in my new book, The Wiggly World of Organization  Taken together, these present a fundamental challenge to conventional thinking about the dynamics of organization, and they have important practical implications for managers and other practitioners - from CEO to the front line.

From a wiggly world perspective then, organization is…

Managing business performance – It’s not a numbers game!

“Making the numbers” is important in business. Whether we’re talking about commercial performance, quality of service provision, compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, or whatever, numbers matter.

At the same time, knowing the numbers gives us little clue as to how best to manage business performance on a continuing basis.
When we’re talking about the complex social dynamics of organization, numbers don’t cut it. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, only the notation is numerical, the decisions are entrepreneurial¹. That is to say, managing business performance is about committing resources today, to deal with a continuously emerging and ultimately unknowable future.

Yet we still appear to be locked-in to a view of business performance management that is rooted in the ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’ logic that properly underpins the management of technical performance.

Mastery, mystery, and muddling through - 1

In a recent article, the Financial Times' political columnist, Janan Ganesh, argues that Theresa May's government is "stronger for its weakness".  In agreeing with this, Deborah Rowland comments briefly (here) that the accompanying uncertainty and 'not knowing', arising from the lack of a Commons majority, is likely to demand more collective decision-making and result in more creative solutions. She uses Keats's notion of "negative capability" to illustrate her point.

I very much support her view that strength can come from the capacity to survive and thrive in conditions of 'unknowability'. Indeed, the need and ability to do so flows directly from the complex social dynamics of human interaction, in which 'not knowing' is the norm, not the exception.

Sadly, Deborah then ends her post with a disappointingly dismissive reference to "muddling through", when talking about the required leadership response to these conditions. On this point, I disagree fundamentally. And it is this aspect of organizational dynamics and leadership practice that I want to say more about here.

The challenge of taking complexity seriously - Second helping

In response to my previous article, The challenge of taking complexity seriously, I received a comment via LinkedIn which implied that there are circumstances in the social world which are not complex. Also that, in those situations in which complexity “persists”, this does not occur randomly but rather is “shaped” and “driven” by a “structure and simple rules”.

My efforts to address these points in a comment were thwarted by a ‘computer-says-no’ message, to the effect that I had exceeded LinkedIn’s word-limit for replies. This brief, ‘follow-up’ article is the result. It was initially published on LinkedIn in May 2017…

A passionate 'muddler througher'

    

Every Sunday, during the Pienaar's Politics programme on BBC Radio 5Live, there is a section entitled, Backbenchers Questions. Yesterday, it was the turn of Bob Stewart, MP for Beckenham and one-time Colonel in the British Army, to take the hot seat.

At one point, stand-in host Chris Mason asked him whether or not he was confident about the forthcoming negotiations on Brexit.

"In the end," he replied, "We always muddle through and get something."

"Is muddle through good enough, though?" challenged Mason.

"That's what happens in life," said Stewart, with a hint of incredulity in his voice that anyone should ask such a question.

And so it is.  Muddling through is what happens in life.  It's what all of us do. All of the time.

Mason signed-off the section by describing Colonel Stewart as, “A passionate ‘muddler througher’”. 

The folly of promising a ‘cast-in-concrete’ future

In today’s copy of The Times, Matthew Parris comments on the outcry that has followed the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer’s decision to raise a particular tax on small businesses. Under the headline, “When it’s right to break political promises,” he supports the rationale for breaking the Conservative Party’s 2015 commitment not to raise National Insurance Contributions (NICs) for the self-employed. At the same time, he criticizes what he sees as the inept manner in which the change in policy has been introduced.

Surely, though, there is a wider issue here. The real problem is not so much with what Philip Hammond has done in policy terms. Or the fact that the proposed changes break a promise in the manifesto. It is with the very notion of making firm manifesto commitments in the first place.

In the run-up to the 2015 election, candidates of all parties were constantly asked by interviewers to explain precisely what things would be like at the end of the five-year parliament, based on the pledges made in their party manifestos.  In the main, they duly obliged (as politicians always do!). 

As things turned out, of course, their inability to predict what would happen in the future was laid bare on election night itself.  Politicians, pundits, and pollsters alike all expected the election to result in a so-called “hung parliament”, with a coalition between the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties being the most likely means of forming a viable Government.  In the event, the Conservatives gained an overall majority and a triumphant David Cameron put together his Government, with a seemingly unobstructed path ahead of him and his colleagues for the next five years.  Eighteen months on, the rest – like David Cameron’s premiership – is history.

Reframing accountability in organizational practice

 

Naomi Stanford is widely-known for her insightful writing on organization design. In a recent LinkedIn post, she has questioned the ways in which accountability is understood and applied in an organizational context. This challenge is long overdue. I strongly agree with her that this taken-for-granted aspect of conventional management practice is in urgent need of a rethink.

At the same time, I would base my argument on a different issue from those that she has identified.

Ready… Blame… Fire!

Too often, the term “accountability” is used as a synonym for blame. It serves as a label to hang around the necks of ‘the guilty’ when things appear to have ‘gone wrong’. This does little to encourage people to comment candidly on their own practice and performance. Or to enable them, individually and collectively, to work to improve what’s going on. Most importantly, though, it completely ignores the complex social reality of organization, through which ‘outcomes’ emerge in practice.