informal coalitions

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.

Playing skilfully into the moment

Guest blog by Majken Askeland¹

Why are we looking for alternative ways of understanding change in organizations? Because we are noticing that what we are doing is not working well enough. The big question then becomes – why is it not working and what can we do differently? This has been explored thoroughly from many different angles for a long time.

Ralph Stacey and his fellow researchers and students at the Doctor of Management Program (DMan) at the University of Hertfordshire have explored this question over a period of more than twenty years. In this, they use complexity theories from science as an analogy for understanding how change actually occurs in organizations.

What is complexity and leadership about and why is it important in understanding change in organizations?

As a DMan student, I have investigated this for quite some time. And to me an experience I had a year ago helped me make sense of this question. I will share it with you because of a conversation I had this weekend at the Complexity and Management Conference just south of London. I was talking at the time with Chris Rodgers. His response to my sharing this experience was enthusiasm and delight; much like my own original experience. He encouraged me to put it down in writing and has later worked with me on the article. 

The story goes…

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.

At one point in her post, Naomi refers to a report entitled, “Culture and Accountability in Organizations”. In it, the authors say, “[Although] all cultures have accountability systems to create predictability, order, and control, the nature of accountability systems can vary considerably across cultures.”

The suggestion that it is possible for managers to “create predictability, order, and control”, in anything other than the basic technology-heavy elements of wider techno-human processes, remains a depressingly familiar mantra.  This is completely at odds with people’s everyday lived experience of organizational life. Even where technology and procedural routines dominate, these have emerged from - and continue to be sustained by - the cultural, political, and social dynamics of everyday human interaction.  It is this same self-organizing, patterning process of conversational interaction which provides the sense of order and 'everyday predictability' that allow people to go on participating together.

Whatever happens in practice, then, (whether ‘good, ‘bad’, or ‘indifferent’) is not determined by formally designed structures and accountability systems. It emerges instead from the widespread interplay of myriad local interactions. Some of these reflect people’s formally allocated roles and relationships. Many more take place informally, whether intentionally, habitually, or as chance encounters. This is as much the case in an unalloyed “command and control” regime as it is in organizational settings designed to promote openly collaborative and ‘self-managed’ ways of working.

Nobody acts independently. Everybody is always both enabled and constrained in what they do by the actions, inactions, and interactions of everyone else.

So where does this leave the notion of accountability?

The a-b-i-l-i-t-y to account

It’s in the detail of people’s moment-to-moment exchanges that organization is enacted and ‘outcomes’ emerge. Managers would therefore do well to direct their attention towards the quality of people’s participation in this ongoing interactional process. Central to this is people’s ability to account for the specifics of their own practice. And it’s in this particular sense that accountability has meaning and potential value. Whatever the specific context, people should be able (and en-abled) to give an increasingly informed account of the whys, whats, and hows of their actions.

In this way, it is likely that they will be better placed to:

• draw lessons from their own experience, to enhance their understanding and practical judgement - especially where things turn out differently from their own and others' intentions;
• deal, in increasingly competent/expert ways, with the issues and challenges that they face, with less need to seek advice and/or permission (i.e. facilitate their response-ability);
• recognize if and when judgement based on their past experience is inadequate to address those unfamiliar situations that are not amenable to structured analysis and 'if you do this you'll (probably!) get that' logic; and
• offer practical insights from their own practice that might stimulate and enrich the ongoing conversations, actions, and interactions of others.

In relation to accountability, this implies a shift away from the judgement of people in a right/wrong, good/bad, and success/failure way. Instead, it seeks to provoke and support movement in people's ongoing practice, in ways intended to facilitate joint sense-making, collaborative problem solving, and a continuing search for (if not guarantee of) performance improvement.

__________

Related posts:

Reframing accountability

Je ne target rien - Enabling performance in organizations

Keogh report comes closer to recognizing the complex social dynamics of hospital practice

'Waking people up' to the reality of leadership and management practice

Yesterday, I spent a couple of very enjoyable hours at the RSA in London talking with Pete Burden. In a post entitled, “Understanding leadership and management differently” he had been fulsome in his support of my “10 much-needed shifts in the way that we understand and talk about leadership”. In light of this, we were knocking around a few thoughts on how such shifts in the patterns of people’s understanding might come to be adopted more widely – especially given the pressures on managers to account for their practice in terms that reflect the dominant management discourse.

The challenge

Like the photographs in magazines that present an impossibly perfect impression of the human form, this airbrushed view of organization bears little resemblance to managers’ everyday lived reality. Yet it persists. Judging by many of the most popular posts in LinkedIn Pulse and elsewhere, there is little sign of this changing anytime soon. As Pete suggested in his later post, “Facing the Fear?”, the thought of ‘not knowing’ (or, perhaps, being seen not to know) tethers managers to the language and assumptions of certainty, predictability, and control. This then perpetuates the myth, which continues to contaminate their own and others’ practice.

10 much-needed shifts in the way we think and talk about leadership

We all know how organizations work. We’ve read the books and magazines, seen the research, and attended the courses. If we’re looking for ways to change, develop, restructure, merge, demerge, turnaround, or otherwise transform the organization for the better, we are spoilt for choice. These - always “new” - ways of working are all neatly packaged, politics-free, and presented as common-sense responses to the challenges that we face. Provided that everyone follows the prescribed programmes, systems, and procedures, we’re assured that the outcomes we’re looking for will come to fruition. Sorted!

Trouble is, this well-ordered, fully aligned view of organization and management practice, with its unfailingly positive results, bears little relationship to the world that managers experience every day.

The straight-line, ‘do this and you’ll get that’ idealizations are far removed from the wiggly reality. Despite this, it’s the former that continue to dominate the ways in which management is spoken about and judged in formal organizational arenas and wider society.

This does nobody any favours – other than, perhaps, those who design, package and sell the supposed ‘solutions’. In particular, it creates unrealistic expectations of what managers can sensibly achieve. This increases pressure on them to conform to this fantasized view of organization and contaminates their day-to-day practice.

Most importantly, it inevitably distorts the ways in which they account formally for their actions. The resulting reports then serve to reinforce the assumptions of scientific rationality, predictability, and control on which the popular rhetoric – if not the reality - of organizational management and leadership practice is based. And so the fantasy continues.

Writing management wrongs

 

The autumn 2015 edition of Professional Manager contains a great article by Adrian Furnham, entitled “Write a business bestseller”. In it he identifies 11 essential ingredients of what he describes as “a management blockbuster”.

Whilst setting out this recipe for success in the literary world, he neatly exposes the gaps between the simplistic view of organization that such books typically present and the complex reality that managers experience day in, day out. He does this so subtly, though, that I can see many readers eagerly following his ‘advice’ in pursuit of their “dream of being a management guru”.

In essence, Furnham cleverly advances the same argument that I was trying to make more matter-of-factly in my recent post entitled, “10 examples of language that denies the real-world complexity of organization and management”.  On the face of it, he is offering some advice to budding authors. In actuality he is deriding the naïve ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’ prescriptions that prevent more meaningful engagement with the dynamics of organization and a more practical understanding of management practice. 

Order in the complexity of human interaction

Around three-and-a-half years ago, Dave Snowden and I had an in-depth exchange on the dynamics of organization. This was triggered by his comment on a post of mine entitled, “Self-organization and emergence as natural dynamics of organization.”

In a recent blog post of his own, "On the value of order," he once again takes issue with the suggestion made by some people (“from serious academics to superficial consultants with various gradations of sense and sensibility in between”) that all situations involving people are complex, regardless of context. I’m one of those people – as I was back in January 2012. Since I don’t see myself as an academic – serious or otherwise - I guess I might qualify as a superficial consultant. Or perhaps I’m one of Dave’s in-betweenies.

Anyway, it seems to me that his analysis confuses a description of the unavoidably complex dynamics of everyday human interaction, which exist regardless of context,with the range of responses that one might deliberately seek to make according to context.

10 examples of language that denies the real-world complexity of organization and management practice

According to conventional wisdom, managers can somehow stand outside the ongoing flow of human interaction and choose the optimum way to manage the situations in which they find themselves. Then, provided that others implement their decisions as planned and comply with the prescribed ways of working, it is assumed that the sought-after outcomes will be achieved.

Most managers would concede privately that this bears little resemblance to their everyday lived reality. However, the presumed ability to predict, organize, and control outcomes persists. Nor is it limited to management writing, leadership development programmes, and consultancy offerings. It also frames the ways in which managers’ actions are scrutinized and commented upon by politicians, journalists, and members of the general public. Most significantly, perhaps, this scientifically rational view of organization and management practice remains central to the way in which managers’ performance is typically judged by the in-house scorekeepers and commentators on whom their current standing, ongoing remuneration, and future prospects depend.

When managers account formally for their practice, therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised if they adopt the clichéd language and “We did this and got that” explanations that reflect this managerially ‘correct’ and politically acceptable view of their practice.

Leadership secrets of Jeremy Corbyn...

 

 

Following Jeremy Corbyn’s startling victory in the UK Labour Party's leadership election, we can no doubt look forward to a number of articles and blog posts that claim to have identified what it is about 'Corbyn the man' that accounts for his success - and what leadership secrets we can glean from his achievement. This, though, isn't one of them.  Wrong focus. Wrong question.

If we really want to gain some insights into the dynamics of leadership from Corbyn's win, we need to look elsewhere. Being a "principled", "authentic", and "honest" individual (all adjectives used to describe him during the election period) is worthy of note. But this is not the main thing that managers, politicians and others might most usefully take from the events of the past few weeks. So what is?

The “And they all lived happily ever after” fantasy – Technology, complexity and the human condition

I  recently came across a LinkedIn blogpost by Tim Rogers entitled, Who should we insist wear Health Tech?  In it, he advocates the use of various wearable technologies as ways of improving individuals’ health, and then speculates about the potential benefits that these could bring to wider society. On the face of it, it all sounds reasonable and straightforward.

However, I find the use of the verb "insist" in the post’s title revealing. As often seems to be the case, there is also a "we" doing the insisting of some unnamed others.  So power and politics are very much in play here (as they always will be, of course)  even though these underlying dynamics of human interaction will rarely if ever be acknowledged when the use of such technologies is advocated. The same could be said about the morality of the whys, whats, and hows of their deployment. In a similar vein, the word “opportunity” usually features prominently – as it does here. But one person’s opportunity is another person’s threat, as they (almost) say.

Unquestionably good?

What concerns me most is that proponents seem to take it for granted that all such developments are unquestionably good - invented by 'good' people, with the intention of doing 'good' things, for the 'good' of other individuals, and thereby enhancing the common 'good'. The real-world dynamics of human interaction are conveniently ignored, in favour of a utopian view in which there is universal wellbeing, co-operation and harmony.  A similar pattern can be found in relation to a lot of the stuff that is advocated as a way of ‘dealing with’ complexity.