informal coalitions

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…

The challenge of taking complexity seriously

I recently came across a blogpost entitled, Simple Thinking in a Complex World is a Recipe for Disaster. It was written by Prof. David Green of Monash University in Australia. 

 

In it, he cautions against the tendency to oversimplify the complexities of everyday life, and gives some practical advice on how to take complexity seriously. In particular, he maintains that we should,

"... avoid following simple slogans uncritically. Avoid dismissing uncomfortable facts out of hand."

So far, so good. 

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’”. 

Je ne regrette rien - taking comfort from complexity

Over recent years, many articles have been written  about the need to "defeat", "overcome", or otherwise "eliminate" organizational complexity. By this, the writers invariably mean the overly-complicated structures, systems, and procedures that tend to grow up over time and which can outlive their usefulness. 

 

Simplifying unnecessarily complicated ways of working is to be welcomed, of course. But this surface-level, as-designed view of organization says nothing about the underlying dynamics of what's going on. That is, the complex social process of everyday human interaction, through which organization is continuously (re)enacted and outcomes emerge in practice. 

 

Immersed in the 'game of life'

 

Taking this further, these same dynamics are also at play in our living of life more generally. That is to say, beyond the natural world, everything that happens in our life emerges from the world-wide interplay of our own and everyone else's ongoing interactions. Some of these are intentional. Others are habitual.  Some are planned. Others occur spontaneously or by chance. Some are bound up in the full trappings of formality, whereas others reflect informal networks of relationships. Some are acted out in person. Others exist solely in our imaginations. This relational process will sometimes be co-operative. At other times the exchanges will be competitive and conflictual. Rarely will the differences be clear-cut. Even though we are conscious of a lot of what is going on, large chunks of our lives remain outside our conscious awareness. 

Reclaiming the C-word

 

It’s time to stop pussyfooting about. We need to reclaim the C-word.

 

To some people, the word is taboo. It never crosses their lips or appears in their writing.  Not the sort of thing that a properly educated and well-ordered understanding of the world should concern itself with. 

 

Others reluctantly acknowledge its existence and even use the word now and again as a focus for their angst. But they see it as something that gets in the way of the idealized image of the world that they've been brought up to believe in and revere. A crude expression, suggesting a lack of refinement and confused thinking in those who persist in its use. Something that has no place in  'proper' social intercourse and the accepted way of being. Something, in fact, that needs to be designed-out of everyday life. 

Then we have those worldly-wise people whose communication is peppered with the C-word - whether spoken or implicit.  

The C-word is, of course, COMPLEXITY.  

 

If we're really serious about understanding how the world 'works', and how we might participate more usefully in it, we need to take complexity seriously.  Whether we're concerned with the course of our personal lives, the nature and success of the organizations we co-create daily, or the condition of society more generally, the complex social dynamics of human interaction are always in play. 

 

Complexity just is. We need to get over it. And get into it!

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.

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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.