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. 

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.

It's the dynamics of organization that are complex, not the explanation

I've argued throughout this blog and elsewhere that management thinking and practice is seriously undermined if we fail to take seriously the complex social dynamics of organization (see here and here, for example). At the same time, I don’t think it is helpful for those who share this view to ram the language of complexity - and especially complexity science - down managers’ throats.

Provided that we stick with language that reflects their everyday lived experience, I find that managers (whether CEOs or first-line supervisors) can readily recognize and make sense of these hidden, messy, and informal dynamics. A friend once described this approach as, "Talking about complexity without talking about complexity."

So what might this mean for management and consulting practice?

“Talking the walk” as an act of everyday leadership practice

In a recent HBR blog post, entitled The Best Leaders “Talk the Walk”, Fast Company co-founder and author Bill Taylor argues,

“… the more time I spend with game-changing innovators and high-performing companies, the more I appreciate the need for leaders to “talk the walk” — that is, to be able to explain, in language that is unique to their field and compelling to their colleagues and customers, why what they do matters and how they expect to win. The only sustainable form of business leadership is thought leadership. And leaders that think differently about their business invariably talk about it differently as well.”

Taylor rightly acknowledges the importance of language to people’s understanding, motivation, and performance - whether for better or worse!  I wonder, though, if the way that he describes the notion of “talking the walk”, and the example that he uses to explain it, does it full justice. In particular, I think that he fails to highlight how, practised properly, this signals a fundamental shift in the nature of leadership communication. A shift, that is, that privileges joint sense-making and relationship building ahead of the excessive emphasis on 'getting the message across' that continues to dominate current practice.

Hidden, messy and informal dynamics of ‘planned’ organizational change

According to conventional 'wisdom', change is initiated by senior managers in response to an external stimulus and/or to realize their ambitions for the business. The required changes are then defined in detail and delivered using one or more formal "change management" methodologies, tools, and techniques (of which there is no shortage!).

In reality, though, regardless of which approach might formally be adopted...  

change emerges in the ongoing social process of conversational interaction – not in the periodic issuing and step-by-step management of formal plans, programmes, and projects.

The "beautiful, ugly truth"… of organization and management

“The beautiful, ugly truth” is how the leader writer in the latest New Scientist (28 June 2014) headlines the argument that it is “better to see the cosmos as it is, rather than as we’d like it to be”.

Suggesting that scientists have come to expect truth to be beautiful - and symmetrically structured - the article argues instead that “the cosmos makes more sense if it’s not quite perfect”.  This provides a lead-in to the cover story, which exposes the “ugly fact” that we live in an inelegant universe.  I guess that some might even call it “wiggly”!

“Perhaps,” the leader writer suggests,

“It’s time we stopped trying to find the truth through beauty, and instead try a bit harder to find beauty in the truth of ugly facts.”

I’ve argued much the same throughout this blog in relation to the nature of organizational dynamics and management practice. That is, managers, practitioners, politicians, and other commentators would do well to see the ‘beauty in the truth’ of the complex social dynamics of organization and the muddling through nature of real-world management practice. The challenge is illustrated below.

 

 

 

More on the “muddling through” nature of real-world management practice

In the previous post, I suggested that the most accurate way to describe what managers do in practice is that they "muddle through". Crucially, this is not some second-best response to the challenges that they face. It’s the only thing that they can do, given the social complexities of everyday organizational life.

However, this sits uneasily with the assumptions that still govern mainstream management thinking.  From that perspective, performance is seen as the result of formal, rational analysis of ‘the facts’; step-by-step decision-making by people whose agendas are fully aligned; and the seamless translation of those decisions into programmable action ‘on the ground’. In Informal Coalitions, I sought to expose this as a fiction. I argued there that ‘outcomes’ arise instead from informal interactions, joint sense-making, and political accommodations, made by people who are trying to make a difference in the complex, uncertain and ambiguous conditions that they experience day to day.

Complexity science and organizational dynamics

Much of the stuff that is written on organizational complexity is couched in terms of scientific concepts drawn from the natural world. This a wholly inappropriate way of trying to engage practising managers. More than that, though, it is also misleading to import scientific notions of chaos, complexity, thermodynamics, and the like into explanations of the complex social process of everyday human interaction - other than by way of analogy, perhaps.

Even then, I don't believe that it adds any value to use the related terminology in the context of managerial and consulting practice. Nor is there any need to do so. The dynamics of self-organization and emergence can be explained wholly in terms of the ongoing conversational interactions in which everyone is engaged and with which they are all familiar.

Attempts to explain this social process in terms of complexity science is, in my view, wholly misguided as well as counterproductive. The dynamics of human interaction are fundamentally different from those that are found in the natural world - from which the complexity sciences have been derived.

 

Making progress by paying attention to the everyday realities of leadership practice ahead of idealized prescriptions

In a new LinkedIn Group associated with the Centre for Progressive Leadership, members were recently invited to answer the following question:

"What are your top five 'must haves' if we are to see progress in the field of leadership?"

In response to this, and echoing my recent paper for the Centre entitled Taking Organisational Complexity Seriously, it seems to me that meaningful progress depends on the willingness and ability of managers to:

• understand and engage more insightfully with the complex social reality of organizational life;
• avoid the lure of simplistic, “if you do this, you’ll get that” prescriptions; and, in the words of Ralph Stacey,
• accept that "Managing and leading are exercises in the courage to go on participating creatively despite not knowing." 

At present, there is a wide gap between the established ways in which people understand and talk about organizational leadership, and the current reality of what leaders actually do in practice. Rather than prescribing some idealized future state based on prescriptive 'must haves', therefore, I thought I would respond to the question by offering five ‘already haves’. That is, five ways (amongst others) in which people's experienced reality of organizational life and leaders' actual behaviours already run counter to the ways in which these are supposed to operate according to conventional management 'wisdom' and common discourse.

These five 'already haves' are reproduced below.

Silos R Us - A natural dynamic of human interaction

An email recently arrived in my inbox pointing to an article that argued,

"Functional, operational and professional silos and mental ‘walls’ need to be demolished."

This is a perennial cry. Managers. consultants, and others have complained for years about this so-called "silo mentality". Yet still it persists. Why might that be?

To begin with, the tendency for people to act in this way is designed-in during formal organizationsal design projects. People are brought together to achieve things that they couldn't achieve alone. And, to enable them to do so, they are divided up (or divide themselves up) into separate divisions, departments, teams, roles, etc. This requires them both to strive to excel in terms of their specialist role contributions and, at the same time, to collaborate for 'the greater good' - however this might be constructed.

More significantly, though, 'silo behaviour' is a natural dynamic of the complex social process of everyday interaction. People seek to go on together in the midst of competing demands, needs and expectations. And they aim to do this in ways that preserve their sense of identity and self-worth; sustain their important relationships; enable them to be seen as competent in the eyes of significant others; and so on.

So 'silo behaviour' is one expression of the normal politics of everyday organizational life.