informal coalitions

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.

Organizational consulting – Taking complexity seriously

To what extent do your offerings as an organizational consultant, or those that you receive as a prospective client, foreground the complex social dynamics of organization and the implications of these for management practice and performance? Or are these framed instead in neatly packaged, ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’, terms?

“You’ve got to treat these people like trained monkeys.”

 

(Essential – if boring – preamble…)

It was autumn 1974. Some twelve months previously, I’d completed my engineering apprenticeship in the then publicly-owned UK power generation industry (CEGB). I was called to a meeting with the head of the maintenance department of the power station in which I was working at the time. He told me that I would be moving into the Work Specification Production Office. There, along with a clutch of other engineers, my job would be to produce documents that would specify in detail the work to be carried out by skilled craftsmen in the Mechanical Maintenance Department, on any and every conceivable maintenance task that they might find themselves working.

A few years previously, the CEGB had embarked on what I considered even then to be an ill-conceived Pay and Productivity Scheme. In it, craftsmen and others were paid according to their ability to carry out their assigned work within the time assessed by specially appointed Work Study Assistants. The Work Specifications, on which the times were based, included excessively elaborate, step-by-step instructions for the craftsmen, together with lists of precisely defined tools for them to use.

(Get on with it, Chris…)

O.K. To help me on my way, the head of department gave me a piece of advice that has shaped my approach to management to this day.  Although not in the way that he had intended.

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…

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. 

Paint-by-numbers consultancy

I recently received an invitation to attend a seminar on the new European Standard for Management Consultancy Services (EN 16114). This standard came into being around three years ago, in response to the EU's Services Directive, which seeks to establish a common market in services in the same way that it has in goods – a way of weeding out ‘bent banana’ consultants, presumably! 

Its advocates see this as a common-sense – and hence self-evidently beneficial – approach towards the “professionalization” of consulting practice.  But is it?

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?

Cultivating marginality

In a paper I wrote in the late-1990s, I drew attention to Wallace and Ridgeway’s point about the importance of "marginality" in the dynamics of organizational change and innovation. In Leadership for Strategic Change (1996), they argue:

"['Marginal men' (sic) have] . . . in an ambiguous environment . . . the capability to spot differences, to determine the patterns in unconnected data, and thus to perceive the factors that are relevant. ... They spot ideas that others do not and then they make public the ideas that others might not understand or appreciate…".

It seems to me that this remains an important characteristics of leadership in practice – whether exercised by those in formal management roles or others who are not.  It recognizes the complex social (pattern-forming and pattern-shifting) dynamics of organization.  And it veers away from the ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’ prescriptions that continue to dominate management orthodoxy - increasingly reinforced, it seems, by the apparent promise of ever more sophisticated analytical tools that will ‘cut through complexity’ to deliver the sought-after certainty, predictability, and control.

Managing complexity: the battle between rhetoric and reality

In a recent article for Forbes, Managing Complexity: The Battle Between Emergence And Entropy, LBS Professor Julian Birkinshaw offers the view that there are three processes at work in organizations that account for their "level of complexity".

These he describes as:

1. The top-down organizational design process.
2. A bottom-up emergent process of spontaneous interaction which he equates with the notion of self-organisation.
3. An entropic process, in which an (essentially closed) organisational system moves gradually and inexorably towards maximum disorder (or, importing the language of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, towards maximum entropy).

Apparently, "we all know" how the first of these three processes works - although the inference that this has nothing to do with self-organization and emergence belies that claim.

As regards the second, ‘bottom-up’ process of self-organizing emergence, Birkinshaw suggests that, under "the right conditions … well-intentioned individuals … will come together to create effective coordinated action".

And, in terms of the threat of "maximum disorder" arising from ‘The Second Law’, the claim is that, "… as organisations grow larger, they become insular and complacent. People focus more on avoiding mistakes and securing their own positions than worrying about what customers care about. Inefficiencies and duplications creep in. Employees become detached and disengaged. The organisation becomes aimless and inert."

The unwrapped sandwiches

I run a bimonthly network meeting for senior OD practitioners in central London. At a recent session, we were each invited to write a brief narrative on an experience that had struck us in some way and which had left some residual feelings and/or recollections that might merit further exploration. We were then asked to reflect on this personal narrative, both ourselves (as we were reading it out loud to a couple of other participants) and those others who were listening to our recollection of the event from an ‘external’ perspective. In this sort of mini learning set, we then talked about what we had heard during the retelling of our story, as part of a process that session leaders Douglas Board and Rob Warwick call "immersed reflexivity"¹.

My ‘striking moment' concerned a meeting that I had attended some weeks earlier in support of another independent consultant.  Our aim had been to secure a contract with a major organization in the UK. Although the meeting itself was an awkward affair, with the client director exhibiting some behaviour which suggested that any resulting work would be somewhat of a challenge, the initial response was positive. By that I mean that we were asked to design and deliver the first event of a number that we had proposed for the project team, line managers and the Board.  As we left, though, we shared our concerns about what, despite the outcome, had been a very unsatisfactory affair. I felt in particular that the main client didn’t ‘get’ what it was that we were proposing – and that he didn’t appear particularly interested in exploring anything beyond the mechanics (timing, attendees, reporting back, etc) of the initial workshop. These were issues that we agreed needed to be confronted sooner rather than later.