informal coalitions

Practice-based evidence

In a recent LinkedIn post and related article, Mike Cardus argued strongly in favour of organizational consultants basing their work with clients on the use of evidence-based practice.  I’m afraid that, in the context of organization and management practice, I disagree equally strongly with this line of argument.  This post outlines some of the reasons why I advocated the use instead of what I call "practice-based evidence".

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.

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.

Remembering "Escrick Man" – Reflections on organization and management

 

Twenty-four years ago today, on Saturday 29 February 1992, I spent several hours in a meeting with my colleagues on Drax Power Station’s Executive Team. We met in the pleasant surroundings of a country hotel in Escrick, some five miles south of York city centre.

The UK’s Electricity Supply Industry had been privatised in January 1991, with Drax becoming part of the largest of the CEGB’s three successor companies, National Power. As the country’s biggest and most modern coal-fired power station, its performance was very much in the spotlight. In meeting at Escrick, our aim was to take stock of the progress achieved in rising to the immediate challenges of privatisation, as well as identifying further steps needed to develop the business commercially.

Unlocking organizational talent

As Business Performance Manager, it had fallen to me to design and orchestrate the station’s change strategy, Transforming Drax. This brought together a diverse range of actions, aimed at moving the business away from its public-sector past to a position of successful, self-confident, and far-sighted leadership in the wider generation industry. Crucially, this “transformation” was couched in terms of broad themes rather than detailed projects and programmes.

From controlling to enabling business performance

Performance-enabling leaders: 

• Pay attention to what’s actually going on in the business, rather than relying on the supposed indicators of performance that find their way onto “scorecards”, “dashboards”, and the like.
• Recognize that organization is ‘wiggly’ - that is, things don’t happen in the neatly packaged and controllable ways that conventional management wisdom suggests they should.
• Expect surprises - helping people to anticipate and respond creatively to what actually emerges, rather than to those things that might have occurred if the real world had been kind enough to comply with the planning assumptions.
• Maintain high expectations of people’s willingness and ability to contribute.

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.

Performance-enabling leadership? Acting into an unknowable future

As I’ve suggested many times in this blog, it is not credible to acknowledge the socially complex nature of organization and then to claim that a particular concept, tool or technique is certain to deliver the sought-after results.  Despite this, managers are called upon to act with purpose into this unknowable future. That is, their role places them in charge but they are not in control of the outcomes that might emerge from their own and others’ contributions.

So how are they to proceed? What might they use to inform the judgements that they make, as they seek to enable people to perform in organization-enhancing ways?

The starting proposition is that organization is enacted through the myriad conversations and interactions through which people make sense of what’s going on and decide how they will act. And it is through the widespread interplay of these ‘local’ (i.e. small-group and one-to-one) conversations that performance ‘outcomes’ emerge and that "success" and "failure" come to be recognized as such. A sobering thought for managers is that most of these interactions take place in their absence. And yet it is through these conversations that people co-create the meaning of what they are doing and that individual and collective action is mobilized – whether in support of the official agenda or in opposition to it.

So, against this background, how might leaders participate in this ongoing process of conversational interaction, if their intention is to enable people to perform at their best?

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.