informal coalitions

A cultural ‘snapshot’

The self-organizing patterning of interaction that we think of as organizational culture is dynamic and always evolving. Although at any given instant it might be thought of as having a discernible pattern, this is only an abstraction of the intricacies of the ongoing process. 

The diagram above has proven useful in stimulating more in-depth conversations about the nature and impact of what I call “deep culture”, the dynamic which creates expectancy that things will progress in certain ways and not in others. In using this, the important thing is to look for underlying patterns in the conversations that are generated by this reflection.

In one instance, the power of underlying assumptions to channel thinking and behaviour was vividly demonstrated. A group of managers of a newly formed business unit were reflecting on the underlying assumptions within their parent organization, as a preliminary to looking at their own practice. Each of three sub-groups explored four of the 12 categories and, following consolidation of their outputs and further conversations, the team identified a number of recurring themes that they felt reflected key aspects of the prevailing culture. 

Most of the key words and phrases that the managers used to represent these six main themes were expressed negatively. That is, they were described in terms of things to avoid rather than things to aspire to. These included a cluster of sub-themes around people’s required behaviour, which comprised self-confident, no negatives, no problems just challenges, and not saying no. In that organization, at that time, being seen to be negative was perceived to be “career limiting.” However, when the senior manager involved wrote to me with his summary of the output, he began his e-mail by commenting as follows: “I felt it important to capture the assumptions in positive terms.” In relation to the acceptability or otherwise of negativity within the parent organisation, for example, he translated the above, largely negative, descriptors as follows: “Having a confident, positive, can-do attitude.”

Despite his genuine desire to expose and engage with the shadow-side issues, he felt compelled to present the output in a culturally acceptable ‘self-confident, no negatives, no problems, ‘can’t say no’ sort of way. It is in this way that people’s ongoing interactions become channelled – imperceptibly – along established ‘pathways’ of thought and action.

As always, the value of using an exercise such as this rests on the conversations that arise out of it. Cultural patterns are formed, continuously iterated and potentially changed through local conversations and everyday interactions. This approach uses that same medium to uncover the patterns that currently shape organizational sense-making-cum-action-taking. The insights gained can then be used to explore if and how these patterns might be shifted for organizational benefit.

This was frist posted on LinkedIn

 

Gaslighting

""As stated in Wikipedia, 

"Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment."

In an important article on the Becoming International website, which is aimed at leadership and development for women, Alison Maitland calls this out and offers some practical help for those affected by this pernicious practice. 

I penned a relatively short comment in response to Alison's LinkedIn post on this, but the site's 'word counters' intervened and prevented my posting it in the form that I had intended.  So I scrapped the comment and decided to post my response on the blog.   So here it is...

Are “shared values” the norm?

In Informal Coalitions, I challenged the widely held view that people need to share the same values, if organizations (and society more generally) are to function effectively.

I referred to this again recently, as a brief aside during a session on the conversational nature of organization. The meeting had been arranged by Naomi Stanford who, having reflected on what she saw as my “very firmly” stated view, later addressed this question in one of her excellent weekly blog posts on aspects of organization design.

As usual, she raised some interesting questions, pointed to a number of comments made on the subject by others, and offered some observations of her own. She concluded by saying that she agreed with the basic proposition.

So where am I coming from on this? And does it matter?

The essence of leadership

To begin with, establishing a set of organization-wide “shared values” has been a taken-for-granted aspect of the leadership task since the concept was first introduced by McKinsey consultants in the 1980s. This formed the central element of their “7-S Framework” (although they originally gave it the less catchy title of “Superordinate Goals”). According to this, and similar formulations, leadership is something that those formally appointed to specific organizational roles do to others (their “followers”), in ways designed to enhance individual and collective capability and performance. In McKinsey’s case, addressing and aligning the elements of the 7-S Framework was seen as the primary route to achieving this.

However, the nature of leadership is not defined by the job descriptions of particular role-holders. Nor is its practice confined to those who happen to occupy those formally designated positions.

Acts of leadership emerge spontaneously, as ‘punctuation marks’ in the ongoing process of everyday, conversational interaction.

Such acts are characterized by the ability of participants in this process to mobilize the collective action of others, in support of particular ways of thinking, being, and acting. That is to say, to succeed in encouraging and enabling people to come together around conversational themes which increase their understanding, emotional engagement, and capacity to act. And which shift the patterning of their ongoing interactions in significant ways.

As a natural dynamic, people tend to coalesce informally around those themes that make sense to them and which resonate sufficiently strongly with their own values and motivations. Or those that attract the support of others with whom they personally identify.

Whenever a sufficiently powerful coalition has been mobilized informally in this way, the conditions exist for the particular theme to be raised successfully as a formal policy proposition. In other cases, it will continue to be taken up in related shadow-side conversations and affect what happens in practice - often decisively - although it will not be spoken about in formal arenas.

So where does this leave us in relation to shared values?

On framing understanding and co-creating the future

Crucially, mobilizing collective action in this way does not require those involved to subscribe to a shared set of values. Any more than it requires them to have the same personal goals in life, natural ways of being, self-concepts, or whatever. It is only necessary for the particular theme being advanced at the time to make sense in relation to each individual's “personal frame of reference” (as I termed it in Informal Coalitions).

We each perceive, interpret, evaluate, and act into the world through the frame provided by this imaginary construct, which is unique to each one of us. This affects our ways of being, thinking, and acting (largely unconsciously); both clarifying and distorting our view of the world, and providing us with our sense of self. However, this uniquely personal frame continuously (re)emerges and becomes embodied via the communally social process of our ongoing interactions with others. This is the same interactional process through which organization is continuously (re)enacted, and out of which our concept of "the organization", as a collective identity, emerges.

As we act, moment to moment, into the continuously emerging future, this framing helps us in our never-ending quest to keep all of our important relationships in a desired state simultaneously. This not only includes those that are immediately relevant to the matter in hand, of course, but also others in our lives that might be affected by what is going on at that moment. I described this in Informal Coalitions as "the art of organizational plate-spinning". So the feelings that are motivating our behaviour at any given moment are unlikely to be confined to those that are supposed to affect our behaviour in a particular work context.

Insightfully, Ralph Stacey makes the distinction between publicly stated norms and personally held values. Both of these are socially formed, and intimately intertwined, in the course of this ongoing interactional process. Importantly, too, they both contribute to the framing of people’s thoughts and actions in each specific circumstance. However, whereas values provide a source of personal motivation and enthusiastic (or, at least, willing) participation, norms act as a form of social control, by constraining how people behave in the public arena.

The exercise of disciplinary power

Whenever “shared values” are referred to in the conventional management discourse, therefore, it is actually norms that are being spoken or written about. And, although these are often presented as a central aspect of so-called “transformational” leadership (with all of the positive connotations that this is meant to conjure up) Stacey points out that these actually act as a form of disciplinary power (after Michel Foucault). That is to say, these norms enable those who are formally in charge in a particular situation to control - at least to some extent in public settings - the thoughts and actions of those whom they are managing. This is because people are aware that observed compliance with the prescribed norms of behaviour provides the basis for such things as job selection, everyday acknowledgement and inclusion, formal recognition and reward, future advancement, and so on. Establishing such norms is therefore one of the ways in which managers (who are themselves subject to these same dynamics) seek to ‘catch the real-world wiggliness of organization in a net’, as I’ve described it elsewhere (see here, for example).

Although those formally in charge in a specific context cannot control what emerges overall from people’s myriad interactions, this does mean that they can exercise a degree of control over the ways in which those (inter)actions play out in public. The imposition of behavioural norms provides them with the disciplinary power to achieve this - even if the established management discourse glosses over this, by labelling these as “shared values”. Here, as everywhere else, there will be widespread differences of interpretation, and in the ways in which particular norms are taken up by people in practice. This means that any possibility of achieving an identikit response 'across the board' is purely illusory - unless pursued in an obsessive, cult-like fashion.

Does it matter?

Establishing norms is not, in itself, bad. Any more than a “values-led” approach is necessarily good. It depends on the nature of the imposed norms, and how these are applied. And on the specific, personally held values that are motivating and guiding people’s behaviour. Large-scale social organization necessarily requires people to behave in line with certain norms, if the process is to continue to function; a necessary degree of order and coherence is to be achieved; and the 'licence to operate' is to be maintained. In some cases, too, the constraints on behaviour that these involve might well command the widespread support of those affected, such as complying with the law; not knowingly putting the health and safety of people at undue risk; and so on.

What is unhelpful - and potentially unethical - though, is to disguise the exercise of disciplinary power - and the essential dynamics of constraint, compliance, and control that this involves - as characteristics of something that should be unquestionably met with willing engagement. Something, that is, which is enthusiastically “shared” rather than unilaterally imposed. Worse still would be the situation in which norms were packaged as "shared values" but applied in ways that amounted to coercion and bullying.

Mastery, mystery, and muddling through - 1

In a recent article, the Financial Times' political columnist, Janan Ganesh, argues that Theresa May's government is "stronger for its weakness".  In agreeing with this, Deborah Rowland comments briefly (here) that the accompanying uncertainty and 'not knowing', arising from the lack of a Commons majority, is likely to demand more collective decision-making and result in more creative solutions. She uses Keats's notion of "negative capability" to illustrate her point.

I very much support her view that strength can come from the capacity to survive and thrive in conditions of 'unknowability'. Indeed, the need and ability to do so flows directly from the complex social dynamics of human interaction, in which 'not knowing' is the norm, not the exception.

Sadly, Deborah then ends her post with a disappointingly dismissive reference to "muddling through", when talking about the required leadership response to these conditions. On this point, I disagree fundamentally. And it is this aspect of organizational dynamics and leadership practice that I want to say more about here.

Management by muddling through - It’s science, but not as we know it

On Sunday, it will be a year since Carly Chynoweth’s piece on Management by muddling through was published in the Sunday Times. Her interest in the topic had been sparked by my blog post entitled, The 'beautiful, ugly truth' ... of organization and management, in which I had referred to, "... the muddling through nature of real-world management practice."

This notion of management as muddling through sits uncomfortably with established thinking on how organization works and how performance happens.

In particular, this perspective runs counter to the view that professional management practice is marked out by its pursuit of scientific rationality, predictability, and control.  We see this reflected in the calls for practice to be “evidence-based”; the moves by representatives of professional bodies to standardize all aspects of the roles of managers and other organizational specialists; and the requirement for organization-related academic research to demonstrate a measureable benefit, if it is to be considered to be worthy of investment.

Underlying assumptions

All of this presumes, first of all, that the scientific method is capable of discovering universal, ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’ truths. Secondly, it takes for granted the idea that this same methodology can be applied to the complex social process of human interaction that we call “the organization”.

On financial regulation and the complex social dynamics of organization

A recent discussion in the Complexity in Organisations group on LinkedIn drew attention to comments made in June 2010 by the then head of the Financial Services Authority, Hector Sants. In a speech to members of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (reported here), he expressed his view that regulators should have their brief extended to include oversight of the cultures of those organizations that were subject to their regulation. According to Sants,

"Unacceptable culture within firms was a major contributor to the financial crisis and so regulators should play a greater role in judging how culture drives firms' behaviour and impacts on society as a whole, according to the chief executive of the Financial Services Authority (FSA)."

He made great play on the need for prudence in managers' decision-making, before concluding that,

"Determining an ethical framework is for society as a whole, not an unelected regulatory agency. However, it is, I believe, our role to police behaviour and expect firms to have the right culture which facilitates the delivery of the outcomes we expect."

For Sants’s prescription to make sense, though, the following statements would need to be true:

• The “prudence” or otherwise of a manager's decision is obvious at the instant that the decision is made.
• There is a direct causal link between managers' decisions and “societal outcomes”. 
• “Culture” is the product of a manager's intentions (i.e. something that they can design, build, and change at will).
• There is a direct causal link between an “unacceptable culture” and the “outcomes [that] that drives”.

So do these stack up?

“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.

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.

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.

Why escaping the chains of the dominant management discourse is proving difficult

Ralph Stacey has argued that a fundamental factor in the global financial crisis has been widespread adherence to a management discourse that bears little relationship to people's everyday experience of organizational life (see here). Despite a continuing gap between theory and practice, the view persists that a generalized set of rational, scientific principles can be identified and applied to organizations. As a result, the expectation that organizational outcomes can be predicted and controlled, based on rational analysis and formal processes, continues to dominate managers’ practice, consultants’ offerings and mainstream management publications.

So why does this unhelpful pattern persist?

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, when the sought-after benefits fail to materialize this is most often blamed on poor implementation rather than unsound thinking. That is, the above discourse contains within it the expectation that shortfalls will occur during implementation.  Perversely, then, failure confirms its validity. It is part of what managers take for granted and ‘know’ to be true. By adopting a “do it better and get it right” stance to implementation, failure is rationalized as a problem with execution and the flawed assumptions remain to fight another day.

But there is also a further characteristic of the complex dynamics of social interaction that, paradoxically, tends to reinforce the dominant management discourse. This is the ability – and often the motivation - that exists post-event to explain outcomes in ways that imply the existence of rationality, predictability and control.  Below, I’ve set out three contrasting examples of organizational dynamics, all of which fall foul of this tendency.