Employee Engagement: Competence, Motivation, Opportunity

In his Contrarian Thinking blog, Etienne Laliberté posted a link to a discussion paper entitled "An HR Director's Guide to Employee Engagement". I think the authors really underscore the limitation of the competency approach here:

The long-standing focus on ‘skills’ as key to increasing productivity is too limited. The ‘people and performance’ model identifies the three requirements for releasing employees’ discretionary effort as ability, motivation and opportunity. The skills agenda addresses only the first of these – employee engagement addresses all three. There is an historic opportunity for the Government to demonstrate that it understands the drivers of...performance.

Their Main Point: You not only need the relevant competencies, you need opportunity and motivation.

But here's the tricky question: Which is more important?

First, consider whether relevant competencies are something people are born with. Generally they are learned. They are abilities that people learn both formally and informally, in the classroom, and more often on the job.

Second, consider what are called "generic competencies". Who cannot learn them? Apart from the tragic cases, people have capacity to learn most generic competencies, and it's a matter of motivation and opportunity whether they realize these capacities or not.

I can understand that for jobs in which professional certification and/or very well-developed technical skills are required, these requirements would be included in a job description or a job posting. But it is very important to understand that competencies are not like standard features on a car, like horsepower, or doors, or seating. They are not static givens that people are born with, they are things that, given the opportunity and motivation people will learn, develop and display.

The fact that competencies are learned, not givens, raises questions about the value of hiring on the basis of lists of generic competencies. We should be looking for potential and providing opportunities, not looking for static givens thereby ruling out potential.

If I were hiring someone for for a job, I would certainly ensure they had the key professional technical expertise required, but on the more generic competencies, I'd forgo the standard list, except perhaps for communication skills, and look for what they enjoy:

What did they do or what ideas do they have that make their eyes light up when they tell you about them? Are they interested in the fine details, or are they interested in the big picture? Do they prefer action or contemplation? Do they feel anxious if things are not perfectly clear and stable, or can they tolerate a certain level of ambiguity? Are they more comfortable dealing with "just the facts" (task masters) or do they explore possibilities (experimenters)? Are they motivated primarily to climb the ladder (careerists) or to express creativity (innovators)? Do they enjoy working alone or in groups? What balance of direction/discretion are they most comfortable with? In what way do they really want to make a difference in their professional lives?

Understanding people's preferences, their motivations, would tell me most of what I'd need to know, if not more, than checking off the standard lists. And given the opportunity to act in accordance with their preferences and motivations, they would continually develop the relevant competencies.

So motivation and opportunity do not merely "complete" the trio of elements of employee engagement necessary to improve performance, they actually are the basis for learning, developing and displaying competence.

On Risk Aversion

Is risk aversion a fear of auditors or bad press...or is it denial of the natural transformation that is occurring now towards models of complexity and resilience? It seems we prefer the illusion of control, delivered by models that are
- analytical,
- artificial,
- compartmentalized,
- categorical
- linear,
- mechanical, and
- simplistic.

To be able to achieve manageable simplicity, we would have to be able to identify and control the context, the boundaries, the parameters in which we operate. It is no longer possible to imagine that that we can. The flurry of performance measurement gone mad is probably a reaction formation. Facile metrics are a tragic and total waste of resources, and that's one of the few simple things we do really all know.

The Logic of Quantophrenia

Here's a crash course on the reasonable and unreasonable (quantophrenic) use of indicators (business metrics):

Reasonable:

Given a reliable indicator (sign) of a concrete problem, there is a concrete problem.
If the problem is resolved concretely, the indicators should represent (track/signal) that.

I>P (If I then P)
Therefore,
~P > ~I (If not P then not I)

This is a logically valid form of reasoning. It spurs committed people to remedy the concrete problem.

A simple example for illustrative purposes: Imagine that an unexpectedly high number of employees have been on long term acting assignments in different parts of your organization. What does that indicate? Let's say you do some research and your investigation reveals that, although there are a number of bona fide developmental activities occurring, the problem is due to cumbersome staffing processes and a weakness in integrating business and HR planning, making assignments a quick remedy. So what do you do? You reason that if you streamline staffing and pay more attention to resourcing with respect to projected business requirements, over time, your numbers should diminish to levels that would be expected given developmental activities.

Quantophrenic version:

Given some accurate indicator (sign) of a concrete problem, there is a concrete problem.
If the indicators have changed for the better, the problem has been concretely resolved.

I>P
Therefore,
~I > ~P

IS NOT a valid form of reasoning (it commits what logicians call "the fallacy of denying the antecedent"), and in itself a sign of a problem; i.e., tick box management.

To illustrate, using the previous example, an unexpectedly high number of employees on long term acting assignments indicates problems with cumbersome staffing processes and a weakness in integrating business and HR planning. So what do you do? To meet your indicator target, you remove everyone from their acting assignments. Obviously, you have met your indicator target 100%, but you have not solved the concrete problem, in fact you have quite clearly exacerbated it.

This is a very simplistic example, but it illustrates the potential dangers of metrics as business drivers.

Question: what drives quantophrenia?

Conceptual Filing Cabinets are not Reality

Ever noticed that when corporate downloads an initiative to remedy an internal management problem, the effects on the ground tend to be the opposite of what was intended? Without going into details, this may explain why. Mintzberg said:

"Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. One is analysis, the other is synthesis"*

The fact is, the corporate structure tends to be organized in terms of business lines or branches, so initiatives get forumulated around compartmentalized resources.  That means analytical thinking will predominate in planning - and analytical thinking relies on compartmentalized categories – checklist items. People mistake their conceptual filing cabinets for reality and are rewarded for substituting numbers for facts. But as some astute Brit said not long ago, “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.”  The success of mechanistic models of the past has seduced us to seeking "simple" solutions in  complex arenas, much more complex than are tackled by the hard numbers of "hard science." 

Most activities in business are dynamically interconnected and adjustments in one area can be offset by failing to consider their impact on other areas. Thinking strategically involves connecting the dots, lateral thinking, the use of the right brain, which is basically grounded in intention, will, and commitment (caring).

The first thing required for an effective strategy is that you genuinely care.

The second thing is flexibility and openness.

Some folks believe that analytical thinking is a cut above more poetic sensitivities and that it is the sole defender objectivity and of fairness. I'd like you to consider that such a view is rather narrow, sometimes honest but simplistic, other times useful to people with a power-for-power's-sake agenda. Models of evaluation based on analytical thinking are just as prone to manipulation and bias as any poetic kind of perspective. They are also dangerous as one doesn't need brute strength or mass hysteria to convince, but one can just point to "the numbers"as an incantation. This is less likely in very precise areas such as physics, but in business, there are just no exhaustive and exclusive definitions that can be reliably used for evaulative purposes. Our definitions and indicators are handy rules of thumb, never meant to be the be-all and end-all of evaluation. (ISO - I despair.) A planner can pick a few handy items from a potentially infinite list of possible indicators.  Nevertheless, those who employ a definition, a methodology, who fail to think things through broad-mindedly with an honourable meaning, purpose and value, who yet check a list of measures, have the advantage of the appearance of objectivity. This is a pernicious effect of the "trope of science" and needs rooting out.

*link no longer available.

Are Change Agents "Spoilsports"? OR The Politeness of Organizational Politics

I recently read a great article by Mark Kingwell in the April 2009 edition of Walrus Magazine called Obama: All in the Game. In that article, I was struck by this:

To refuse the collective illusion of the game is not to cheat; it is
much worse — it’s to be a spoilsport.

What does this mean for those who question the rule book? Organizational culture tends to be self-replicating. In other words, organizations are hegemonic. Following the narrative of the organization means not being a spoilsport, and if you follow it well, you can get ahead. Change is difficult to get off the ground, as it is those who adapt best to the existing narrative that are supported in their career development, while innovators can be seen as threats.

In public life, there is more often than not a misfit between our real emotions and our professional persona. Emotion is a response to the world's response to our desires. Some of our desires are selfish, but more often they are desires for fair treatment and the resolution of distress-producing circumstances, which would benefit the organization generally.

This is a clue to the objectivity of a political malaise - that it disturbs people, even while they work hard to rationalize it away, repress or deny it, or even take personal responsibility for it, when it is ultimately the product of a collectively produced socio-cultural dynamic. Organizational stress and health issues are in ample evidence, unfortunately.

As long as our desires are healthy, our emotions are healthy. In contrast, having "emotional intelligence" (EQ) means you have managed to be on the same page as other adherents to a narrative, i.e, that you are savvy enough not to question the rule book, and that you are not digging too deeply into causes, disturbing the apparent comfort of the confines of the status quo. EQ means that you put your professional health before your emotional health.

In other words, EQ represents your capacity for diplomacy, not innovation. That will make you a survivor. For no matter how well-intentioned you might be in looking for solutions to problems that distress you and others, it is more often the collective will that the narrative be preserved. I'm not even sure that it's that "people prefer the devil they know," as the old saying has it. It's just that it is dangerous to both the authors of the narrative and those subject to it to question the rules, to disturb the "collective illusion" that sustains organizational power structures. For better or for worse, power structures represent "the very fabric of society" and resistance to change should not be underestimated. This is the reason why initiatives meant to introduce organizational change are undertaken superficially and this superficiality is supported with tick-box metrics that show "concrete measurements" of desired changes. People nervy enough to question the rules deeply are swiftly marginalized as the spoilsports who "just don't get it."

So what does it take to be a successful change agent?

Perverse Effects of Business Metrics

Please think about this:

[T]here is a tendency to fall back on what is easiest to measure and to count, i.e. outputs, even if they are less important than outcomes. The danger of this, however, is to negate the major purpose of results-based reform, which is to refocus efforts on what citizens and society ultimately gain from government.

From OECD article http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/4/10/2497163.pdf paragraph 25.

Methodolatry

I just came across this article discussing "methadolatry" and although the author is discussing modelling and simulations, I think a lot of his insights could be applied in business planning. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jos/journal/v2/n3/full/jos20087a.html

I love the sections entitled Methodolatry, the Dead fish fallacy, and the Jehova problem (6-8), especially the stuff in each section written under "The motivation".

I will be expanding on these thoughts in the near future.... Something about their impacts on the culture of work and employee engagement. Stay tuned.

A Short Definition of Leadership and its Opposite

A leader sees, encourages and enables others' better natures.

The micromanager will ignore, discourage or otherwise diminish them.

Leaders open and support (authorize) vital systems, while authoritarians shut them down.

Leaders are attuned to creative possibilities, while the officious urge the return to familiar ground when confronted with them.

How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic

When people mistake efficiency for effectiveness (means for ends), there is a pointless adherence to the administrative rules (i.e., bureaucracy in its pejorative sense.) To avoid making this mistake, what has to happen in organizations is a cultural change around the reporting requirements, because people will do (and generally restrict their attention to) what they are measured on.

If the measurements are all about either efficient transactions (e.g., in purchasing, staffing) without reference to context and objectives, or an assessment of the value of the objectives, then nothing has been measured. How can you measure efficiency without some reference to a strategic, big picture, generally not-easily-measured end, especially in public sector and non-profit organizations?

When bureaucratic controls slide from being necessary evils to being just plain counterproductive , something is dreadfully wrong. Controls need to be aligned with goals.

A very crucial element in remedying such a situation is to help people understand that reports are not results, they are just means of getting information, which might be more or less (but is quite often less), helpful to broader planning and information sharing.

A report is information subset covering some aspects of what happened. It is not identical to the concrete events that actually happen. Neverthlesss, some people seem to spend more time bean  counting  than doing, following procedures, rather than innovating, challenging, and leading change. Their efforts need to be undertaken with a view to deep, quality results. Quality and depth of results is important, and that does not mean pulling out an army of accountants immured in a quantophrenic vision of quality control. It means having inspiration, courage, and support to use one's own judgement and discretion in assessing how to best align one's activities with the organization's goals, or even to question the broader social value of the ends being sought.

So it's not just a web of institutional regulations, it's the stifling amount of reportage that is not aligned to anything other than short term means and efficiencies that makes an institution overly bureaucratic (and therefore less efficient). And this adminstrative kind of bureaucracy eventually becomes an entire focus, even a way of life, providing some (i.e., the uninspired and officious) expediencies and a sense of power and accomplishment, having done everything "by the book".

The rest just wither away, eventually.

And thus bureaucracy sustains itself.

Putting theories into practice for organizational renewal

Years ago, I taught a first year introduction to psychology that was being offered to provide students with some information that would help them be more effective in their studies. To that end, I was introducing them to some concepts in learning and memory as modeled in cognitive psychology. The idea was that if they knew how memory worked, they could understand why certain methods of study were more effective than others, and apply that knowledge to their own advantage.

I was totally taken aback one day when I asked a class to do an exercise that involved drawing a conceptual map, or “mind map” of the structures of memory. One of the students asked,

“When you ask us to draw a mind map of memory, do you mean real memory or the stuff we’ve been learning in class?”

Ouch.

How could such a question occur? I heard myself answering that scientific theorists are people doing their best to explain realities such as how real memory works.

When you introduce people to a new theory or model, you are really asking them for a change in perspective, a new way of selecting and organizing information. In fact, a theory is a way of selecting and organizing the information that comes through experience. A good theory is a more systemic way of integrating information. (And as we all know, there are bad theories.) But people are resistant to change, and new theories just bounce off them as theoretical. A change in theoretical paradigms, or institutional perspectives, has a huge impact on how people see themselves and their world, and it takes more than a few reasonable sounding presentations to bring people in.

We select and organize information all of the time, and usually through a combination of two largely complementary dimensions of culture:

1. The residue of theories and beliefs that we have inherited as members of a linguistic community
   
2. Ideas and conversations that support the economic structure (and by economic structure, I mean the actual concrete social interactions and hierarchies in which we participate collectively to produce our livelihood ).

When new theories start to emerge, new ways of looking at things, there are three strands of activity.

1. Conservation: The conservators of tradition (usually the majority) dig in their heels. It’s as if there is a collective antibody to a revision of thought. (e.g., Reductionist backlashes against complex systems theory, patriarchal backlashes against understanding the reality of misogyny.)
   
2. Naïve Adoption: The radicals react to the conservators and, in their haste to get on a change bandwagon, don’t bother to do in-depth research and reporting, and divest the new theories of any credibility and do them a disservice by reducing the ideas to appealing but fanciful metaphors. (New-agers, for instance, on complexity theory, or radical feminists and some of their more questionable generalizations about men.) Genuine researchers get tarred with some kind of pejorative brush, and may even turn away from these research areas given that they have become ideologically tainted.
   
3. Realization: Then there’s the ineluctable (barring any “dark age” forces) but gradual adoption of the new paradigm (such as the adoption of complex systems by certain researchers in environmental science, biology and geology, or the acceptance of the equality of men and women.)

Organizational changes, such as the Government of Canada’s PS Renewal initiative need to be seen to be seen as realizable, not just an "academic exercise" by those who have the responsibility to move it forward.

In order to change the culture, these new ideas need to become ingrained in the discourse but also in the "economics" i.e., systems and practices, of the public service. But before that will happen, it is important to recognize that there will be both a conservative backlash and possibly a rush to a naïve adoption that will serve the interests of the conservators.

Sound leadership, an enabling infrastructure, and a strong focus on the public good will allow the better forces to move the organization forward.

Emotional Intelligence: It's just small-p politics

Some people are brilliant at coming up with routines, processes, tools, and methodologies to manage meetings and address the difficulty, in corporate circumstances, in talking about the subject of their creativity and curiosity (while some techies have "permission" to do that, most people working in large organizations don't.)

People who are members of a community of practice are excited by their work and sharing their expertise as an end in itself. For these people, meetings aren't tainted by having to negotiate a plethora of hidden agendas. And people have the courage to own and speak about their creative ideas without needing some cumbersome legitimating routine. Other groups are more caught up in institutional politics and therefore they need a hand creating "safe spaces" for themselves to have what really should be ordinary conversations about things that interest them as human beings (other than small-p dominance and getting ahead.)

It's not a healthy situation to need some kind of negotiation strategy just to have a conversation about what inspires people's thoughts, hopes and imagination. Perhaps the ability to do that is considered emotional intelligence, but in my book, it's called Promotional Intelligence.

In my opinion, we should learn about emotional intelligence from people enthusiastic about sharing the opportunities for discovery life affords. We should emulate people from communities of interest. We should not emulate those supposedly "emotionally intelligent" members of the narrow small-p politics set who find enthusiam embarrasing generally, or their complements, i.e., those waiting for permission to speak.

Complexity and Employee Engagement

In a blog entry called Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War , Venkatesh Rao states

[N]ot only do Boomers not get complexity, they are suspicious of it, thanks to their early cultural training which deifies simplicity. The result of this difference is that Boomer management models rely too much on simplistic ideological-vision-driven ideas. Consider, for instance, the classic Boomer idea of creating “communities of practice” with defined “Charters” and devoted to identifying “Best Practices.” No Gen X’er or Millenial would dare to reduce the complexity of real-world social engineering to a fixed “charter” or presume to nominate any work process as “best.” … I suspect, as Gen X’ers and Millenials take over, that the idea of vision and mission statements will be quietly retired in favor of more dynamic corporate navigation constructs.

I don’t know that this is strictly about the generations, but it certainly is insightful. I’d like to link this to the debate between what is called reductionism and complexity. Reductionists believe that “the truth is simple” and try to explain things by reducing everything to a narrow set of definable objects and a set of laws for their interactions. It’s as if there is a warehouse full of categorized objects (e.g., sub-atomic particles, genes) and a certain set of rules about how these are to interact, that are based on these things’ intrinsic, mathematizable qualities.

To me, it’s obvious that nothing in the universe is like that. First of all, laws are not forces, but mathematical conceptions of patterns of interaction. The idea that you can produce and explain things through the placement of objects and the application of laws leaves out a lot of information. For instance, in nature, when does a process start, and with what event or thing? What are the boundaries and parameters of a system of interactions? (How do you know what factors will be/become relevant?) Does one particle have the same properties as a number of them, and if not what is the “minimum”?

In recent years, complexity and complex systems theory have undercut a lot, but certainly not all (or even most), of reductionist thinking. Physicist, Robert B. Laughlin, for instance, argues that laws are not what causes certain interactions, but the reverse, laws are what emerge from interactions. Complexity theorist, Stuart Kauffman observes that reductionists just take parameters as givens, while showing that in living systems, life creates its own parameters (e.g., cell walls). Nature is self-organizing.

The point is that the old Newtonian paradigm is now crumbling and a new paradigm is well underway to becoming the reigning one, a point that Gilles Paquet has made with effect. So how does this tie to mission statements and charters and what-not?

Methodologies parameterize: They define limits of operation, without necessarily any awareness being generated of how the limits are drawn. This is why there are predictably going to be “perverse effects” of target-setting. Transaction quotas, for instance.

Programmed procedures might be great when you can reasonably identify all of the things that might have an effect on the outcome and control for that but, outside of a laboratory or some staple factories perhaps, life’s not like that. It’s putting the cart before the horse to think that the methods, processes, templates, and formalized procedures we've come up with so far provide adequate parameters of possible activity. Process templates and toolkits, initially touted as panaceas, are all eventually discarded, not always because of the shocking unforeseen, but due to the fact that they can never capture all of the complexity of normal operations. And besides, most people prefer to think rather than follow instructions, as long as they have the time to do so.

An over-reliance on methodology cuts off possibilities and prohibits learning and risk-taking and the use of good judgment, and sets up blind, impersonal systems as abstract authorities. The results of over-programming organizational processes mean you’ll lose the engagement of more risk-tolerant and innovative employees and wind up entangled in a web of rules.

Putting the B in Bureaucracy

How to get tangled in a "web of rules":

1. Make sure that the point for which the rules and administrative procedures are implemented is obscure. (This is made that much easier by the prevailing assumption that the desired result is simply whatever is produced by fastidious adherence to a process, methodology or technique.)
   
   
2. Maintain a strict hierarchy and ensure that people blindly follow the rules even though doing so in certain instances runs counter to the objective that they were supposed to ensure.
   
   
3. Rather than solving administrative problems with a systemic view, make enough ad hoc adjustments in the system to appear to to have a sincere interest in remedying flow problems. That way, the very logic of the system in relation to the objective is completely lost and there is no way a reasoning person can determine why the rules exist in the first place.
   
   
4. When it reaches the point that no one knows where the rules came from or why they’re following the rules, develop business metrics to prove compliance (here creativity is a bonus, but only here) and carefully post them framing them as achievements of results and outcomes, thus ensuring "transparency"). Then make heavy investments in technical systems to ensure that compliance (a.k.a. achievement of results) is easy to monitor (in principle, anyway).  

In today's complex environment, to possess the foresight necessary to map out administrative and reporting processes so that they never run counter to the strategic objectives would need more genius and ingenuity than any person alive on the planet today. While perfection is not in the cards, there have to be ways of identifying and remedying the administrative blockages and obfuscations that lead to loss of meaning and employee disengagement, let alone inefficiencies. Learning should be ongoing.
The solution is to make sure that the policy objectives are always clear (and meaningful) to people and that bureaucratic processes are always up for examination. The administrative rules should not be absolute but treated as heuristics used judiciously by intelligent and ethical managers and leaders.
Today, it is said that a relevant public service is a flexible public service.

Those who are firm and inflexible
are in harmony with dying.
Those who are yielding and receptive
are in harmony with living.*

*From verse 76 of the Tao te Ching, translated in the book, The Tao of Power by R.L. Wing.

Irony of the Audit

Do public organizations overspend in the effort to demonstrate that they don't overspend?

A lot of time and work goes into reporting, but what is being reported? Is it the money spent, services provided, or the needed social change accomplished?

I wonder why people are so interested in things like expense accounts and less worried about how their money is working to provide services and enhance society. Perhaps what the Minister spent on lunch is just much easier to measure and report on. Or maybe roads, garbage and wastewater management are not that big in terms of the media-sexy factor and don't interest the politicians. It's equally likely that the narrow focus is because the work of the public service is too varied and complex to be summed up in any kind of number, but numbers are what people think is objective, even though they're only meaningful when what is being counted really counts.

It would make a lot more sense, in terms of what gets demonstrated, and may increase public engagement, to emphasize more strategic goals, showing what the public service actually does, rather than what it spends.

The public service is not a business and does not exist in order to make a profit, or even to be "fiscally responsible." The correlate of private sector profits for the public sector is the the public good. Fiscal responsibility is not a goal, but a means.

There is usually an inverse relationship between what is worthwhile and what is easy to measure.

Means and Ends

The expresssion, "the ends don't justify the means," makes sense.

I sometimes wonder, though, whether we aren't today guilty of a reverse approach: We assume that the means justify the end. For example, money (which has no instrinsic value, i.e., it is not an end in itself) drives industrial production. It is not the things produced, but "the bottom line" that drives production and the concrete outcome is really not considered intrinsically important.

Maybe that's not quite right. Who's to say what's intrinsically valuable (valuable in itself, valuable as an end) and what's valuable only as a means to an end? Values are subjective, right?

I think you can pretty much prove that there are some things that are valuable, but that are not intrinsically valuable, but only valuable for something else. Money is the archetypical example. Considered in itself, "money has no value apart from the paper it's written on." Can it stand alone as the goal of all action? No, it's only worth pursuing if you can spend it, or do something else with it, like purchase things that you need or want or gather social power or prestige.

Conversely, I don't think it's that easy to prove what is intrinsically valuable. Maslow thought certain experiences tied to self-actualization were intrinsically valuable, as opposed to things that were the conditions for that (i.e., life's necessities). Creativity, art, that kind of thing, are considered of intrinsic value, ends-in-themselves.

There's a logic to it: Would you create an organization, for instance, whose sole objective was to audit itself? Even if somebody wanted to create such an organization, everyone would think they were a bit squirrelly (or perhaps totally bureaucratic) ;) and with good reason. That shows that fiscal responsibility is not an end in itself, it is only a means, a way of doing things. On the other hand, it would not be bureaucratic at all to create an institution whose sole objective was to give people opportunities to do curiosity-based research or develop artistic talent.

In the last blog, Jack Martin was quoted as saying that it was a mistake to put the methodological cart before the ontological horse, i.e., to assume that the method or means by which information is obtained is the only criterion by which the reality of what it's about is assessed. This ties back to the mistaken idea that all that is real is measurable because there is, of course, plenty that is real that is not measurable...and much of it considered "subjective" as a result. There's plenty that we don't know, and plenty that we don't know that we don't know. To think that the methods we've come up with so far provide adequate parameters for ascertaining the limits of possible existence is nevertheless a very common assumption.*

Another example of putting means before ends is in the idea that it is a given good that citizens should be "productive". What should they produce? There are plenty of products that aren't worth producing. What about our own reasoning capacity to evaluate the worth of the products we produce? Do we value that less or more than our "productivity"?

*But beware the fallacy of arguing anything from a lack of knowledge ;).

The Art of Objectivity

As many people have pointed out across several disciplines including management (Gilles Paquet), physics (Robert Laughlin) and psychology, there is a ubiquitous and lamentable tendency to believe that all that is real is measurable and only what is measurable is real. A few years ago, I found a great article on "The Top Ten Problems of Psychology" (I believe it is no longer available) by Jack F. Martin. In it, he commented on the thinking of Sigmund Koch, saying

Koch (1981) views such tendencies in psychology as residing within a more general twentieth century trend toward…regard[ing] knowledge as the result of "processing" rather than discovery…[and]…he is not the only historian of psychology to make the general observation that psychology has typically placed its methodological cart in front of its ontological horse (e.g., Bevan, 1986; Danziger, 1990)

What Koch is saying when he criticizes the notion that knowledge is a result of processing rather than discovery has nothing directly to do with computing. He is talking about the view that what is considered real (one's "ontology") is the output of a methodology, and if you think about it, this is putting the cart before the horse!

Robert Laughlin laments the same tendency in physics when he says,

The myth of collective behaviour [of particles] following from [laws of nature] is, as a practical matter, exactly backwards. Law instead follows from collective behaviour, as do the things that flow from it such as logic and mathematics.

You may think that scientific methodology is the arch guarantor of objectivity and truth, but as I have said before, to count anything you need a definition, sometimes called an "operational definition", and to test anything, you need to consider what types of things would have an effect on the outcome. The shorthand for that is, you have to identify, at least provisionally, the relevant determinants. The even shorter shorthand for that is that you have to identify the context, or "frame of reference." But coming up with definitions and determining contexts are not themselves products of a method, but preliminary to the development and application of a method, and arrived at by reasoning. Before anyone can apply a method, there has to have already been some observation (guided by interest, knowledge and reason, of course) and some reasoned hypothesizing.

What happens if we take this into consideration when it comes to business metrics? What happens when people are subject to an illusion that some kind of process or methodology determines what is considered real? The usual: Reason flies out the window and the B in Bureaucracy takes over. Consider Martin's tenth problem of psychology and then draw the analogy to business:

[The] inquiry practices of psychologists mostly reflect a misunderstanding of Bridgman's (1952) notions of operational analysis and definition. ...[P]sychologists frequently treat such definitions as exhaustive of the very conceptual meanings to which they are intended…only to point...[and] psychologists' conceptualizations of complex phenomena such as human motivation and confidence often are impoverished to the point where they are equated...with...a small number of predetermined factors such as effort, ability, luck, and task difficulty…

When the results one is supposed to achieve are tied to narrow indicators, and when people conflate the indicators (the report) with the result (the real, physical "out there" event/state of affairs) there is more attention to efficiency (the method) than the actual results (the ontology). It all goes horribly awry once some sort of methodology is in place that is supposed to be adhered to thoughlessly, as if the magic of some operational definition has created an "objective" situation, and we follow the methodology like unthinking robots, because in contrast to the robotic following of method, thought is supposed to be "subjective". This ignores the fact that it is through reasoning (well or badly) that we have come up with the method in the first place!

The advice to "let the managers manage" is the advice to trust that managers can reason things out. Why else were they hired? Strangely, there is more risk in following methodology and discouraging reasoning than there is in allowing creative human thought.

What is really needed is worthwhile goals and some committed, honest, thoughtful people to bring them into objective reality.

Concrete Deliverables: Watch out for Goal Displacement

Burt Perrin, in a report entitled, Implementing the Vision: Addressing Challenges to Results-Focused Management and Budgeting writes,

Goal displacement occurs when indicators become the objective, where the focus is on “meeting the numbers” rather than doing what the program was created to do or improving actual outcomes. Thus it represents the distortion of program activities.

In fact it is conceivable that working to meet number targets may even produce "perverse effects" such as serving those easiest to serve rather than those in most need, or focusing on procedural efficiencies to increase numbers (of transactions, say) rather than improving system efficiencies, which might decrease them. This occurs for two reasons.

First, efficiencies, which numbers measure (more or less accurately), are not goals, but ways of achieving goals. Numbers are not targets, but for tracking. Second, as Perrin notes, "It does not always make sense to attempt to represent a complex initiative by just a very small number of quantitative indicators. There typically is an inverse relationship between what is important and what is easiest to count and to measure."

So as people focus on meeting the numbers and confuse the report for the result, they close off to the complexity of the situation, and actions become skewed to achieving "concrete deliverables" which could be anything but. What do we take to be objective today? Is it the evidence of the senses, all the flux and change that happens in real time? Well, not really! It is rather what can be measured, quantified and counted.

Getting the numbers right is not an easy matter. To count measure and something, you need to have a category or definition, which is a static mental compartment and sorting device. For example, in order to count employees, you first have to establish a category or definition of "employee" for your organization. If your definition of employee changes, your numbers will change, even if nothing "concrete" changes.

So now, the question about what constitutes objectivity moves up a level. How many of the categories and definitions we use are given and natural like mammal and bird and how many are social and historical like person or fiscal year? Many categories may seem self-evident but to what extent is our confidence in our categories due to social and historical factors, including learning, rather than natural ones? Have we arrived at the end of learning? Of course not.

When it comes to precision measurements and results, physics is the archetype. To discover physical laws, physicists have to establish that their results are reproducible. They need to determine what factors need to be controlled and what properties are internal to the phenomena under investigation. When developing tests they carefully articulate operational definitions, which define phenomena in mathematical terms. There is no algorithm or checklist procedure for these activities, and it takes a great deal of skill, knowledge and insight. You might say, there is an “art” to ensuring objectivity.

Scientists in areas such as biology and geology and even some areas of physics, are investigating things where there are innumerable factors that cannot be isolated and controlled. Scientists are beginning to question whether we have been acting as if something is real because it is measurable, rather than the reverse. (See for instance, Robert Laughlin's A Different Universe.) They emphasize the need to think of nature more as a dynamic complex system. This moves the question of what constitutes objectivity up yet another level because it means considering not just how we define something for the purposes of counting instances of it, but how we frame and contextualize it to distinguish relevant from irrelevant factors in understanding how it behaves and changes over time as a part of a system.

If anything is complex, human organizations, and especially public service organizations, are complex. How closely do the auditor's and comptroller's categories ally with those of the organizational or program strategist's? In the public service, how do you know when you have contributed to the public good? rather than burdened your employees with administrivialities and set them on the straight and narrow road to pursuing "concrete deliverables" that are anything but. Is being quantifiable a necessary quality of all worthwhile goals? How realistic is that?

Why this blog?

My purpose is to contribute to a discussion that might inspire meaningful changes in the way we go about planning and justifying what we do. In this blog, I'm going to look at common assumptions people make and consider how they may inadvertently be leading us astray. For example, one of the main ideas I'm considering is related to goal-setting and the belief that being measurable is a necessary quality of a goal. This has its roots in people's assumptions about what is concrete and objective, which can be shown to be quite abstract and subjective. This will be the subject of the next post. Stay tuned...