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?