An observant layman's view of the next step in the evolution of business practices

0 -) The transitional stage where we are (and how it is awkward). >>; Where we will go to live.

1 a) We superimpose hierarchical processes on a networked organization (and it causes gaps, disconnects and counter-productive drivers where there should be connections between lines of organization). >> We move to a flatter, more collegial organization focused on the strategic pillars, less obsessed with levels.

1 b) We superimpose hierarchical processes on a networked organization (and it obscures strategic and tactical potentialities because of the performance focus on tightly defined target "results"). >>; We learn to work collaboratively and are motivated to look for synergies based on overall goals rather than branch-specific targets.


2 a) We manage the information we need to make decisions in terms of "documents" at the filing end of business processes (and that means we don't leverage the power of the basic desktop technology at our fingertips to minimize duplication) >>; We learn to think in terms of information rather than documents and plan our information GATHERING for the most optimal re-use and cross-referencing.

2 b) We manage information we need to make decisions in terms of "documents" at the filing end of business processes (and that means we suffer unabated information overload and/or information decision fatigue ) >> Realizing that paper based models cannot scale to the speed of digital information production, we redefine what constitutes a "record" and manage information tactically at the gathering stage rather than documents at the filing stage.


3 a) Our strategies for simplification and lean production are based on material work and products (less input, more output; compartmentalizing work into "manageable elements", measuring same "manageable elements" as opposed to their contribution to the objective of the work as a whole). >> We learn that leveraging digital simplification means thinking in terms of an overabundance of meaningful cross-referencable categories at the front end and parsing at the result stage of activities so that we can immediately pull up the information we need to make decisions as we go; we are happy to work in beta mode together, rather than holding off sharing until the totally polished offering is presented. A mental transition is necessary - see that an informed redundancy is necessary for streamlining because modern streamlining must be in real time and resilient.

Doables, deliverables and results - change habitual mental models for more sustainable results

When the Bloor Viaduct in Toronto was being designed, the designer apparently had the prescience to include enough in the design to allow for future subway trains, even though at the time no such trains existed in Toronto.

In today's world of narrow targets and measurable deliverables, we obscure the broader horizon of potential, making us less resilient.The impulse to make things manageable by analyzing them into discrete components, picking two or three to "do" and finding easy "measures" for them means we lose context and enjoy the illusory sense of safety provided by a narrowed horizon. We may be able to check things off the list, but are they meaningful contributions? Planning that engenders tidy, comfortable conceptual grids is not the path to resiliency but of "a foolish consistency." Today, our planning models render us more machine-like than organic and responsive to real needs. Therefore they break more easily, littering and cluttering our mindscape. That's why we're so grey and tired at the end of the day.

So the question for all us is:  How we can insert possibility and breadth into our mindspace and workspaces?

The Relationship between Objectivity and Bureaucracy

In 2009, I posted a short blog entry, How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic. Here, I'd like to delve a bit further into what is pejoratively known as "bureaucracy" and tie the discussion to a broader cultural theme, one I'll call Fetishizing the Heuristic. The terminology is a bit academic, but apt, so I'll explain.

Heuristics are flexible guidelines, generally sane models, not meant to account for every contingency, but a pencilling in of a plan or set of criteria based on experience. (Maslow's Hierarchy, for example, was intended to be considered a flexible heuristic, but rarely is.)

To fetishize something means to idolize it...

So when a heuristic is idolized, the criteria embodied in a flexible guideline magically come to have a life of their own, alienated from the creative and reasonable minds that set them out. They become viewed as if they issue from a higher order of existence.

So, for example, a preliminary plan is developed that covers a time span, or evaluative criteria are set out provisionally. As soon as dates and scoring methods are assigned, it's as if these plans or criteria issued directly from an eternal source of objectivity, not from the minds of those composing them. (They become reified in processes, detached from the aim that inspired their development.)

The problem that arises is that once the guideline has been drawn up and numbers assigned to what started off as a provisional guideline, no counter-evidence from the actual world of objective reality will change the guideline. Where there is deviation, it will considered as a way of illustrating how things and people have failed to meet the criteria, not as evidence that the model needs adjusting.

Jack Martin of Simon Fraser University wrote in 1996 (in a no longer available newsletter of the American Psychological Association) lamenting how assessment criteria, never intended to be more than reasonable, flexible, useful guidelines, become irrationally narrowed and fixed once they are operationalized (assigned a numerical scale). This causes the quality and relevance of research in empirical psychology to degenerate.

Then, of course, these guidelines become embodied in institutional procedures - further alienated from the agents, the creative and reasonable minds of people in the organization, who would otherwise use their minds to question them, adjust them, and maintain their usefulness.

In practice, understanding how we can fetishize the heuristic should lead us to be more active in questioning and revising plans and criteria as necessary, understanding they issue from human needs and objectives.

The broader, more philosophical understanding is that a lot of the conceptual packaging we use to identify something as objective is faulty and needs to be revisited. We need to re-insert the awareness of our responsibility as agents into our plans and to adjust in an ongoing way to what is happening, rather than mechanizing thought in bureaucratic processes or bracketing ourselves out of existence while we follow an eternal diagram (our role in conceiving it, forgotten).

In a nutshell, don't treat a working hypothesis, guideline, process or model as if it issued from the heavens. After all, it's your model and you should have every right to correct it as more evidence becomes available - and there will always be more evidence, unless you are omniscient. 

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.

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.

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 ;).

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...