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.