We think in order to act, but we also act in order to think. We try things, and those experiments that work converge gradually into viable patterns that become strategies. This is the very essence of startegy making as a learning process. – Henry Mintzberg
Filed under adult learning, humor
This is one of my favorite idea bites. I’ve truncated a long section of McSwain’s work to make it bite-sized. The paper it was taken from, A Transformational Theory of Organizations, is one of my all-time favorites. It actually served to put me on the hunt for new paradigms in organizational theorizing.
The baseline goal that that the organization or any human system must pursue is the development of the person within it; other matters, other goals, must come after.
…the primary axiological commitment of transformational theory is not dominantly rational or utilitarian in motivation or behavior.
… indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that the technology of the field of organization development is at bottom a set of techniques for managing the resolution of individual and group projections, thereby releasing the energy that is bound up by them.
Cynthia McSwain/
A Transformational Theory of Organizations
American Review of Public Administration 23:2.1993
Filed under experiential learning, psychology
In fact, the real cause of this so-called turbulence may be planning itself, which by imposing formalized procedures on organizations has desensitized them and made them vulnerable to unexpected changes. — Put it more boldly, if your organization has formal plans but no vision, and if you then try to control your future so rigidly that you cannot adapt en route, then every unpredicted change you will encounter will make you feel as if the sky is falling.
Henry Mintzberg
That’s Not Turbulence, Chicken Little, It’s Really Opportunity
Planning Review; Nov-Dec.1994
Filed under psychology
Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy.
Karl Weick
On Re-Punctuating the Problem
in New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness; Jossey-Bass 1977
Filed under Karl Weick
Love and power are not opponents; it is our ideas that have constructed them so. — The resolution of this tiresome conflict between power and love requires but one simple test, a move from the singular to the plural. Just add an s. The world is not one world, power is not a single idea, and love, which comes in thousands of varieties and even more disguises, is a generic commodity, unable to be owned by any single definition. So, too, business; just add an “s” to profit; profit not only for partners and shareholders. The monotheism of the profit motive can be loosened so that it makes places for other kinds of profitability; profitable for the long-term continuity of life and future generations, profitable to the pleasure and beauty of the common good, profitable to the spirit. The double bottom line of social and ecological responsibility extends profitability only part way. The idea of profitability itself needs pluralizing.
James Hillman
Kinds of Power,
Doubleday, 1995
Hard-headed realists take pride in asserting that organizations are concerned with real things like profit and loss. To label profit a thing is to miss much of what is interesting about it. Profit is one way of labeling and making sense of the world; it is variable in a cause map, it can be an enacted environment, and it can be a symbol. It is one form of sensibleness that can be imposed on an organization¹s stream of experience but it is only one form of sensibleness, and it is an arbitrary one at that.
Karl Weick
The Social Psychology of Organizing,
McGraw-Hill, 1979
Filed under Karl Weick
Workers must no longer be considered as cost factors to be “compressed” or “rationalized” but as allies to be won. — …managers must forfeit their long-cherished and, at times abusive, privileges to move toward a new form of organization centered on the human being as well as on a flexible and creative approach. — This is the practical and ideological price to be paid if we are to halt and reverse the process of industrial decline that has plagued large North American corporations over the last decade.
Omar Aktouf
Management and Theories of Organizations in the 1990s: Toward a Critical Radical Humanism?
Academy of Management Review; 17:3.1993
comment-One place to start is to review managerial capability in terms of (what are) managerial folk psychological assumptions. However, the conventional starting points almost always are anchored to normative ways of assessing managers. A pernicious quality of those norms is that they contribute to the very problem of dehumanization. It basically never happens that a manager is asked, for example, “What do you think a human being is?”
The stereotypes are of “real masculinity” being equated with domination, conquest, and control -and thus also with “heroic” male violence. And such sterotypes are essential for the maintenance of a top-down model of social organization.— She [Sally Helgesen] shows how the workplaces run by these women tend to be more like “webs of inclusion” rather than hierarchies of exclusion; communities where sharing information is key.
Riane Eisler
From Domination to Partnership: the Hidden Subtext for Organizational Change
Training and Development; February 1995
If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to make much interesting sense of what’s going on or of its place in it. That’s not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.
Karl Weick
The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed.,
McGraw-Hill 1979
Filed under Karl Weick
Heather Mundell writes a blog on career development. Via her life@work I came upon a new blog by veteran bizblogger Curt Rosengren, M.A.P. Creating Meaning, Abundance, and Passion, and read:
A no-brainer part of any system designed to help you maintain your momentum is the simple question, “What motivates me?”
Ahh…motivation…a subject of interest for me recently. This is obviously a great question to pose to one’s self. More to the point of my own interest, this question also underlies the crucial question any motivator needs to ask if they wish to motivate somebody else, “What motivates you?” This too is obvious enough, yet my recent literature review quickly discovered that a lot of cookie-cutter writing on motivation misses this clear starting point completely. In my research it got to the point where I wondered if the various ‘top-down’ advisories really wished to suggest that the motivator simply doesn’t need to know what are the subject’s motivating factors.
It strikes me as useless to speak of wanting to reinforce intrinsic motivation if one doesn’t also take the trouble to learn what motivates the ‘motivatee’ internally.
Filed under web 2.0+
Though staff may indeed be as valuable as bosses make out, corporate structures and attitudes are seldom sufficiently flexible to accommodate and profit from individuality. — It is no longer possible either to create or continue to sustain a monolithic culture in any large organization. Nor is it better to succumb to the tyranny of the minority. The lessons of evolution are as relevant to organizations as to life — nurture your variations, enlarge your gene pool. You never know which will be the fittest next.
Paul Thorne
People Power: Managing Diversity in Mature Corporate Organizations²
International Management; Dec. 1991
comment-In rough terms, my experience is that the number one sign of variations being squished is compliance to the organizational ‘chain of being;’ through which creativity, smart analysis, and novelty is prevented from moving upward. In other words to nurture variation is to also allow ‘its’ vitality to flow where it can literally alter the course of organizational evolution. I wish I had a nickle for every boss who wielded the fallacious Appeal to Authority as support of their being ‘the smartest person in the room,’ when in fact real intelligence was something they were mortally fearful of.
This said, as an employee I developed the ability to be extremely compliant for the sake of sustaining my employment! I don’t enjoy working in those environments but I appreciated learning how to be complaint!
If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to make much interesting sense of what’s going on or of its place in it. That’s not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.
Karl Weick
The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed.,
McGraw-Hill 1979
Several captures from the old web site. Subject: organizational oceanography! Weick and Mintzberg are two of my main guys.
Specifically, I would suggest that the effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, monstrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy.
Karl Weick
On Re-Punctuating the Problem
in New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness; Jossey-Bass 1977
In fact, the real cause of this so-called turbulence may be planning itself, which by imposing formalized procedures on organizations has desensitized them and made them vulnerable to unexpected changes. — Put it more boldly, if your organization has formal plans but no vision, and if you then try to control your future so rigidly that you cannot adapt en route, then every unpredicted change you will encounter will make you feel as if the sky is falling.
Henry Mintzberg
That’s Not Turbulence, Chicken Little, It’s Really Opportunity
Planning Review; Nov-Dec.1994
Planning concerns man’s efforts to make the future in his own image. If he loses control of his own destiny, he fears being cast into the abyss. Alone and afraid, man is at the mercy of strange and unpredictable forces, so he takes whatever comfort he can by challenging the fates. He shouts his plans into the storms of life. Even if all he hears is his own voice, he is no longer alone. To abandon his faith in planning would unleash the terror locked in him.
A. Wildavsky
If Planning Is Everything, Maybe It¹s Nothing
Policy Science No. 4, 1973
Karl Weick is one of my main guys. The Social Psychology of Organizing and Sensemaking In Organizations are deservedly classics but each of his books are terrific. Anyway…in the aftermath of the earlier MAZE THE COURSE post, the following excerpts from an interview Dr. Weick gave in 2003 are timely. Incidentally, he’s speaking here of what he calls the HRO, the High Reliability Organization.
The key difference between HROs and other organizations is the sensitivity or mindfulness with which people in most HROs react to even very weak signs that some kind of change or danger is approaching. In contrast to HROs, most companies today are hugely unprepared for the unpredictable. Managers are under the illusion that they know more or less what’s going to happen next or how other people are likely to act. That’s both arrogant and dangerous. Not only do those managers ignore the possibility that something unexpected will happen but they also forget that the decisions they do make can have unintended consequences.
//\\
Can organizations learn to be more mindful?
They can, by adopting some of the practices that high-reliability organizations use. For instance, besides being fixated on failure, HROs are also fiercely committed to resilience and sensitive to operations. Managers at these organizations keep their attention focused on the front line, where the work really gets done. For example, among wildland firefighters, the most successful incident commanders are those who listen best to the people out there actually fighting the fires. HROs also defer to expertise, and they refuse to simplify reality. This last point is particularly important because it has profound implications for executives. As I have often written, leaders must complicate themselves in order to keep their organizations in touch with the realities of the business world//\\
he problem with defining and refining your hypotheses without testing them is that the world keeps changing, and your analyses get further and further behind. So you’ve got to constantly update your thinking while you’re sitting there and reflecting. And that’s why I’m such a proponent of what I call “sensemaking.” There are many definitions of sensemaking; for me it is the transformation of raw experience into intelligible world views. It’s a bit like what mapmakers do when they try to make sense of an unfamiliar place by capturing it on paper. But the crucial point in cartography is that there is no one best map of a particular terrain. Similarly, sensemaking lends itself to multiple, conflicting interpretations, all of which are plausible. If an organization finds itself unsure of where it’s going, or even where it’s been, then it ought to be wide open to a lot of different interpretations, all of which can lead to possible action. The action and its consequence then begin to edit the list of interpretations down to a more manageable size.
And this is the point I wish to underscore: Action, tempered by reflection, is the critical component in recovering from cosmology episodes. Once you start to act, you can flesh out your interpretations and rework them. But it’s the action itself that gets you moving again. That’s why I advise leaders to leap in order to look, or to leap while looking. There’s a beautiful example of this: Several years ago, a platoon of Hungarian soldiers got lost in the Alps. One of the soldiers found a map in his pocket, and the troops used it to get out safely. Subsequently, however, the soldiers discovered that the map they had used was, in fact, a drawing of another mountain range, the Pyrenees. I just love that story, because it illustrates that when you’re confused, almost any old strategic plan can help you discover what’s going on and what should be done next. In crises especially, leaders have to act in order to think – and not the other way around.
Filed under Karl Weick
Mark Schenk, writing at Anecdote | If you can’t measure it…
I recently heard a presentation that mentioned the truism ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. It reminded me of how uncomfortable I have always been with this statement and the way it gets touted like a mantra in some organisations. If we view the functions of management as ‘plan, organise, lead, control, direct’, then both ‘measuring and managing’ appear to be more appropriate in an ordered world where cause and effect are knowable. For complex situations, where cause and effect cannot be predicted with acccuracy, the concepts of measure and manage aren’t sufficient to be successful. Measure and manage also don’t make any allowance for emergence and tend to overlook any unintended consequences. Fortunately I think many more people recite this truism than really believe it.
I prefer to view the function of management as ‘creating the conditions that enable people to be successful’. I also much prefer the concept expressed by Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted countsâ€.
Nor is the count the thing counted. In the best case and presumptively, business degreed managers had to slog through math coursework framed by an explanation of what is the difference between metrics and the phenomena measured, and, crucially, what metrics cannot measure. There’s another crucial step just beyond this which would be to explain how because something can’t be measured accurately (or at all,) doesn’t mitigate its phenomenal effects.
You can test this by asking any manager how the metrics implicate the operations of the thing measured, and, how those operations hang together systematically to describe measurable differentials and contingencies unfolded over time. Note there is in an old fashioned sense a kind of newtonian hydraulics implicit under the numbers.
The key point is that there exist other differentiated and contingent phenomena which are also implicit in the (so-called) system and these are not accurately quantifiable. Which is to say there is, necessarily, a kind of uncertainty principal at work in systematic metrical extrapolations and systematic qualitative descriptions because only some of the effects in a system can be, in effect, computed and qualitatively apprehended.
It follows from this that any rigorous system-awareness would also necessarily acknowledge the cognitive bias made effective through any and all sensemaking which is overly reductive, overly deterministic, overly blind to this uncertainty factor.
This open up to something very interesting. Suppose, then, that there are tacit workarounds to this problem of fuzziness. Those workarounds would instantiate various ad hoc heurisms and I would tentatively submit those heuristic features are not easily measured.
Filed under Gregory Bateson, psychology
In synch with yesterday’s post, I note today Dr. Kets De Vries’s article, Reaping the Whirlwind:Managing Creative People (pdf:2000; INSEAD) is available on the web.
Steve Hardy at Creative Generalist has done a valuable capture from Caterina, in turn captured from a presentation by Intuit’s Keoki Andrus. Moreover, comments to the post of origin elaborate a fuller itemization. Here’s two of the lists compiled by Steve.
Seven Deadly Deficiencies
1. Contempt for others
2. Obsession with self
3. Commitment dysfunction
4. Inflexible mindset
5. No productive focus
6. Unrelenting pessimism
7. Embraces Dilbertian views of leadersEight Ways to Wipe Out High Performers
1. Work overload
2. Lack autonomy (micromanagement)
3. Skimpy rewards
4. Loss of connection
5. Unfairness
6. Value conflicts
7. Let low-performers ride
8. Create an environment of fear, uncertainty and doubt
These are ways to wipe out colleagues and subordinates regardless of the ‘height’ of their performance. I, or anybody, could add to these lists. The deadliest deficiency in my experience is hypocricy, talking up commitments and principles while walking them down, right out of existence. #2 Obsession with self, is especially destructive when it is paired with deficits of self-knowledge.
This latter pairing can result in very annoying, hypocritical, behaviors. The ready example, because I’ve been subjected to the behavior so many times, is when someone presents for approval a strength that is actually a weakness. If I had a dime for every time a piss-poor listener tried to get me to acknowledge that they are a really good listener, I’d have a lot of dimes.
(For the record, I can be a good listener but it takes a big effort on my part!)
It is a common aspect of the positive face people wish to present that people elevate some of their weak characteristics. Yet, it is also my experience that the hunt for validation is often a red flag. In other words, people don’t need to be reminded of what your best qualities are; they should be self-evident and speak for themselves.
As an old timer, this subject always brings to my mind the great work of Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, and, also, the framework concerned with the problem of the Personaprovided by C.G. Jung; see CW7, |Two Essays on Analytic Psychology|. Between the two the continuum between typical eruptions of self-deception and horrid narcissism is brilliantly covered.
Filed under analytic(al) psychology
Patti Anklam, as is her marvelous way, weaves valuable threads leading to thought provoking places.
“Virtual” is a funny word for me right now, as I’m deep into writing Net Work, and the distinction virtual works for online communities as well as distributed communities, but there’s a difference and I’ve not yet found the right pair of words to signify the difference.
I don’t use “virtual” much but I might have the same problem if I did! It’s got the virtu; virtiiroot. Virtual rolls better than ‘temporary’ or ad hoc. In online lingo it refers to semblance, as in the virtual world resembles the real world. There’s a need for disambiguation here.
If we pose two polar qualities to better hinge the conception of the virtual, my initial choices would be: primary< -->secondary, and, similitude< -->analogy. The rich differentiation is found in the secondary/similitude and.or secondary/analogy. So, a real world virtual network could be secondary to, and similar, or, analogous to the primary network. Also, virtual networks in organizations tend to be spontaneous and this evokes for me their tacit in waiting and emergent status.
Her recent post got me wanderingwondering and it contains some valuable links about networks, communication and learning to explore.
Wow. Value Based Management.net is a goldmine. Almost every resource is linked internally to pithy descriptions of conceptual and methodological frameworks. The amount of material is overwhelming. The search engine allows me to note important omissions, such as no no mention of Appreciative Inquiry, but, with a jungle so amazonian, so what?
In fleshing out the squareONE links page important thinkers on the periphery of experiential learning theory demand highlighting. Weick, who’s methodology of sensemaking is experiential remains a central influence to my own ‘galumphing,’ (a Weickian term for exploration). His book <The Social Psychology of Organizing> is an accessible, thought-provoking inquiry. As was the follow-up, <Sensemaking in Organizations>.
Henry Mintzberg stands a bit outside experiential theorizing, yet his work on strategy-making as a real-time activity tips the balance toward flexible designing and away from chilly planning. <Mintzberg On Management> and <Structure in Fives> and <The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning> are essential. Weick, Mintzberg and Peter Drucker, as I see it, are in a league of their own. (Okay, maybe Warren Bennis too.)
Karl Weick: | KW @business.com (links) | KW@veryard | KW @onepine |
“Leadership When Events Don’t Play By the Rules”
Henry Mintzberg: henrymintzberg.com | HM @business.com |
5 Basic Parts of an Organization | HM @theworkingmanager |
Filed under Karl Weick, sociology
Although I have no experience working in large or even middling small businesses, the question of leadership, what it is, and what it concerns, and how it is to be developed, arises through my interest in organizational development and professional development practices. (Leadership is germane to entrepreneurial businesses too, but entrepreneurs aren’t very often very thoughtful leaders.) There isn’t one optimal model of leadership, mostly because there isn’t one optimal vision of what it concerns. (There is agreement about one aspect: leaders are almost always very intelligent.)
Three classic books on leadership have come to the top of my reading stack recently. Their particular visions of leadership are different. Two of the books are about the same vision, Servant Leadership. The other is even more fascinating, because it is about synchronicity and leadership. The books with links to Amazon are:
(1) Servant Leadership. Robert K. Greenleaf
(2) The Power of Servant Leadership. ed. Larry C. Spears
(3) Synchronicity. The Inner Path of Leadership. Joseph Jaworski
Jaworski’s fine autobiographical book doesn’t directly comment on Greenleaf’s equally interesting concepts. However, Jaworski’s psychological view, drawn from Jung, implicitly expands upon the concretized, (thus engaged with institutional and social reality,) and less psychological views of Greenleaf, et. al. There is no ideal concrete relationship between these two ‘realities’. They stand in dynamic relationship to each other. But, this flux of relationship between business/personal spirit and business/personal soul nevertheless promises radical possibilities: above all, leadership forged in the crucible of the experience of reflective psyche.
This very same critical tension first came to my attention nine years ago in two superb books, Leadership Without Easy Answers. Ronald Heifetz; and Kinds of Power;James Hillman. Both are classics; Hillman’s would be so just for his suggestion that profit is not just one kind of profit, and his psychological and imaginal exegis of both power and profit.
While I on this subject, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner’s The Leadership Challenge is a must read book in the field. Both authors have been asserting intrapersonal and interpersonal ‘values-oriented’ perspectives against the conventionalist instrumental and ‘scientific-operational’ perspectives for some time. Warren Bennis may be the most cogent analyst of leadership of them all; see: On Becoming a Leader may be the most read book about leadership. My favorite Bennis book is his recent Geeks and Geezers.
Filed under adult learning
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