You've
seen it all too often. Some expensive executive or high-paid consultant
stands at the front of the room talking to you about the New Vision for
the organization. About the need for engagement, the competitive
challenge, the need for innovation, to be a champion of essential
change. About how greater integration, responsiveness, synergy,
efficiency ("cost-effectiveness") and collaboration must and will be
achieved.
And then you will hear how this is going to be accomplished. This will
involve 'cascading down' the new messages and processes. Embracing and
communicating the sense of urgency. Rigorous new metrics that will
monitor progress. An internal marketing and communication program.
Perhaps some new training. Stronger controls. A rebranding. A
reorganization (most often a shuffling of existing managers). Possibly
a modest devolution of authority (read: more responsibility).
You can't be blamed for being cynical. You've heard it all before. Five
years after the last comparable drumroll, nothing has really changed,
or if it has, the changes have nothing to do with the last Big Change
Project. Most likely, the changes have entailed squeezing more out of
fewer people, by downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring, doubling-up
workloads, cutting benefits, replacing older people with cheaper,
younger ones. There's probably some new technology left over from the
change that didn't help anyone and is now little-used. Profits are up,
so the shareholders are happy (for now), but while 'productivity' and
'efficiency' are up, effectiveness is down: There is no time for
anything except routine, grinding work, fighting fires, squeezing
customers. There is no time for innovation, for learning, for improving
effectiveness. There is no time to think.
Things are the way
they are for a reason. The executives and outside
'experts' who sponsor all these simplistic over-hyped programs are not
interested in understanding this reason. They don't have the time. They
probably couldn't understand what's really going on even if they took
the time. They care about short-term bottom-line results. Profits.
Revenues. Efficiency. Cost reduction. Risk reduction. They don't care
how they're achieved or whether they're sustainable. They don't care
about the fallout – burned out workers, disengagement,
unthinking obedience, lost loyalty, long-term vulnerability, lack of
innovation, lack of new skills. The job of the lineman is to hurt the
opposition in the very next play, and in so doing make the quarterback
look good. What was done in the last play is forgotten, unimportant.
What will be done in the next quarter is irrelevant. Block and tackle,
do your job, and better keep doing it better all the time or you're off
to the minors. How? That’s your problem. Just
make sure that you do it, and at the same time do what you're told.
Follow the Game Plan. Doesn't matter if it makes no sense, or if it
makes no difference to the game.
The real problem with this lunatic approach to management is that, for awhile, it works. And
management is only evaluated on what they do for awhile. Once
they retire or get promoted, they don't care what shambles they leave
for the next incumbent. It's a fiercely political, competitive
environment. It's prevalent in almost every large organization, because it works
for awhile, and because if you spend enough time in it, and 'succeed'
in it, you start to believe it's the only way to run an organization,
and that it's effective. In fact, it's dysfunctional, unsustainable,
self-destructive, simplistic, unfair, demotivating, and ineffective.
There are ten things to remember about complex adaptive systems (which
include all social and ecological systems):- It is impossible to know 'enough' about such systems to prescribe blanket 'solutions' to 'problems' in
such systems: There are too many variables. A one size answer never
fits all in such systems.
- The wisdom of crowds is essential to even a basic
understanding of such systems: The more people involved in
understanding, thinking about, and making decisions about such systems,
the more likely those decisions are to be effective. And that means
diverse people – including front line workers and even (gasp!)
customers, not just larger groups of egotistical muddle-headed managers.
- Such systems are unpredictable: Because there are
so many variables, many of them unknown, it is folly to even attempt to
predict what will happen, even in the short term. It is even more folly
to reward senior people for having guessed 'right'
or to penalize them for having guessed 'wrong'.
- Many of the variables in such systems are
uncontrollable: Big organizations have this crazy belief that they have
the power to change markets and processes, when in fact all their
billion-dollar ad campaigns do is tap into (or fail to tap into) a
latent demand, and their process changes mostly show up only in the
procedure manuals and Intranet sites. If they're actually
implemented on the front lines, chances are the 'improvements' were already being done unofficially
because the people on the front lines already realized their value. And
if (as is often the case) the management-driven process change actually
makes things worse, the people on the front line will simply find a
workaround that makes it appear that they're complying when
they're really not. Front-line workers are expert at this.
What's really ridiculous is that senior executives and
consultants are unfairly rewarded when their changes 'work' (i.e. when profit rises in the following
quarter) and unfairly penalized when they don't, when in
reality any correlation between the process/program changes and
subsequent changes to the bottom line are almost always unrelated,
sheer coincidence.
- In such systems, prevention is difficult but
better than a cure after the fact: You don't need to be able
to predict disaster to be able to put in steps to help prevent it.
Prevention requires imagination, and unfortunately we live in a world
(especially true in large organizations, where imagination is actively
discouraged) of terrible imaginative poverty. And when organizations do
think about 'what could go wrong', their thoughts
are almost always mis-focused on external risk mitigation. You can't prevent
disruptive innovations coming from outside your organization.
You can prevent all your best people from leaving because
they're underappreciated and disengaged.
- In such systems there are no 'best
practices' or 'best policies': Every
situation in complex adaptive systems is unique. Trust the people
closest to that situation to know what to do, don't try to
impose some practice that worked well in some completely different
context (though telling a story about that practice might help those
closest to the situation decide whether it could be adapted to their
situation). Likewise, don't expect any policy to suit all
situations, and don't insist that policies be followed
blindly. Trust (there's that word again) the people closest
to the situation to know what's best to do.
- In such systems, great models can spread but they
usually can't be scaled: Most of the huge inept bureaucracies
in our world probably started out as effective, well-functioning
small-scale experiments. As soon as such experiments get recognized as 'working models' (not the same as 'best
practices', though many people, alas, don't know
the difference), there's a tendency for them to spread
virally, and get adapted to suit different circumstances.
That's a good thing. But there's also a tendency
for someone to try to make them work on a larger (sometimes much
larger) scale. If you don't understand why this almost always
fails, re-read Small is Beautiful.
- There is a tendency for those working in such
systems to presume 'learned helplessness' of
customers and employees: The customer, the citizen, is often viewed as
a mere, passive consumer of your
organization's products and so-called wisdom. The employee,
likewise, is assumed to be ignorant, stupid and disinterested in the
success of the organization beyond his/her own job. Most people
don't take kindly to having their intelligence insulted. And
failure to engage customers and employees in co-producing the product
is a tragic waste of great opportunity. The key is knowing how to
engage them: Not through passive questionnaires or surveys, but through
conversations, stories, and presenting the 'problem' to them so they can help you appreciate it better
and then address it. Learned helplessness is widespread, but
it's an easily curable disease.
- In such systems, genuine decentralization is
almost always a good idea: That means pushing out real authority along
with responsibility. It means making a patient investment in people as
they learn from mistakes (by patient I mean years, not months, and the
investment includes writing off the mistakes as professional
development, not penalizing them). It means setting realistic goals,
providing appropriate money without strings attached or second
guessing, and letting small decentralized units self-manage. The only
crimes of a self-managing unit that should result in re-assessment are
(a) protracted failure of the unit to collaborate well amongst themselves
and (b) prolonged dissatisfaction of customers. And both problems
suggest that you have incompetent people in the units, not that the
idea of having decentralized self-managing units is a bad idea.
- In such systems, networks outperform hierarchies:
This is a corollary of the other nine tenets of complex adaptive
systems. Information, ideas and working models spread faster and more
effectively peer-to-peer than up and down hierarchies.
If more of the people who would have us sit through their decks of
powerpoint bullet-point slides would make the effort to understand
complex adaptive systems, instead of relying on the 'accepted
wisdom' of management and change management, we might finally be able to start breaking down large organizations, in both
the private and public sectors, into small, empowered, autonomous units
that actually work. I get the sense that those under 25, and women, get
this better than the rest of us. Unfortunately, these are exactly the
people who are most likely to get bored, frustrated and disengaged by
large organizations, and leave them to the fools that keep trying to
implement what has never worked, and never will.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
