Business process = interactions among people. Business process innovation is about doing better or doing differently.

“Enterprise 2.0 is a business transformation that involves many leaders and influencers across the organisation … adoption involves organisational transformation across multiple vectors beyond technology: culture, operational processes and business strategy.”

That is Murray and Shah (2010) in Nurturing BlueIQ: Enterprise 2.0 Adoption in IBM.

Been Here Before

Focus on people, behaviours and processes in response to competitive pressures sounds a lot like workplace transformations that have been taking place in manufacturing for the best part of twenty years – and in response to the same global competitive pressures.

The first wave of smart working, lean, quality and agile manufacturing, was a consequence of engaging shopfloor operators in continuous improvement and problem solving – the sort of people who had until then been overlooked. The need to recognise the knowledge and capabilities of everyone in the workforce is even more urgent now. Enterprise 2.0, smart working  – whatever you prefer to call business transformation – is emerging in response to hyper-competitive global business conditions, as well as the need to collaborate and integrate across distributed business process.

Employees First, Customers Second

Vineet Nayar (2010) talks about the value zone being where customer value is created. He says:

“In traditional companies, the value zone is is often buried deep inside the hierarchy and the people who create value work there.”

In manufacturing that was on the shopfloor. Creating trusted relationships, the role of influencers, distributed leadership and operating environments where people are able to contribute and gain recognition were key enablers first time around.  Agile and appropriate support systems set the intial conditions for high-performance.

Making The Invisible Visible

A major difference between the first and second wave is that the business processes have changed dramatically with the move away from manufacturing. Work-in-progress and machine layouts are obvious. This of course is not the case with services, where processes are hidden. Invisible relationships and tacit knowledge therefore have to be made visible so that they can be co-created and shared.

But distributed processes that required cross-boundary collaboration  were also very much a part of manufacturing. There is more research than you can shake a stick at on doing business within networks and collaborating across distributed business processes. This research report from the EU, The Future Workspace: Perspectives on Mobile and Collaborative Working is just one example of what is already known about the cultural, operational and business strategy dimensions of collaborative processes in “networked spaces” where people work together irrespective of constraints in location and time

Enterprise 2.0 needs to do better or do differently. It does not need to go re-inventing knowledge unnecessarily.

Smart working behaviours from people with agile minds, and who work with adaptive systems, enable customer-focused performance. This includes innovating, sensing, adapting, coordinating, collaborating, integrating and learning.

Distributed Performance Systems

Smart working is a function of distributed performance systems, which include people, technologies and congenial, socially engaging workspaces. These are places where we have ‘stuff’ around us that makes us feel comfortable and artefacts that help us think together.

Distributed performance systems extend Weick’s concept of the interact and double interact, which are dynamic inter-locking behaviours that become flows of knowledge. We are all augmented by place, space and ’stuff’.

CIPD and Smart Working

The CIPD was spot-on in identifying a four pillar model of smart working, which incorporates management values, high-performance work systems, enabling technology and the physical workplace. They are not right in playing down “traditional organisational design theory and practices that centre on a process-driven approach to designing roles and interactions in the workplace.”

Customer-focused process coordination and innovation were at the centre of first wave of smart working – lean, quality, agile manufacturing etc – and they remain at the core of the second wave of smart working.

IBM and Smart Working

Pearson et al have got it right that smart working practices are enacted through networks of employees, customers, partners, suppliers and freelancers operating across organisational, demographic, professional and geographical boundaries. These are “tied together by business processes that span organisations, time and distance.”

There is not a peep about the role of place in their analysis of smart working. The nearest their fifteen smart working practices, for dynamically connecting and engaging people in collaboration, get to including place is that collaborative capabilities need to be included within business processes.

The Conclusion Is …

I am right and they are only half right . Only kidding. The conclusion is that I think that Judith Heerwagen’s insight on congeniality and distributed cognitive systems is the bridge between the process and place / technology / employee relationship focused perspectives on smart working. These things are all in the service of customer-focused performance. And like I said, that is what smart working always was and still remains.

“Service design is a relatively new discipline that asks some fundamental questions: what should the customer experience be like? What should the employee experience be like? How does a company remain true to its brand, to its core business assets and stay relevant to customers?”

Oh, glory halellujah! You see, I was getting quite depressed by the time I got to the final chapter of the book I am writing. All this academic knowledge. All these organising principles that appear to be ignored in practice. And those management gurus who continue to churn out the same old stuff, without mentioning that it is the same old stuff and in doing so implying novelty.

So no difficult questions then about why good practices are so overlooked? Little focus on practice, full stop. Lots of prescription but not a lot of focus on ‘how’ and action. My heart sank even further reading various summaries of the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, especially one article that suggested it was time to start looking at E2.0 from the perspective of business value. Well, I never.

This coming week sees me putting the finishing touches to the book. It is time to move on. The book is my very public drawing a line under academic activities to go back to doing what I love, which is co-designing learning experiences. Seems to me that designing service and designing learning experiences go hand-in-hand. It is what I have been doing on and off for almost a decade. It is time to get back to it. I can’t wait!

The first thing she tackled was changing attitudes and behaviour towards absence. This had not gone down well. Some nurses chose to resign, leaving Delia with plummeting resourcing levels. This was her first major hurdle. Had she done the right thing? Might she have done things differently? Would she have to do some damage limitation among the remaining nurses?

A Linchpin

At the time Delia took on her new responsibilities, structural changes were taking place within the Greater Glasgow district. Delia got a new nurse manager. The excellent relationship that developed between she and her new manager was crucial. Although the intention and drive to transform the performance culture came from Delia, the encouragement she got from her manager gave her confidence and courage to carry on when the going got really tough.

The relationship was pivotal in two ways. The first was that everything Delia was trying to do was within policy guidelines and taken together with the wider structural changes meant that the management environment was changing in her favour. The new manager was entirely behind both the structural changes and Delia’s determination to change local systems on the hospital ward and influence behaviour.  Her boss’s authority and support gave her the armour she needed to forge ahead with what she wanted to do.

The second way in which the relationship was crucial was in how their attitudes to each other strengthened their professional interactions. From the outset, Delia regarded her manager as “outstanding”. She actively encouraged Delia, giving her full freedom and not interfering. She proffered advice when she was asked but otherwise remained in the background with the public spotlight falling on Delia. The nursing manager communicated total confidence in her and this did not waver as things got difficult.

Things could not get more difficult than the staff shortage she was left with when nurses began leaving. As she fretted about whether or not she had done the right thing, her manager reassured her that the right people were leaving, to stay resolved and that this in time would give her the opportunity to build the team that she had envisaged.

What Next?

Delia’s early actions were met with stiff resistance. Apart from challenging long-held attitudes and behaviours, she had to battle against the fact that she was dealing with peers. Earning respect  was not easy. Nevertheless, the effects of her actions were quickly noticed across the organisation and her peers soon caught up.

Having secured management backing and made her intentions publicly known, the next step in the transformation was to continue building personal support. Delia set about nurturing deputies in whom she would demonstrate the same level of confidence as she got from her manager. She started with two like-minded nurses and this has now expanded to include others. This personal support team has become a close-knit unit that reinforces attitudes, values and performance expectations.

Followed By …

Her next step was to get others on board and to initiate a recruitment drive. She knew that she was seeking to recruit primarily on attitude and is not shy in admitting that she was looking for nurses who would be compliant and ”mouldable” around the values, high-performance behaviours and caring attitudes that she expects from her staff.

It took her just over two years but she has now taken the ward from the one with the worst reputation to the top-performing ward along a range of indicators, including the best record on infection control, the most cooperative ward in the hospital and the ward with the consistently lowest absentee rates.

And Now?

The ward still feels chaotic and this is partly in the nature of work. As well as the work having elements of routine, for example feeding, washing and administering medication to patients, there are large elements of unpredictability, including emergency admissions and sudden deterioration in patient condition requiring immediate attention. Many of the remaining inefficiencies are created by the wider system, for example a target and record-keeping culture that skews where effort is expended.

The key is that Delia has created resilience through strong personal relationships shaped by values. It is this that allows she and her nurses to function despite the chaos, providing effective, caring service to patients and to each other.

The National Health Service is actively promoting lean systems and working practices. Delia now understands that what she set in motion five years ago, and how she did it, is consistent with lean approaches. The unpredictable elements of the work and the constraints imposed from the hospital ward’s external environment create stress for the staff. There was deep unhappiness recently following an incident where nurses on the ward felt they would be unfairly blamed for something over which they had no control.

Delia feels that it is her job to influence morale when something like this happens by modelling behaviour and maintaining positive attitudes. She tries to create a strong ethos of caring and looking out for each other among the nurses, leading by example whether that is in good hygiene practices or remaining positive.

Viability

Viability for hospitals is about whether patients live or die. A hospital ceases to be viable if the patients are killed instead of cured, as the recent understandable ballyhoo over the Vale of Leven Clostridium difficile outbreak deaths shows. I recently and unsuccessfully tried to explain the Viable Systems Model (VSM). I am going to have another go because I think Delia’s story neatly illustrates the principles embedded in the model, which can be interpreted and applied in other situations. Her experience is not a one-off. It is a combination of personal action and facilitating systems.

A system is viable if it can survive. That means it has to be able to scan continously for threats and opportunities and be able to adapt accordingly. It also has to have robustness and resilience to allow it to continue to function in the face of uncertainties it has to deal with from its local environment.

The VSM consists of sets of interdependent viable systems, nested like Russian dolls at different levels within the highest level system. Another image that came to me was bubbles of resilience tumbling outwards and upwards, piling up on each other. A flight of fancy perhaps but it made sort of sense to me.

Each viable system, aka resilient bubble, has management functions it is responsible for carrying out. The management responsibilities shape distributed leadership, performance, control, co-ordination, adaptation and integration. Local is where the knowledge and capabilities are located. Viability is therefore dependent on distributed autonomy, distributed leadership and distributed capabilities if problems and opportunities are to be handled nearest to source.

Delia’s Ward

The hospital can be seen as sets of viable systems, that is hospital wards, operating theatres, laboratories, pharmacies and catering, all nested within the higher-level viable system of the whole hospital. The levels of embeddedness do not stop there. The hospital is one of many within the Greater Glasgow region, then within Scotland and finally the Scottish NHS is embedded within the highest level viable system, the National Health Service. Nested, lower-level management systems function autonomously and are also linked to other lower and higher level systems by the cross-boundary control and coordination mechanisms.

How might the VSM have been useful in this case? One of the reasons that distributed autonomy is not more commonly found in organisations is fear over loss of control (Argyris, 1997). Had the drive to transform the performance been a senior executive initiative, the model provides guidance on how to design coordination and control mechanism to facilitate decentralised control while maintaining centralised coordination. The model also shows that transformation can take place at a local level, that is if the wider management environment is sufficiently favourable. In this case it was.

The nursing manager represents the control function of the higher level management system, which is the whole hospital. She is responsible for communicating policy from the highest level system, the NHS, to the lower-level system’s control function, which in this case is Delia.

Delia as the control function of this specific lower system, the hospital ward for which she is responsible, then interprets the policy communicated to her according to the needs of her ward. She is also responsible for overall control of prime activities on the ward, caring for patients, which she devolves to her deputies who perform the role of the coordination function.

So that is how I see it. The VSM can be used as a diagnostic tool to assess the robustness of a system’s response capabilities, degrees of resilience, abilities to scan for threats and opportunities, and capabilities to adapt. It can also be used a design template for service design. More about service design in my next post …

It seems to me that threats to viability are as likely to come from within. Sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations, anyone? Although it affects us all, this seems so far removed from my everyday existence. Life and death isn’t.

My sister Teresa, brother William, nieces Alison and Elaine, and other sister Delia and her partner Claire all know a thing or two about viability. They wouldn’t think they do but they do. They are all nurses in a large hospital in the west coast of Scotland. Viability for them is about whether their patients live or die. A hospital ceases to be viable if the patients are killed instead of cured. This is a story about how Delia took her ward by the scruff of the neck and set in motion, in a textbook-perfect way, a transformation of the performance culture in her ward. That improved the viability of her ward no end. Your chances of getting an infection on her ward are the lowest in the hospital.

And there was not an academic or expert in sight. She did this on her own. Well that is not quite true, as you will find out.

Setting The Scene

The hospital is located in a geographical area that is still feeling the effects of catastrophic industrial decline that started more than thirty years ago. Medical staff routinely cope with the health effects within a population that has high incidence of alcohol and drug misuse, and other illnesses associated with social deprivation. The work environment is particularly challenging.

This story begins five years ago when Delia had newly taken charge of a ward. She walked into disorganisation and inadequate systems. She describes her early feelings of anxiety as she struggled to create order out of the chaos that faced her. Following several weeks of this anxiety, she decided that enough was enough . She would not allow herself to become a victim of the poor systems and performance culture that she had inherited.

Delia is careful to attribute no blame to her predecessor, who although having a more laissez-faire attitude to management than her own, was nevertheless operating within a wider inadequate performance management system that set expectations, or lack of to be more accurate. These are currently undergoing fundamental transformation. As well as commenting on the systems she inherited, Delia said that despite her long nursing experience, she did not feel prepared for the role and had “fallen into it”. She had been given no education on workload planning or managing people. She did it instinctively.

What Happened?

One of the first things she decided to tackle was attendance management. There was no sickness control, resulting in “free-for-all” attitudes to attendance. Lowering rates of absenteeism was an immediate priority. This was a problem because there were nurses on the ward who had poor attendance records and whose behaviour in this respect had for years gone unchallenged. As Delia put it, this was her opportunity to “tell people what I was about and that I would take no nonsense”.

What then happened was that people began to leave and at one point the ward was forty percent down on resourcing levels. The shortfall had to be addressed through agency staff, which was expensive and the quality of nurses was unpredictable and variable. She had set out to make a very public statement about the boundaries and expectations she was setting. Had she done the right thing? Out of the frying pan and into the fire?

What Happened Next?

I will tell you tomorrow! I hope you come back to hear how the story unfolds. I had written ‘how it ends’ but the story is still unfolding after five years. I will introduce you to another crucial character tomorrow.

Just to warn you that this is a long post, which I am chunking into two separate posts. This one reviews the issue of autonomy-control-empowerment and reviews the Viable Systems Model (VSM).

This sets the scene for the following post, which proposes that the VSM might be more appropriately viewed, to reflect current global workplace trends, as the VSN model (Viable Smart Networks). Many thanks if you stick with it!

Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM) describes how systems engage with their environments. It is not widely known in practice, which is a pity because it offers valuable insights for enterprises trying to do business in complex, inter‐connected and fragmented environments. Recaping from an earlier post, the VSM:

• encourages structured thinking about sensing environmental change

• shows how responsibilities for core management functions have to be distributed throughout an organisation for it to remain viable

• provides mechanisms for distributed integration and coordination

• shows how to maximise local autonomy while simultaneously achieving centralised coordination

Autonomy-Control-Empowerment

I stumbled across the VSM when I was doing my doctorate. I wanted to understand the implications of flattening hierachies and pushing decision-making down to the shopfloor. How far could this go? What did it mean for control and co-ordination? And many, many other questions. It soon became clear that  fears about letting go of centralised  control of operations management was a significant barrier to achieving distributed control and coordination. Chris Argyris, back in 1998, said there was a “battle between autonomy and control that rages on while the potential for real empowerment is squandered”. I noted many others saying the same thing at the time.

You could be forgiven for thinking that was then and this is now. If so here’s an article from the HR Review, commenting on a Work Foundation report and entitled Businesses Urged To Give Employees ‘More Autonomy And Less Intensive Management’ . Exhibit Two is Gary Hamel’s WSJ post from April 2010 on Empowering Individuals and Empowering Institutions, which includes recommendations to decentralise where possible and to enlarge the scope of self-determination.

Neither he nor the authors of the Work Foundation report mention the fact that the autonomy-control-empowerment thing is old hat. Repeating the necessity and desirability of self-determined, empowered individuals is not necessarily going to make it happen. Experience tells us that there are considerable barriers to be overcome.

The VSM

(1) A system is viable if it:

• can maintain a separate existence

• has problem-solving capabilities

• can withstand trauma inflicted on it from its wider operating environment.

(2) A viable system can be an economy, an eco-system of enterprises in alliance, an individual enterprise, a business unit, a team and an individual. The VSM consists of sets of integrated viable systems structured within a nested hierarchy. Please bear with me if you are uncomfortable about the word hierarchy. I will address that in the next post.

(3) All viable systems within the overall structure must comply with the law of requisite variety, which requires that a system’s responses to its external environment must create complexity equal to complexity in the environment. Here’s a link to a previous post that describes how requisite variety is achieved through amplifiers (to increase variety) and attenuators (to reduce variety).

(4) Each of the nested, interlinked viable systems that make up the entire system has five management functions. These are:

How It Hangs Together

The diagram shows recursion to two levels.  The grey oblong is the higher-level system’s meta-management (policy, coordination, control and intelligence).

The higher-level system’s prime activities are also self-regulating, lower-level viable systems and these are contained within the smaller oval.

The long thin oval represents the external environments, including the local environments of the lower systems and the wider external environment for the higher-level system

Doing

Coordination of the three viable systems adjust among themselves, engaging as they do with higher-level coordination. The more active coordination, the less need there is for control to intervene in operations. Maximising self-determined action at the lower levels is consistent with requisite variety, drawing as it does on all available skills and capabilities. Limiting control’s input also reduces the cost of cumbersome bureaucratic management.

Adapting

Control remains crucial. With attention removed from operations, it can focus on scanning inwards (together with coordination) and outwards (together with intelligence) for threats and opportunities. Higher-level control communicates with higher-level policy as well as the policy functions in the three lower-level viable systems to keep them updated on required adaptations to strategic priorities.

Control’s main function therefore becomes constant, active sensing and collaborative engaging to ensure adaptation.

Complex But Not Adaptive

Organisations are definitely complex but they are frequently not adaptive, as we saw in the failure of GM and Toyota’s safety recalls. The VSM provides simple mechanisms and principles that:

• require maximum localised autonomy, while at the same time enabling distributed top-down and bottom-up coordination

• recast the principle role of control as having responsibility for ensuring adaptation – not meddling in operations, although it retains a monitoring dialogue with operations.

How these fundamental principles and mechanisms are achieved in practice is for those responsible within each viable system to decide. So long as what they do is consistent with achieving the overall system’s objectives – i.e. remaining adaptable and viable. What, as they say, is not to like?

Argyris, C. (1998). ‘Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Harvard Business Review, vol. 76, no. 3, 98- 105.

I keep claiming that I am going to write about business viability and the VSM. I will but other thoughts keep getting in the way. This post is a quick reflection on social support for formal learning.

I found this post, Communities Ignite Learning, via @hjarche. It struck many chords. The author, Gina Minks, says that real learning did not happen during her recent Masters degree studies. The biggest lesson from her studies was that communities ignite learning.  Gina found the #lrnchat Twitter community particularly valuable.

“Also, where would I be without #lrnchat? Because of this online Twitter chat, I connected with other IS grad students nationwide, as well as professionals and some of the superstars in our field.”

She also describes the excellent support from people in her organisation. While getting all this formal and informal support, Gina sadly reports that she did not feel part of her university / faculty community.

“When I graduated last Sunday, at least one other Master’s student and 3 other PhD students walked. No one from the program arranged anything for us as graduates, not even a meet and greet. None of the faculty were even in town – they were at a conference. The student organization did nothing to recognize the accomplishment.”

Observations From Experience

I don’t even have the words to describe how much that apalls me. As well as using this post to alert you to Gina’s, it also gives me the opportunity to comment from my own experience in managing a university-wide work-based Master’s degree programme.The degree programme was built around a strategic challenge executives had to confront at work; academic credit was awarded for what they demonstrated they had learned from what they had done.

Doubtless there were things we got wrong and could have improved. One thing I understood very early on was that social support for executives learning in the workplace was crucial and involved a support team. A vital person was my admin assistant, herself a graduate. One of her duties was to alert the executives when a work-based assignment was due to be submitted. I soon realised that rather than just email, she was calling them for a chat. The relationships she developed with them  contributed to creating a total system of learning support.

Problems and issues were usually picked up by the workplace and academic supervisors. My assistant often got wind of things that might need attention before they did. The more formal progress monitoring between students and academic supervisors, which while friendly, was sometimes a little more distanced than the relaxed, bantering informal chat between my assistant and the executives. I was going to say that her informal support was more caring but that is not true.

This brings me to social support from academic supervisors. Work-based learning can be very challenging. People doing work-based Master’s degrees were usually working under high pressure and they were learning in a way that was not traditional. This sometimes took some getting used to. I remember two groups from the early days when the degree was first set up: nurse practitioners and officers from the Royal Air Force.

The nurse practitioners were taking on additional management and medical duties. The majority had been away from formal education for some years. Competence was not an issue with these students but self-belief certainly was. Academic supervisory duties always include an element of personal care but this was something else. We needed to be particularly patient, empathetic and encouraging. The nurses were fine. They made their discomfort known to us and we were able to help.

The group I still feel shamed about were the RAF officers. I was fooled by their coping, capable demeanour and assumed they were doing fine. After all, they were getting superb support from their peers and from the institution. I was right about the support they were getting. I was wrong that they did not need more academic support. Their ability to do polished presentations hid nerves and uncertainty. I did not see it until they were doing their vivas.  Too late for them but I learned not to make assumptions and future students benefitted.

Social Support From Peers

Roll forward several years. I had left the university to work for myself. I was contacted by Professor Robin Matthews at Kingston Business School, which has a strong and long-standing partnership with an academic institute in Moscow. Did I want to help develop the work-based Masters’ approach for post-MBA executives? Well, of course.

This learning programme was challenging in many ways: different language, cultures, learning traditions and students with enormous responsibilities on their shoulders. Personal support for these senior executives, each of them involved in taking their businesses in new strategic directions, was considered to be a crucial part of the learning experience. Like earlier experience in the UK, the adminstrative team was pivotal. The team consisted of people who all had MBAs, PhDs and one had a Masters in Education. These fabulous people in Moscow gave a level of caring, personal attention that was second to none. Relations with academic supervisors were also intense.

The real difference in this programme though was the support the executives got from each other. This was more important and effective, I think, than anything the formal team was able to offer. They all understood the emotional pressures they were under and although the executives were employed in a range of private and public  sectors, they experienced common challenges. The camaraderie among the executives was a joy and privilege to watch. I wish I could put that in a bottle and sell it to businesses.

Social Technologies

As Gina shows, we now have the possibility of tapping into that sort of peer support through online communities. I find the social suppport I get as a start-up, from my network on Twitter especially, is invaluable. That sort of support is now possible for anyone learning, either formally or informally. And that is what I want to help facilitate through The Learning Place (@learnplace). This is taking a long time to get going, but get going it will .

What it boils down to is this:

(1) Lean, quality and agile manufacturing were the last big disruptive management innovation.

(2) Engaging people in sharing their tacit knowledge of processes and their machines, problem‐solving and continuous improvement, especially those previously overlooked on shop floors, was core to the success of lean, JIT, quality etc. No engagement, no lean. This was about committing to a different philosophy of work, changing attitudes (esp. middle management) and new ways of doing things.

(3) We are now in a new phase of disruptive management innovation.

(4) I contend that there is a legacy of learning that we can profit from as we move into this new phase, enabled and energised by social networking and collaboration technologies.

(5) Patterns and parallels can be discerned, and there are differences. This is what the book explores.

(6) Continuous improvement in the previous wave of disruptive innovation is now the collaborative intelligence of the second.

(7) In the first wave, management innovations were concerned with accommodating process innovation and control. Only then processes were largely contained, constrained, tangible and visible.

(8) This new wave is also about process innovation and control / coordination. Only now processes are global, distributed, invisible and intangible.

(9) The book explores implications for management education, implications for making the transition to new ways of working and managing, and implications for supporting organisational structures and systems.

(10) The book also tells stories of people and companies I have worked with (and some I have not) who set about making the transition to new ways of working and managing. It also pulls together tools, technologies and approaches to help people get started in making the transition for themselves.

Phew!

I would like to try out some thinking on the usefulness of the Viable Systems Model (VSM), which describes how systems interact with their environments. The VSM has not had widespread exposure in the management literature outside of a band of devotees. This is a pity because it offers valuable insights for enterprises trying to do business within increasingly complex, inter‐connected and fragmented environments. Specifically it:

• encourages structured thinking about sensing environmental change

• shows how responsibilities for core management functions have to be distributed throughout an organisation for it to remain viable

• explains mechanisms for integration and coordination

• explains how to achieve maximised local autonomy simultaneously with centralised coordination

It would be too much to tackle in one blog post so I will spread it across a few posts. Two core principles underpin the VSM: recursion and requisite variety. The rest of the post tries to explain requisite variety.

Requisite Variety

Led by Gary Hamel, a gathering in of thirty five of “the world’s most progressive thinkers on management and organisation” compiled a list of twenty five stretch goals for management, Management Moonshots, ten of which were ‘regarded as uniquely critical.’ One of the ten was:

“reinventing strategy making as an emergent process … in a turbulent world, strategy making can no longer be a top down activity. What is required instead is a strategy process that reflects the biological principles of variety, selection, and retention.”

What is variety and why did the conference of management thinkers single it out as a critical issue?

Variety describes the occurrence of distinct elements from among a set. For example, the set ‘c,b,c,a,c,c,a,b,c,b,b,a’ has twelve elements but only three that are distinct. The set is said to have a variety of three (Ashby, 1956). In practice, variety is an heuristic indicator of complexity.

Requisite variety implies that a system’s responses to its external environment must match it in complexity. It does this in two ways: by trying to attenuate and amplify complexity.

Amplification

Amplifiers increase variety.

Amplification creates diversity of opinions and perceptions, and organisations have to be “preoccupied with keeping sufficient diversity inside the organisation to sense accurately the variety present in ecological changes outside it.”(Weick , 1979). Surely organisations are already richly‐diverse ecosystems, full of differences in personal values, experiences, perspectives, beliefs, professional, organisational and national cultures, emotional states and so on?

Diversity creates conflict that has to be managed, as well as tensions and tradeoffs that managers have to work with constantly. Tannenbaum’s comment about “circumscribing idiosyncratic behaviours and keeping them conformant to the rational plan of the organisation” is a reminder that businesses are not comfortable with the mess that diversity creates. Businesses therefore spend a lot of time and effort trying to curb diversity. Despite the management challenges associated with diversity, it is essential for learning, adaptation, and dynamic knowledge creation and innovation.

Hansen proposes that collaboration has to be disciplined to be effective. Using a similar logic, encouraging disciplined diversity provides a tactic for constantly sensing what is happening in external environments.

This matters because path dependency strongly biases businesses to decisions already made, especially where time, money and resources have been committed. Concentrating on core products and services, ‘sticking to the knitting’ (Peters and Waterman, 1981), without simultaneously sensing and responding to environmental change creates opportunity for disruptive innovators opportunistically to take advantage of these developments under the noses of the inflexible dinosaur companies heading for crisis (Christensen, 1997).

Encouraging diverse perspectives is consistent with the principle of requisite variety. It contributes to cultures where constant questioning prevents the sort of rigidity that ultimately seems to have prevailed within General Motors. Responsibility for embedding these sorts of practices lies principally with leadership influencing cultural norms through behaviour and indicating what is acceptable and unacceptable by actions.

An amplifying strategy for a business would be to recognise, elicit, value and deploy the brain power of its whole workforce, including partners within its supply eco‐systems. Continuous improvement and problem‐solving, so integral to lean and quality, the last wave of disruptive management innovation, are examples of amplifying responses.

Social technologies are now creating phenomenal potential to energise creative, collective intelligence, launching a new wave of management innovation and unprecedented access to exponential requisite variety.

Attenuation

Attenuators try to reduce the amount of complexity in a systems.

A dominant business response over many decades has largely been misplaced attenuation, focused in the wrong direction towards controlling people and their behaviour ‐ the very people whose knowledge and collective intelligence are so essential for competitive fitness.

More than that, enterprises in their attempts to regulate and control people add additional management layers that create top heavy oganisations. The proliferation of organisational layers imposed to control “idiosyncratic behaviour” can instead create crippling bureacracy, which adds significantly to management overheads, stifling diversity and creating dysfunction.

I was going to launch into a musing on Cherns’ (1976, 1987) sociotechnical principles of system design, the principle of Minimum Critical Specification, because adding unnecessary management layers offends against it. I will save that discussion for another post – oh, joy I hear you say . Very interesting, in fact.

*Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers. D.Cartwright (ed). New York, Harper Row, p169.

“OK, I have let go. What do I do now?”

I also referred in the last post to Ouchi’s analysis of behaviour and output control. The more I thought about it, the more a generic “manage behaviour bad, manage outputs good” position is unacceptable. Is behaviour not to be influenced? Of course it is. What are outputs anyway, when much of what we do is intangible? Aaargh.

My hero Weick to the rescue. He says:

“As new technologies increasingly take on the form of abstract working knowledge, they move deeper inside the operator’s head, which means that effective control over these new technologies will be exerted by cognitive varaibles and unobrusive controls.”

So the language leaves a lot to be desired but the thought that technology and abstract work are inextricable and inside our heads is both obvious and profound. How do you go about controlling that?

What do observed behaviours tell us? Not a lot since they are “mystified by interactive complexity”. Output control fares no better under his scrutiny. He says:

“Output control is also difficult for many of the same reasons. Visible outputs are less meaningful because so many observable determinants other than operators’ actions can affect them. While an operator can be held accountable for the output, that accountability is empty if neither the operator nor the monitor understand what is ocurring or why.

… Cognition is is an increasingly important determinant of organisational outcomes because with fewer visible artifacts, more of the organisation has to be imagined, visualised and filled in from cryptic clues. All of this fleshing out is cognitive and is affected by decison premises.”

We Need To Talk

Random thoughts on things that make the already complex processes involved in control infinitely more complex:

1) Lee Bryant of Headshift’s observation about the trend away from “easily repeatable processes” to “barely repeatable processes.

2) Of Whales And Suckerfish:

“The many loose associations that corporations now have with outside parties demand a different treatment to that meted out to their own inside employees. “Partners” and those to whom work is outsourced cannot be commanded to do things in the same way that companies can command their own in-house troops.

The most interesting point about this new sort of organisation is not that traditional firms have whittled themselves down to a hard core of capabilities; it is that they have taken on a new type of job—the management of all the different external relationships that they have set up.

They may not “do” as many things for themselves as they used to, but they still have to manage the people that they have contracted to do those things for them … the new name of the game is “co-operation and persuasion”. In short, partners have to be cajoled to change their mind or their way of doing things.”

3)Knowledge flows are are co-created and distributed throughout networks of relationships that are “all tied together by business processes that span organisations, time and distance.”

It is hard to know where to even begin thinking about the skills and capabilities we are all having to learn. One thing is for certain, we need to learn to speak each others’ languages, crack open the code of each others’ cultures, learn to listen, be patient and well – to communicate. Was always the case. It is so much more so now – with bells on.

I need to think some more about distributed cognitive systems.

Weick, K.E (2001) Making Sense Of The Organization. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.

Control

Two dominant and enduring themes in the management literature are control and how to motivate and engage people in the workforce. Tannenbaum said in 1968:

“The theoretical analysis of control in social systems has a long and venerable history … control helps circumscribe idiosyncratic behaviours and keep them conformant to the rational plan of the organisation.”

Except that it quite obviously does not. People will not be controlled. They might appear as if they are complying but they are in fact resisting strongly. Victor Newman, speaking at the recent KM conference at Henly called this “consent and evade”. They will connect and do their own thing within informal shadow systems, which can be destructive or creative depending on how they respond to the organisation’s formal systems.

That was then and this is now? Obsession with control continues. A McKinsey article on informal networks in 2007 said that they “typically fly under management’s radar, they elude control” and “the greatest limitation of these ad hoc arrangements (informal networks) is that they can’t be managed.”

Motivation

Denials abound that employee engagement is not just more attempts to get people to do more stuff for nothing and that it means businesses having to change if they want to engage employees – and increasingly all the other stakeholders  like partners, supply chain, freelancers, customers etc. See for example the recent MacLeod report, Engaging For Success, which is actually very practical and realistic. I have sympathy with the “getting something for nothing” view. I critically assessed ‘empowerement’ in my PhD thesis and was amused to read the author of one article describing empowerment as:

“Delegation beefed up with a shot of testosterone … may be the latest in a long line of cant terms from the managerial lexicon of hypocrisy… the art of geting employees to do things against their inborn inclination to indolence has a long past history.”

Control And Motivation

There is a tension between control and motivation. The more minutely managers attempt to control, the more people withdraw and the less effective their attempts. And of course, the less effective their attempts the more repressive the control becomes.Motivation and control are two sides of the same coin. Letting go creates opportunity for self-determination, self-control and more meaningful work.

Control is a legitimate management concern. And control is not the right word anyway. We only need to look at the recent global financial catastrophe and the volcano in Iceland to know that control is an illusion. And yet businesses try to survive in highly uncertain operating environments.

It is how business objectives are tackled that matter. I have written somewhere about hearing Jim Balsillie, one of the joint CEOs of RIM (company that makes the Blackberry), comparing business to white water rafting. Business, he says, is a series of optimisations that require minute by minute sensing, assessing and adjusting. And for that, everyone has to be pulling together to keep the boat upright and heading forward. He says the idea of steering is laughable. He points RIM in a general direction.

Like the monkey with his hand in the biscuit jar, clutching the biscuits but unable to get his fist out of the neck of the jar, management needs to let go. There are ways to get what they want. If the monkey lets go and tips the jar up, the biscuits fall out. Management needs to let go, paradoxically, if they want to get people engaged.

Relationships As Crucial Control Point

What has any of this got to do with relationships as the crucial control point in organisations? Looking back at the control literature, it is clear that a lot of futile effort goes into controlling behaviour rather than outputs. In an examination of behaviour and output control published back in 1977, Ouchi concludes that behaviour control is particularly inappropriate where work is complex and unpredictable. I would argue that any work where peope are involved is complex and uncertain. So that is all work, then. Particularly in today’s connected, mobile, distributed, time-challenged, no-slack workplaces.

I remembered this morning that I have already been thinking about relationships and motivation in a post called Collaboration By Design. In a retrospective commentary in 1987 on an earlier article he had written on motivation, Herzberg said:

“The key to job enrichment is nurturing client relationships, rather than functional or hierarchical relationships.”

He explains what he means by giving the example of various trades supplying services to one another in aircraft maintenance. This new focus on process, relationships and service (absent in his earlier article) is crucial. This is exactly the philosophy of process integration in approaches like quality and lean, where participants interacting  across internal and external processes regard each other as customers expecting and receiving service.

So …

Outputs involve people co-ordinating business processes that are spread across organisations, time and place. Relationships are the crucial control point in organisations; they determine what happens at the joins and boundaries. Business processes are enacted through relationships, and both processes and relationships are tied together and enabled through distributed performance systems. Ergo, business is social. And that is all there is to it!

References

Bryan, L.L, Matson, E. and Weiss, L.M. (2007). Harnessing The Power Of Informal Employee Networks, The McKinsey Quarterly, No 4.

Herzberg, F. (1987) One More Time: How do you motivate employees? Harvard Business Review, Sept – Oct 1987.

Ouchi, W.G.  (1977) The Relationship Between Organisational Structure And Organisational Control. Adminstrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 22, p. 95 – 113.

Price, F. (1993) Perspectives: Educated Power. TQM Magazine, Vol. 5, No 3.

Tannenbaum, A.S. ( 1968). Control In Organisations. McGraw Hill, New York.

I have been thinking a lot about the role of workplace design, high-performance work systems and smart working. I was already thinking about augmentation of human capabilities, inspired by Manuel Castells’ observation that:

“What is specific to our world is the extension and augmentation of the body and mind of human subjects in networks of interaction powered by microelectronics-based, software-operated, communication technologies.”

Although interesting, this sounds far too clinical and dispassionate to me. It needs fleshing out. Augmentation of the whole person has to include psychological and emotional dimensions. How we are augmented or diminished is relational and linked to our feelings and responses to where we sit within a social structure.

I have written elsewhere about Professor Sir Michael Marmot researching the link between the risk of early death and position in social hierarchy. He says that “failing to meet the fundamental human needs of autonomy, empowerment, and human freedom is a potent cause of ill health”. This also applies within the workplace  – he has shown that risk from early death from heart disease is a bigger problem for those at the bottom of the pile, those who feel they have no control or not enough influence at work, than for high-flying senior executives.

He also says that:

“as evolved beings, we are social animals … the other important human need, after autonomy or control, is to be socially engaged.”

What do socially engaging workplaces feel like? Judith Heerwagen, an environmental psychologist, says that congenial environments are:

“those that reflect our natural ways of relating to each other, socially, cognitively and emotionally within distributed cognitive systems …

we can think of ourselves, our tools, our colleagues, our toys, our stories, our post‐it notes, and our piles of files as a distributed cognitive system that helps us remember and organize our thoughts …

we use them to capture and remind us of ideas and thoughts, while our minds work on them, combining them with other thoughts and ideas.”

Distributed Performance Systems

I think I prefer to think about distributed performance systems.

DPS = Us + stuff (toys, whiteboards, post-it notes, images et) + place + technologies + behavioural expectations

As I am writing this post, the idea of force field analysis comes to mind. Sitting down to work out togther what diminshes or augments us, using a force field analysis technique to create dialogue around what influences our performance, could be very interesting.

The following is still rough and a work-in-progress (i.e. incomplete). They are observations from literature reviews I have done over the past few years. It seems to me that distributed performance systems would need to include:

People

• Consideration of employees demanding a “new reality from work” in where, when and how they work

• The fact that we are networked (job related and personal), connected, and have distributed, dynamic relationships

• All generations value opportunities for learning

• Culturally  and demographically diverse

• Generation Y is relationship‐focused (“addicted to their friends”) and collaborative in the workplace

Place

From the business perspective:

• Communicate company values to attract and retain skilled people

• Able to support stimulation, reflection, collaboration, play, socialising, sharing, learning, connecting, concentration, creativity and contemplation

• Sensitive to cultural and demographic diversity

• Designed to influence flows of information and social interactions

From the workforce perspective:

• Be emotionally engaging

• Supports learning and creativity, and choreographs social interactions.

• Provide the possibility of choice

• Meet status needs and allow demonstration of individual identity

• To be safe and non‐threatening

• Let people use and display ‘stuff’ that resonates with comfort, safety, creativity and learning

Processes and Policies

• Develop skills and guidance for engagement in Mode 2 knowledge creation (collaboration, learning to engage in constructive conflict, critical thinking, thinking about thinking, develop methodologies for changing mindsets, engaging with diverse perspectives, cultural tendencies and making sense of fluid knowledge in dynamic situations)

• Methods and approaches for formal learning networks (communities of practice)

• Processes for encouraging informal learning and serendipity (communities of interest – phrase attributed to @tebbo)

Technologies

• Intuitive and easy to use

• People choose which technologies work for them

• Secure access

• Enabling people to do what they need to do with and through others

I need to think some more about what distributed performance systems look like. This is just a start.

“In order for the promised benefits of Enterprise 2.0 to become reality people have to be prepared to say what they think.”

I have been having conversations with interesting people lately. Recurring themes are authenticity, having a voice and being able to disagree without being disagreeable. For me, I shy away from expressing public disagreement in writing. When I have done, I have usually felt bad – like I have been acting as a ‘know-it-all’ or I have been very stupid in what I have said. Asychronous communication lets us self-censor.

When I have had an outburst in person, (Euan has heard one of those from me) I am full of shame. But why? I never indulge in name-calling and hope I remain respectful.

Mode 1 And Mode 2

I heard Dr Frances Westley talk about Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge production in a keynote address to a conference about the future workplace a few years ago. She said that learning to handle and express constructive conflict is one of the key skills we are all going to have to learn if we want to engage effectively in collaborative knowledge creation. This is true whether online or offline.

This is what I recently wrote about Mode 1 and Mode 2:

“Mode 1 is traditional discipline‐based knowledge, and Mode 2 is cross-disciplinary, collaborative, reflexive, socially‐mediated and created in response to practical challenges. Skills for engaging in new knowledge production include risk taking, making judgements, pattern discernment, inter‐personal skills, negotiation, active listening and conflict management.

Dr Westley maintains that constructive conflict is a critical element in surfacing knowledge; learning how to engage with conflict is crucial. People have to learn how to listen, negotiate and adapt.

She linked collaboration and culture, saying that learning to crack the code of other cultures would have to become a core capability in engaging in collaborative knowledge creation. People hold their beliefs deeply. Values and beliefs need to be surfaced, and people need to be aware that they work from cultural values and assumptions. Being an outsider can help people figure it out, crack the cultural codes and recognise patterns to assist integrative thinking.

Managers regularly have to reconcile the horns of multiple dilemmas in Mode 2 knowledge creation, requiring engagement with decisions and choices that are characterised by paradoxes and dilemmas. New methodologies for changing mindsets are vital to enact a culture of synthesis, in which people simultaneously keep their disciplinary specialist knowledge while integrating it with those of other disciplines.

These new methodologies must be able to allow us to interpret viscous, fluid knowledge within dynamic situations and promote thinking about thinking, through collaborative learning. Knowledge embedded
in different disciplines has to be uncovered and re‐integrated within a systematic perspective.”

Disagreeing Without Being Disagreeable

I wish I could lay claim to having said that but I can’t. This was Alistair Moffat of Nokia, who very kindly spoke at the Global Mobility Network. He was describing the process of initiating an emergent culture creation process following the formation of NSN from a merger.

As you know, the human cost of mergers is high. If you want to see a case study of how people were encouraged to say what they think online, then this is it.

Of course! So simple and so obvious and yet so overlooked.

In this blog post, I want to build on this fundamental insight to propose that the principles of designing with transaction costs in mind is already well-established. I both agree and disagree that the firm of today is not the firm of tomorrow.

This post is written from my notes. I apologise in advance for any misunderstandings or misrepresentation.

The nub of his argument was that according to classical economics, firms exist because they are the best way to reduce transaction costs through access to capital. People worked for firms because the employment contract endowed benefits. JP set about demolishing both reasons. He said that most people in the room had better credit ratings than most banks. Firms’ superior ability to secure better access to capital is now dubious.

As for the employment contract, whatever psychological contract there might have been between employer and employed is long gone – for valuable knowledge workers anyway. The balance of power is shifting as communication technologies enable armies of self-determined freelancers to carve out their own path to making a living, supported within networks and communities of peers.

He went on to explore scale, search, sharing, and being synchronous in the context of the firm of tomorrow.  Specifically:

• Scale – we need to think about disruption and need to figure out how to operate at scale, always with a view to minimising transaction costs. How to do this?

• Search – what are the implications of scale, sharing and being synchronous / asynchronous? Everyone can get anything they want and at any time. The best search is social; the recommendation market is powerful and granular use of social networks is the best way to discover information. We cannot all know everything but we can nurture reputations as being the go-to-people for specific capabilities. We need to develop filters to choose according to who knows what. He spoke about the serendipity of dipping into Twitter. On the whole, though, we all have access to too much information. In our efforts to reduce transaction costs, we use knowledgeable people to give us answers quickly.

• We need to design for sharing, including creating organisational systems that support sharing behaviour. He recommends starting with open access and then closing as necessary, although there are obviously practical and cultural considerations against such a blanket open approach for existing businesses.

• JP spoke about how social technologies allow us to be synchronous; the shifting of time and space allows us to do things we could not do before. I jotted in my notes that JP said “we need to instill attitudes and expectations into a new generation”. I must be mistaken since I am sure he knows that these attitudes and expectations are already there. It is existing organisations that are having to adapt to the expectations and demands of a new generation.

Customers And Transaction Costs

Only yesterday I listened to John Seddon saying that transaction costs are reduced in the organisation at the point where the organisation touches the customer.  For me, that is often at the frontline – you know that level in the organisation where people are generally ignored? In manufacturing, it is on the shopfloor.

Process control and innovation approaches unfortunately get labelled and then the core principles embodied in them tend to become obscured as adherents of this method or that argue about their relative merits or how evil they are. At root, though, they all have three things in common: innovation, collaboration and customer focus.

People are encouraged to see themselves as customers when receiving input from others, and in turn recipients of their work are their customers. Now link this with the constant quest for process innovation and problem-solving and right there you have a key reason why the Japanese auto makers out-performed their US competitors for years. In their drive for growth, Toyota appears to have wandered far from this fundamental value-creating customer perspective.

My doctoral research fifteen years ago was based around exploring organisational design that enabled the value locked up in operator tacit knowledge to be released, to the benefit of both the operators and the business. Although I disliked the word empowerment, I came to the (obvious) conclusion that knowledge really was power and that business had to be nice to people if they wanted them to contribute their tacit knowledge to process control and innovation.

Value And Transaction Costs

This brings me to another dot recently joined. I was delighted to listen to Verna Allee talk about her work on value networks. I thought I understood what value networks are about but actually hearing Verna explain it, I understood more viscerally. Verna said something very interesting: that value networks are “Lean Plus”. So there is someone else who gets continuity.

The way I see it is this: if continuous improvement is linked to the first wave of smart working, then the phenomenal, exponential potential of connected, collective intelligence leads to the second wave. This is what Smart Working: Creating The Next Wave is about.

The revelation? That framing design issues from a transaction cost perspective is an alternative to framing in terms of potential and unrealised value, which is what I tend to do. If businesses do not readily hook into the notion of value, they certainly do get cost reduction. Put people’s ingenuity to work doing that would be a good start.

The firm of tomorrow might not look like the firm of today but it will be designed according to the same existing and well-understood principles, that are interpreted and applied according to context.

“Something precious we get from SM but very rarely mention: Encouragement”

Something Precious

Now you may perhaps think that I have gone loop-the-friggin-loop (reference Shirley Valentine) but this is how I felt some weeks ago when several people I follow on Twitter, all of whom I admire hugely, said nice things about a video @DebbieDavies made for me. I especially like the bit in the advertisement video where he goes over top and the sensation you feel where the roller coaster goes plunging downwards (it’s amazing how our brains fool us into forgetting that this is not real):

The encouragement was both for Debbie and her production skills and also for me in what I was trying to communicate. My overwhelming feeling was gratitude for the generosity of spirit of these busy people, who took the time and effort to respond. It  reflects so well on them and it shamed me into thinking that I perhaps need to be more encouraging to others. It is too easy to get caught up in my own stuff.

The experience got me thinking about transition to new attitudes and new ways of doing things in organisations. You might already know that I am writing a book – I have gone on about it enough. I will be honest. I am struggling a bit with it. The reason I am struggling is because, like a million other flat, lifeless academic, research-focused accounts of organisational life and experience it sounds so – well, lacking in the sort of emotion I felt when those kind people took the time to  encourage me by saying nice things, which of course I now want to pass on to others.

Encouragement is much more than a feeling, though. It contributes to the energy and virtuous swirls of caring support that we provide for each other, which is going to be increasingly critical in the coming months and years. I don’t think we have seen anything like the the sort of fall-out from the global financial catastrophe that we are yet to experience. Major unheavals were on their way, even before the financial crisis, from the effects of demographic, technological and economics shifts. I recommend Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everone Else And No One Can Pay to anyone who might be tempted to think that we have got away with it and business as usual has returned.

Here’s the wee video that elicited so much encouragement:

Are you familiar with The Reduced Shakespeare Company? Their Hamlet in two minutes is very funny. And then they do it backwards.

The Reduced Version

I am not suggesting that for one second that my prose might be compared with Shakespeare’s masterpiece. Half-way readable would be good. Once the book is finished though, I will do a two minute version of each chapter. But for the moment, I am afraid you are lumbered with the full version.

I would really appreciate any comments, suggestions or questions.

The following is an exerpt from a draft chapter from the book I am writing just now. It is not blog-friendly prose but it will do to show why I think Bandura is not full of shit. What he says is linked to Karl Weick, who is other of my favourite theorists.

Social and Complex

“Organisations are essentially dynamic networks of relationships. Weick (1979) provides strong thought leadership in understanding how complex social interactions among people play out. He speaks about organising as flows of behaviour and describes the basic building blocks of organising in terms of “individual behaviours interlocked among two or more people, who change each other’s behaviour”. When two people engage, he calls the act of one person responding to another an interact. If the person who instigated the exchange then further responds, this is a double interact. Weick tells us that the double interact is the stable component in organisational growth and decay, and that inter‐locked behaviours are the elements that make up dynamic processes.

We are all individually complicated to begin with and we constantly change; our moods fluctuate, we feel more or less at ease in different places and with different people, we have sensitivities, agendas, positions to defend, cultural biases and personal values that influence how we communicate, how we react and so on. Add to this fluctuating and fluid personal change the influence we are able, or unable, to exert on each other and it is not difficult to see what happens when complex individuals try to communicate with and manipulate other equally complicated individuals.

Weick was far from alone in focusing on the highly‐dynamic and social nature of human systems. Argyris and Schon (1978) for example recognised organising as active and cognitive, and Schoderbeck et al (1978) described groups interacting within ‘organised complexities’, which they describe as:

“phenomena composed of a very large number of parts that interact in a non‐simple way”.

In Bandura’s social cognitive view of human activity, events are the outcome of continuously interacting behavioural, cognitive and environmental influences, which are inter‐locked and mutually shaped (Bandura, 1978). This ‘reciprocal determinism’ is a core feature of Bandura’s work. His stance is very much in opposition to behaviourist theorists, who believe that behavior is causally determined by what is happening in the environment, so that the environment “becomes an autonomous force that automatically orchestrates and controls behaviour”. Bandura disputes this. Although the environment does influence behaviour, people choose, through cognition, what they want to see and how they perceive their environment. They learn in four ways:

• Enactively ‐ by doing and experimenting

• Vicariously ‐ by watching other people’s experiences

• Socially – through conversation and by listening to the judgements of others

• Logically – by developing rules of inference and deriving new knowledge from reasoning.

As Bandura says:

“By their actions, people play a role in creating the social milieu and other circumstances that arise in their daily transactions”.

Self‐regulating, self‐organising and self-reflecting are core concepts in Bandura’s accounts of the constantly shifting, mutually adapting and dynamic engagements of people with each other and their environments. Bandura points out that complex interactions among behaviour, cognition and environment lead to probabilistic outcomes rather than predictability.”

Talking Shit?

Talking sense more like!

Why despite so much accumulated advice and good practice is there so much bad management practice around?

In the face of such tumultuous environmental change and organisational dysfunction, there are many voices calling for management re-invention and new paradigms. This obsession with novelty is delusional*. Bob Sutton says that anyone claiming invention of radical new models “suffers from arrogance, ignorance, or both.” The tendency in management literature to talk of 21st century management and new paradigms risks overlooking fundamental insights of trail-blazing theoretical thinkers from decades ago, from years of academic research and lessons learned from process innovation methods that took root in manufacturing from the 1980s onwards.

To be fair, there are workplace changes that really are new, like getting to grips with social networking and collaboration technologies. What are they? How are they used? Which technologies are used for what purpose? What are the social protocols associated with them? What are their implication for ways of working, and what does their use imply for skills development? Castells et al (2007) tell us that all technologies diffuse only when they resonate with pre-existing social structures and cultural values. Social networking and digital collaboration technologies might be new but knowledge around social and organisational issues are not.

We already know a lot about the social structures, organisational design and cultural conditions that have to exist to support these technologies in practice. We also know what issues are involved in making the transition to new ways of doing things. Technologies change but people essentially do not, or if they do they change much more slowly.

Many of the people promoting Enterprise 2.0 come from a technology background. While these professionals appreciate the need to understand how people engage with their work, how they work together, and what helps or hinders this, they may not be fully aware of the abundance of well-documented research that exists around work organisation design principles that would support these new technologies in use.

In his quest to lead the charge on re-inventing management, Hamel (2007) identifies what he sees as three of the most pressing challenges facing businesses today . These are:

“adapting to the pace of change, the need to make innovation everyone’s job, and the need to create a highly engaging work environment that inspires employees to give the best of themselves”.

The need to make innovation everyone’s job through continuous improvement is a core component of process innovation and control methods like lean and approaches to quality. There is a resurgence of interest in lean being linked to a “new era in management”. Fine et al. (2009) suggest that “substantial, scalable and sustainable” gains are achievable by focusing on the ‘soft’ side of lean. It is hard to see why this is news and it is also hard to appreciate how it is possible to do lean effectively, without integrating a culture of innovation and collaboration within everyone’s jobs. Lean requires all involved to think and act differently, actively participating in and taking responsibility for process integration and innovation. The clue is in the fact that many companies bring in external experts to instigate and oversee lean initiatives, which makes no sense if the people with the process knowledge, those doing the work, are not made responsible for sharing and applying that knowledge. Lean methods are receiving renewed attention in national and regional public sectors as the need to cut costs and demonstrate efficiencies following massive public spending, for example a focus on lean in the UK National Health Service.

Hamel is an influential management thinker. It is therefore disappointing that he makes no reference to the plethora of European research that exists on high-performance management systems (Cowling et al, 2008; Guest, 2006) and work organisation (Totterdill et al, 2009). These are rich resources for businesses looking for guidance on designing adaptive and emergent ways of working and managing, and finding help on making the transition to working practices appropriate for the environment the business is operating in. The lessons, principles and management challenges arising from the case studies Hamel references are necessary but insufficient. Among his “21st century management principles” are a number that can be traced back a long way.

That really is the point of the book I am trying to write (which is frankly driving me nuts). I am suggesting that there are first principles of organising. These have to be constantly assessed, interpreted and applied according to what is happening in the external environment and how most effectively to organise to meet customer expectations.

One of the principles Hamel mentions is variety and observes that “the broader the gene pool the better”. The gene pool from which this book draws is very broad indeed. It precisely because there is so much actionable knowledge being overlooked and not being heeded in practice that the book is being written.

The objectives of the book are to:

(a) review current workplace trends (in people, technology, place and space)

(b) review what we already know about effective management and high performance work methods

(c) show how first principles from what we already know can be discovered, interpreted and used in action to help businesses learn and adapt in today’s turbulent, fast-changing and connected business environment.

Whether it will make a blind bit of difference to anyone is debatable.

P.S. Contact me at @drmcewan if you would like the references

* Andrew Pettigrew and Evelyn Fenton (2000). The Innovation Organisation. Sage

According to the article, critical thinking skills include how to frame questions, how to question assumptions, how to look at problems from multiple perspectives, thinking through clashing priorities and ability to choose among potential options.

Business Education At Master’s Level

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK provides benchmark statements for undergraduate and postgraduate learning across a range of subjects, including Business and Management. Skills expected of all master’s programmes are listed on page 6 of the business and management document, and include the requirement to think critically, identify assumptions, evaluate options and deal with complexity.

I became aware of the QAA master’s-level learning characteristics a decade ago when leading a university-wide effort to  widen master’s level work-based executive education in a UK university (more about that in a while). I obviously cannot share internal university documents. What I can say is that the academic standards unit within the university produced a document that made the QAA criteria very explicit and comprehensive, including:

• the nature of the operational context (complex, unpredictable, innovative and with the likelihood of ethical dilemmas arising);

• cognitive skills (ability to deal with complexity and contradictions, to evaluate alternative approaches, and confidently synthesise ideas)

• key transferable skills (ability to engage critically with communities of peers, reflecting on own and others’ work, including skills in negotiating conflict).

So UK business programmes are already teaching people to think and learn critically? Well, probably not effectively – and that has to do with content-led taught programmes. It seems to me that the QAA’s intention for interconnectedness between subject knowledge and skills development is unrealistic without some element of practical work-based knowledge-in-action. Teaching business practice in the classroom is like teaching people to ski. For that you need to try, fall over, get up again, improve your technique, fall over some more and then  – voila, one day you remain upright.

How many people setting out on a taught master’s programme realise that the degree is being awarded for skills development as well as demonstrating competence in subject knowledge? I would bet not many.

Critical Thinking In Practice

“Once people begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes in some context and this helps them to discover what is occuring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next. Managers keep forgetting that it is what they do, not what they plan that explains their success … meaning lies in the path of action … if you get people moving, thinking clearly and watching closely, events often become more meaningful.”

Karl Weick, Making Sense Of The Organisation, p346

The work-based approach my colleagues and I were promoting starts with the question ‘What do you need to do?’ Using a learning agreement and applying the criteria for critical thinking and key transferable skills to crafting learning outcomes and assesment criteria, a custom-designed programme is designed around achieving that objective for an individual executive or cohort.

The learning agreement is like an empty framework of learning goals, activities, learning outcomes, assessment criteria and modes of assessment – all to be specified to fit the needs and requirements of individual students. Customised subject knowledge is dropped into the framework in a just-in-time way, at the point where it is needed in action.

My experience is that value really comes from community. Of course facilitators, mentors, subject knowledge, tools, methods and analytical frameworks matter. But it is what happens when people support and teach each other that really makes the difference. Acting and learning within our social networks teaches us how to trust, take risks, judge, discern patterns,collaborate, resolve paradoxes, choose, negotiate, listen, understand cultural differences and engage in constructive conflict.

Now how can you begin to teach these things in a classroom?