Taylorist Buildings

He made the fascinating observation that Taylorist offices influenced by Scientific Management, with its unremitting focus on efficiency, have resulted in unsustainable workspaces that are under‐occupied and unsuitable for emerging business conditions. Dr Duffy calls office buildings ‘misleading and obsolescent units of analysis’ and wonders why self‐reliant people should be constrained by them. Knowledge nomads use their clout to choose how, where, when and with whom they work. They are certainly not constrained by walls and place.

Taylorist Management

It is not only building design that is having to escape the strangling dominance of Taylorist influence. Despite unstoppable and converging forces in the external business environment, management practices and attitudes, also significantly influenced by a century of Taylorist approaches to management, remain stubbornly resistant to change. The parallels between under‐utilised workspace and under‐utilised human intelligence and creativity, arising from the separation of thinking and doing, is striking.

Taylorist IT Deployment

Taylorist attitudes are also influencing IT deployment in the UK. Although take-up of information technologies in the UK is high, one of the publications from the Future of Work, a six-year research project involving twenty two universities, drew attention to the fact that business have the choice of using ICT as an enabling technology deployed in combination with high‐performance HRM measures or as monitoring tools to control workforces. At the time the research was being reported on five years ago, the authors of Managing to Change? commented that the trend toward control without workforce participation was “deeply disquieting”. In their view, there is a substantial risk that low cost, automatically generated monitoring and control information, not shared with those being monitored, would be likely to become damaging and divisive.

Something’s Got To Change

IT, HR and FM need to mobilise urgently. The functions need to be having conversations internally and across professional boundaries. Stepping back to think about how things might be done better is not easy. The drag of the status quo is a major obstacle and of course businesses tend to become more controlling in recessionary conditions such as we are currently experiencing. Nevertheless, concerted effort at dialogue and understanding is now urgent. We have communication and collaboration tools at our disposal like we have never had before, and highly effective techniques for visualisation and decision support. There are no excuses – only the will to recognise the pervasiveness of the Taylorist stranglehold and to overcome it.

As Darwin was reputed to have said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

(1) Literature, art and history tell us that humans have always been connected.

(2) Social media give us new and evolving ways to connect, discover and inspire.

Evidence From The Middle Ages

I am currently reading Roads To Santiago: detours & riddles in the lands and history of Spain by Cees Noteboom. He describes a book he sees in the museum attached to the cathedral in El Burgo de Osma. He specifically describes a map of what they thought the world looked like in 1086. Noteboom says:

“This Codex Beato is Carolingian in its colouristic treatment and ornamentation, Arabic in the application of yellow and ivory and geometric patterns, Lombardian in the interlaced arabesques and animal motifs, Irish in the spiralled braiding, Islamic in the predominance of red and black, while eastern influences manifest themselves in the Mozarabic stylisation…

But we know how profound the pollinating influence in those days was, that the world was already a world, that people communicated and saw each other’s art, that artists and craftsmen travelled and inspired one another.”

Evolution Of Social Media

I was alerted to Om Malik’s post about the evolution of blogs through a Twitter micro-message, a Tweet, by Jon Husband. Om says:

“Today most of us walk around with newfangled smartphones that are nothing short of multitasking computers, essentially content creation points.

And they’re networked, which means creating and sharing content is becoming absurdly simple to do. With the increased number of content creation points –- phones, camera, Flip video cameras, Twitter -– we are publishing more and more content.”

Applications like AudioBoo and VideoBoo allow us to “capture information at the point of inspiration”, as Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish proposed three years ago in their book Mobile Web 2.0. The iPhone and applications being developed for it now given us a glimpse of what is possible to do, create and share using smart phones.

Discovery And Inspiration

I wrote a post a while back called Thinking About Discovery. I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Until recently, my dominant feelings have been frustration and incomprehension that we know about effective, smart working and managing and yet so much of this knowledge is overlooked in businesses. Talent, skills, knowledge and willingness to contribute are going to waste.

The view I am choosing to take now is, “Great that means a journey of discovery for businesses and enterprises stuck in old attitudes, ways of managing and working”.

Like the medieval artists who travelled, discovered and were inspired by each other, we now have amazing tools and technologies that let us discover and inspire each other. What an opportunity businesses now have to create learning architectures and social collaborative environments where people can experiment with insights gleaned from beyond their organistional boundaries, learning and being inspired from different practices and cultural influences.

Trying to explain and describe new ways of working doesn’t work. Like trying to explain the business value of social media, you just have to explore, discover, experiment – and experience.

The Smart Work Learning Place

One of the things I want to do with The Smart Work Company is to build on this experience and create a learning network for senior executives online. And so The Learning Place is just about ready. Well, the software has been ready for a while. It has taken me some time to sort out practicalities, like Terms and Conditions and membership criteria.

Who Is It For?

The profiles of the people I have in mind are modelled on the sort of senior people I have been working with since 2000. They are all executives, in public and private sectors nationally and internationally, who have a specific strategic thing they need to do. This is probably something they have not done before, and there are significant consequences for their enterprise and for them personally. Examples in the past three years are from sectors as diverse as construction, engineering design, energy, retail banking, public sector, executive search and telecommunications. The executives who become members of The Learning Place will have their own unique and widely diverging strategic challenges they are dealing with in their workplaces.

What Is It For?

The Learning Place is an online resource for busy executives to challenge their strategic thinking and action during a time of change. This is what the recent press release said:

“In fast changing times – senior managers and directors need time to think. Sadly, a relentless schedule of travel, meetings, emails, phone calls and deadlines leaves little time for reflection and independent feedback. A lull may happen within an airport lounge, between meetings or at some random time of the day.

The Learning Place is waiting for the member to log in and think in a way which suits them. The Learning Place gives the member time to breath, learn, think and reflect in their own time and in their own way – on their own and with peers. They are helped along the path with tools, techniques and resources which are right for them. There is no set course or ‘one-size-fits-all’ format. This is learning and development as it should be – social, natural, flexible and human.

What Topics Will Be Addressed?

That will depend on the executives who are members of The Learning Place. I have structured The Learning Place into four ‘lounges’, as a way of loosely sign-posting conversation and resources on:

Smart Working

Smart Strategising

Smart Collaborating

Smart Managing

I have also condensed my knowledge of research and theoretical insights on organisational dynamics, enterprise responses to them and current workplace trends into 5 ‘first principle’ modules: Smart Basics. This content and structure is suggestive to get things going. Members will add content and direct conversations.

Won’t People Be Too Busy?

That of course is a danger. The conversations and content on The Learning Place will need to provide real value to attract and keep the attention of busy, high-profile people. This is just some of the value I hope will be created:

• Emotional support. Listening to my friends, many of them are worn-out. We have all experienced temporary insanely busy periods. It appears that this has become widespread and unrelenting. Recession, threat of redundancy, overwork – how can people be expected to innovate and be effective under these conditions?

• Getting different perspectives and ideas is energising; I know this from my experience of co-facilitating the Global Mobility Network.

• Access to research. Of course the professional institutes are a source of current research. What The Learning Place offers is an inter-disciplinary research perspective. IT, HR and Facilities Management need to be working together much more than they currently do.

• Most valuable of all, perhaps, will be the opportunity to explore the practical implications of workplace trends, smart processes, and tools and methods.

I am obviously interested in hearing from you if you think you might fit the profile I have described, and you think you could gain value from The Learning Place. Membership is by application and will be free until the end of December, 2009. After that, an annual subscription fee applies.

I am also interested to hear from you if you think you have experience of implementing strategic change in finance or pharmaceuticals. Please contact info@thesmartworkcompany.com if you are interested in knowing more.

I was asked to produce a thought provocateur piece late last year for a one-day seminar as input to the report The Smart Workplace in 2030, which was just recently published.

Atomised, Customised and Kaleidescopic

In my short talk, I spoke both as an observer of workplace trends and from my own experience. I said that work is becoming atomised and kaleidescopic for knowledge workers. I can customise my day according to what mood I am in, what I need to do and who I need to be with. Taking the four categories of knowledge work (socialise, focus, collaborate, and learn) from the Gensler UK Workplace Survey 2008, I gave examples of different places I work and why.

Focus: I can ignore emails, not immediately answer calls, set my Skype presence indicator to Away and not check into Twitter if I need to focus working from home. What I like about working from home is that it is comfortable and the decor is oviously to my taste. Working from home too much drives me stir-crazy and I have to get out, especially if I need inspiration or contemplation. In which case, I take myself off somewhere like the members area at the Royal Festival Hall, where I can sit and think while looking out across the river. There are loads of quiet, inspiring places like this. A friend was telling me that there is a cafe in the Royal Opera House. Must check that one out.

For me, I focus best in isolation but also focus when collaborating with colleagues.

Collaborate: So where do I collaborate? At client offices, sometime we isolate ourselves in a room and plan, review, create, brainstorm, write  – and mess around a bit looking at shoe websites. That’s working, by the way. Our brains are processing stuff. My excuse anyway. We also collaborate in open plan offices, in which case we need to keep the noise down.

I also go to One Alfred Place to meet and to collaborate. The physical surroundings are important to me. I used to be a member at the Institute of Directors but I found it male and stuffy. As an aside, an Economist special report last year, Nomads at Last, on the consequences of mobile telecoms noted that so-called third spaces can be isolating places. Although people might be gathered in the same place, they are all busy communicating via digital devices to others elsewhere. These spaces can be lonely and noisy.

Socialise: Not as often as I would like these days, I go to Tuttle on a Friday morning. This is the most interesting, eclectic, intelligent and influential business network in London. I go because of the calibre of people I meet. When it began, the group used to meet at The Coach and Horses in Soho. It has now moved to the ICA – how cool is that?

Learn: Continuous learning is just so much a part of what I do, on my own or socially, and I do not go anywhere special to learn.

As work becomes more knowledge-based and less location-dependent, place assumes great significance as an enabler of what we do and what we wish to communicate about our identity.

The Employment Contract

The Washington Post article reports on ‘teleworkers’ and implies that they are a mix of free agents (entrepreneurs) and employees. This topic deserves a separate post. I want to quickly note here that not many people have yet picked up on the employment contract as an issue. In all the scanning of workplace trends I have done over the past three years, I have read a lot about talent, the war for talent, the need to engage talent etc. I have also noted the rise in employers conceding to employee demands flexible working, including choice in where, when and how people work. Some of this rise is a response to legslation in the UK but is also as a response to employee demands.

Perhaps now in the recession is not a time when people feel that they can jump ship, but my question is – why do valuable knowledge workers need to be employed at all?  Social media and digital communication technologies are enablers. But it is other trends and shifts that are tipping the balance of power in favour of knowledge workers, who now have access to technologies that enable them to connect, share, and collaborate in their efforts to become self-determined. I think this is a trend to watch and one that will challenge how employers engage with staff they wish to retain.

If they wish to retain them as employees. Perhaps permanent employment contracts are on their way out? Just thinking out loud …

Am in reflective mood, having had a break from work. One of the things I am thinking is – why do I blog? It is hard work and takes up a lot of my time. Would anyone care if I stopped? On a good day, I know I blog to help me work out what I think. On a not so good day, like today when I have far too many urgent things to do, I feel I am wasting my time. And yet I feel compelled to file my weekly post.

AMPLIFICATION – TAKE 2

I said here that systems retain viability by developing requisite variety, which enables them to handle the complexity coming at them from their external environments. An amplifying response for an enterprise would be to recognise, elicit, value and deploy the brain power of its workforce and customers. Social computing technologies create phenomenal opportunity and potential to build on what we already know about this sort of amplifying response from the business process control and innovation techniques of lean manufacturing.

ATTENUATION

The other mechanism for achieving requisite variety is attenuation, which is about taking action to reduce or diminish the effects of factors that threaten system viability. Enterprises try to attenuate through systems, processes and structures. Now I may have got this completely wrong but the following two thoughts strike me:

The dominant business response is largely attenuation rather than amplification.

Attenuation tends to be focused in the wrong direction, which is towards controlling people and their behaviour – the very people whose knowlege and collective intelligence are so essential for competitive fitness.

What is my evidence for making those assertions?

Evidence for the first statement is summarised in my last post, which linked to David Guest’s summary of the key elements of high-performance work systems. High-performance work systems are amplifying responses to environmental complexity. Despite growing research indicating the business benefits of high-performance work systems, their adoption in the UK has been poor. I suspect the UK is not alone.

What about attentuation being focused in the wrong direction?

For me, there is enormous advantage in looking backwards. Doing that in the management literature on control is a bit of an eye-opener. I have written about this in How Organisations Work (And Don’t Work). Control has been a dominant concern for business over the decades. Tannenbaum* wrote 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.”

Since then, a ‘considerable literature’** has emerged on control and continues to be a management preoccupation. According to a 2007 McKinsey article***, informal networks in organisations ‘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’.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There is, it seems to me, a tension between amplification and attenuation. Of course control is an entirely valid management concern. It is how control processes are designed and monitored that matter. Threats to system viability from the outside needs agile and effective internal systems (attenuating responses) to support amplification through innovation and knowledge management. People are the answer, not the problem. Although they quickly become a problem if they are micro-managed and not trusted. See How Organisations Work (And Don’t Work) for a summary of destructive shadow systems.

REFERENCES

* Tannenbaum, A.S. (1968). Control in Organizations. McGraw‐Hill Inc., New York

** Selto et al ( 1995). ‘Assessing the organizational fit of a Just‐In‐Time manufacturing system: testing, selection, interaction and systems models of contingency theory’. Accounting, Organization and Society, vol 20. Nos 7 & 8, 665‐684

*** Lowell, L et al. (2007). Harnessing the Power of Informal Employee Networks, The McKinsey Quarterly, No. 4

Skimming articles in a futile attempt to keep up with workplace trends, I discovered a gem of a paper by Professor Sir Michael Marmot. Published in the Lancet in 2006, the article is entitled ‘Health In An Unequal World’ and is the text of a lecture given to the Royal College of Physicians. In the article, Professor Marmot is clear that social environment is a crucial influencer and determinant of health. He says:

“The unnecessary disease and suffering of disadvantaged people, whether in poor countries or rich, is a result of the way we organise our affairs in society. I shall argue, in this oration, that failing to meet the fundamental human needs of autonomy, empowerment, and human freedom is a potent cause of ill health … the challenge is to understand how position in the social hierarchy is related to health”.

Then only today @markgould13 posted this on Twitter. It is from Jeffrey Pfeffer, who I have long admired. Pfeffer says:

“Although much of the research and public pressure concerning sustainability is focused on organizational and economic effects on the physical environment, companies and their work practices affect the human and social environment as well … there is evidence that high performance work arrangements are better for both financial performance and human sustainability.

We need to embark on a project to reduce the illness and death being caused by companies and their management practices.”

Reduce the illness and death being caused by companies and their management practices? Wow. That is a very strong statement, which resonates with me for personal reasons.

Social Environment And Performance

So what are these high-performance work arrangements that Pfeffer mentions? Professor David Guest is good on summarising the key elements of high-performance working, which systematically incorporates structures and processes that enhance competence, opportunity to contribute, motivation and commitment.

Competence includes ability and motivation for continous learning, and learning is social in today’s networked and connected world. This means commiting to a holistic view of organisational learning, which is built into all supporting IT, HR and facilities management systems.

Opportunity to contribute is closely aligned to continuous learning. Guest says:

“The core mechanism for ensuring that competent workers have an opportunity to contribute is job design … jobs should be designed, either singly or in team-based groups, to provide sufficient autonomy, control and responsibility to make full use of knowledge and skills, and to permit on-going learning and adjustment.”

Despite the performance benefits of high-performance work arrangements (the evidence is that these work practices need to be implemented as mutually supporting systems) their take-up in the UK has until recently been poor.

The CIPD in partnership with Cap Gemini carried out a research study on smart working last year. How Smart Is UK plc? reported that only 9.6 % of respondents ’strongly agreed’ that their companies deliberately designed roles that embrace smart working concepts, with 35.2% ’somewhat agreeing’. The author(s) comment that ‘building autonomy and innovation formally into job roles is still an aspiration.’ Guest attributes the lack of take-up of high-performance working to ignorance, inability and doubt about financial benefits.

This is set to change. The developments in the external environment, which I have been writing about in the past few blog posts, are driving new ways of working and increasing workforce autonomy and self-determination. As with general health, the organisational and social environment is an influencer of workplace health and performance. Creating working environments that are good for business and good for people is fast becoming a not-so-secret unfair advantage for enterprises willing to design jobs, processes and structures around employee autonomy and self-determination.

We know what works. We know how to do it. It is all to play for.

“The history of modern business is the history of GM, and vice versa … if the success of GM defined the management agenda for 20th century, then its failure defines the management agenda for the 21st.

The rash of commentary on GMs’ troubles is obviously linked to its iconic status; it represents a metaphor for the mighty fallen. There is shock that this could happen to an apparently invincible corporation.

One of the most productive plants in the US has been NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.), a joint venture between GM and Toyota set up in 1984. According to Yochai Benkler, “as of the numbers last year, it continued to be one of the three most productive plants in the U.S.”

NUMMI emerged from the embers of a failed GM plant, which closed and the re-opened with the same people, same unions but different values and busines processes. I first came across NUMMI in an HBR article, Time and Motion Regained, by Paul Adler, when I was doing my doctoral research. I was intrigued by the account of what had happened at NUMMI, which was that a form of Taylorism had apparently been introduced and accepted.

A faculty member at Babson College in the US puts it well:

“In effect, they gave Taylorism to the workers. It taps into three sources of adult motivation -the desire for excellence, a mature sense of realism, and a positive response to respect and trust”

It’s Been A Long, A Long Time Coming

The joint venture was set up in 1984. That is 25 whole years ago. What exactly did GM learn from the joint venture? Not much it would seem. Yochai Benkler characterises GM as driven by management practices that monitor people below and incentivise people above, attempting to extract everything from relationships. Here is Gary Hamel’s assessment:

“GM’s failure isn’t the result of one spectacularly ill-conceived decision—the company didn’t jump off a cliff. Instead, it meandered into mediocrity, one small short-sighted step at a time. Like a two-pack a day smoker, GM committed suicide in degrees.”

In an excellent article, The New GM – a first look, in Automotive World, CEO Fritz Henderson is reported as as saying:

“the “New GM [will be] dedicated to building the very best cars and trucks – highly fuel efficient, world-class quality, green technology development and with truly outstanding design. Above all, the New GM will be re-dedicated in its entirety to our customers.”

The article pithily observes that “quite why this wasn’t the case with the old GM will no doubt become the subject of many books and academic theses to come”.

A Change Is Gonna Come

The business environment BC, that is before credit crunch, was already turbulent, with significant economic, structural, technological and demographic developments causing uncertainty. The global financial crisis has taken this existing uncertainty into another dimension. Businesses need urgently to review and adapt their working and management practices, to ensure their continued viability.

Organisational cultures and management practices can be extremely resistant to adaptation. GM gives us a powerful symbol of rigidity and a clear example of what can happens to the mightiest of companies. As I said in my last post:

“Decline is associated with inability to sense and respond to changes in the external environment. Path dependency strongly commits businesses to past decisions. “Sticking to the knitting”, one of Peters and Waterman’s eight indicators of excellence, as an exhortation to concentrate on core products and services might need clarifying and expanding on?”

Yes, change is gonna come -  one way or another. That doesn’t mean that it is going to come in ways that are advantageous to business.

P.S.

What about NUMMI? The Automotive World article says:

“A large question mark hangs over the future of GM’s 25-year old Californian joint venture with Toyota, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc (NUMMI). The operation builds the Pontiac Vibe, and the Toyota Tacoma and Corolla. The confirmation that the Pontiac brand will be wound down by the end of 2010 leaves GM’s role in the joint venture at best unclear; it is difficult to see the plant, and the joint venture, being of any relevance to a lean New GM.”

In Search Of Excellence

This is how Tom Peters summarises In Search of Excellence, the book he co-authored with Robert Waterman:

“You could boil all of Search down to one idea: Soft is hard. Up until then, everybody assumed that hard was hard. “Hard” numbers told you everything that you needed to know about dealing with hard assets, such as factories, machinery, and buildings. But Search said that everything soft is hard. People, customers, and relationships — they make up all of the soft stuff that determines what really gets accomplished and how well it gets done. It turned out to be a revolutionary message.”

The claim that they ‘faked the data‘ (which Peters denies) has not diminished the book’s popularity and despite the well-documented poor performance of some of their ‘excellent’ companies after it was published, there is ample research to support what Peters and Waterman said.

Another more recently popular book in a similar vein is Jim Collins Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies. Steven Wheeler from the University of Southern California’s Centre for Effective Organisation, participating in a roundtable discussion on the life cycle of great business ideas, says that:

“if you had taken the 18 companies that were profiled in the book and invested in each of them over the next 10 year, you would have got about a 150 percent return. That is not too bad – until you compare it with an S&P 500 index fund, which would have given you a 250 percent return. And if you had the foresight to pick up a copy of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For each year, you would have gotten a 600 percent return.”

Wheeler goes on to comment that one way to build a successful business is to create an environment where people enjoy their jobs and are eager to work. All so far so good, and consistent with Peters and Waterman.

When Good Companies Go Bad

In the FastCompany article linked to above, Peters dodges the question of why some of the excellent companies subsequently performed so poorly. He says such criticism is ‘missing the point’. I have read the Fastcompany article back to front and I cannot see how it is missing the point. What accounted for the poor performance, especially if the companies cited conformed with Peters and Waterman’s eight indicators? Whether or not this is a good question, it is one I want to ask.

Jim Collins is back with another book, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. I have not yet read it but from the product description on Amazon, the first stage of decline is hubris born of success, taking businesses outside of their core.

This article from the FT concludes that:

“Organisations fail not because they stray from their core, but because they stick to it too closely as circumstances shift … the idea that focusing on the core is the best defence against failure is too simplistic for these complex and turbulent times.”

Now we are getting somewhere. Decline is associated with inability to sense and respond to changes in the external environment. Path dependency strongly commits businesses to past decisions. “Sticking to the knitting”, one of Peters and Waterman’s eight indicators of excellence, as an exhortation to concentrate on core products and services might need clarifying and expanding on?

Again from the FT:

“GM executives were so focused on cross-town rivals that they underestimated the threat posed by Japanese carmakers … once a trajectory is set, subsequent commitments reinforce the status quo. These can be bet-the-company decisions or incremental steps refining current technology”

Peters is obviously well aware of this. He says, again in the FastCompany article:

“The CEO of General Motors announced that GM wasn’t in the business of making cars, it was in the business of making money. (This came as a shock to most of GM’s customers, who were in the market to buy a car – or even a better way of life – not to spend money.) That may account for the rise of Japanese automakers, who most certainly were in the business of making cars … that customers would definitely want to buy.”

The trajectory set by GM, of which Peters was so disapproving, has culminated in General Motors filing this afternoon for bankruptcy protection.

I want to finish with another question. What is it about Peter Drucker that makes him such a baddie in Tom Peters eyes? That’s me got more reading and probing to do

Systems and Organisational Development

I have been thinking about the influence of systems recently. As part of a PR push, I am writing a lot of articles. One editor told me that her publication’s readers are asking about articles on Organisational Development (OD). The term is a bit out of fashion. In all the Two Point Zero this and that, you do not hear many people talk about OD and if you do, it is from old hands like myself who have been around the block a few times.

More is the pity. I say this is because OD has an overt focus on the link between systems design and effectiveness of performance. From the CIPD Factsheet on Organisational Development:

“Organisational development applies to changes in strategy, structure and processes of an entire system … focused on effectiveness through workforce skills, knowledge and engagement in problem-solving, innovation and knowledge-sharing.”

Creating Learning Architectures

People are using other terminology, like Learning Architectures to describe systems for orchestrating learning within and between innovation eco-systems of enterprises. Although John Seely Brown talks about how Toyota works with its suppliers as though it is a new phenomenon, it is not. We already have a wealth of knowledge of systemic strategies, structures and processes through at least 15 – 20 years EU-funded research on collective learning and innovation across distributed manufacturing supply chains. (Thanks to www.bpodr.co.uk for the link to Seely-Brown’s engaging talk).

I really like the terms Learning Architecture and Social Architecture, both of which reflect current workplace developments (enterprise fragmentation and connectedness). My plea, as ever, would be to recognise that we have a lot to learn fom OD insights, which we risk losing as the term fall into disuse.

How systems are designed and put in place influences how people behave and perform. I have written more on the subject here.

Update 30th April 2009

This short amendment to my original post is to summarise it for the Working / Learning Blog Carnival over at David Wilkins’ Social Enterprise Blog. The post is about self-directed and self-instigated learning for personal survival in the workplace as a response to stress, and to gain a perception of control in the face of a seemingly overwhelming work situation.

It is a story of a senior nurse taking control without instruction from above. The post also reflects on theoretical perspectives of taking this sort of chaotic action, which requires courage that not all managers have or they are too ground down to instigate. This offers a clear role for learning facilitators, who stand alongside the managers as they start their journey to change destructive cultures and detrimental working practices.

Taking Control Through Action

One of the things I want to do with this blog is to report stories of managers getting on and succeeding in creating working environments that are good for business and good for people.

One of these people is my sister, who is a senior nurse in a hospital in the west of Scotland. Talking to her in November 2006 (I was back home for our mum’s funeral), she was telling me about her response to the pressures of the job. She decided that she would no longer put up with the situation she was in and so she took matters into her own hands. Without waiting for instructions from above, she instigated a text-book performance improvement and culture change initiative. She acted on intuition and her long experience of working with people. This nearly drove her nuts but she reasoned that this was no worse than the stressful situation she was already in.

Chaotic Action

In his classic book, The Social Psychology Of Organising, Karl Weick writes about the implications of his analysis for practice. He proposes that chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction and says:

“When there is confusion and some member of a group asks, ‘What should I do?’ and some other member says, ‘I don’t know, just do something’, that’s probably a much better piece of advice than you might realise. It’s better for the simple reason that it increases the likelihood that something will be generated which can then be made meaningful. It’s OK not to know where you are going so long as you are going somewhere. Sooner or later, you’ll find out where that somewhere is.”

Taking action, no matter how chaotic the context, creates outcomes for debate and assessment that inform further action. It also has a psychological effect; it creates the possibility for increased self-efficacy – “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce effects”. High self-efficacy beliefs are associated with personal confidence and perceptions of competence. This is what the social psychologist Albert Bandura says

“A strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many ways. People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided … they set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them.

They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks. They attribute failure to insufficient effort or deficient knowledge and skills which are acquirable. They approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over them. Such an efficacious outlook produces personal accomplishments, reduces stress and lowers vulnerability to depression.”

My sister denies that she is anything special. I disagree. Profoundly disagree. Whatever it was in her that made her take action was not conscious awareness of superior capability. Quite the opposite; if one thing characterises my dedicated siblings  – two sisters and one brother all nurses in the same hospital – it is modesty in recognising their enormous capabilities. They know they are good but see that as just doing their jobs.

Not every manager has her courage and determination. Part of what the Smart Work Company does is to work alongside more diffident managers to help build up their confidence as they set in motion the transition to new ways of working and managing. I asked my sister if she would have appreciated that sort of help and she said ‘of course’. She would have known what to expect, that the sort of resistance she was meeting was normal and that in fact, although nothing is predictable, her experience was consistent with patterns of indicators we see from documented accounts of culture change and performance improvement. She would also have appreciated the emotional support, some of which she did get from sympathetic nursing staff (she also got a lot of bad-mouthing).

More Than Two Years On

I am going back up home next weekend for my great-nephew’s christening. Chatting to my sister yesterday, she told me that the high heid yins (as we colloquially call upper management in Scotland) have put in place a hospital-wide programme of reforms, partly in response to a bad outbreak of C difficile in another hospital in the region. Her ward had a snap inspection last week and of course passed with flying colours. I am taking my video camera and voice recorder to get an interview with her. The interview will be posted as soon as I can edit it.

Press release of the The Smart Work Company launch.

Wishing everyone a restful and happy Easter holiday

I have just read this article in HR Review and thought ‘ho-hum’. It is headed ‘Businesses Urged To Give Employees ‘More Autonomy and Less Intensive Management’’ and comments on a new report from the Work Foundation, Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work.

From the HR Review article:

“Ian Brinkley, co-author of the Knowledge Workers and Knowledge Work report, and associate director at The Work Foundation, said: “So far in this recession employers have been reluctant to lose the skills, talents and experience of their workforces. Yet at the same time they seem to be failing to make the most of them. Many people could be doing more but are denied the chance to do so.

He said that companies should be aiming to “give people more responsibility” and he suggested that they aim for “more autonomy for people and less intensive management”.”

Increasing autonomy was a key theme in the CIPD’s Smart Working: How Smart Is UK plc? report last year. This found that smart working was currently more of an aspiration than a reality. The call was for a move from command and control to greater degrees of freedom, flexibility and collaboration.

I did a doctorate on all this stuff fourteen years ago. One of the things I explored was how manufacturers balanced localised autonomy in decision-making on the shopfloor and simultaneous, centralised co-ordination. At that time, in among all the froth about employee empowerment there were people calling out hype for what it was. Chris Argyris, for example in an article in the Harvard Business Review in 1998 – Empowerment: The Emperors’s New Clothes. He said:

“The battle between autonomy and control rages on while the real potential for empowerment is squandered.”

The McKinsey Quartely 2009 Number 1 has on the front cover “The crisis: A new era in management”. Ah, some new thinking? Not a bit of it. Here we find an article entitled “From Lean To Lasting: Making operational improvements stick” by focusing on the ’soft’ side of lean. Listen, if there was no ’soft’ side there would be no lean. Process control is only possible because of operator tacit knowledge and their willingness to engage in continuous improvement and problem-solving.

We already know all this. A new era in management? Don’t hold your breath. Yep. I am fed-up 

I am re-visiting the meeting of 35 of ‘the world’s most progressive thinkers on management and organisation’ in May 2008. The output from the meeting was a list of twenty five stretch goals for management, Management Moonshots, ten of which were ‘regarded as uniquely critical.’

I have been worrying away at this like a dog with a bone. I happen to agree with a number of these stretch goals. It is possible to map many of them against classic texts from management thinkers I respect, some of whom were there at the meeting.

All this thinking has been available for a long time. And there’s the rub. If these fundamental insights have been around for so long, what makes anyone think they are going to be taken up and actioned now? Because we have crisis conditions? I don’t think so.

And another thing. Just because this august gathering came up with their twenty five stretch goals, are these the most pressing issues for management practice?

Applause to the group for raising and publicising the issue of management practices and their fitness for purpose in 2009. I do think, though, that the way in which the management reformation movement is being promoted is distinctly Management 1.0. At the end of his WSJ article, Gary Hamel asks, “which of these moonshots do you think is the most important to address now? And why?”

Not “Have we got it right? What have we missed? What would you propose?” I am probably being ungenerous and unfair. But there you go. That’s how it feels to me.

Reinventing Strategy

The ninth of the ten uniquely critical stretch goals is summarised as:

“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.”

Variety in a system is requisite when it is at as least as great as the complexity it is attempting to regulate. Anyone who knows me professionally knows that the social psychologist, Karl Weick is one of my thought-heroes. He says in The Social Psychology of Organising:

“It’s because of requisite variety that organisations have to be preoccupied with keeping sufficient diversity inside the organisation to sense accurately the variety present in ecological changes outside it.”

Management Reformation

So far it feels to me like the strategy for management re-invention is being approached in a manner akin to top-down, privileging and promoting the views of prominent thinkers to the exclusion of the experiences and collective intelligence of managers at the sharp end, practitioners, consultants and thousands of academic foot soldiers researching new management practices.

Transforming management practices, if it really happens, will emerge from vast mosaics of local action, experimentation and failures. The enormous complexity of the undertaking, following the principle of requisite variety, will require complexity of perspectives much greater than those possible from the group that convened in 2008.

So while I agree with many of the stretch goals, are they correct and sufficient? At the very least, management transformation demands wider debate and needs to include multiple perspectives. Even if consensus does begin to emerge around the stretch goals, what then? How do businesses go about making the transformation to new ways of working and managing? Again it has got to be collective transformation, learning, sharing, experimenting and failing together.

And Finally

Anybody else want to join me in proposing alternative priorities for the transformation of management?

Sadly, no-one has told the patient.

We live in a connected world, where competition from clever and cost-effective talent is not going away. Businesses really need to value people’s knowledge if they want to stay in the game, creating work environments that let people collaborate and learn together.

We have been here before. Continuous Improvement (CI), problem-solving and cross-functional collaboration are the hallmarks of successful lean manufacturing. They represent the first wave of smart working. Collaboration and social computing technologies present businesses with enormous opportunities for a second wave. Building on what we already know from the first time around, it is now possible to tap into deep reserves of collective intelligence, both inside and outside of the enterprise.

The Smart Work Company

The Smart Work Company helps enterprises transform performance by changing management cultures and processes. We do this by blending action learning and new management thinking, where ‘new’ is in fact putting into practice management methods that have been known about for a long time and have yet to become mainstream.

How We Do It

We start with a strategic challenge a senior executive wants to address. Together we determine what needs to be done, who needs to do it and how. Learning is through action, experience and reflection, alone and with others. Conversation, collaboration and sharing experience with peers is a crucial part of the learning process. It is about collaborative transformation – changing together.

The Last Word

We know what to do. We know how to do it. The knowledge is there for the taking and now is the time to act.

Many thanks to Nigel Temple for helping me shape the words.

Now I realise that this will come as no surprise to many of you but don’t academics make a meal of things? I include myself in this criticism.

What it boils down to

Organisations are dynamic networks of relationships. It is systems of people – their behaviours, relationships, beliefs, perceptions, interpretations, cultures, attitudes, emotions, capabilities and how they communicate – that are the core of organisational activity. So far so obvious.

Over on the right of the diagram are all the things that businesses do to try to contain all this complexity. The topic of control in all its forms – behavioural, operational and strategic – has been endlessly and repeatedly picked over, right up until recently when we have McKinsey associates writing that the greatest limitation of informal networks is that cannot be controlled.

Informal networks always existed. They never could be controlled and never will. What emerges from research at a meta-level is that creating supportive formal systems, which let people do satisfying and rewarding work, is associated with high performance. Treat people badly, unfairly, excessively control, micro-manage and distrust them, and they resist, disengage and sabotage. Well, what do you know?

Formal systems influence what people do. A lot is already understood about what effective formal systems look like and much of this knowledge is overlooked. That’s what my business is about – trying to spread the word and engaging senior executives in conversation and shared learning on putting effective support systems and management practices in place.

I have been monitoring global workplace trends for the past three years. It turns out that much of the neglected knowledge gives us big clues to how businesses can adapt to current technological, demographic and organisational developments.

And there you have it. Fourteen years of my own work and umpteen combined years of numerous other practitioners, researchers and theorists

• what it is;

• why it is important;

• lean manufacturing, quality and continuous improvement, if implemented in ways that recognised the primacy of people skills and knowledge, represented the first wave of smart working;

• a second wave is imperative and emerging, and there is a valuable legacy of learning from the first wave.

The diagram summarises work of many theorists and academic researchers over decades, supplemented by recent sources on global workplace trends. Even if it is not useful to anyone else, it helps me to organise my thoughts and I will be using it as a jumping off-point for my bloggy rambles

One of the major bees buzzing around in my bonnet is that we already know a lot about how to respond to current turbulent workplace trends, with all their attendant disruptions and opportunities.

I started this blog because I had a very positive response to a book proposal I submitted to an international publisher at the beginning of the year. The working title was “Smart Working: Creating The Next Wave”. The first wave was twenty years ago in manufacturing when shopfloor operators’ knowledge and experience were crucial to continous improvement and problem-solving activities in lean manufacturing. You want people to contribute discretionary effort and willingly tell you what they know? You are going have to treat them nicely and with respect. I got a PhD for saying not much more than that.

Quote from an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, Number 1 (The crisis: A new era in management):

“Mastering lean’s softer side is difficult because it forces all employees to commit to new ways of thinking and working.”

* sighs deeply * Yes, we know and we know what management approaches and tactics encourage the transition to new working practices. We are just not making enough use of these insights. I decided not to go ahead with the book, well not yet anyway. It would have been at least a year before publication and I don’t want to wait. What I want to say is urgent, in my view, and I would have been too impatient to wait that long.

I might end up publishing the book. Meanwhile, I will say what I need to say through the blog posts. Here we go.

The headline is from Gary Hamel and Bill Breen’s book, The Future of Management, which I have been critiquing and reflecting on in my past few posts.

My overwhelming impression of the book is that while there is much to agree with, it is far too long on overstatement and short on substance. Specifically, it suffers from a lack of recognition of the plethora of research that exists on management innovation.

There is a wealth of EU and UK nationally funded research into new ways of working and managing. For example, I was involved in both of these EU funded research projects into new ways of working and new organisational forms: here and here. I would thoroughly recommend anyone who is interested in sourcing some actual research on management innovation to read Andrew Pettigrew and Evelyn Fenton’s The Innovating Organisation (international survey data collected at two time points and eight longitudinal case studies). If anyone is a glutton for any more punishment, they could have a look at a major research programme funded by the ESRC some years ago into The Future Of Work. The research involved twenty two universities in the UK and was conducted over six years.

Overstatement

Well, of course overstatement for effect  can make a point. It can also distort and be counter-productive.  As just one among many examples, on p.136, Gary Hamel and Bill Breen say:

“In most organisations, control is exercised via standard operating procedures, tight supervision, detailed role definitions, a minimum of self-directed time, and frequent reviews by higher ups”.

No, approaches to control and co-ordination are much more varied than this caricature and I will come back to this in a later post. And again on p.151, their ‘principles of modern management’ are offered with no evidence that these principles, culled from the earliest theorists, actually represent what is happening in organisations today.

By the way, Professor Hamel says on p.241, “In the end, isolated initiatives and one-time projects are no substitute for a sustained, company-wide campaign of breakthrough management innovation. Today, I know of no company that has mounted such a crusade”.

Well, I do. Try this small manufacturing company, Dutton Engineering. When I did some interviews there in 1998, the teams on the shopfloor were autonomous, self-organising and had significant responsibilities for management tasks. Or how about BT, who appear ad nauseam as an example of a company that used property rationalisation to change its management culture. This is a brief account of an interview I did with a senior BT executive.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream

This is what I feel like sometimes. We already know so much but this has been largely overlooked. Of course management needs urgently to change. But what’s the point of reinvention (which Professor Hamel urges) when we already know how to put in place management systems, working environments and governance principles that are associated with effective business performance, including workforce autonomy and self-determination? We already know how to design systems and high-performance working practices that are based on using and developing people’s skills, knowledge and creativity, which fulfills their desire for learning and meaningful work.

Democratising Possibilities Of Social Computing

The emergence of social networking and collaboration technologies really do present wonderful new oportunities to ignite collective intelligence and to power the sort of self-management we already know how to support.

One of my favourite quotes on the potential of social computing comes from Rex Lee, Director of Collaboration Services Group, Bell Laboratories. This is what he has to say:

“Many of us who push the concepts of social computing and Enterprise 2.0 are often referred to as evangelists … what we are evangelising about isn’t a bunch of technology. It never has been. It’s about human potential. About a more efficient and effective way to collaborate. Collaboration in the ENTIRE reason a company exists”.

That’s why the future of management will mean mobilising all that we already know about how to enable autonomous, self-organising collaboration and social learning. By all means, invent and innovate management approaches if what curretly exists does not fit. The task ahead of us in changing management habits is challenging enough. Why make it any more difficult by ignoring the wealth of research knowledge available to us?

OK, I am about to conduct an experiment with myself and I invite anyone who wishes to join in. What I want to do is critique the The Future of Management, by Gary Hamel (with Bill Breen) as I read it.

I am well aware that I may well be inviting egg on my face, severe criticism and ridicule. However, it is exactly these fears that have kept me quiet for too long (this may be news to some of my friends and colleagues ).
What’s Bugging Me?

I have a deep weariness of reading about supposedly new paradigms emerging in ways of working and management practices. On the face of it, this book sounds like another attempt to promote novelty. Professor Hamel’s goal is to help the reader become a management pioneer and equip him / her  to “reinvent the principles, processes, and practices of management for our postmodern age”.

My argument is that we already know many of the principles, processes, and management practices that are appropriate for effective strategic action in the face of current global environmental turbulence. They have largely been ignored or over-looked. To my way of thinking, a good place to start is with what we already know rather than needlessly reinventing ‘new’ principles. Reinterpreting – yes, definitely.

How Dare I?

I am sitting here asking myself that! Professor Hamel is highly respected, and I approach my critique from a respectful stance.  He says:

“I’m humble enough to know that one person’s imagination and foresight are no substitute for those of a multitude”.

That multitude includes, for me, the hundreds and thousands of academic researchers whose work is written up in obscure academic papers in obscure academic journals and which most likely never sees the light of day except when accessed by other foot-soldier academics like myself, when writing yet more obscure academic papers that end up in further obscure academic journals!

Here’s the thing, though. This collective intelligence (see it was there long before Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0) over the years reveals patterns, connections and insights that are now becoming invaluable. My intention in this critique is to make sure that some of these insights add to whatever Professor Hamel is proposing.

And Finally For This Post

“So this is a book for … everyone who … thinks that employees really are smart enough to manage themselves, who knows that “management”, as currently practiced, is a drag on success  – and wants to do something about it.”

Yep – you can count me in!