Why can’t we move on from the old ways of understanding, managing and designing organisations?
If there is one good question that keeps us busy thinking about, this is one of them:
Why aren’t people interested in learning new ways of understanding, managing and designing the work, and only want to stick with what they know? They often also try to project what they know to the rest of the world as being the truth.
Why is it so difficult to move away from the current prevailing management and organisation paradigm?
I would like to give a real example I came across some years ago. In this large organisation, the decision-makers wanted to reward a long standing employee, lets call him Tim, by increasing his salary. However, according to their own rules, they could only increase his salary if he is given more responsibility, and they could only do this by making him a manager. But there was no management role that they could put him in as he was in fact technically able, but certainly not a manager of people. So, in their wisdom, they decided that to increase his salary, they would make Tim a manager, but how could they do that if they didn’t want him to manage anybody?
So they came up with the idea that, in addition to his current technical role, Tim could be the manager of the stationery cupboard of the organisation! Let us leave the bizarreness of the decision for a moment, to focus on Tim and his rise in the new world of a manager. He took pride in his new role with gratitude at the decision of the hierarchy. And this translated into a behaviour that developed from the seriousness of someone who wants to make a difference, and do a good job.
What was his new role really about, and how do you think he behaved as this new manager? Did he go to someone to ask what a managers behaviour should be? Did he research how he should behave? No. He automatically behaved in the way that he assumed a manager should behave. And where did that come from? From his experience of working in organisations over the past 20 years. What he now needed to do, was obvious to him.
What exactly did that look like? Tim recognised that he had to demonstrate his new found power, and assert himself. Tim took control, and became efficient. He locked the cupboard and kept the key in his pocket. He instructed all employees to go to him if they needed anything. When an employee needed a pen, for example, the old pen had to be produced as proof of real need. Upon producing evidence of the demise of the old pen, the new Tim pulled out the key from his pocket, to then select the correct pen for the employee. Giving the employee helpful advice that Tim thought suitable. He extended this approach with note paper, and most other items; you had to actually describe what you were going to do with the highly prized material.
There were examples where Tim would turn away the employee, on the grounds of insufficient need.
Tim kept accurate records of whom and what was allocated to staff.
Tim had an air of pride about him, and would occasionally wander around the offices, surveying the landscape. His clothing was slightly neater than before. He had a sparkle in his eye. He had become an efficient manager.
We are less interested in the bizarre wisdom of this new role and his methods, and more interested in asking the question of where did Tim get the presumption of what his role as a manager should be? The answer is easy, it came from the working environment around him, that invisible immersion in a past and present culture that created the hidden and unspoken rules of what a manger is and what they do. And those unspoken rules are typified into a list of principles that we can extract from that invisible environment that we all appear to be working in.
Tim is described here as he is an example of us all. There seems to be two ways of learning to be a manager; one is how we absorb the role from our experience (the most common), and the second is an immersion in a learning process that develops the role (far less common).
We suffer from cognitive bias…
We fool ourselves, we all believe we are learning, that have a free and open attitude, that we listen, that we make balanced judgements. Just the other day, I am reading a Linkedin post by someone prominent on Linkedin, who is saying that it is important to lean and have an open mind, how they are constantly learning from others, and how that is so important. I know this person as perhaps one of the most rigid in their thinking. They criticise and ridicule areas outside of their knowledge. They dont actually understand much of the reality of organisations except that narrow field that they purpose to be an expert in.
I was actually open mouthed reading that post.
But it simply reinforces the limitations that we all have, that we fail to recognise, and cover over the reality we have about ourselves.
And as eloquently put by Donella Meadows;
“The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions — unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them — constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.”
The Senior Leadership Team (SLT) is a good model to understand how that leader group paradigm works. What does that group actually do and how do they work?
The answer, if we read the theory about organisations, is that leaders are in control and have oversight. They develop strategies and they develop the values and mission of the organisation; they set the direction. They also ensure everyone works along that direction. The develop and use measures.
The answer, if we look at them in the reality of sitting next to them for a few days is very interesting. Research upon research, and from people like Chris Argyris, have pointed to the fact that the reality of that group is often not one of of leadership, nor of a team. They often do not function like a group that share a common purpose and principles, nor work together for a common goal. If we observe them, we find that there are two levels; the visible one, and the real one. The visible one is the image that the group portrays in its correspondence, and image to those outside the group. It is one of cohesion and control. The other level is the reality, where that group are actually a collection of individuals that are often working against each other. They have hidden agendas, and they maximise one part of the organisation at the expense of another. They jockey for position in-front of their boss, as they vie to be seen as being the type of leaders that impresses the CEO. Where often that impression is one that simply mimics the behaviour and traits that the CEO has.
This model is understood and shared by everyone else in the organisation, and when we look at other organisations, or read articles about design or management, the same mindset is recognisable. It is the prevailing model that we share here. This use of a model in this way is a metaphor. The way that it is used is that it creates a mental model of how a service works that we then use to act upon. The book Metaphors we live (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) by explores this, and demonstrates that we use metaphors to make sense of our work, rather than actually understanding its reality. Thee prevailing metaphor is an organisation as a machine, and the hierarchy controls. Reductionism.
Why is it do difficult?
Why is it so difficult to move away from this and learn other ways? Argyris and Schön’s action theory leads us to consider the depth of knowledge changes. Three levels of learning are highlighted.
-Single-loop learning consists of change through action, and learning restricted by the current culture and behaviours.
-Double-loop learning induces the possibility of change in values or principles with regard to the ‘theory of use’ — are we doing the right things? According to Argyris, this learning is the only one that enables the ‘culture and behaviours’ another underlying principles to be called into question. Double loop learning is difficult, in that it requires safe environment to experiment with alternative ways.And it can challenge prevailing common beliefs in the organisation.
- Triple-loop learning, to emphasise the possibility of “learning about learning” or “learning to learn” and learn lessons from experience. We surface and examine mental models, and can look back on ourselves from an external perspective. This snow really difficult, as it requires us to question the base assumptions have about ourselves and the way that we understand organisations.
The key aspect of double and triple loop learning, is that it can rarely be imposed, it can only be developed within individuals if and when they wish this to occur. They require the Ego to be put aside. We have to be supported in becoming vulnerable to others of our peers.
Now we can understand more about why it is so difficult for people who run organisations to alter the basis of how they understand, design and manage organisations.
