Archive for the ‘Management’ Category
From inactivism to interactivism – managerial attitudes to planning
Introduction
Managers display a range of attitudes towards planning for the future. In an essay entitled Systems, Messes and Interactive Planning, the management guru/philosopher Russell Ackoff classified attitudes to organizational planning into four distinct types which I describe in detail below. I suspect you may recognise examples of each of these in your organisation…indeed, you might even see shades of yourself 🙂
Inactivism
This attitude, as its name suggests, is characterized by a lack of meaningful action. Inactivism is often displayed by managers in organisations that favour the status quo. These organisations are happy with the way things are, and therefore see no need to change. However, lack of meaningful action does not mean lack of action. On the contrary, it often takes a great deal of effort to fend off change and keep things the way they are. As Ackoff states:
Inactive organizations require a great deal of activity to keep changes from being made. They accomplish nothing in a variety of ways. First, they require that all important decisions be made “at the top.” The route to the top is deliberately designed like an obstacle course. This keeps most recommendations for change from ever getting there. Those that do are likely to have been delayed enough to make them irrelevant when they reach their destination. Those proposals that reach the top are likely to be farther delayed, often by being sent back down or out for modification or evaluation. The organization thus behaves like a sponge and is about as active…
The inactive manager spends a lot of time and effort in ensuring that things remain the way they are. Hence they act only when a stituation forces them to. Ackoff puts it in his inimitable way by stating that, “Inactivist managers tend to want what they get rather than get what they want.”
Reactivism
Reactivist managers are a step worse than inactivists because they believe that disaster is already upon them. This is the type of manager who hankers after the “golden days of yore when things were much better than they are today.” As a result of their deep unease of where they are now, they may try to undo the status quo. As Ackoff points out, unlike inactivists, reactivists do not ride the tide but try to swim against it.
Typically reactivist managers are wary of technology and new concepts. Moreover, they tend to give more importance to seniority and experience rather than proven competence. They also tend to be fans of simplistic solutions to complex problems…like “solving” the problem of a behind-schedule software project by throwing more people at it.
Preactivism
Preactivists are the opposite of reactivists in that they believe the future is going to be better than the past. Consequently, their efforts are geared towards understanding what the future will look like and how they can prepare for it. Typically, preactive managers are concerned with facts, figures and forecasts; they are firm believers in scientific planning methods that they have learnt in management schools. As such, one might say that this is the most common species of manager in present day organisations. Those who are not natural preactivists will fly the preactivist flag when they’re asked for their opinions by their managers because it’s the expected answer.
A key characteristic of preactivist managers is that they tend to revel in creating plans rather than implementing them. As Ackoff puts it, “Preactivists see planning as a sequence of discrete steps which terminate with acceptance or rejection of their plans. What happens to their plans is the responsibility of others.”
Interactivism
Interactivists planners are not satisfied with the present, but unlike reactivists or preactivists, they do not hanker for the past, nor do they believe the future is automatically going to be better. They do want to make things better than they were or currently are, but they are continually adjusting their plans for the future by learning from and responding to events. In short, they believe they can shape the future by their actions.
Experimentation is the hallmark of interactivists. They are willing to try different approaches and learn from them. Although they believe in learning by experience, they do not want to wait for experiences to happen; they would rather induce them by (often small-scale) experimentation.
Ackoff labels interactivists as idealisers – people who pursue ideals they know cannot be achieved, but can be approximated or even reformulated in the light of new knowledge. As he puts it:
They treat ideals as relative absolutes: ultimate objectives whose formulation depends on our current knowledge and understanding of ourselves and our environment. Therefore, they require continuous reformulation in light of what we learn from approaching them.
To use a now fashionable term, interactivists are intrapreneurs.
Discussion
Although Ackoff shows a clear bias towards interactivists in his article, he does mention that specific situations may call for other types of planners. As he puts it:
Despite my obvious bias in my characterization of these four postures, there are circumstances in which each is most appropriate. Put simply, if the internal and external dynamics of a system (the tide) are taking one where one wants to go and are doing so quickly enough, inactivism is appropriate. If the direction of change is right but the movement is too slow, preactivism is appropriate. If the change is taking one where one does not want to go and one prefers to stay where one is or was, reactivism is appropriate. However, if one is not willing to settle for the past, the present or the future that appears likely now, interactivism is appropriate.
The key point he makes is that inactivists and preactivists treat planning as a ritual because they see the future as something they cannot change. They can only plan for it (and hope for the best). Interactivists, on the other hand, look for opportunities to influence events and thus potentially change the future. Although both preactivists and interactivists are forward-looking, interactivists tend to be long-term thinkers as compared to preactivists who are more concerned about the short to medium term future.
Conclusion
Ackoff’s classification of planners in organisations is interesting because it highlights the kind of future-focused attitude that managers ought to take. The sad fact, though, is that a significant number of managers are myopic preactivists, focused on this year’s performance targets rather than what their organisations might look like five or even ten years down the line. This is not the fault of individuals, though. The blame for the undue prevalence of myopic preactivism can be laid squarely on the deep-seated management dogma that rewards short-termism.
The façade of expertise
Introduction
Since the 1980s, intangible assets, such as knowledge, have come to represent an ever-increasing proportion of an organisation’s net worth. One of the problems associated with treating knowledge as an asset is that it is difficult to codify in its entirety. This is largely because knowledge is context and skill dependent, and these are hard to convey by any means other than experience. This is the well-known tacit versus explicit knowledge problem that I have written about at length elsewhere (see this post and this one, for example). Although a recent development in knowledge management technology goes some way towards addressing the problem of context, it still looms large and is likely to for a while.
Although the problem mentioned above is well-known, it hasn’t stopped legions of consultants and professional organisations from attempting to codify and sell expertise: management consultancies and enterprise IT vendors being prime examples. This has given rise to the notion of a knowledge-intensive firm, an organization in which most work is said to be of an intellectual nature and where well-educated, qualified employees form the major part of the work force. However, the slipperiness of knowledge mentioned in the previous paragraph suggests that the notion of a knowledge intensive firm (and, by implication, expertise) is problematic. Basically, if it is true that knowledge itself is elusive, and hard-to-codify, it raises the question as to what exactly such firms (and their employees) sell.
In this post, I shed some light on this question by drawing on an interesting paper by Mats Alvesson entitled, Knowledge Work: Ambiguity, Image and Identity (abstract only), as well as my experiences in dealing with IT services and consulting firms.
Background: the notion of a knowledge-intensive firm
The first point to note is that the notion of a knowledge-intensive firm is not particularly precise. Based on the definition offered above, it is clear that a wide variety of organisations may be classified as knowledge intensive firms. For example, management consultancies and enterprise software companies would fall into this category, as would law, accounting and research & development firms. The same is true of the term knowledge work(er).
One of the implications of the vagueness of the term is that any claim to being a knowledge-intensive firm or knowledge worker can be contested. As Alvesson states:
It is difficult to substantiate knowledge-intensive companies and knowledge workers as distinct, uniform categories. The distinction between these and non- (or less) knowledge-intensive organization/non-knowledge workers is not self-evident, as all organizations and work involve “knowledge” and any evaluation of “intensiveness” is likely to be contestable. Nevertheless, there are, in many crucial respects, differences between many professional service and high-tech companies on the one hand, and more routinized service and industry companies on the other, e.g. in terms of broadly socially shared ideas about the significance of a long theoretical education and intellectual capacities for the work. It makes sense to refer to knowledge-intensive companies as a vague but meaningful category, with sufficient heuristic value to be useful. The category does not lend itself to precise definition or delimitation and it includes organizations which are neither unitary nor unique. Perhaps the claim to knowledge-intensiveness is one of the most distinguishing features…
The last line in the excerpt is particularly interesting to me because it resonates with my experience: having been through countless IT vendor and management consulting briefings on assorted products and services, it is clear that a large part of their pitch is aimed at establishing their credibility as experts in the field, even though they may not actually be so.
The ambiguity of knowledge work
Expertise in skill-based professions is generally unambiguous – an incompetent pilot will be exposed soon enough. In knowledge work, however, genuine expertise is often not so easily discernable. Alvesson highlights a number of factors that make this so.
Firstly, much of the day-to-day work of knowledge workers such as management consultants and IT experts involves routine matters – meetings, documentation etc. – that do not make great demands on their skills. Moreover, even when involved in one-off tasks such as projects, these workers are generally assigned tasks that they are familiar with. In general, therefore, the nature of their work requires them to follow already instituted processes and procedures. A somewhat unexpected consequence of this is that incompetence can remain hidden for a long time.
A second issue is that the quality of so-called knowledge work is often hard to evaluate – indeed evaluations may require the engagement of independent experts! This is true even of relatively mundane expertise-based work. As Alvesson states:
Comparisons of the decisions of expert and novice auditors indicate no relationship between the degree of expertise (as indicated by experience) and consensus; in high-risk and less standard situations, the experts’ consensus level was lower than that of novices. [An expert remarked that] “judging the quality of an audit is an extremely problematic exercise” and says that consumers of the audit service “have only a very limited insight into the quality of work undertaken by an audit firm”.
This is true of many different kinds of knowledge work. As Alvesson tells us:
How can anyone tell whether a headhunting firm has found and recruited the best possible candidates or not…or if an audit has been carried out in a high-quality way? Or if the proposal by strategic management consultants is optimal or even helpful, or not. Of course, sometimes one may observe whether something works or not (e.g. after the intervention of a plumber), but normally the issues concerned are not that simple in the context in which the concept of knowledge-intensiveness is frequently used. Here we are mainly dealing with complex and intangible phenomena. Even if something seems to work, it might have worked even better or the cost of the intervention been much lower if another professional or organization had carried out the task.
In view of the above, it is unlikely that market mechanisms would be effective in sorting out the competent from the incompetent. Indeed, my experience of dealing with major consulting firms (in IT) leads me believe that market mechanisms tend to make them clones of each other, at least in terms of their offerings and approach. This may be part of the reason why client firms tend to base their contracting decisions on the basis of cost or existing relationships – it makes sense to stick with the known, particularly when the alternatives offer choices akin to Pepsi vs Coke.
But that is not the whole story, experts are often hired for ulterior motives. On the one hand, they might be hired because they confer legitimacy – “no one ever got fired for hiring McKinsey” is a quote I’ve heard more than a few times in many workplaces. On the other hand, they also make convenient scapegoats when the proverbial stuff hits the fan.
Image cultivation
One of the consequences of the ambiguity of knowledge-intensive work is that employees in such firms are forced to cultivate and maintain the image of being experts, and hence the stereotype of the suited, impeccably-groomed Big 4 consultant. As Alvesson points out, though, image cultivation goes beyond the individual employee:
This image must be managed on different levels: professional-industrial, corporate and individual. Image may be targeted in specific acts and arrangements, in visible symbols for public consumption but also in everyday behavior, within the organization and in interaction with others. Thus image is not just of importance in marketing and for attracting personnel but also in and after production. Size and a big name are therefore important for many knowledge-intensive companies – and here we perhaps have a major explanation for all the mergers and acquisitions in accounting, management consultancy and other professional service companies. A large size is reassuring. A well-known brand name substitutes for difficulties in establishing quality.
Another aspect of image cultivation is the use of rhetoric. Here are some examples taken from the websites of Big 4 consulting firms:
“No matter the challenge, we focus on delivering practical and enduring results, and equipping our clients to grow and lead.” —McKinsey
“We continue to redefine ourselves and set the bar higher to continually deliver quality for clients, our people, and the society in which we operate.” – Deloitte
“Cutting through complexity” – KPMG
“Creating value for our clients, people and communities in a changing world” – PWC
Some clients are savvy enough not to be taken in by the platitudinous statements listed above. However, the fact that knowledge-intensive firms continue to use second-rate rhetoric to attract custom suggests that there are many customers who are easily taken in by marketing slogans. These slogans are sometimes given an aura of plausibility via case-studies intended to back the claims made. However, more often than not the case studies are based on a selective presentation of facts that depict the firm in the best possible light.
A related point is that such firms often flaunt their current client list in order to attract new clientele. Lines like, “our client list includes 8 of top ten auto manufacturers in the world,” are not uncommon, the unstated implication being that if you are an auto manufacturer, you cannot afford not to engage us. The image cultivation process continues well after the consulting engagement is underway. Indeed, much of a consultant’s effort is directed at ensuring that the engagement will be extended.
Finally, it is important to point out the need to maintain an aura of specialness. Consultants and knowledge workers are valued for what they know. It is therefore in their interest to maintain a certain degree of exclusivity of knowledge. Guilds (such as the Project Management Institute) act as gatekeepers by endorsing the capabilities of knowledge workers through membership criteria based on experience and / or professional certification programs.
Maintaining the façade
Because knowledge workers deal with intangibles, they have to work harder to maintain their identities than those who have more practical skills. They are therefore more susceptible to the vagaries and arbitrariness of organisational life. As Alvesson notes,
Given the high level of ambiguity and the fluidity of organizational life and interactions with external actors, involving a strong dependence on somewhat arbitrary evaluations and opinions of others, many knowledge-intensive workers must struggle more for the accomplishment, maintenance and gradual change of self-identity, compared to workers whose competence and results are more materially grounded…Compared with people who invest less self- esteem in their work and who have lower expectations, people in knowledge-intensive companies are thus vulnerable to frustrations contingent upon ambiguity of performance and confirmation.
Knowledge workers are also more dependent on managerial confirmation of their competence and value. Indeed, unlike the case of the machinist or designer, a knowledge worker’s product rarely speaks for itself. It has to be “sold”, first to management and then (possibly) to the client and the wider world.
The previous paragraphs of this section dealt with individual identity. However, this is not the whole story because organisations also play a key role in regulating the identities of their employees. Indeed, this is how they develop their brand. Alvesson notes four ways in which organisations do this:
- Corporate identity – large consulting firms are good examples of this. They regulate the identities of their employees through comprehensive training and acculturation programs. As a board member remarked to me recently, “I like working with McKinsey people, because I was once one myself and I know their approach and thinking processes.”
- Cultural programs – these are the near-mandatory organisational culture initiatives in large organisations. Such programs are usually based on a set of “guiding principles” which are intended to inform employees on how they should conduct themselves as employees and representatives of the organisation. As Alvesson notes, these are often more effective than formal structures.
- Normalisation – these are the disciplinary mechanisms that are triggered when an employee violates an organisational norm. Examples of this include formal performance management or official reprimands. Typically, though, the underlying issue is rarely addressed. For example, a failed project might result in a reprimand or poor performance review for the project manager, but the underlying systemic causes of failure are unlikely to be addressed…or even acknowledged.
- Subjectification – This is where employees mould themselves to fit their roles or job descriptions. A good example of this is when job applicants project themselves as having certain skills and qualities in their resumes and in interviews. If selected, they may spend the first few months in learning and internalizing what is acceptable and what is not. In time, the new behaviours are internalized and become a part of their personalities.
It is clear from the above that maintaining the façade of expertise in knowledge work involves considerable effort and manipulation, and has little to do with genuine knowledge. Indeed, it is perhaps because genuine expertise is so hard to identify that people and organisations strive to maintain appearances.
Conclusion
The ambiguous nature of knowledge requires (and enables!) consultants and technology vendors to maintain a façade of expertise. This is done through a careful cultivation of image via the rhetoric of marketing, branding and impression management.The onus is therefore on buyers to figure out if there’s anything of substance behind words and appearances. The volume of business enjoyed by big consulting firms suggests that this does not happen as often as it should, leading us to the inescapable conclusion that decision-makers in organisations are all too easily deceived by the facade of expertise.
Catch-22 and the paradoxes of organisational life
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch”, Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions…” Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Introduction
The term Catch-22 was coined by Joseph Heller in the eponymous satirical novel written in 1961. As the quote above illustrates, the term refers to a paradoxical situation caused by the application of contradictory rules. Catch-22 situations are common in large organisations of all kinds, not just the military (which was the setting of the novel). So much so that it is a theme that has attracted some scholarly attention over the half century since the novel was first published – see this paper or this one for example.
Although Heller uses Catch-22 situations to highlight the absurdities of bureaucracies in a humorous way, in real-life such situations can be deeply troubling for people who are caught up in them. In a paper published in 1956, the polymath Gregory Bateson and his colleagues suggested that these situations can cause people to behave in ways that are symptomatic of schizophrenia . The paper introduces the notion of a double-bind, which is a dilemma arising from an individual receiving two or more messages that contradict each other . In simple terms, then, a double-bind is a Catch-22.
In this post, I draw on Bateson’s double bind theory to get some insights into Catch-22 situations in organisations.
Double bind theory
The basic elements of a double bind situation are as follows:
- Two or more individuals, one of whom is a victim – i.e. the individual who experiences the dilemma described below.
- A primary rule which keeps the victim fearful of the consequences of doing (or not doing) something. This rule typically takes the form , “If you do x then you will be punished” or “If you do not do x then you will be punished. “
- A secondary rule that is in conflict with the primary rule, but at more abstract level. This rule, which is usually implicit, typically takes the form, “Do not question the rationale behind x.”
- A tertiary rule that prevents the victim from escaping from the situation.
- Repeated experiences of (1) and (2)
A simple example (quoted from this article) serves to illustrate the above in a real- life situation:
One example of double bind communication is a mother giving her child the message: “Be spontaneous” If the child acts spontaneously, he is not acting spontaneously because he is following his mother’s direction. It’s a no-win situation for the child. If a child is subjected to this kind of communication over a long period of time, it’s easy to see how he could become confused.
Here the injunction to “Be spontaneous” is contradicted by the more implicit rule that “one cannot be spontaneous on demand.” It is important to note that the primary and secondary (implicit) rules are at different logical levels – the first is about an action, whereas the second is about the nature of all such actions. This is typical of a double bind situation.
The paradoxical aspects of double binds can sometimes be useful as they can lead to creative solutions arising from the victim “stepping outside the situation”. The following example from Bateson’s paper illustrates the point:
The Zen Master attempts to bring about enlightenment in his pupil in various ways. One of the things he does is to hold a stick over the pupil’s head and say fiercely, “If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it.”… The Zen pupil might reach up and take the stick away from the Master–who might accept this response.
This is an important point which we’ll return to towards the end of this piece.
Double binds in organisations
Double bind situations are ubiquitous in organisations. I’ll illustrate this by drawing on a couple of examples I have written about earlier on this blog.
The paradox of learning organisations
This section draws on a post I wrote while ago. In the introduction to that post I stated that:
The term learning organisation refers to an organisation that continually modifies its processes based on observation and experience, thus adapting to changes in its internal and external environment. Ever since Peter Senge coined the term in his book, The Fifth Discipline, assorted consultants and academics have been telling us that although a learning organisation is an utopian ideal, it is one worth striving for. The reality, however, is that most organisations that undertake the journey actually end up in a place far removed from this ideal. Among other things, the journey may expose managerial hypocrisies that contradict the very notion of a learning organisation.
Starkly put, the problem arises from the fact that in a true learning organisation, employees will inevitably start to question things that management would rather they didn’t. Consider the following story, drawn from this paper on which the post is based:
…a multinational company intending to develop itself as a learning organization ran programmes to encourage managers to challenge received wisdom and to take an inquiring approach. Later, one participant attended an awayday, where the managing director of his division circulated among staff over dinner. The participant raised a question about the approach the MD had taken on a particular project; with hindsight, had that been the best strategy? `That was the way I did it’, said the MD. `But do you think there was a better way?’, asked the participant. `I don’t think you heard me’, replied the MD. `That was the way I did it’. `That I heard’, continued the participant, `but might there have been a better way?’. The MD fixed his gaze on the participants’ lapel badge, then looked him in the eye, saying coldly, `I will remember your name’, before walking away.
Of course, a certain kind of learning occurred here: the employee learnt that certain questions were taboo, in stark contrast to the openness that was being preached from the organisational pulpit. The double bind here is evident: feel free to question and challenge everything…except what management deems to be out of bounds. The takeaway for employees is that, despite all the rhetoric of organisational learning, certain things should not be challenged. I think it is safe to say that this was probably not the kind of learning that was intended by those who initiated the program.
The paradoxes of change
In a post on the paradoxes of organizational change, I wrote that:
An underappreciated facet of organizational change is that it is inherently paradoxical. For example, although it is well known that such changes inevitably have unintended consequences that are harmful, most organisations continue to implement change initiatives in a manner that assumes complete controllability with the certainty of achieving solely beneficial outcomes.
As pointed out in this paper, there are three types of paradoxes that can arise when an organisation is restructured. The first is that during the transition, people are caught between the demands of their old and new roles. This is exacerbated by the fact that transition periods are often much longer expected. This paradox of performing in turn leads to a paradox of belonging – people become uncertain about where their loyalties (ought to) lie.
Finally, there is a paradox of organising, which refers to the gap between the rhetoric and reality of change. The paper mentioned above has a couple of nice examples. One study described how,
“friendly banter in meetings and formal documentation [promoted] front-stage harmony, while more intimate conversations and unit meetings [intensified] backstage conflict.” Another spoke of a situation in which, “…change efforts aimed at increasing employee participation [can highlight] conflicting practices of empowerment and control. In particular, the rhetoric of participation may contradict engrained organizational practices such as limited access to information and hierarchical authority for decision making…
Indeed, the gap between the intent and actuality of change initiatives make double binds inevitable.
Discussion
I suspect the situations described above will be familiar to people working in a corporate environment. The question is what can one do if one is on the receiving end of such a Catch 22?
The main thing is to realise that a double-bind arises because one perceives the situation to be so. That is, the person experiencing the situation has chosen to interpret it as a double bind. To be sure, there are usually factors that influence the choice – things such as job security, for example – but the fact is that it is a choice that can be changed if one sees things in a different light. Escaping the double bind is then a “simple” matter of reframing the situation.
Here is where the notion of mindfulness is particularly relevant. In brief, mindfulness is “the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment.” As the Zen pupil who takes the stick away from the Master, a calm non-judgemental appraisal of a double-bind situation might reveal possible courses of action that had been obscured because of one’s fears. Indeed, the realization that one has more choices than one thinks is in itself a liberating discovery.
It is important to emphasise that the actual course of action that one selects in the end matters less than the realisation that one’s reactions to such situations is largely under one’s own control.
In closing – reframe it!
Organisational life is rife with Catch 22s. Most of us cannot avoid being caught up in them, but we can choose how we react to them. This is largely a matter of reframing them in ways that open up new avenues for action, a point that brings to mind this paragraph from Catch-22 (the book):
“Why don’t you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.”
“Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees,” Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. “I guess you’ve heard that saying before.”
“Yes, I certainly have,” mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. “But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.”
“Are you sure?” Nately asked with sober confusion. “It seems to make more sense my way.”
“No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.”
And that, I reckon, is as brilliant an example of reframing as I have ever come across.
Eight to Late 