Archive for the ‘mismanagement’ Category
A project manager’s dilemma in five limericks
It is so very hard to cope
with such a platitudinous scope;
vague and unclear,
I’ll tell you right here,
of making it we have no hope.
The goal so very elastic,
based on claims fantastic.
Slick presentations,
and proclamations
couched in language bombastic.
I’ve deployed many dark arts.
Simulations and Gantt Charts.
All to no avail,
my project will fail.
I may as well be throwing darts.
My project, like shifting sand,
is starting to get out of hand.
Despite all attempts
it still makes no sense.
I really think it should be canned.
This truth spinning round in my head
is better left unsaid.
If I were to try it,
they’d only deny it
and give me the sack instead.
On the unintended consequences of organisational change
Introduction
Change, as the cliché goes, is the only constant. At any given time, most organisations are either planning or implementing changes of some kind. Perhaps because of its ubiquity, the rationale and results of change are not questioned as deeply as they ought to be. In this post I describe some unintended effects of organisational change, drawing on Barbara Czarniawska’s book, A Theory of Organizing and other sources. I also briefly discuss some ways in which these side effects can be avoided.
I’ll begin with a few words about terminology. In this article planned changes (also referred to as reforms) are changes instituted in order to achieve specific goals. The goals of reforms are referred to as planned effects – that is, planned effects are intended results of change. As I discuss below, although planned effects may eventually be achieved, change initiatives have a host of unforeseen but significant consequences. These are referred to as unplanned, unintended or side effects.
This article is organised as follows: I’ll begin by describing some of the positive and negative side effects of change, following which I’ll discuss why side effects come about and how they can be managed.
Advantageous side effects of change
Although, the term side effect has a negative connotation, some side effects of change can actually be advantageous. These include:
- Questioning of the status quo: In most organisations, processes and structures are taken for granted, rarely is the status quo questioned. Organisational change presents an opportunity to pose those “How can we do this better?” type questions that challenge the way things are done. Such questioning is unplanned in that it generally occurs spontaneously.
- Opportunities for reflection: This is a consequence of the previous point: questioning the status quo can cause people to reflect on how things can be done better. Again, this is an unintended consequence of a reform, not part of its planned goals. Also, it should be noted that although opportunities for reflection arise often, they are generally ignored because of time pressures.
- Spontaneous inventions: Finally, questioning of and reflecting on the status quo can trigger ideas for improvement.
Most people would agree that the above points are indeed Good Things that ought to be encouraged. However, the important point is that people who are in the throes of a planned change seldom have the time or motivation to pursue these opportunities.
Harmful side effects of change
The negative side effects of planned changes are insidious because they tend to occur as a result of inaction – i.e. by not taking corrective actions to counter the detrimental effects of change. The following side effects serve to illustrate this point:
- The aims of reform become cast in stone: The objectives of a change initiative are formulated based on an understanding of a situation as it exists at a particular point in time. Problem is, as time evolves the original objectives maybecome irrelevant or obsolete. Yet, in many (most?) change initiatives, objectives are rarely reviewed and adjusted.
- The means get confused with the ends: Following from the previous point, a change initiative becomes pointless when its objectives are no longer relevant. However, a common reaction in such situations is to continue the initiative, justifying it as a worthwhile end in itself. For example, if the benefits of, say, a restructuring initiative become moot, the restructuring itself becomes the objective rather than the benefits that were supposed to flow from it. This helps save face as the project can be declared a success once the restructuring is completed, regardless of whether or not the promised benefits are realised.
- Improvisations and spontaneous inventions are suppressed: As I have discussed at length in this post, planning and improvisation are complementary but contradictory aspects of organizational work. A negative aspect of planned change initiatives is that they are inimical to improvisations: those responsible for overseeing the change tend to ignore, even suppress any improvisations that arise because they are seen as getting in the way of achieving the objectives of the primary change.
Planned change initiatives are generally implemented through programs or projects. In fact, most major projects in organisations – restructurings, enterprise system implementations etc – are aimed at implementing reforms of some kind. However, although the raison d’etre of such projects is to achieve the planned objectives, many suffer from the negative side effects mentioned above. In her book Czarniawska states, “Planned change rarely, if ever, leads to planned effects.” Although this claim may be a tad exaggerated, the significant proportion of large projects that fail suggests there is at least a whiff of truth about it.
In the next two sections I take a brief look at why planned changes fail and what can be done about it.
The origin of the side effects of change
Most structures and processes within organisations have a complex, path-dependent history. Among other things, they develop in ways that are unique to an organisation and are often deeply intertwined with each other. As a result, it is impossible to be certain about the consequences of changing processes or structures – there are just too many variables and dependencies involved.
There are two related points that flow from this:
Firstly, those who plan changes need to have a good understanding of legacy: the history of the issues that the change aims to fix and those that it may create in the future. The problem is most of the people involved in planning, initiating and executing reforms have little appreciation of such issues.
Secondly, most major changes are conceived by a small number of people who hold positions of authority within organisations. These folks have a tendency to gloss over complexities, and often fail to involve those who have a detailed knowledge of the affected processes and structures. Consequently, their plans overlook dependencies and possible knock-on effects that can arise from them. This results in the negative side effects discussed in the previous section.
..and what can be done about them
Czarniawska recommends the following informal rules for successful change:
- Be willing to modify the objectives of the change and your path to get there as your understanding of it evolves.
- Implement lightweight processes, avoid bureaucratic procedures.
- Be open to improvisations.
This is good advice as it goes, but how exactly does one use it?
In our recently published book, The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, Paul Culmsee and I discuss how issues of legacy and lack of inclusiveness can be addressed.
Firstly, we suggest that apart from time, cost and scope (the classic iron triangle), project decision-makers would be well served by considering legacy as a separate variable in projects (also see this post on Paul’s blog for more on this point). More importantly, we describe techniques that can be used to surface hidden assumptions and aspects of history that could have a bearing on the project and those that might cause problems in the future.
Secondly, we discuss how one can work towards creating an environment in which a diverse group of stakeholders can air and reconcile their viewpoints. Such a discussion is a prerequisite to creating a plan that: a) considers as many viewpoints (variables) as possible and b) has the support of all stakeholders. Without this, any implementation is bound to have side-effects because of overlooked variables and/or the actions (or non-actions) of stakeholders who do not support the plan.
Of course, inclusiveness sounds great but it can be difficult in practice, especially in large organisations. What can decision-makers do in such cases? The answer comes from a slightly different, if rather obvious direction.
In his very illuminating book on decision-making, James March notes that organisations face messy and inconsistent environments. Given this, decisions made and implemented at lower levels have a better chance of success than those made in rarefied air of board-rooms. Paraphrasing a statement from his book:
Since knowledge of local conditions and specialized competencies are both essential and more readily found in decentralized units, control over the details of policy implementation and adaptation of general policies to local conditions are [best] delegated to local units. From the standpoint of general management, the strategy is usually seen as one of gaining the informational and motivational advantages of using people with local involvement, [but] at the cost of accentuating problems of central coordination and control.
Indeed, most of the nasty side effects of planned change arise from over-centralisation of coordination and control. The solution is to devolve control and decision-making authority down to the level at which the changes are to be implemented.
Conclusion
Planned change fails to achieve its goals because planners cannot foresee all the consequences of change or even know which factors may be important in determining these. Moreover, individuals will view changes through the lens of their background, biases and interests. Since organisations consist of many individuals with different views, managing change is essentially a wicked problem.
To sum up, those who initiate large-scale changes should keep in mind the law of unintended consequences: any planned action will have consequences that are not intended, or even foreseen. These consequences can be managed by getting a better appreciation of the factors that affect the processes and the structures to be changed. One can gain an understanding of these factors through a consideration of legacy and/or via dialogue involving all those who work with the processes and structures that are to be changed. The simplest way to achieve both is by delegating decision making and implementation authority down to where it belongs – with the people who work at the coalface of the organisation.
Macrovisions and micromanagement
Introduction
Much has been written about leadership, management and the difference between them. The former is associated with creating a shared vision and strategy for the future whereas the latter has administrative and bureaucratic connotations. Most organisations celebrate leadership but consider management to be little more than an operational necessity.
In view of the exaggerated rhetoric regarding leadership it is of interest to ask how it is actually practiced on the ground. This question was investigated by Mats Alvesson and Sven Sveningsson in a brilliant paper entitled, Good Visions, Bad Micro-management and Ugly Ambiguity: Contradictions of (Non-) Leadership in a Knowledge-Intensive Organization. In this post I elaborate on one of their key conclusions: that there is a gap between the espoused view of leadership and its practice.
Leadership in theory
The emphasis on leadership in management theory has lead to the widely accepted notion that leaders matter and that their actions can affect organizational performance and effect change in a positive way. Moreover it is also assumed that it is straightforward to identify leadership qualities in people as these manifest themselves through a set of well-defined behaviours and attitudes. In other words, leadership is a stable and robust concept. The main aim of the authors was to find out how well this theoretical conception of leadership holds up in the real world.
The case study and research methodology
The authors conducted a detailed study of how managers in a knowledge-intensive organisation viewed and practiced leadership. The study consisted of extensive, multiple interviews with managers at different levels in the company (from the CEO to project managers) supplemented by observations made at management meetings. Two rounds of interviews were conducted. In the first round, the authors asked the interviewees what their jobs entailed. Most responses centered on vision, leadership and strategy. However, when asked to elaborate on their responses, most managers described their day-to-day work in terms of administrative and bureaucratic managerial procedures. This pointed to a gap between espoused leadership and how it is actually practiced. In the second round of interviews, the authors attempted to gain some insights into the reasons for the gap.
Macrovisions: the espoused view of leadership
The authors observed that when asked questions about their jobs, most managers spoke of leadership and how they practiced it. Big picture topics such as vision and strategy – what I call macrovisions – were recurrent themes in their responses . Most managers claimed that their job was to articulate such macrovisions while leaving the details of day-to-day operations to their subordinates. As examples, consider the following responses from interviewees:
A strongly knowledge intensive work as ours build on independent and active employees who has (sic) the ability to take their own initiative.
This is consistent with modern themes of worker autonomy in decision, particularly in knowledge-intensive organisations such as information or biotechnology. Reinforcing this, another manager said:
I try not to interfere too much in operations. That would be wrong in every way, no one would benefit from that, but I am available if anyone has an operative question, otherwise it’s more me trying to make myself unavoidable in strategic issues but avoidable in operational issues.
Yet another manager spoke of macrovisions in the following way:
And if you provide the big picture, if there is a sense that these [minor decisions] are in the context of the wider strategy and it is not just, bang, bang [shooting with finger from the hip] we shoot this one and now we shoot that one, and now we gallop off in some other direction; if it fits a bigger picture, then I think we can manage. But that is where leadership comes in I think, we need to provide that context and the picture and the overall direction, to say “we are not here in the middle and you cannot [be allowed to] ride off in just any direction.
Macrovisions thus appeared to provide a broad framework within which employees had the freedom to make decisions that were broadly consistent with the organisation’s strategy.
Again, it is important to emphasise that managers were not specifically asked about visions, strategy or leadership, yet their responses invariably alluded to these themes. The responses suggest that most managers in the company viewed leadership rather than management as their primary role.
This was consistent with the overall management vision set by senior executives. As the authors put it:
The expectations formulated by higher-level senior managers and made explicit by the CEO on various occasions, is that managers should refrain from detailed management
Indeed, some managers spoke of managing details in derogatory terms. Consider the following response:
Requesting detail which is of no value to your personal job or position, and that can be detail about a specific office, budget thing through to really me going down to the project level and saying, “Well, how are we doing on that project and I really want to know”, so it is about the ability not to do that, and delegate and trust the people.
In short: most managers felt that their work involved articulating and implementing macrovisions rather than practising micromanagement.
Micromanagement: the practice of “leadership”
A natural question arising from the above is: how did managers actually practice leadership? What are the things they did in their day-to-day work that exemplified leadership?
To answer this question, interviewees were asked what they did in their day-to-day work. Strangely, most managers reverted to themes they had described in uncomplimentary terms. For example, when asked to elaborate on how he practiced leadership, one manager said:
There are many different ways of working. I think that as a manager here one has to implement significantly more directive ways of handling people, that is, that you say to people that you will spend the next month occupying yourself with this development, I want you to learn about this. I think that you have to have a much more directive way of handling of people in these operations.
This was not an isolated case; another manager said:
I do get involved from a technical viewpoint, I expect, obviously my knowledge is still developing here, but I expect to understand quite consciously what the group is doing.
Yet another manager, when asked about the leadership tools that he used, referred to things such as budgets, recruitment etc. – things that are usually concerned bureaucratic, administrative procedures. There was little if any reference to activities that one might associate with leadership.
There is thus a clear gap between what the managers professed to practice and what they actually practiced. In the authors’ words:
…the responses brought forth aspects of managerial activities obviously quite far removed from most understandings of leadership in contemporary management literature and also from the more ‘grandiose’ ideas on the subject that they also claim to believe in and base their work on. Managers therefore talk of themselves as leaders without doing much that clearly and strongly refers to ‘leadership activities’. The case study exhibits the contrary: the activities of managers are more closely related to what is understood as micro-management…
Indeed this view was confirmed when the authors spoke with lower level managers. A project manager said:
Perhaps there’s a dialogue about that (leadership) that doesn’t really percolate down to those in production and it tends to become reactive. And micro-management, there’s a will to know too much in detail, when perhaps they should really be working with empowerment, that people are able to take responsibility, to send responsibility for the budget to me and have faith that I take responsibility for my colleagues, and all the positive talk such as “we are going to be the company of choice”, how are we going to realize all that, there’s too much administrative detail going through my superior.
…so much for all the talk of leadership.
The rhetoric and reality of leadership
From the above it is clear that we have a paradoxical situation: managers believed they were being leaders when they are actually weren’t leading at all. The question is: why did this happen?
The authors offer a number of speculations for this, which I briefly outline below.
Firstly, leadership qualities are generally seen as desirable. Management literature and education tends to place leadership at the pinnacle of managerial practice. Consequently, there is considerable pressure on managers at the middle and senior levels to display these qualities.
Secondly, there is the issue of identity; how managers see themselves. Like those described in the case study, most managers would like to view what they do as leadership rather than “mere” management or administration. As a result, they may unconsciously describe what they do in the flattering language of leadership rather than the mundane terms of management. However, as the authors stated in the paper, “Leadership talk and fantasies seem to leave a thin spray of grandiosity on the ‘leaders’” Clearly, this may be of more use in bolstering managerial self-esteem than anything else.
Thirdly, managers often have to deal with conflicting agendas and requirements. In the case study managers were expected to display leader-like behaviour. However, at the same time, they were held responsible for specific and very tangible results. To deliver on the latter, they often felt they had to keep track of the details of what their teams were doing and step in when things were going wrong. There was a continual pressure to get involved in detail while maintaining the illusion of being leaders.
Another point that the authors do not mention explicitly is that middle and frontline managers are often expected to lead without being given the autonomy to do so.
It is likely that some or all of the above factors lead to a divergence between the rhetoric and reality of leadership.
Conclusion
The central message of the paper is that the concept of leadership is an idealization that is often compromised in practice. Most people who work in organisations will not find this surprising: managers are generally aware that their day-to-day work has little in common with the rarefied notions of leadership promoted by management schools, while others are likely to have worked with micromanagers who are masquerading as macrovisionaries.
Eight to Late 