Archive for the ‘Organizations’ Category
Organisational surprise and its relevance to project management
Introduction
As humans, we tend to believe that events and processes will unfold in the way we expect them to. Unfortunately things rarely go according to our expectations and we end up being, well… surprised! But it isn’t just individuals, entire organisations can be caught unawares by events. In this post I draw on a paper entitled, Clues, Cues and Complexity: Unpacking the Concept of Organisational Surprise, to elaborate on the different ways in which surprises can crop up in organisational settings and in particular, in projects. My focus is on the latter because the temporary and one-off nature of projects seems to render them particularly prone to surprises.
Organizational surprise
The authors define organizational surprise as, “any event that happens unexpectedly or any expected event that takes an unexpected shape.” One does not have to look far to see examples of organizational surprises. It is almost certain that any experienced project manager would have encountered a number of surprises in the course of his or her professional work. These could be unforeseen events (such as a project sponsor leaving for greener pastures) or unexpected twists and turns in what ought to have been a straightforward process (such as a software upgrade turning out to be more complicated than expected).
The ubiquity of organizational surprises begs the question as to why we are still “surprised by surprises.” The short answer is that this happens because we tend to overestimate our ability to control the future. The authors suggest that we would be better served by regarding surprise as an inherent property of all open systems (which includes entities such as organisations and projects). After living through the consequences of many over-optimistic managerial actions (both, my own and those of others), I would have to agree.
Classifying surprise – a typology of surprises
Nothing I have said so far would be surprising to readers: indeed, project management is largely about managing uncertainty…and all project managers know that. What might be new, however, is a classification of surprises proposed by the authors of the paper. I have hinted at the classification in the previous section where I gave one example each of a surprising event and a surprising process. It is now time to generalize this to a typology of surprises.
The authors classify surprises along two dimensions:
- Issue – An issue can occur in one of two ways:
- When something unusual happens.
- When something that usually happens does not happen.
It is important to note that although the term issue has negative connotations in project management parlance, it is used here in a neutral sense – i.e. issues can be either positive or negative.
- Process – a process is a chain of related events that unfolds in an unusual manner. For example, when an ATM cash withdrawal fails because the machine does not have enough money left to process the withdrawal.
From the perspective of surprise, issues and processes can be either expected or unexpected. This gives us the four categories illustrated in Fig 1.
Figure 1: A typology of surprises
Let’s take a tour of the four categories
- Expected issue and process: This is the zone of predictability where one-off events tend to go as foreseen. An example of an expected issue that was successfully dealt with through planning was the Y2K problem. Another example is provided by (successful) risk management activities that are triggered when a foreseen risk eventuates.
- Unexpected issue, expected process: This is where a surprising issue occurs, but the consequences follow are expected. An example this would be a chance occurrence (say, a project team member on a troubled project stumbles on a novel technique that saves development time), and this leads to the project being completed within time and budget (expected process following the event).
- Expected issue, unexpected process: This occurs when an expected event evolves in an unexpected way – i.e. leads to a surprising process. A common example of this in a project environment is when a front-end project decision unfolds in unexpected ways. Another common example is an organizational change that has unintended consequences.
- Unexpected issue, unexpected process: This is a situation where both the event and the processes around it are counter to conventional wisdom. In this case, those involved need to understand, or make sense of the situation and hence the term sensemaking crisis. An example of this is when project managers fail to anticipate factors that turn out to have a major influence on the way their projects evolve. One could argue that many high profile project failures were the result of such crises. The Denver Baggage Handling System and the Merck Vioxx affair are good examples. In both cases, the projects failed because those responsible failed to react to certain events that changed the trajectory of the projects irrevocably.
Let’s now take a brief look at the usefulness of this classification.
Coping with surprise
Managers expend a great deal of effort in attempting to predict surprises and hence corral them into the zone of predictability (Reminder: this is the bottom left quadrant in Figure 1). As mentioned earlier, this is difficult because organisations are open systems, and novelty is an inherent property of such systems. The main implication of this is that surprises in quadrants other than the zone of predictability cannot be foreseen. So, instead of worrying about predicting surprises, project and program managers would do better by focusing their efforts on creating an environment that enables team members to cope with nasty surprises and take advantage of good ones.
What might such an environment look like?
This question is best approached via a related question: what are the qualities displayed by project teams that are able to cope with surprises?
Here are some essential ones that are mentioned in the paper:
- Vigilance / problem sensing– a deep awareness of the project environment, with the ability to sense any changes in it.
- Resilience – the capacity to adjust to changes in the internal and external environment.
- Ability to improvise– the ability to respond to the unexpected by devising appropriate courses of action under pressure
The striking thing about these qualities is that they are impossible to create or engender by management fiat: teams will not improvise unless they feel empowered to, nor will they be resilient or vigilant unless they are intrinsically motivated to be so.These characteristics are emergent in the sense that they will be displayed spontaneously by teams that are in a frame of mind that comes out of being in the right environment.
The primary task of a project manager, or any manager for that matter, is to create such a holding environment that provides psychological safety to the team and encourages rational (or open) dialogue between all project stakeholders (yes, including project sponsors). I won’t elaborate on these terms here since they are dealt with at length in the articles that I have provided links to in the previous sentence.
Different types of surprise require different approaches
Having the right environment is the key to dealing with all four kinds of surprises. However, even within such an environment, it is important to note that different types of surprises have to be tackled in different ways. In particular:
- Predictable surprises are best tackled through traditional management approaches (as discussed in PMBOK, for example). In view of the prevalence of such approaches, I should perhaps emphasise again that they work only for a small subset of all possible surprises (only those that lie in the first quadrant)
- Surprising events and surprising processes are best dealt with by the people who are at the coalface of the problem since they are intimately familiar with the context and history of the problem.
- Sensemaking crises are best handled by collaborative problem solving approaches such as Dialogue Mapping.
The above yet again underscores the importance of the creating the right environment, for although predictable surprises can be tackled through traditional approaches to project management, those that lie in the other three quadrants cannot.
Conclusion
A fact of organizational life is that project managers are often caught unawares by unforeseen events and their dynamics. In this post, I have summarized a typology of organizational surprises and have elaborated on its relevance to project management. I have also briefly discussed the ways in which different types of surprises can be tackled, emphasising that the key to tackling surprise lies in creating an environment that provides psychological safety and encourages open dialogue.
In closing, I reiterate that projects and organisations are open systems, and surprises are characteristic of such systems. The biggest surprise, therefore, is that we are continually surprised by some of the events and processes that occur within them
Patterns of miscommunication in organisations
Introduction
The hierarchical structure of many workplaces tends to constrain or even stifle open exchange of ideas and information. This is particularly apparent in communication between employees who are at different levels in a hierarchy: people are generally reluctant to speak their minds in front of their managers, even when assured that it is perfectly OK to do so. There is good reason for this: managers often “talk the talk” about being open to other points of view but contradict their words subsequently (see my article entitled, the paradox of the learning organization, for an example of this).
In this post I draw on this paper by Max Visser to describe some of the tactics or patterns of miscommunication which managers employ to sideline, devalue or even completely dismiss employee viewpoints.
Background
Those who toil in the lower echelons of an organisation’s hierarchy can easily sense the gap between managerial talk and intent. One setting in which this gap becomes particularly evident is in group meetings, where a manager’s words may say, “speak freely” but his body language or responses may append an unspoken “be aware of the consequences” clause.
As I have discussed in this post, communication is just as much about context (e.g. manager-subordinate relationship within an organisational setting) as it is about content. This point of view is central to the interactional view of communication that originated in the work of Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick. According to the interactional view, communication operates at two levels: the spoken or written meaning (content) and the situation/relationship (context). Among other things, this view focuses on the ways in which the content of a message – such as “speak freely” – may be rendered ambiguous by signals that appear to contradict it. In the remainder of this post we’ll look at a few ways in which managers do this via verbal communication. We’ll also take a brief look at the different ways in which employees respond to such behaviour.
Patterns of miscommunication
The best way to describe these patterns is through an example. Consider the following situation:
An employee presents a business case for a new CRM system to his manager. In the presentation, the employee describes the rationale for implementing a new system and then evaluates a few products based on agreed financial, technical and other criteria. Finally, he recommends a particular product, System X, based on the evaluation and then seeks feedback from his manager.
The manager, who does not want to commit to a course of action may choose one of the following strategies to devalue the employee’s work:
Tangentialisation
In this case the manager makes a statement that acknowledges the employee’s message but ignores its content and intent by saying something like:
“So how long have you been working on this?”
By going off on a tangent, the manager avoids giving a relevant response.
Disqualification
There are four types of disqualification
Evasion
This occurs when a manager avoids giving a response by changing the topic. For example, the manager might glance at his watch and saying:
“Oh is that the time? I have to go, I’m late for a meeting with my boss.”
The difference between tangentialisation and evasion is that in the latter, the manager does not even acknowledge the message.
Sleight of hand
Here the manager appears to acknowledge the message, but then switches the topic. An example of this would be a response along the lines of:
“Yes, you enough data for a Phd thesis here [laughs]. I think we’re drowning in data.“
The point here is that the manager initiates a discussion about a side issue – the volume of information presented in the business case rather than its relevance or veracity. Moreover this is done in an apparently light-hearted, yet somewhat demeaning way. Thus although the manager avoids giving direct feedback, he still makes it clear he does not think that the employee’s work is up to scratch.
Status disqualification
Here the manager switches the focus from the message to the messenger. Usually status disqualification is accompanied by insinuations regarding the messenger’s competence. A typical example of this would be a comment like:
“It’s clear you have not done these kinds of presentations before!”
Without saying it explicitly, the manager is implying that the employee has not done a good job and therefore no further discussion is necessary.
Redundant question
This is where the manager lobs the ball back in the employee’s court by asking a question that implicitly challenges the employee’s conclusions. An example would be:
“[smiles knowingly] I see, but does your data justify your choice of System X?”
Such a question signals the manager is not convinced, but without explicit disagreement. The onus is now on the employee to justify his conclusions.
Mystification
Here the manager changes the context of the discussion altogether by saying something like:
“Let me tell you something about CRM systems.”
Here the manager changes the frame of the discussion – it is now about educating the employee rather than evaluating the product. Of course, in doing so he also insinuates that the employee’s analysis is not worthy of a response.
Employee responses to managerial miscommunication
When faced with any of the above tactics, the employee can respond in one of the following ways:
- Meta-communication: Here the employee understands the manager’s tactics and attempts to point out the inconsistency and double speak in the manager’s response. This is a risky course of action because the manager may view it as a direct challenge to his or her authority. However, if done right, the manager may actually become aware of the incongruence of his/her response and change behaviour accordingly.
- Evasion: Here the employee withdraws from the conversation by ignoring the manager’s message altogether. One way to do this is to offer no response at all, but this might not be possible as the manager may well insist on a response.
- Acceptance: In this case the employee accepts the content of the manager’s response, but ignores the non-verbal signals (derogatory tone, looking at watch etc.). In doing so, the employee effectively accepts the manager’s criticisms.
- Countering: Here the employee counters the manager’s message by using one of the tactics of the previous section. This generally leads to a verbal escalation as the manager will view such a response as a direct challenge to his authority and thus respond in kind.
Because of the nature of the manager-employee relationship and the fear of challenging authority, I would hazard a guess that majority of employees would respond by acceptance or (more infrequently) by evasion. In an ideal organisation, of course, they would respond by meta-communicating.
Conclusion
In this post I have described some common patterns of miscommunication between managers and the managed in organisation-land. The common element in all the patterns is that the manager acknowledges the message at one level but responds in such a way as to leave the employee confused about how the response should be interpreted. In effect, the miscommunicating manager avoids giving a response.
The interactional view of communication tells us that context and relationship are more important than the content of a message because what is not said is often more significant than what is. The patterns listed above make this amply clear: managers who miscommunicate are asserting their positional authority rather than saying anything of substance or value.
An ABSERD incident – a service desk satire
The expenses application crashed just as Tina had finished entering the last line. She wasn’t duly alarmed; this had happened to her a couple of times before, but Nathan in IT was able to sort it out without her having to reenter her expenses.
She dialled his number, he answered in a couple of rings. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, she described the problem.
To her surprise, he replied, “I’m sorry Tina, I can’t help you. You will have to call the service desk.”
“The service desk?” She asked, “What’s that?”
“We have streamlined our IT service procedures to comply with the ABSERD standard – which stands for Absolutely Brilliant SERvice Desks. It is an ABSERD requirement that all service calls must be routed through a centralised service desk.” explained Nate. “The procedures and the numbers you need to call were in the email that was sent out to everyone last week.”
“Yes, I read it, but I didn’t think the ABSERD procedures applied to something like the expenses app.,” said Tina, somewhat bemused.
“I’m afraid it applies to all services that IT offers,” said Nate.
“But isn’t the service desk located elsewhere? Will they even know what the expenses app is let alone how to fix it?”
“Ummm…they’ll fix it if they can and escalate it to the next level if they can’t,” replied Nate. “The ABSERD processes are detailed in the email,” he explained again helpfully.
“You know what the problem is. Tell me honestly: do you think they’ll be able to fix it?”
“Probably not,” admitted Nate.
“So they’ll escalate it. How long will that take?”
“The ABSERD service level agreement specifies that all non-critical issues will be responded to within 48 hours. I’m afraid the expenses app is classified as non-critical.”
“So that’s 48 hours to fix an issue that you could sort out in minutes,” stated Tina in a matter of fact tone.
“Ummm…no, it’s 48 hours to respond. That’s the time frame in which they will fix the issue if they can or escalate it if they can’t fix it. As I mentioned, in this case they’ll probably have to escalate” clarified Nate.
“You mean they’ll take 48 hours to figure out they can’t do it. Now, that is truly absurd!” Tina was seriously annoyed now.
“Well, the service desk deals with calls from the entire organisation. They have to prioritise them somehow and this is the fairest way to do it,” said Nate defensively. “Moreover, the service level agreement specifies 48 hours, but there’s a good chance you’ll get a response within a day,” he added in an attempt to placate her.
“And who will they escalate the call to after 48 (or 24) hours if they can’t fix it?” asked Tina exasperatedly.
“Ummm….that would be me,” said Nate sheepishly.
“I’m sorry, but I’m totally lost now. By your own admission, you’ll probably be the one to fix this problem. So why can’t you just do it for me?”
“I’d love to, Tina” said Nate, “but I can’t. Jim will have my hide if he knows that I have bypassed the ABSERD process. I’m sorry, you’re just going to have to call or email the service desk. I can’t do anything about it”
“Why are we suddenly following this ABSERD process anyway? What’s the aim of it all?” asked Tina.
“Well, our aim is to improve the quality of our service. The ABSERD standard is a best practice for IT service providers…,” he trailed off, realising that he sounded like a commercial for ABSERDity.
“You do agree that it actually increases the service time for me. You could have fixed the issue for me in the time we’ve had this conversation but I’m going to have to wait at least 24 hours. I fail to see what has “improved” here.”
“Look, this is the new process. I’m sorry can’t do anything about it,” said Nate lamely.
“OK, I’ll log the call.” she said resignedly.
“I’m sorry, Tina. I really am.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said in a gentler tone, “but I’m probably going to miss the deadline for getting my expenses in this month.”
“Tell you what,” said Nate, as the obvious solution dawned on him, “I’ll fix the problem now… but please log the call just in case someone checks.”
“Are you sure you can do that?” asked Tina. “It would be nice to get reimbursed this month, but I do not want you to get into trouble.”
“It shouldn’t be a problem as long as you don’t tell anyone about it…I wouldn’t want to make it known that I bypass the ABSERD procedures as a matter of course.”
“My lips are sealed,” said Tina. “Thanks Nate, I really appreciate your help with this.”
“No worries Tina. I’ll call you when it’s done,” he said as he ended the call.
Eight to Late 