Systems Thinking for Demanding Change

Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

2015-06-04T22:34:00.002+01:00

#orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.

Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial ("misplaced confidence", "kidded themselves"), believing that "organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership". Following the election, "a danger now is oversteering the other way".

Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).

Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in 'blue collar conservatism'. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts "is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments". Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne's plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative's relationship with the working classes.

What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

Steve Richards goes further ...

"During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. ... In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery."

... and insists that "the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate".

One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.

Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour's inner circle.

"Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. ... [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control."

But that's not enough.

"The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out."

Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated 'spads', and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as "leader". Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.

Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government's role in the 2008 economic crisis.

"The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers."

Sources:

Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)

Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)

Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)

Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)

Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)

Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)

Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)

Related Posts:

Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012) (August 2016)
Dark Politics (May 2015)

Updated 6 June 2015

Developing cultures of high-quality care

2013-02-26T23:57:00.000+00:00

#kfleadership Excellent lecture at @TheKingsFund this evening by Professor Michael West. Here are some of my notes.

When he left college West was short of money, so he took a job in the coal mines. Productivity was important to everyone, and the pay at the end of the week depended on the quantity of coal extracted. But there was one thing more important than productivity, namely safety.

In many organizations this would just be lip service. But in the coal mines, safety was taken very seriously, and management actions were completely congruent with this.

West argued that the same should apply in the Health Service. Of course productivity is fundamentally important, but the number one priority should not be productivity but high-quality and safe patient care.

Valuing patients and staff turns out to be good management. West's argument is not merely based on rhetoric, but is supported by data. Patient outcomes and patient satisfaction are highly correlated with staff satisfaction and morale, and these in turn are correlated with staff engagement, which West defined in terms of three things: pride, intrinsic engagement and involvement in decisions. Ultimately this links back to improved productivity.

Someone in the audience objected that productivity must always be the top priority, otherwise you risk running out of money to pay for patient care. West replied that productivity follows from good people management. He agreed that the NHS has a great deal to learn from the private sector, and expressed a hope that private sector expertise (including non-executive board members) would not be limited to the Marketing and Finance perspectives.

West affirmed that the NHS is full of intelligent and highly motivated people, and said that the traditional command and control mode of leadership was such a waste of resource. The key role of leaders is to learn from staff, and to realize the potential of the people.

People at all levels require courage to accept challenging targets - in other words, to strive for things that they won't always achieve. The organization must accept and learn from failure to reach these targets. Blaming people for failure to excel is not only stupid and unfair, it is also counter-productive, because it makes people risk-averse and inhibits them from striving for anything that isn't guaranteed in advance.

Leadership includes the courage to seek unwelcome information - for example feedback that indicates things not going well.

After the lecture, I was chatting to a group from a London teaching hospital about accountability. As I see it, accountability doesn't only mean taking responsibility for the consequences of one's decisions (such as short-sighted cost-cutting) but also taking responsibility for what one chooses to pay attention to. One of the classic examples in Moral Philosophy concerns a ship owner who sends a ship to sea without bothering to check whether the ship was sea-worthy. Some argue that the ship owner cannot be held responsible for the deaths of the sailors, because he didn't actually know that the ship would sink. I think most people would see the ship owner having a moral duty of diligence, and would regard him as accountable for neglecting this duty.

In the current climate, the NHS leadership has a duty to achieve high quality patient care and productivity, and the evidence from Professor West is that this can best be achieved by engaging staff at all levels. Executive boards must surely be held accountable if they neglect to do this.

See also Culture of Fear (Storify, 27 Feb 2013)

The ship-owner example can be found in an essay called "The Ethics of Belief" (1877) by W.K. Clifford, in which he states that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence".

Related post: Ethics and Intelligence (April 2010), Agility and Fear (February 2013)

Updated 28 Feb 2013

Are we making progress?

2013-02-03T16:20:00.002+00:00

In a great post, @JohnQShift explains how to build a culture of learning in your business. He calls this A Matter of Life or Death (Feb 2013)

In the post, John reports one of his clients observing that they had made some progress in their business over the year. By progress, the client meant that

people were beginning to take up more responsibility and initiative without having to wait for the boss to tell them what to do

there was more discussion amongst the staff as to how to manage some of the day-to-day challenges they meet and less referring to the boss for the “answer”

mistakes were being used as entry points to examining business processes and working out how they could be improved

they had a clearer idea of their collective purpose and how important relationship is to achieving that purpose

the leaders were devoting more of their time to ensuring the conditions and structures of the business were optimised so that people could get on with their jobs (and less time micro-managing operational tasks).

Leadership and Organizational Intelligence

2012-05-10T18:55:00.000+01:00

Chief Knowledge Officer

Joseph Goedert, Expert says it's time for Health Care to create ‘Chief Knowledge Officer’ position. Health Data Management, Oct 2011

Chief Learning Officer

CLO Magazine

Josh Bersin, Today's Chief Learning Officer (November 2010)

"A few years ago I wrote an article about how the CLO is really three people: A Chief Culture Officer (driving engagement, learning, and collaboration), A Chief Performance Officer (driving employee performance, alignment, and skills); and a Chief Change Officer (vigilantly driving change, seeing the future, and helping the CEO and other leaders transform the workforce as the business and workforce changes). Today, more than ever, the CLO must be all three."

Chief Sensemaking Officer

Peter Flemming Teunissen Sjoelin, Making Sense: One of the Components of Achieving Holistic Management (Jan 2011); Holistic Management in a Context of Enterprise IT Management and Organizational Leadership (May 2011)

Chief Collaboration Officer

Morten T. Hansen, Scott Tapp, Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer? HBR Oct 2010

Lydia Dishman, Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer. Fast Company, May 2012

Is this several different (but overlapping) positions, or several labels for the same position? I believe these are all aspects of Organizational Intelligence, and call for coordinated leadership. That doesn't necessarily mean a single position, but certainly not a set of disconnected or rival initiatives.

And who will take such positions? Hansen and Tapp suggest that the responsibilities should be added to one of the existing C-level roles - probably one of the following five.

The current CIO.
The current HR head.
The current COO.
The current CFO.
The current head of strategy.

I agree that organizational intelligence might reasonably be added to any of these disciplines, but it would undoubtedly represent a radical shift for the traditional disciplines that dominate these functions. Leadership indeed.

There is always another story 3

2011-11-01T15:08:00.001+00:00

@alantlwilson the Anglican Bishop of Buckingham once went on telly suggesting Apple was in some sociological respects a religion. Following Steve Jobs' death, he praises Jobs for having resurrected a corporation and for what he calls genuine moral leadership. By quoting Hebrews 11 (He Being Dead Yet Speaketh), Bishop Alan is clearly inviting us to compare Jobs with the moral leaders of the Old Testament.

Bishop Alan rightly warns against the idolisation of business leadership, but regards Steve Jobs as an honourable exception.

What passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices. ... Not so Mr Jobs.

Alan Wilson, He Being Dead Yet Speaketh (Oct 2011)

In a comment posted below Alan's blog, the Reverend Michael Johnson begs to differ, wishes Apple's moral leadership had extended to its suppliers and those who build iPhones and iPads in very stressful sweatshops in China, and continues with a wry comment about the Jobs myth: It says something about the way we perceive our world that many shocking truths are obscured by slick promotion of stylish desirables.

By the way, there is a brilliant and very rude rant about right-wing Christians on the Fake Steve Jobs blog: Hate-spewing Christians need to listen up. And even though I know it was written by Dan Lyons, I really really want to believe that it was actually based on Jobs' own words. You know, He Being Dead Yet Speaketh.

There is always another story
There is always another story 2

The Centralization-Decentralization Dialectic

2011-10-25T01:00:00.002+01:00

Why is it that attempts to decentralize often seem to result in an accumulation of power at the centre? There are several possible explanations.

1. In some instances, the decentralization agenda may be completely fraudulent. Popular leaders may spout the rhetoric of decentralization as a means of permanently gathering more power for themselves.

2 Alternatively, the leadership may believe that a temporary centralization is a necessary step towards what Lenin called The Withering Away Of The State. "Although leaders such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher may have been inspired by liberal mentors - Thatcher being directly inspired by Hayek - they nonetheless were decision makers who benefited from power." (Marciano and Josselin p xvi)

3. As a third possibility, the leadership may genuinely believe in the desirability of decentralization, both short-term and longer-term, but find themselves frustrated by larger system forces. Emerging system behaviour somehow manages to nullify any planned intervention that challenges the essential purpose and identity of the larger systems: Stafford Beer coined the term POSIWID to refer to this phenomenon.

4. We may note that there is always a paradox in imposing a decentralization agenda from the centre. Mark Bray observes that "the terms centralization and decentralization usually refer to deliberate processes initiated at the apex of hierarchies. However, sometimes patterns change by default rather than by deliberate action. Also power may be removed from the centre either with the acquiescence of or in the face of resistance by the centre."

5. There are various trade-offs involved. For example, Jan Zábojník discusses the trade-off between the distribution of information and the distribution of motivation.

6. Centralization and decentralization often take place alternately, creating a kind of oscillation, or even simultaneously. For example, Paul Corrigan talks about Centralising and decentralising the NHS simultaneously (October 2011), and asks how to work with that?

7. Or perhaps we need to stop thinking about centralization-decentralization as a simple polar choice. Writing on IT centralization and decentralization (HBR July 2008), Susan Cramm says it's time to kill off this centralized versus decentralized IT debate. No longer should we ask, "Should we centralize or decentralize IT?", but rather, "How do we decentralize IT in a centralized manner?"

Bob Avakian, Centralization, Decentralization and the Withering Away of the State (2004)

Mark Bray (2003), Control of Education: Issues and tensions in Centralization and Decentralization, in Arnove, Robert F. and Torres, Carlos A. (eds) Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, second edition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.204-228.

N McGinn and T Welsh, Decentralization of Education UNESCO 1999

Alain Marciano, Jean-Michel Josselin (eds), Democracy, freedom and coercion: a law and economics approach Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007

Richard Saltman, Vaida Bankauskaite, Karsten Vrangbaek (eds) Decentralization in Health Care: Strategies and Outcomes. Open University Press 2007.

Jan Zábojník Centralized and Decentralized Decision-Making in Organizations (pdf), Journal of Labor Economics, January 2002

There is always another story

2011-10-15T15:36:00.008+01:00

Steve Jobs talks about death

"About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. ... It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now." [Stanford University, June 2005]

But according to some sources, there is a critical omission from the story. The diagnosis was in October 2003. Jobs spent several months trying alternative medicine before agreeing to the surgery, which took place in July 2004. Some cancer experts believe this delay may have shortened his life.

Polarity

Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are "insanely great" or "shit." One is facing death from cancer or "cured." Subordinates are geniuses or "bozos," indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second's notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his "hero-shithead roller coaster." (Fortune Magazine 2008)

Some might think that this was at odds with his Buddhist beliefs: Polarity is an Illusion, Oneness is a Reality.

Risk

It is important to understand the ways in which Jobs' attempts to manipulate his world pose risks for Apple - and thus its investors. They are evident in his difficult partnerships with music and television companies, which chafe at his insistence on setting uniform prices for their songs and videos on iTunes; in the real story of his battle with cancer; and in his deployment of stock options at Apple and Pixar, which exposed both companies to backdating scandals. (Fortune Magazine 2008)

The risks here come not only from the attempts to control everything, but from the polarity, delay and denial, which emerges from the way he tackled his cancer as well as in the way he ran Apple.

Storytelling

Writing in the Guardian, in the week Jobs died, Charlie Kaufman reveals something important about story-telling. He wasn't talking explicitly about Jobs, but as Matthew Creamer points out, he might as well have been.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

The other thing that happens is adjustment. You find out which part of the story works, which part to embellish, which to jettison. You fashion it. Your goal is to be entertaining. This is true for a story told at a dinner party, and it's true for stories told through movies. Don't let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include. As an experiment, write a non-story. It will have a chance of being different.

Meanwhile, some reviewers of Walter Isaacson's authorised biography of Steve Jobs are questioning whether it is a true representation of the man - see revew roundup by Clare Spencer.

Is a single true representation possible - of anyone, let alone Jobs? Brent Shlender writes

"Most of us who wrote in depth about the brilliant career of Steve Jobs sooner or later came to realize that we were complicit in the making of a modern myth. ... Nevertheless, Steve was merely mortal. And his storied life was one of dissonances and contradictions."

Steve Jobs wasn't a visionary

2011-10-09T10:58:00.007+01:00

I'm afraid I disagree with my friend @markhillary and countless others who have described Steve Jobs as a visionary. See for example Mark's piece Steve Jobs Succeeded Against all the Odds (Huffington Post, 6 October 2011).

If you want a visionary from the billionaire college-drop-out class of 1955, Bill Gates is your man. A computer in every home? A chip in every household device? Computers in schools? Business @ the Speed of Thought? Wiping out polio? Those are the kinds of goal we regard as visionary.

Jobs himself credited Gates' vision. "Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software." (WSJ May 2007)

As Horace Dediu (@asymco) points out, Steve Jobs was not a visionary or a futurist. He just built the future, one piece at a time.

On his own account, he didn't even "put the dots together and saw where they led", as Horace (I think mistakenly) claims. The point of the calligraphy story in his Stanford Commencement address [Stanford University, June 2005] is that "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Lucy Suchman talks about plans and situated actions. Situated action is "living in the moment", which Buddhism calls mindfulness, and Jobs himself called following your heart. (See PresentationZen). There is no grand plan, simply enormous attention to detail.

What he did connect was people and knowledge. @jonahlehrer says his secret sauce was Consilience. See my post From Convenience to Consilience.

That's not exactly vision. But it has a lot to do with what Gartner calls "ability to execute". After Steve's death, Dan Lyons (responsible for the brilliant and funny FakeSteveJobs blog) asked Woz what he thought was Steve's greatest strength. "Everyone else will say vision, and gosh darn that’s important but that doesn’t go anywhere without operational discipline. ... He organized the company to have good tight controls. Watching everything he could — that is operational excellence." (RealDanLyons, 11 October 2011)

Malcolm Gladwell agrees. "Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man." (Steve Jobs Real Genius New Yorker, November 2011) via @ironick

But of course you may disagree. There is always another story.

Constitutional Change

2011-04-29T12:40:00.001+01:00

This post is about the proposed change to the British electoral system, from "First Past The Post" (FPTP) to "Alternative Vote". British electors will have the opportunity to make a choice between these two (and no other) options in next week's referendum. Most of the public arguments both for and against AV have been pretty fatous and feeble, with plenty of ad hominem.

John Kay is a welcome exception. In his latest article A voting system fit to bar Le Pen from power (FT April 27 2011), Kay offers a lucid argument in favor of AV, and makes the following observation.

Britain has an informal system of alternative voting already, whose operation depends on voters making good guesses as to the likely result. This strengthens the case for the formal adoption of AV, but also explains why it would not make very much difference in practice. ... Even if the alternative vote is not the official system, voters will tend to behave as if it were.

John Kay's analysis therefore distinguishes the formal system of voting in the UK (currently first past the post) from the defacto system in use. He suggests that UK voting behaviour already partially reflects an informal conceptual model based on AV, and the proposed change would merely help the formal system to capture the emergent voting behaviour more accurately.

This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to predict the likely consequences of the change, because nobody knows exactly how British electors will adapt their (emergent) voting behaviour to the new formal voting system. Kay is probably correct in predicting that the first order effects of the change will be much less significant than either the pro-AV or anti-AV campaigners have claimed.

One of the arguments put by the anti-AV campaign is that AV is more complicated than FPTP. But FPTP already provokes some people to adopt complicated voting behaviours, and it is not evident that the behaviours associated with AV would be any more complicated than the behaviours associated with FPTP. The point here is that we should look at the total sociopolitical complexity of a given voting scheme, not merely the counting procedure.

There is also a second-order question - whether any given outcome from this referendum makes further constitutional change (e.g. full proportional representation) more or less likely. I have seen some divided opinion about this, but it seems pretty speculative. Some of the campaigners acknowledge that the first-order effects will be pretty small, and they see the current campaign as merely a preliminary battle in a longer-term and more fundamental reform.

To lead people on a journey ...

2011-03-16T09:10:00.000+00:00

#PROMSG @PG_Rule tweeted

1. We have to start from where they are (not from where we are).

and I added three corollaries

2. We have to start from where they really are (not from where they think they are).

3. We have to make our way to where they are (not expect to lead them from a distance).

4. We have to head towards where they want to be (not where we want them to be).

The Power of Principles (Not)

2011-01-31T12:38:00.000+00:00

Discussing The Enclosure of the Commons with @umairh.

@umairh Here's some more stuff we can pimp--oh, sorry, I mean "privatize"--while we're at it. The atmosphere, the oceans, our grandkids. Oh, wait...

In response, I pointed to @owenbarder 's blog Enclosure of the Commons – 21st Century Edition.

@umairh Exactly. That's why fighting back with "open-source"/commons principles is so disruptive--and important.

But the history of enclosure doesn't suggest that it can be defeated by "principles". Wikipedia: Enclosure. Fighting back may be important and disruptive, but surely disruption needs more than principles? After all, people have often defended enclosure with another set of equally plausible principles - protecting the environment, increasing agricultural productivity, or whatever.

Here's a more general question - to what extent have "principles" ever contributed significantly to social or political change. Many key historical changes - examples might include the abolition of slavery in the USA, the enfranchisement of women, and the independence of India - were heralded by strong and principled campaigns. But why were these campaigns more successful than those against enclosure?

We might note that in each case of successful progressive change, there is an alternative explanation for the event, based on socioeconomic and geopolitical forces. For example, with the availability of cheap quinine (reducing the economic dependence on labour of West African origin), slavery ceased to be the cheapest form of labour in malaria-ridden plantations. Such socioeconomic explanations should caution us against regarding the forceful articulation of principles as the sole driver of social change.

In business and engineering, as well as politics, it is customary to appeal to "principles" to justify some business model, some technical solution, or some policy. But these principles are usually so vague that they provide very little concrete guidance. Profitability, productivity, efficiency, which can mean almost anything you want them to mean. And when principles interfere with what we really want to do, we simply come up with a new interpretation of the principle, or another overriding principle, which allows us to do exactly what we want while dressing up the justification in terms of "principles".

The BBC Moral Maze programme this week discussed a recent case of a Christian couple in the UK who refused bed-and-breakfast to a gay couple, thereby offending against recent anti-discrimination legislation. This case appears to involve two conflicting applications of the same principle - tolerance and human rights. Listening to the programme, I thought how easy it might have been for the Christian couple to turn away guests they regarded as undesirable by appealing instead to the principle of security, and how often "security" and "risk" is used as a reason for being unpleasant or unhelpful to other people. I also remembered FakeSteveJobs' recent rant against Christian intolerance, in which he offered the following interpretation of the Good Samaritan story. "Jesus, your big hero, was saying that if you have some rule or conventional wisdom that causes you to do harm to people, violate the goddamn rule." [FSJ December 2010]

So much for principles then.

I have previously written about the over-emphasis on principles within the discourse of enterprise architecture: What's Wrong With Principles, What's Wrong With Principles 2.

Adapt or Die

2010-12-03T14:38:00.000+00:00

Notice anything strange about the following stories?

Universities in Wales told to 'adapt or die' (BBC News 3rd December 2010)

Education Minister Leighton Andrews has told universities and further education colleges in Wales there will be fewer of them by 2013. Those that survive will be those that respond best to the government's agenda, which makes future funding dependent on a willingness to "progress swiftly to merger and reconfiguration".

(By the way, that doesn't sound like adaptation so much as shotgun wedding.)

UK: Scotland 'Adapt or die' warning to companies (BBC News 4 October 1999)

Independent research, commissioned by a leading internet company, suggests small and medium sized (SMEs) firms are failing to invest in new technologies and could be losing their competitive advantage.

Net industry told to adapt or die (BBC News 23 October, 2002)

Britain's broadband industry must start co-operating or face going bust.

Computers upset the workplace (BBC News 17 September, 2002)

In the long run technology does not cost jobs, it moves them around. Humans simply have to adapt or die, to retrain in a way that the pre-computer generations never had to.

In these cases, the "adapt or die" meme comes from an outside agent that is trying to impose or sell some kind of change, rather than emerging from the organization's own sense of its future identity and viability.

Leadership in an empty room

2010-11-15T11:04:00.000+00:00

@ruskin147 asks "Can brain scans tell us what makes a leader? And can a psychometric test really prove that I have zero leadership skills?"

Rory Cellan-Jones, who is the BBC technology correspondent, reports on an ongoing study of the management brain at Reading University (incorporating Henley Business School) [BBC News 14 November 2010]. The researchers are doing a brain scan of a successful local businessman, Sir John Madejski, known for buying Reading Football Club as well as endowing a Centre for Reputation at Henley Business School. (Among other things, the researchers may discover what might motivate Sir John to give more money to the University. Has the ethics committee been consulted?)

Perhaps a brain scan in a laboratory may tell us something about the decision-making style of the subject, but the relationship between decision-making and leadership is an indirect one. If brain scans were going to tell us anything directly useful about Sir John's leadership abilities, we'd need to scan his brain while he was chairing a meeting. Or even better, scan the brains of the other people in the meeting, to measure how much of their attention and respect he commanded.

In his piece, Rory also talks about psychometric testing, which of course suffers from the same limitation - that it provides an assessment of an individual away from a specific organizational context. Of course such exercises may yield indirect clues about how an individual might perform in a given context, but such clues would have to be very carefully interpreted.

A bureaucratic approach to people management might define a fixed profile of leadership skills, including personality traits as well as cognitive abilities, and then attempt to recruit or promote people who fit this profile, as well as facilitating the development of these skills in junior staff. Furthermore, a cookbook approach to team-building and organizational development might have a standard team template, defining the combination of complementary profiles required for a successful team (cf Belbin).

In contrast, a systemic approach to people management would look at how people of diverse abilities and styles can contribute to the emergent leadership and collective intelligence in a complex organization. A lot of attention in the management literature is devoted to charismatic leadership, but the real leaders are those who bring out leadership in other people, whose organizations are full of leaders, in other words people at all levels trying to make a difference.

We get some clues about the paradoxes of leadership by looking at the extraordinary range of personality types who have occupied the White House, Downing Street, Elisee Palace and the Kremlin. Some weighed down by too much understanding of the complexities of the real world, some apparently untroubled by knowledge. Some devious manipulators, some obsessive visionaries, and some who gave the impression of having landed in the job by historical accident. No fixed profile there.

If we want to appreciate Sir John Madejski's leadership skills, we'd need to look at several things in addition to his decision-making style. What does he pay attention to in his organization and environment, how does he make sense of new and emerging stuff, how well does he learn from his mistakes, and above all how does he communicate his insights and vision and energy and enthusiasm to the rest of the organization. In my Organizational Intelligence Primer, I ask some of these questions in relation to Bill Gates and his famous Internet memo; I wonder what a brain scan or psychometric test would tell us about Bill Gates and his leadership style?

See also David Millward, What goes on inside Sir John Madejski's head? (Get Reading, 19 November 2010)

Minor updates 16 December 2012

Old thinking

2010-08-21T21:38:00.001+01:00

@dhinchcliffe and @oscarberg have been reading The End of Management by @alansmurray (WSJ, 21 Aug 2010). Dion points to the rise of "mass collaboration" as the new economic model. Oscar points to Alan's comment that "old methods won't last much longer".

@oscarberg "I see how old mgmt methods fail every day, but mgmt does not see their failures because they're stuck in old thinking."

As it happens, I'm in the middle of rereading The Tree of Knowledge, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. (If you think it's an easy read, then you probably haven't understood it.) What management is capable of seeing is a function of what Maturana and Varela call structural coupling.

@jhagel "Trying to change yr life/the world w/o changing yr own mind inherently doomed to failure." @ethannichtern, Radical Buddhism and the Paradox of Acceptance (Huffington Post, Aug 2010)

Organizational Intelligence after Drucker

2010-08-21T18:59:00.002+01:00

@roundtrip via @gagan_s discusses whether Enterprise 2.0 counts as a technological phenomenon (which Greg calls the Technarian position) or a social phenomenon (which Greg calls the Proletarian position).

Greg offers a third position, which he names Druckerian after Peter Drucker, nominating Drucker and Doug Engelbart as the patron saints of Enterprise 2.0. He quotes Drucker's vision

"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things." Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Chapter 28, The Spirit of Performance, p. 361 (1974)

and suggests that

" ... although both technology and broad bottom-up participation are necessary to achieve the Druckerian vision, neither element alone is sufficient to achieve the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together to achieve the ends of enterprises they choose to affiliate with".

In other words, neither purely technical nor purely social, but sociotechnical. (Many people think of a socio-technical system as a composite system, containing some social subsystems and some technical subsystems. This is a simplification, which can sometimes be dangerously misleading. I tend to see sociotechnical systems as a quasi-fractal decomposition, in which all the subsystems are themselves sociotechnical.)

Twenty years ago, Takehito Matsuda defined organizational intelligence as "the interactive-aggregative complex of human intelligence and artificial intelligence in an organization". In other words, the intelligence is neither located solely in people (human intelligence, group intelligence), nor in software and other technical artefacts, but is an holistic (and indivisible) property of the organization regarded as a sociotechnical system.

(There are some important implications of this, which I need to come back to.)

Greg talks about "the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together". I may be reading too much into this, but I am uncomfortable with the connotations of such words as "noble" and "ordinary", especially in a post that also contains the word "proletarian", because it makes it sound as if re-engineering is something done by the ruling classes to the working classes.

Instead of seeing Drucker's vision of the organization as something that can be engineered, we should instead see it as self-referential. The most extraordinary thing that "ordinary human beings" can do in an organization is to enact this extraordinary and yet vital purpose for themselves. As Steve Hodgkinson says, "Think like a gardener, not an engineer" (via @ITSinsider).

(Politics aside, there are some fairly fundamental questions about leadership and change here, which I need to come back to.)

Related post: Arguing with Drucker (April 2015)

The Paradox of Change

2010-04-04T02:57:00.002+01:00

@PG_Rule @leanstekel @flowchainsensei .

If culture change requires behavioural change, and behavioural change requires system change, where does system change come from? How is system change possible?

@PG_Rule retweets @leanstekel The best way to change and sustain an organizational culture is by first changing and sustaining management behavior ~ Jim Womack newsletter

@flowchainsensei No. Best way to change org culture is to change the system. Implies mgmt change first - but they're in a system too.

@leanstekel systems are man-made; who should initiate change? a system is not an excuse

@flowchainsensei Although, remember the story of the monkeys and the ladder. Sometimes the (mgmt) system has a life of its own. #zombie

@PG_Rule Splitting hairs. Snr management is responsible for designing the system of work. It can't change unless they change 1st

@richardveryard Perhaps the distinction between espoused-system and system-in-use (Argyris) gives you some wriggle room.

@richardveryard so the possibility of change emerges from contradictions within the (management) system

The paradox of change is that a completely closed and contradiction-free system would find change impossible. Advocates of revolutionary change have always understood the strength of the forces maintaining the status quo, and the importance of finding (or if necessary creating) contradictions as seeds of change. I think this is what Marxists call dialectic materialism.

For example, Mao Zedong On Contradiction

"The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes."

For "thing" read "system".

If we turn our attention away from the political systems that concerned Lenin and Mao, towards the kind of management systems that interest Bob, Rob and Grant, what are the possible contradictions that might trigger cultural change and behavioural change and therefore system change?

The most obvious kind of contradiction is often a conflict between values and outcomes, or between policies and outcomes. Perhaps the system is increasingly perceived (from within its own management subsystem) to be struggling to remain viable in the face of hostile events. Perhaps policies are perceived to be not achieving their intended results. (For this kind of contradiction to trigger productive change, it is important for these contradictions to be perceived by the right people. But as we shall see, there are other kinds of contradiction that may be able to trigger change without being consciously perceived or explicitly acknowledged.)

The next most obvious kind of contradiction is that there are multiple conflicting values and multiple conflicting policies. This is almost inevitable within a large complex system or organization. This pluralism creates opportunities for changes to emerge; these changes may not be consciously planned, and may be unwelcome to some or even to all stakeholders. (However this emergent change typically increases diversity, which creates a different kind of opportunity for change. Kevin Kelly's Nine Laws of God include two that are relevant here - Maximize the Fringes and Honour Your Errors.)

A more subtle kind of contradiction is between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. The official understanding of the system (what Argyris calls the espoused theory) always falls short of what is really going on (the theory-in-use). This gap between the official and the actual can provide space in which the most radical and productive changes can start to take root.

Evolution or Revolution 2

2010-03-24T14:53:00.003+00:00

@ceciiil asserts a difference between @oscarberg and @bduperrin in his post E2.0 Evangelists : the Revolutionaries and the Evolutionaries (March 24, 2010).

I'm not convinced by this distinction. Cecil says that revolutionaries believe in disruption and evolutionaries believe in incremental change. But these beliefs are not mutually exclusive. In a simple linear world perhaps, incremental change is unlikely to be disruptive. But in a complex dynamic world, incremental change can often trigger disruptive change. (There is a branch of mathematics called Catastrophe Theory, dedicated to the study of such non-linear phenomena. And Hegelians define dialectics as the transformation of quantity into quality - see for example Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels.)

So I have long argued that the difference between evolution and revolution is largely a difference of perspective. Not either/or but both/and.

The following is an extract from Chapter 5 of my book on the Component-Based Business (Springer 2001).

A sudden change is often described as a revolution. A progressive change over time is often described as an evolution.

Even in biology, the distinction between sudden change and slow change is problematic. If you had been sitting on the seashore many millions of years ago, you might have seen the first sea creatures crawl onto land, and this might seem a sudden and dramatic event, from a human perspective. However, a squid might see this event as relatively unimportant, merely as one of many tentative explorations by a few creatures at the margins of the oceans, or as a fairly routine extension to previous innovations within a large and diverse community of sea creatures.

Many present-day commentators characterize the emergence of computing, or the Internet, or E-Business, as revolutionary. From one perspective, these appear to be previously unseen phenomena, emerging suddenly into public awareness from the obscurity of some other domain. From another perspective, the same phenomena appear to be a natural consequence of a large number of independently planned and executed moves by a large number of engineers, businessmen and others, whose origins can be traced back to innovations made years ago, decades ago, perhaps even centuries ago.

Thus the same phenomenon can be described as revolutionary AND evolutionary at the same time, depending on where you’re standing, and the amount of history you’re prepared to absorb.

If I describe a change as revolutionary, I’m inviting you to concentrate your attention on certain aspects of the change. I want you to see it as a dramatic break with the past, with sweeping implications across a fairly wide domain.

If I describe a change as evolutionary, I’m inviting you to take a different perspective. I want you to be aware of the links between the past and the future, and the extent to which previous patterns and innovations are being adapted and reused.

Some people feel safer with evolutionary descriptions of change, while others feel happier with revolutionary descriptions. As a manager or consultant, I might feel the need to motivate some people, while reassuring others. Sometimes I want to emphasize continuity; at other times, I want to emphasize novelty. At least from a logical point of view, I’m not necessarily contradicting myself if I describe things differently for different stakeholders – although there may be ethical or practical difficulties if the descriptions diverge too greatly.

Related Posts

Evolution or Revolution (May 2006)

Where is the fear?

2010-03-19T09:22:00.005+00:00

@hnauheimer recommended a discussion in the Linked-In Organizational Change Practitioners group. Rauf Aslam Butt had asked why people FEAR to change, and this prompted a number of responses about resistance to change being caused by anxiety, ego, dislike of effort, fear of the unknown, and so on.

I thought it was interesting that we often describe other people as fearful, anxious, reactive, and so on, but never ourselves. WE are rational and THEY are emotional.

Sometimes resistance to change is a perfectly rational response to a flawed or ill-conceived initiative, as my friend Linda Levine pointed out many years ago. Many change programmes in large organizations are not properly thought through, and many large organizations are trying to run several incompatible change programmes at the same time. As Christina Buchanan said in the discussion, we should all fear badly-planned change.

The second good reason to fear change is that the change may get half-way through and then run out of money or trust. (People losing faith when the change gets to that inevitable dip in the middle.) Or there'll suddenly be a new person at the top with a different agenda.

People learn to be apprehensive about change because of accurate observation of what has happened in their organizations and elsewhere. Art Kleiner suggests that "resistance to change occurs not because people fear change, but because they fear the consequences of contradicting the perceived priorities of the core group" (Strategy+Business, April 2010). Rather than complain about "fear", maybe change practitioners should look at addressing the causes of fear. (Perhaps this was the purpose of Rauf's original question.)

When change agents perceive ordinary busy people as fearful or ego-driven, simply because they don't leap with enthusiasm and energy for every half-baked scheme that is put to them, or because they ask awkward questions, maybe there's a certain amount of projection involved. (Psychologists call this transference.) It might seem that the people who are really most anxious about this change and its immediate prospects are the change agents themselves? But that's not the whole truth either.

Following my post Where is the intelligence?, we might ask a similar question about the true location of the fear. Even if the change agents authentically acknowledge their own feelings about the change, and deal with these feelings in a healthy and mature manner, we might wonder if the change agents really owned these feelings, or whether they were sensitively picking up the anxiety embedded in the organization itself. (Psychologists call this counter-transference.)

Unless we are completely emotionally cut off, our feelings inside organizations are strongly connected to the emotional state of the organization as a whole. This applies to feelings such as motivation as well as anxiety, and applies whether we are change agents ourselves or the recipients of change led by other people - often we may be both at the same time.

Change agents should also acknowledge their own contribution to the sum total of fear and anxiety in an organization. One common tactic for change is to create something called a compelling event - a story that attaches fear to the status quo, prodding the organization reluctantly into the future like a herd of cattle. As a consequence of this tactic, many organizations are almost paralysed by the accumulation of would-be compelling events.

But in my opinion, one of the biggest errors of a change agent is to focus attention on the people who are most vocal in expressing anxiety about a given initiative - treating them as if they were the instigators of these feelings rather than merely witnesses to them, sometimes even trying to exclude or avoid them as if this will cause the bad feelings to disappear. But anyone who brings their concerns out into the open is doing you a favour, because these concerns can then be addressed, and the change programme will be better for it. It is the silent ones you really have to worry about.

Linda Levine, An Ecology of Resistance. In Tom McMaster et al, Facilitating Technology Transfer through Partnership (Springer 1997) pp 163-174

Related posts: Passive Adoption (December 2009), Why new systems don't work (December 2009), The Role of the Sceptic (April 2010)

Making Intelligence Relevant

2010-01-18T09:53:00.002+00:00

@richwatson is one of many pointing to a think tank paper called Fixing Intel. The report's primary author, Major General Michael T. Flynn, is the top US intelligence officer in Afghanistan [FT article (html), full report (pdf)].

The report explains how US military intelligence has been rather one-sided, and General Flynn tells us what he has started doing about it. There are some useful pointers here for organizational intelligence in the civilian world, and software industry analyst Richard Watson sees it as a wakeup call for analysts everywhere.

As I see it, the old system was unbalanced in three ways.

1. One-sided activity driving one-sided information gathering

Given that the US troops are targets for a number of specific insurgency tactics, such as roadside bombs, it is perfectly understandable that a lot of interest and attention is paid to protecting troops against these tactics by detecting and defusing the bombs, and identifying and dealing with the insurgents placing the bombs. Thus anti-insurgent activity on the part of US forces calls for information gathering focused on the enemy. As General Flynn explains, "understandably galled by IED strikes that are killing soldiers ... intelligence shops react by devoting most of their resources to finding the people who emplace such devices".

But although this is important, it is not enough. General Flynn makes the important distinction between anti-insurgency (dealing with the enemy) and counter-insurgency (dealing with the conditions in which insurgency exists), and argues that a strategic approach to counter-insurgency calls for a shift of focus - from enemy-centric to population-centric. "Lethal targeting alone will not help U.S. and allied forces win in Afghanistan."

Seen from this perspective, a one-sided emphasis on enemy-centric information gathering appears to be based on the wrong conception of the primary task facing US forces. In his paper on the Primary Risk, Larry Hirschhorn talks about the risk of choosing the wrong primary task.

2. One-sided interpretation

Furthermore, the information is analysed from a particular perspective - limited by location and chain of command, and using traditional "lenses". If the intelligence focus is on identifying and killing the insurgents, then patterns that are not directly relevant to this objective may be missed. There's obviously something wrong with military intelligence if officers "acquire more information that is helpful by reading U.S. newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries".

And while "detecting roadside bombs" is what Treverton would call a "puzzle", understanding the population is more of what he calls a "mystery". [See my post Puzzles and Mysteries.] For such intelligence challenges, it's not about uncovering small but important facts, but analysing more deeply the "vast and unappreciated body of information" that is already available. "Tactical information is laden with strategic significance."

And “the best information, the most important intelligence, and the context that provides the best understanding come from the bottom up, not from the top down,” as General Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, recently stated [Landpower Essay(pdf)].

General Flynn therefore wants intelligence analysts to be more social beings, more extroverted. Hm, not sure about that one.

3. Action is reactive and repetitive - lack of learning

General Flynn again, enemy-centric information gathering and activity is "reacting to enemy tactics at the expense of finding ways to strike at the very heart of the insurgency". He also complains about an intelligence community culture "that is emphatic about secrecy but regrettably less concerned about mission effectiveness". He concludes that "the urgent task before us is to make our intelligence community not only stronger
but, in a word, 'relevant' ".

Thus there is a lack of learning at two levels. For the intelligence community, the feedback loop is one-sided. If secrecy is the primary objective, you can always be criticized for saying too much (errors of commission), but never for saying too little (errors of omission).

As it happens, I was listening to the late Russell Ackoff talking about this distinction in a posthumous radio interview last night [Doing it Wrong]. He was arguing (among other things) that true learning requires paying attention to the "road not taken"

And even in terms of effectiveness, the feedback loop is much clearer when it's a puzzle, because we can measure performance. How many bombs did we detect and defuse, how many did we miss. It's a little more difficult (but by no means impossible) to measure analyst performance in unravelling mysteries.

Meanwhile, the US forces as a whole may be learning a lot of important tactical lessons, but could be failing to learn strategic lessons. "History is replete with examples of powerful military forces that lost wars to much weaker opponents because they were inattentive to nuances in their environment."

From a historical perspective, it is tempting to see the situation in Afghanistan as a repetition of the Soviet experience in the 1980s, and of the British experience in the nineteenth century. But there are some important differences, and potential sources of surprise. Joshua Cooper Ramo, in his book "The Age of the Unthinkable", bigs up Hizb'allah as the equal of Google in the innovation stakes. Afghanistan may not be as stable and isolated as we imagine, nor as tightly connected to other regional issues as the American neo-cons once argued, but it is surely a space where better intelligence could lead to strategic learning.

Summary

from	to
puzzle	mystery
looking for clues	building a map
reactive	proactive
tactical	strategic
analysts are introverted	analysts are extroverted

We may also note the channel by which General Flynn has chosen to make his views public. According to Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell, Defense Secretary Robert Gates saw the report only after it was made public. Although he had real reservations" about the decision to have it published by a private group, Gates "found the analysis 'brilliant' and the findings 'spot on'. ... The report itself is exactly the type of candid, critical self-assessment that the secretary believes is a sign of a strong and healthy organization," he said. [Voice of America, 7 Jan 2010]

Thus Flynn's paper itself and the manner of its publication seems to exemplify the kind of bold extroverted analysis Flynn wants to encourage. Thus it can be regarded as a metacommunication (a communication whose style reflects its content), which when done consistently and authentically is an important element of leadership.

In future posts, I want to look at how intelligence failures like these affect civilian organizations, as well as discussing Richard Watson's parallel with software industry analysis. Comments and contributions and ideas welcome.

Related posts

Puzzles and Mysteries (January 2010)
Linear Thought (April 2017)

Ice Nine

2010-01-08T12:40:00.001+00:00

by Richard and Aidan

Earlier this week, Rachel was on her way to New Zealand via Heathrow. Here's how the interaction of several systems failed her.

1. Thanks to the latest security scare, it now takes two and a half hours to search all the handbaggage and get all the passengers onto the plane.

2. By which time the plane has frozen, and needs de-icing again. That takes another hour.

3. By which time the pilot and co-pilot have already spent so much time sitting on the plane that they no longer have enough flying hours remaining in this shift to take the plane to its destination. So the flight is cancelled.

4. The passengers are asked to return to the baggage hall, collect their checked-in baggage and start the process all over again. But there are many other flights that have been cancelled for similar reasons, and the baggage hall is already full-to-bursting with unloaded bags and frustrated passengers, so Rachel has to wait several hours before her unloaded bags appear on the carousel.

5. Then she has to queue to get onto the next available flight, and the process starts all over again.

By a happy fluke, the next plane Rachel boarded actually managed to take off, and she was on her way to New Zealand, but not before a last-minute search to find enough qualifying aircrew ...

Why does this kind of mess occur? Anyone can look at the whole system and see what could have been done differently. But each system is operated by a different organization, and there is a lack of trust and overall systems leadership.

As readers of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle will recognize, Ice Nine was the name of a fictional crystal that was capable of bringing the whole world to a complete stand-still. Quite an apt metaphor for failed systems then.

Flawed Measures

2010-01-07T10:32:00.000+00:00

Why do something you know is flawed?

Here are a couple of examples that crossed my desktop today.

Anti-paedophile checks 'flawed', admits boss Labour’s controversial anti-paedophile database will not guarantee to keep children safe, the head of the programme has admitted. [Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2010] via @glynmoody and @privacyint

Following my latest complaint that the ongoing OWASP project to identify the Top Ten Security Risks is fundamentally flawed (see previous discussion on my Computing blog) @mcgoverntheory replies "Many contributors to the top ten agreed that top ten lists as a concept are flawed. Its all about helping others move needle."

In both of these examples - I'm sure we could find many more examples of this kind of thing - there is an implicit belief that it is better to do something than to do nothing at all.

At the opposite extreme, we can find the perfectionist strategy that it is better to do nothing than engage in flawed activity. For example, Deming and his followers criticize certain forms of management intervention as "meddling" or "tampering", based on insufficient appreciation of the structure of the system in question, although as I've pointed out (in Reasoning about systems and their properties) such labels are themselves subjective interpretations rather than neutral observations.

The only possible resolution of this dilemma is a willingness to take bold action in the face of uncertainty - accepting the risk that something won't work, taking good precautions to mitigate the risk but going ahead anyway. This is why we need leadership rather than mere management.

Selling the Big Picture

2009-12-14T13:43:00.001+00:00

In my previous post, I asked what Getting the Big Picture meant, and what was it dependent upon. In this post, I shall explore the relationship between the people who "get" the bigger picture and the people who (for whatever reason) "don't get it".

Complexity

Some people think that the difficulty of "getting" the bigger picture is due to a kind of complexity. So to communicate with a broader audience, "we" have to hide the complexity from "them". But does this encourage "them" to undervalue the bigger picture? At what point does a simplistic "big picture" become merely a meaningless and content-free abstraction?

@enectoux people are afraid of complexity. Show EA is NOT complex and you'll get them understand and calm down.
@richardveryard But show people that EA is NOT complex and they'll think they can do it themselves.
@pauljansen But EA is (all) about complexity. If not, it probably is not EA but f.i. Systems Engeneering
@enectoux EAs mission is to deal w/ this complexity, not to throw it in the face of their customers. Otherwise you are useless
@enectoux Look a Wimbledon tennis game, doesn't It seem easy for you? Do you thinking you'll ever be able to return Nadal's service?

Leadership

But there is a deeper reason for my being uncomfortable about the relationship between those who "get it" and those who don't. What kind of authority does "getting the bigger picture" bestow? How do those who get the bigger picture avoid conveying a sense of we-know-best superiority over those whom they are trying to influence?

@pauljansen EA is about Servant Leadership and keeping the right, effective balance between serving and leading
@MartinHowittEA shouldn't be about being superior. there's no long-term model there. We need to focus on helping others realise potential

It is important to remember that even if a lens appears to provide a "bigger picture", this picture is never the only possible one, and should never be regarded as uniquely authoritative. Systems leadership doesn't mean pushing people into accepting the consequences of a picture they don't understand, it means working with them to create a meaningful, rich and well-grounded picture against which to steer a robust course of action.

Social Media and Political Action

2009-12-07T01:48:00.002+00:00

Politicians are fascinated by social media, for several reasons. They are impressed by the apparent contribution of social media to the electoral success of Barack Obama (coordinating local initiative as well as fund-raising), and they are also attracted by the possibility of communicating directly with their supporters.

So I was interested to see the latest Conservative Party experiment in crowdsourcing. The Party has obtained a leaked copy of a government report on public sector IT, and has published it on a website called Make IT Better, with the following statement.

"We want to throw open the process and allow people to contribute their ideas on how policy should be designed. In the post-bureaucratic age, we believe that crowdsourcing and collaborative design can help us to make better policies."

As it happens, I do have some reactions to the leaked government report, which I may cover elsewhere, but what I want to cover here is not what the next government's IT policy should be, but the much more fundamental question "how policy should be designed".

The production of policy is an inescapably political process. In several recent cases, we can see how ministers attempt to steer an uncomfortable path between public opinion on the one hand and expert advice on the other.

Bank bonuses. Banking experts insist that large bonuses are required to keep the banks operating effectively, but popular opinion is largely hostile to this proposition.

Drug classification. Scientists argue that drug classification should be based on the evidence of harm caused by each drug, but politicians fear that this would be politically dangerous and would "send the wrong message".

ID cards, databases and so on. At first, public opinion largely supported such schemes, in the belief that these security mechanisms would provide reliable protection against a range of social ills including illegal immigration and terrorism. However, several highly respected security experts have pointed out the flaws in the government schemes, and have indicated a strong likelihood that the costs will be far higher than the official estimates. Public opinion now seems to be shifting against these schemes.

It would be crazy to say either that public opinion should always trump expert opinion, or that expert opinion should always trump public opinion. And of course "public opinion" and "expert opinion" are not two separate worlds, but there are strong links between them. Thus opinion is rarely simple and consistent, but may contain vigorous disagreement. However, that cannot be an excuse to ignore opinion. Politicians cannot and must not abdicate from this arena.

What's the relevance of social media to this process? There are two important points here.

Firstly, social media provide platforms for self-appointed experts of all kinds to share and attempt to mobilize their opinions. Sometimes these opinions can strike a chord with a broader audience, and feeds into a movement that subverts the established policy - whether by fostering popular suspicion about scientific issues (such as GM crops and mass vaccination), or by mobilizing local opposition to some central funding decision (such as closing a well-loved hospital).

Secondly, governments have traditionally received expert advice from a relatively small elite of professional scientists and businessmen. This has the result of pushing policy in certain directions, often to suit the vested interests of powerful lobbies. But these vested interests are increasingly hard to conceal from the public gaze (thanks in part to social media - think Trafigura), and public opinion can sometimes be roused against these vested interests (as we have seen in the case of bank bonuses). So some kind of crowdsourcing might conceivably offer alternative sources of advice.

There is an important trust issue here as well. Governments are not trusted to spend large amounts of money on IT; anyone who reads the IT press (Computer Weekly, The Register) will be able to quote lots of reasons for this lack of trust. This isn't just an IT issue of course: as Stephanie Flanders, the BBC's economics editor, puts it, "We all believe the savings are there to be had. We just don't trust the government to find them." (Efficiency Trap, 7 December 2009)

Crowdsourcing perhaps offers the possibility of forging a different kind of trust. So the challenge is not to find a better way of generating input for a traditional strategy report, but to find a better way of doing strategy. Politicians may wish to regard certain areas of policy as being purely technological (and not political at all, hem hem), and therefore be willing to delegate these policy areas to "friendly" technocrats, but this is essentially a Faustian pact in which the technocrats (generally senior representatives of the major IT firms) promise to solve all the technical problems in return for a shed-load of cash. Some politicians may have gone along with this kind of deal in the past, but there is an increasingly blatent history of project failure and cost over-runs. (Today it was announced that the NHS IT System is being "scaled back" [BBC News, 6 December 2009].) So there is a major strategic risk here that can no longer be swept under the carpet.

The political challenge for politicians in these situations is to forge a constituency that will support productive action. Not a small club of powerful players, but a broad range of stakeholders with varying levels of power, proximity and interest - and also a wide range of social ties to the people who will vote in the next election. That's the lesson of social media that politicians should learn from Barack Obama: use of the Internet not as a one-sided fund-raising mechanism but as a way to build a new kind of constituency.

And that's where I think the Conservative experiment in crowdsourcing should go - not just collecting negative comments from which to score debating points against the Government, but developing an entirely new way of producing policy out of a genuine conversation with well-informed public opinion. Not easy by any means, but (given the present situation) it has to be worth trying.

A Job Description for Systems Thinking

2009-11-16T07:42:00.001+00:00

Michael Zang asked how to distill the essence of Systems Thinking into a job description?

Michael's question starts with the challenge of "selling" the idea of a Systems Director to an organization with little experience in this area. The job description therefore contributes to at least four different objectives.

1. To create vision and confidence that there is a job worth doing here (in other words selling).
2. To help select a suitable candidate for the job, without unduly narrowing the field.
3. To help determine a reasonable remuneration for the job.
4. To provide guidance and support to the job-holder, without unduly constraining initiative and innovation.

One of the challenges of a "job description" for systems thinking is that the traditional job description represents a fixed decomposition of responsibilities within the organization. The job-holder is required to carry out such-and-such specified activities, and produce such-and-such specified outcomes. This kind of job description comes out of a reductionist view of the organization. (This remains true even if the description is analysed in terms of systems-friendly "behavioural competences". Absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of reductionism, of course, as long as you don't imagine it's the whole story.)

Whereas a System Director will be working on the whole enterprise-as-a-system and the outcomes may be hard to define in advance. Maybe that's why there aren't many of them.

If you are going to have a System Director, that person will be a leader of systems thinking across the organization, not just going into a darkened room to "do systems thinking" with a small bunch of like-minded chums. In fact, you may follow her around the office and not see any activity that corresponds to a text-book description of what systems thinking is supposed to look like, but things just start to shift in interesting and positive ways.

So one way to explore the role of a System Director would be using the VPEC-T systems thinking framework. The "Content" of the job is presumably about system thinking and transformation, but the other elements (especially "Values" and "Trust") are perhaps more about Leadership.

A typical way of running an organization is that there is collective leadership exercised by all the directors together (notwithstanding the obvious fact that some directors will have more power than others) and in addition each director provides leadership in one specialist area. The role of Systems Director implies that one director is a specialist in systems thinking and systems practice, and brings this specialism (the Content in VPEC-T terms) to the general role of leadership.

Simply by opening up a discussion about the nature of leadership roles within an organization, and using a system-thinking lens like VPEC-T to provide a light structure to the discussion, could be a really good way of edging the organization into new ways of tackling complex problems.

The question of Trust is clearly a major issue for any organization. The System Director will draw a decent salary (presumably commensurate with her status in the organization), consume other resources, demand time and attention from her peers, push people out of their comfort zones, and so on, all for the sake of some uncertain and unquantifiable benefits to the organization. There is a much greater commitment here than employing an external consultant, so a considerable degree of trust is required.

But "selling" is not just getting an organization to accept the idea of "Systems Director". What's more important is for the organization to be able to trust the person occupying this role.

And in many unreflective organizations, people are trusted if and only if they fit the organization's stereotype of what people should be like. And yet someone who fits this stereotype may be unable to perform the role. So there is a critical tension to be confronted here.

For me then, what's most interesting about the job description is not the contents of the finished document (competences, outcomes, and so on) but the process of negotiating it - so that it provides a focus for critical discussions between stakeholders and their advisers that will help set appropriate expectations about the role, and start to build the trust that will be required.

Afterword

When this question was put to the Linked-In Systems Thinking group, some of the discussants went to some slightly unproductive places, perhaps responding in advance to positions they imagined others might take. For example, arguing which of the many available schools of systems thinking should be written into the job description. (My own opinion is that it would be better to keep the job description as neutral as possible rather than writing it in the language of any one school in particular.) There was also some (in my view wholly unnecessary) deprecation of people who don't share The Vision, dismissing them as left-brained Cartesians, with a special dig at accountants. One of the enemies of the systems approach (as identified by Churchman) is politics. Even in a Systems Thinking discussion group (which a naive person might imagine would know better) we can see how easily how schism emerges and the debate gets unnecessarily politicized.

Don't Be Surprised ...

2009-08-24T13:35:00.001+01:00

"If you keep doing what you're doing", says @JohnIMM "don't be surprised if you keep getting the same results! Nothing changes without change!"

@j4ngis objects: "Lots of thing changes when you do the same thing. If you every day yell at your wife your marriage will (likely) change."

However, the key phrase in John's remark is "don't be surprised". If you yell at your wife every day, you can be astounded (and thankful) if your marriage nonetheless improves.

By the way, "don't be surprised" is one of those phrases that is very easily overlooked: this is a phenomenon that is often utilized by hypnotists and NLP practitioners. This is how it works. If the hypnotist simply told you "You will be able to relax before your exam", your natural response might be "I doubt it, that's never happened before". But if the hypnotist tells you "Don't be surprised if you should find yourself able to relax before your exam", the statement gets split into two pieces for separate processing. One part of your brain will go "You are wrong, I will be very surprised", while another part of the brain goes "Okay, so I should relax before my exam". Thus you can achieve the desired outcome (relaxation) without actually obeying the hypnotist.

Coming back to the question of change: @j4ngis continues: "purpose of a change is to change a system or keep status quo of (some aspect of) the system." But there's a twist, as Kevin Kelly wrote (as the last of his Nine Laws of God in his book Out of Control): Change Changes Itself.

Or perhaps we should say: "Don't be surprised if change changes itself".

See also Good Ideas from Flaky Sources (December 2009)