Thursday, March 01, 2007
The world of paradox
1st March 2007 - The Hindu Business Line
Anticipating, tackling, pre-empting or just coping with external change is the most fundamental issue facing organisations everywhere, far more so the successful ones with strong, well-defined cultures. This is true of the United Nations, a huge multi-national such as GE or Microsoft, or a smaller, entrepreneur-led firm. Despite the reams written on it, there are no clear, foolproof prescriptions for successful change.
The reason, as any honest advisor would admit, is that reality is too complex, while managerial theory is based upon a deterministic, control and prediction-oriented mental model, akin to physical sciences, which just does not fit the organisational reality. This is the one thing I wish the MBA course had taught me a long time ago.
Consider some paradoxes. We know that to deal with uncertainty outside, companies are counselled to be strongly focussed on the inside, on what they do best and to motivate people to align with the goals. Yet, organisations also have to be flexible enough to shift positions when needed, difficult as this is.
Next, internal cohesion is absolutely essential and indeed mandated in a crisis. This usually leads to centralised decision making in competitive times — which is nowadays is practically all the time!
Meanwhile, managers know in their heart of hearts that this can also lead to concentration of power, bureaucracy, arbitrary choices and even avoidable political manoeuvring. This inhibits the participation of the creative and talented people for fear of censure and loss of face, or worse. Yet, textbooks tell us, in all challenging situations, to be innovative, experiment and throw out the rulebook.
At the very least, contrarian thinking and some degree of personal freedom have to be encouraged. So how do these go together?
Take a more familiar case, of the urgent need to increase the customer responsiveness of the business and to sense their needs in advance. Moments of truth are defined as those meeting points of the customer with the front end of the organisation, which are often far away from the headquarters.
Decisions and actions must be taken with least delay and no reference to the bosses at the centre. Yet, how does one do this without creating anarchy and chaos, the nightmare of all organisation men and process-champions?
You can think of a number of such examples from your own experience. I venture to suggest to you that even to be aware of the paradoxical nature of life is beneficial. As a way of seeing life, this perspective, in today's topsy-turvy world, is superior to the traditional linear, binary, problem-solving outlook.
It is a huge shift away from the previous world-view, which treats knowledge as analytical measurement, leading to prediction and control. And it is a significant change from the linear cause-effect logic on which our education and training are founded. It also hits at the root of the notion of the CEO, as the director and master of his destiny is outdated. Life just doesn't work mechanically. Naturally occurring phenomena, be it icicles or rivers under the Antarctic ice cap, or the mango tree in your garden, exhibit an evolutionary character, which is far from the mechanistic model of how organisations work, which has crept into our thinking about management.
One of the most powerful lessons for managers is that reality is a complex system, inter-related with other systems, rather like the Internet, along with the uncertainty of saying anything definitive about it. Everything depends on everything else and all things are inter-connected.
What is more, the whole system is greater than parts put together, unlike a clock or a motorcar. This property is not unknown to science but it is not emphasised enough in the early stages of education because we are too busy seeing life as compartments.
This says two things about ordinary training and knowledge in the 21st Century economy. One, that it cannot be static; and two, if it is to be useful, we must forever erase the line between doing and learning. This is the essence of the science of Action Research or action learning, as described by Harvard professor Chris Argyris. You learn as you do and not in sequence.
(The author can be reached at sr.chander@gmail.com. His book, Manager at Work, develops these themes further.)
Anticipating, tackling, pre-empting or just coping with external change is the most fundamental issue facing organisations everywhere, far more so the successful ones with strong, well-defined cultures. This is true of the United Nations, a huge multi-national such as GE or Microsoft, or a smaller, entrepreneur-led firm. Despite the reams written on it, there are no clear, foolproof prescriptions for successful change.
The reason, as any honest advisor would admit, is that reality is too complex, while managerial theory is based upon a deterministic, control and prediction-oriented mental model, akin to physical sciences, which just does not fit the organisational reality. This is the one thing I wish the MBA course had taught me a long time ago.
Consider some paradoxes. We know that to deal with uncertainty outside, companies are counselled to be strongly focussed on the inside, on what they do best and to motivate people to align with the goals. Yet, organisations also have to be flexible enough to shift positions when needed, difficult as this is.
Next, internal cohesion is absolutely essential and indeed mandated in a crisis. This usually leads to centralised decision making in competitive times — which is nowadays is practically all the time!
Meanwhile, managers know in their heart of hearts that this can also lead to concentration of power, bureaucracy, arbitrary choices and even avoidable political manoeuvring. This inhibits the participation of the creative and talented people for fear of censure and loss of face, or worse. Yet, textbooks tell us, in all challenging situations, to be innovative, experiment and throw out the rulebook.
At the very least, contrarian thinking and some degree of personal freedom have to be encouraged. So how do these go together?
Take a more familiar case, of the urgent need to increase the customer responsiveness of the business and to sense their needs in advance. Moments of truth are defined as those meeting points of the customer with the front end of the organisation, which are often far away from the headquarters.
Decisions and actions must be taken with least delay and no reference to the bosses at the centre. Yet, how does one do this without creating anarchy and chaos, the nightmare of all organisation men and process-champions?
You can think of a number of such examples from your own experience. I venture to suggest to you that even to be aware of the paradoxical nature of life is beneficial. As a way of seeing life, this perspective, in today's topsy-turvy world, is superior to the traditional linear, binary, problem-solving outlook.
It is a huge shift away from the previous world-view, which treats knowledge as analytical measurement, leading to prediction and control. And it is a significant change from the linear cause-effect logic on which our education and training are founded. It also hits at the root of the notion of the CEO, as the director and master of his destiny is outdated. Life just doesn't work mechanically. Naturally occurring phenomena, be it icicles or rivers under the Antarctic ice cap, or the mango tree in your garden, exhibit an evolutionary character, which is far from the mechanistic model of how organisations work, which has crept into our thinking about management.
One of the most powerful lessons for managers is that reality is a complex system, inter-related with other systems, rather like the Internet, along with the uncertainty of saying anything definitive about it. Everything depends on everything else and all things are inter-connected.
What is more, the whole system is greater than parts put together, unlike a clock or a motorcar. This property is not unknown to science but it is not emphasised enough in the early stages of education because we are too busy seeing life as compartments.
This says two things about ordinary training and knowledge in the 21st Century economy. One, that it cannot be static; and two, if it is to be useful, we must forever erase the line between doing and learning. This is the essence of the science of Action Research or action learning, as described by Harvard professor Chris Argyris. You learn as you do and not in sequence.
(The author can be reached at sr.chander@gmail.com. His book, Manager at Work, develops these themes further.)
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