Perspectives in Management

Puzzle pieces come in all different shapes and sizes. The one thing they all have in common is that the edge of each piece will touch the edge of another piece. The notion of “top” or “bottom” isn’t embodied in the piece, it’s in the picture that the piece is helping to form.

Looking at the transformation picture in the previous post, each piece represents a concept under management and each conceptual piece is related to another piece. There is a chain of dependency across these pieces which must combine as a network to realise the big picture. Traditional management practices focus on a hierarchical chain of command so the orientation of the pieces were shaped to support the management of functional communities and the delegation of responsibility.

One of the first significant changes to this top down view occurred with the introduction of matrix management structures. These structures began in response to attempts to focus responsibility on certain project, customer, product or regional dimensions of operations and this view required a different configuration of pieces than came out of the traditional functional box. Matrix management was supported along the way by the adoption of more comprehensive and more accessible management information systems and this in turn enabled other more pieces to be joined through integrated enterprise wide management systems.

For many people who experienced the changes to management practices which were enabled by integrated management systems, it seemed a logical step to continue the pattern and formalise collections of pieces to be managed for specific end to end outcomes. Over the past 10 years (give or take 40 to 60 years of consulting theory), the practice of Business Process Management has raised the profile of the horizontal end to end dependencies which span the vertical hierarchies of functional responsibility.

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Previous posts have talked about the need for a picture which helps people to put all the management pieces together for big picture results.

Here’s a small example:

This puzzle describes a common transformation pattern – moving to a multi-channel customer service delivery model. You find this in government and commercial organisations when cost pressures have led to a reduction in service quality at call centres and over the counter offices. Customer complaints increase, performance targets are missed and costs rise further trying to patch up the situation. At some point, a decision is made to invest in new technology which will enable customers to get and provide information without having to deal with human beings from the organisation.

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I had a look at the Google Wave demonstration from the recent Google I/O conference. The full presentation is more than 1 hour long and as each feature rolls on to the next you start to realise that you’re seeing a glimpse into a mind altering way of interacting with people anywhere at any time.

Anyone who still thinks that technology is the major impediment to effective collaboration and cooperation between groups of people is about to have this well worn excuse permanently removed. As often happens, the technology has just taken a step beyond our current ability to assimilate it. It’s not that it’s difficult to use – that’s the easy part because it’s a lot like using the tools we’re already familiar with. The hard part is going to be the move from your current perspective of what ‘co-operation’ means in practice to a view in which there is an ‘always on’, transparent and traceable network of interaction between you and your colleagues.

I don’t think it matters if this is an inherently ‘good’ thing – it’s inevitable. Whether it’s going to be Google’s Wave technology or Microsoft’s or something else, most people (particularly those in the business of management) are driven by a belief that being connected to more people more quickly will lead them to being better informed and hence more valuable.

As someone who has seen previous ‘waves’ of technology becoming mainstream in business over the past 30 years, my sense is that this next wave of communication technology will accelerate the dawning realisation that the major hurdle of collaboration isn’t technology – it’s the challenge of establishing an effective,  shared, or at least ‘good enough’, understanding and achieving mutually accountable agreements between collaborators.

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Taking the metaphor of the alignment puzzle a little further…

Organisations exist to amplify the energies of a group of people and achieve that which individuals alone cannot. The smallest ‘parts’ which make up an organisation are, of course, people. While there are material aspects to an organisation (e.g. physical assets, brand, information, technology etc.), these items are there to serve the people.

While each person offers a unique contribution and holds individual perspectives, management practices are designed to apply and improve similar kinds of capabilities. Personal behaviour and skill sets do need to be managed, but this form of management is conducted in a completely different frame of reference than that of groups of people. I appreciate that these frames may grow closer, but practically, in today’s professional management practices, the focus is on groups of practitioners.

So, in order to solve the puzzle of management alignment, we first need to be able to recognise the different pieces which have to be put together.  Management science and a hundred years of professional and academic insights have contributed countless lists of pieces – representing a jigsaw of millions of pieces – but still missing the one big picture on the front of the box!

Easier access to information and greater collaboration between management groups over the past twenty or so years has resulted in a growing realisation that the future of management rests on our ability to improve and govern dynamic collaboration between groups of people offering collective capabilities.

In an attempt to help describe this landscape, many management communities offer their own version of the picture on the outside of the puzzle box, usually placing their capability at the focal point of the picture. See for example, these big pictures constructed with a specific perspective in mind:

• Managing Successful Programs and Prince2
• The Balanced Scorecard Performance System
• Organisation wide Value Chain Processes
• Cross industry Supply Chain Processes
• Enterprise wide Governance, Risk and Control
• Enterprise wide Architecture

and the list goes on…

In a sense, we’ve moved from the challenge of trying to align all the pieces without having a big picture, to trying to align all the pieces using hundreds of pictures, each of which is just different enough from the other to prevent a single, cohesive, perspective from being established.

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Anyone who has worked on a jigsaw puzzle without using the picture on the front of the box knows how hard it is to put things together without a clear frame of reference. Should this blue and white piece go up the sky part or is it white caps on the water? While this may be challenging, it isn’t all that complex and one of the reasons for this is that you have some familiarity with how jigsaws tend to work and how the pictures represented on the joined pieces tend to be oriented.

Imagine however, if you’ve never heard of a jigsaw puzzle and were presented with a pile of colored pieces of cardboard. In this case, you’d probably be hard pressed even recognising that the bits of cardboard were actually pieces of something bigger let alone being able to anticipate the pieces fitting together to form a big picture. In other words, we rely on a number of related frames of reference to work on a puzzle and if we do this with others, these frames are implicitly shared amongst the team working on the puzzle.

Now consider gathering all the middle managers in a large organisation together in a room. There might be a few thousand people, most of whom would not know more than fifty others. Now, ask the people to arrange themselves in an efficient working pattern which will optimise the use of their skills and access to resources to achieve a big picture result. While you do that, I’ll just complete this 100,000 piece all white jigsaw puzzle in front of me – and I’ll beat you – with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back.

What is missing in the case of the room full of managers is the big picture on the front of the box and a sense of where each person fits. In my experience, you’d struggle to even get people to recognise if they were in the ’sky’ group of the ‘water’ group.  It’s worse than that – you’d most likely get a large number of groups arguing about whether there is in fact any sky or water at all and if there was, whether it was on the top of the picture or the bottom, landscape or portrait.

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