Perspectives in Management

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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Courtesy of the mind boggling material available for free at iTunesU, I was listening to an MIT lecture on Cellular Mechanisms by Gerald Schneider.

The lecture was an introduction to neurons and he started out by describing what he called “the primitive cellular mechanisms”.

These are the systems which all cells share:

irritability (response to something in the environment)

conduction (between parts of the cell)

movement (which requires energy and a structure that enables movement in the environment)

secretion, ingestion, memory, and specialisation

All cells – get that?  Not just neurons, but blood cells and every other type of cell in the human body and every other cell we know of across all organisms. The lecturer used these mechanisms as a way of describing what neurons do and also to compare neurons to other kinds of cells.

Each of the primitive mechanisms are interdependent and each offers a different perspective of the cell ’system’. Together, they represent the holistic organisation of the cell.

In my experience, these same primary perspectives can be seen in much larger scale in all organisational enterprises. The separation of concerns approach is described in an organisational context by many management theorists and consultants including Geary Rummler’s Super System view.

In an organisational context, you can think of ingestion as procurement, secretion as value and waste, irritibility as environmental scanning and responsiveness, conduction as the internal network of management communication, physical movement as well as movement in markets etc.. I also like the possibility that the same recursive pattern might occur at every scale of cellular organisms and organisations. This idea has been explored in detail by the physisist and systems researcher, Fritjof Capra.

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