Perspectives in Management

Welcome to Perspectives in Management!

This blog will provide wide ranging  commentary on the various efforts people make to organise and direct groups to achieve holistic outcomes.

In any organisation you’ll find people who participate in one or more communities of practice such as strategy, governance, projects and programs, performance, process, human resources, sales, marketing, products etc.. Each of these communities tends to hold certain common perspectives amongst its members about how their organisations work and the role that their community plays.

At the same time, the whole idea of having an organisation is to achieve outcomes which are greater than individuals could achieve by themselves and this requires an additional perspective – that which integrates and manages other perspectives.

My personal journey of understanding began with a classic engineering based approach to decomposition.  I thought that if you could just know what the various pieces of an organisation were, then you could deduce how the organisation worked. This is a common view held by many technologists and it’s an easy and understandable perspective to hold if your job is to manage ones and zeros and work with the Lego of architecture and technology layers spanning across  the whole organisation.

The more time I spent with the people that the technology was designed to help, the more I realised that the perspective of the organisation held by the technologists was fundamentally different to that of the technology ‘users’.

As my experience broadened, I found that there were similar issues trying to orient the perspective of sales to product development or risk management to business development or human resources to finance.

Great organisations (i.e. great managers) are great at communicating a common intent across these viewpoints and achieving a coherent, integrated, response from each community.

Unfortunately, most organizations (i.e. managers) struggle to communicate effectively outside their own community of practice. Hence the fundamental challenge – how can we improve the alignment of management perspectives and the quality of the dialogue which occurs across community lines.

Today, my own perspective has changed to be more comfortable with the inevitable and on-going challenge of aligning these perspectives to effectively steer an organisation. I’ve stopped searching for the ‘right’ perspective and instead look to facilitate more shared understanding at the edges of these perspectives and clarify the networks of responsibility and communication which exist across the different communities of practice.

I hope that this blog will help to raise awareness and encourage a more informed discussion between the members of management communities.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.