Whenever you talk about ‘management’ with people, any number of mental models might come to mind. Someone might think from the point of view of individual workers, others from the point of view of a team, or a division, or an organisation or an industry, economy, or, or or…
The perspective determines the context of management and whole languages, practices and tools evolve to help people share and collaborate with a common view of this context.
Even though there’s a lot of specific contexts, I think that underneath the covers, there’s really only two – that of the individual perspective and that of a group.
Usually, when you’re thinking about a group, you stop thinking about the individuals (or sub-groups) and vice versa. This kind of dualism reminds me of the wave – particle dualism in physics. Stretching this analagy further, in physics you use different kinds of filters in order to observe light in different forms. If you look for photons, you find photons, if you look for waves, you find waves – but you can’t see the two at the same time (forgive my pop physics education).
As communication technology enables individuals to become more and more connected, I think we’ll see more of the same dualistic analysis patterns in management. For some contexts, we’ll want to look at ‘waves of people’ while in other contexts we’ll want to see people ‘particles’.
Historically, these two perspectives have been adopted by very different communities of practice. The reductionist, atomic, know every elementary ‘particle’ practitioner and the holistic, loosely coupled, dynamic ‘wave’ practitioner.
More traditional (and ‘credible’) management practices have arisen over many years of decomposition and analysis. The whole line of industrialisation, repeatable process, micro management rolling up to macro management. Six sigma, any form of accounting or finance, audit, technology, manufacturing etc..
The ‘wave’ school comes from a less mainstream mixture of mostly academic and HR fields which focus on studying groups of things such as sociology, economics, psychology, cognitive science, behaviour theory, cultural norms etc..
As communication technology enables the world to become more aware, I think we’ll see more and more interest in wave theories of management and this in turn, will put some more pressure on the reductionists to explain how the particles roll up to wave behaviour. The wave ’surfers’ don’t usually care because the issue of specific individual behaviour is outside the wave context of management – you can’t see it.
True leaders, I believe, somehow have a unifying ability to reach a higher level perspective which includes both the waves and the particles and their amplified success provides a glimpse into the power of this capability. Unfortunately, there has yet to be any example of a leader who is capable of teaching others to be as effective as they are – no matter how many how-to autobiographies they write or entertaining presentations they give.
One thing that we can all do however is to become more aware of the perspectives that you consciously adopt. Management evolution will offer increasing returns to those who can effectively combine groups who hold different perspectives to create larger waves of energy.
In the meantime, I urge you to consider the mental models of management that you and your colleagues use. Now consider the models of those in other groups that you depend on and how you are going to get a good enough shared view to improve the outcomes of the whole organisation.
[...] 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 [...]