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.
In an editorial piece in a Booze & Co article about the Best Business Books of 2008, the contributing editor, David Hurst, opined:
Psychologist Jerome Bruner contends that individual learning requires the construction of a mental model of reality to make meaning of our lives. In Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1987), he suggested that there were two complementary ways of building such models. The first is the narrative method, or the telling of stories, and the second is the paradigmatic method, or the formation of logical arguments and conceptual frameworks. To learn to manage better, we need to employ both.
Without conceptual frameworks, we easily become addicted to “war stories” and overloaded with vicarious experiences. Unable to distinguish what is relevant to our individual situations, we may simply stumble from fad to fad, mindlessly copying someone else’s best practices. Without narrative, on the other hand, we cut ourselves off from the past, our only database. Indeed, British historian R.G. Collingwood called his field “the science of human action.” The study of history in the corporate world shows how strategies (effective ways of dealing with the world) are developed from competencies (clusters of good habits learned over time, often through a process of guided trial and error).
While every field of professional management tries to codify experience, this will remain a fruitless endeavour until conceptual frameworks are adopted which can offer a big picture to help provide context and piece together the capabilities of an organisation into a work of art.
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