If you collaborate with the occupying forces, you will be shot.
What a perfect representation of real world collaboration and another example of co-existing, seemingly contradictory, dual perspectives.
These days, collaboration technology is enabling new forms of communication and teamwork. As always-on internet access becomes more and more widely available, people are gradually moving from email to other forms of communication and there’s a lot of hype which suggests big things will come from our ability to quickly form collaborative teams and participate concurrently in multiple communities.
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.
This excerpt from Jeanie Daniel Duck’s article in HBR really struck a chord with me.
The problem for most executives is that managing change is unlike any other managerial task they have ever confronted. One COO at a large corporation told me that when it comes to handling even the most complex operational problem, he has all the skills he needs. But when it comes to managing change, the model he uses for operational issues doesn’t work.
“It’s like the company is undergoing five medical procedures at the same time,” he told me. “One person’s in charge of the root-canal job, someone else is setting the broken foot, another person is working on the displaced shoulder, and still another is getting rid of the gallstone. Each operation is a success, but the patient dies of shock.”
The problem is simple: we are using a mechanistic model, first applied to managing physical work, and superimposing it onto the new mental model of today’s knowledge organization. We keep breaking change into small pieces and then managing the pieces. This is the legacy of Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management. But with change, the task is to manage the dynamic, not the pieces. The challenge is to innovate mental work, not to replicate physical work. The goal is to teach thousands of people how to think strategically, recognize patterns, and anticipate problems and opportunities before they occur.
Managing change isn’t like operating a machine or treating the human body one ailment at a time. Both of these activities involve working with a fixed set of relationships. The proper metaphor for managing change is balancing a mobile. Most organizations today find themselves undertaking a number of projects as part of their change effort. An organization may simultaneously be working on TQM, process reengineering, employee empowerment, and several other programs designed to improve performance. But the key to the change effort is not attending to each piece in isolation; it’s connecting and balancing all the pieces. In managing change, the critical task is understanding how pieces balance off one another, how changing one element changes the rest, how sequencing and pace affect the whole structure.
Although a couple of the words used might give you a hint – can you guess when this was written?
The answer is 1993.
How far have we come in more than 15 years? Not very.
In the previous posts, I’ve described how different stakeholder groups tend to hold different perspectives of how their organisation works and the role they play. What are these perspectives? Well, for our purposes, a perspective represents a common point of view held by members of a stakeholder group. In some groups these perspectives have been refined and tested through years of experiential development using common cultural elements like principles, methods, tools, myths, etc..
Consider some typical communities of practice:
Marketing and Communications
Accounting and Finance
Performance Management
Program and Project Management
Product Development
Process Management
Enterprise Architecture
Manufacturing
In each case, members of the community have established more or less formal professional practices which can be applied consistently in different organisational contexts. The level of consistency varies. For example, accounting standards are followed quite closely across a legislative jurisdiction. Business process management practices on the other hand, tend to involve the same general principles in most organisations, but the methods of the practitioners are more varied, less mature and continue to evolve with experience.
When you participate in a community of practice, you tend to see an organisation using the lens of that community with a primary focus upon improving your domain of management and a peripheral view of the stakeholders who depend on upon your community for support.
Some communities see their role as translators and therefore usually have a clearer view of their direct ‘customers’. In the Performance Management community for example, practitioners provide value to the Strategic Management community by relating results from the Operations communities to desired strategic outcomes. The Balanced Scorecard is one such practice within the Performance Management community.
Alignment is also used in this practice, for example in this presentation by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.
I think this is a good start, but it only represents a small part of the alignment story. There’s an underlying logic to the scorecard practice which applies in other alignment contexts too. For those who are looking at adopting a scorecard perspective, I encourage you to consider how your implementation might be used to put in place a much broader platform of governance at the same time.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years trying trying to sharpen my messages which describe the recurring patterns I see in enterprise management.
I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of different management contexts over the years from inside to outside and top to bottom.
I’ve grown to appreciate the dynamic of the ‘organism’ but also frustrated at seeing so many of the same issues reoccur – regardless of whether the organisation operates in a government, not for profit or commercial environment, I see the same kinds of stakeholder groups struggle to work effectively to execute organisation wide initiatives.
Most organisations struggle to improve the quality of communication across stakeholder groups despite the wealth of data and ease of access which technology has delivered. In order to make real progress, management practices will need to evolve and more formally recognise the importance of the communication and ‘translation’ which occurs at the edge of each stakeholder group.
Corporate Governance is one of the drivers which is creating pressure to improve the consistency and traceability of decisions which cross boundaries of responsibility.
Now that Corporate Governance has become more mainstream, I believe the time is right to take this practice into a broader context of evidence based general management.
A good first step is to agree on some of the common intersection points between practice areas – for example where do project management teams interface with teams from the BPM, HR or Finance practices?
It’s easy to do this if you just let the members of these communities create collaboration spaces. Web 2.0 platforms like wiki’s provide an excellent pragmatic, inexpensive way for the facilitation to begin.
Over time, this seemingly undisciplined organic communication network will actually improve the traceability of communication across stakeholder groups and support a more native form of governance.
