A richer appreciation of leadership and organisation

What if we tried to maintain a picture of the whole organisation and focus on the interaction between the background and foreground systems?

We could see the texture (the fine weave) of how people, work, and organisation interact.

How might the idea of texture help us to better understand organisational performance?

In 1971, Charles Handy observed that:

Power and influence make up the fine texture of organisations, and indeed of all interactions. Organisations can be looked at as a fine weave of influence patterns to think or act in particular ways.

In a number of disciplines—painting, music, geology, and cartography—the study of texture is a way of seeing an effect produced by combining background (regular) and foreground (irregular) structures. For example, the texture of a piece of music might be characterised by the number of voices or instruments (the background structure) and the relationship between them (the foreground structure). If the background is isolated from the foreground (or the foreground from the background), the overall effect of the music is reduced. 

To some extent, texture is a conversation about form and content and how they interact to produce the whole. For Charles Handy, the parts of an organisation (e.g., functional units and processes) might be considered the background structure against which the foreground structures of power and influence are played out. 

Improving our understanding of the factors that influence performance in our organisations leads us to narrow and isolate our focus. In doing so, we give ourselves the great benefit of controlling and manipulating the outcome, but we also break the connection between background and foreground because when we narrow our focus, we must, by necessity, also exclude information.

Alistair Mant’s comparison of component and integrated systems is useful here. In a component system, like a bicycle, performance can be improved by replacing the parts. Our focus on changing the parts does not compromise the whole system.  However, in an integrated system, like a frog, there is less scope for interchangeable parts because replacing those parts can compromise the functioning of the entire system. When we focus on a bicycle's components, it remains a bicycle, but the same approach applied to a frog will likely end badly for the frog. Different approaches and techniques are required to understand how a frog functions as an integrated system. Our organisations are more like frogs than bicycles.

However, most organisations have built deep within the structures and processes that emphasise the idea of the organisation as a component system—a machine (a bicycle). An organisation is seen as a complicated construction of cogs and widgets to be isolated and manipulated toward improved performance.  

If we work with this view, we might see leaders and managers, for instance, as a particular sort of information processing unit. They manage inputs and generate messages—they are part of the information flow within an organisation that contributes to coordinating activities and achieving goals. Leadership and management become purely a task and process-focused activity. In other words, leaders and managers are just one of many reactive cogs in the organisational machine, dutifully responding in predictable ways to stimuli. 

This view does not sit well with our romantic vision of the heroic leader. Or maybe the heroic leader is the story we tell ourselves to cover the mundane reality of our leadership and management experience in the machine organisation.

We seem to have two competing perspectives. The first is the organisational systems and processes that we use to manage the vast amount of information related to finance, workforce, customers, and competitors. We need to corral and condense this information into a form such that organisations can be led and managed in the first place. The second is that leadership and management contribute to organisational performance over and above information manipulation and activity coordination. Both seem to be correct.

We have a contrast between a view of leaders as a prisoner of events and leaders as catalysts that exert control over the organisation and, thereby, events. The ‘cog in the machine’ versus the ‘great leader’. Unfortunately, we appear to be trapped at the poles with no obvious middle ground for us to traverse— we are stuck between the experience of being a bicycle and a desire to be a frog.  

What if we resisted the need to understand our organisations through dissection? What if we tried to maintain a picture of the whole organisation and focus on the interaction between the background and foreground systems? We could see the texture (the fine weave) of how people, work, and organisation interact. 

The benefit of this approach might be a different perspective that provides greater opportunity for subtly, elegance, and completeness in what we see and do. We might begin to see our organisations with new eyes and allow ourselves to develop practical solutions to those recurring problems of organisational performance that often seem intractable. But there is a trade-off. In maintaining a focus on the whole, we will likely reduce our ability to influence the situation directly, thereby reducing our capacity to control the outcome. We would shape the whole toward an outcome rather than tinkering with the cogs and widgets.

Presently, particularly in large organisations, the influence of leadership and management on individual performance is a fine detail that becomes dominated by larger and more prominent organisational control systems. We control leadership and management by focusing on performance management, accountability and responsibility, task management, and output measurement. 

However, when we do try to focus exclusively on fine-grained systems like leadership and management, we lose sight of the broader context. We focus on the individual leader, emphasising style, personality, and capability. The result is often to overstate the role of individuals and implement our rote solution of providing more ‘training and education’. In 1948, Luther Gulick, reflecting on the administrative lessons of World War II, offered an insight into the extent to which individuals can triumph over an organisational system: Good men seldom survive bad organisation. So, more training is not going to help.

Traditionally, the organisation and the leader have been treated as separate and limited machine components. We tend to discuss the pros and cons of leadership separate from the social and structural context within which it takes place. Rather, we should see these as constantly interacting components of the same system. Leadership and management remain an elemental and essentially human activity. The challenge is to find a way to understand the background elements of the organisational system as well as the foreground activities of leaders and managers. A focus on the texture of our organisations might offer a way forward.