Striving for a common sense view of organisation

How do we understand our organisations, and what must we do to adapt to a changing environment?

For the most part, our ideas about how organisations function once inhabited a common-sense world. There was a time when we could form a mental picture of our work and organisational relationships and map this to what we saw around us. 

The machine analogy of industrial organisation was the dominant mental picture. We were each part of a tightly integrated system of processes. We took in inputs, added some value, and passed our products to the following link in the chain. It was a Newtonian physics view of work – one billiard ball hits another to produce an effect that can be observed, tracked and measured. You could see yourself in the bigger pattern of production.

Increasingly, our knowledge of the organisation is letting the moorings of common sense slip. For instance, billiard ball physics, on which we once relied to explain our organisations, has been replaced by theories of relativity, uncertainty principles, a cat that is neither dead nor alive and theories about strings.

Similarly, we have called on biology to describe our organisations. We could once liken our organisations to common sense pumps and plumbing, but biology now has cells, immune systems, DNA, genomes, and moral issues about life. Our once easily grasped metaphors borrowed from other disciplines can now only be understood in the abstract. 

Reform, change and adaptation are sweeping the public and private sectors alike. The rise of globalism on the back of new information and communication technologies, the collapse of the financial markets through greed and poor regulation, and the increase in consumer expectations driven by a desire for status are all driving organisational reform and change. Our common-sense view of the organisation is crumbling under pressure. Everything has become ‘complex’ and ‘uncertain’. 

To shore up our sense of certainty, business and management gurus are reaching for complicated models to explain how it all fits together. We speak about emergent relationships, networks of multiplicity, small worlds, boundary conditions, the wisdom of crowds and energetic equilibrium. Making common sense of how organisations work from this mishmash of abstract concepts takes time and effort. 

How do we understand our organisations, and what must we do to adapt to a changing environment?

First, we acknowledge that organisations are an agglomeration of people and relationships that are arranged in such a way as to produce islands of stability in an otherwise chaotic world. 
Recent management theory draws heavily on the analogies complexity theory to explain ‘self-organisation’ and ‘emergence’ in organisations. The analogies used include flocking birds spontaneously reshaping their group in response to changes in wind, the social rules for foraging ants, and the shared outcomes that emerge from individual termites following a few simple rules. The list goes on.   

However, as interesting as these examples are (and many are fascinating), people are not birds, termites or starfish. We are human. Our common-sense view of the world should be human-centric rather than bird- or bee-centric. It should draw on the strengths and weaknesses of humans working in groups. 

Uncertainty and complexity are not ‘new’ ideas. As the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted, the objective of all human groups remains straightforward:

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. 

The way we organise gives us the means to make sense of uncertainty. It is a common sense view of the world and our interaction. If that view no longer makes sense, we need a new way to think about the world from which a new organisation will follow.  

Today’s organisational structures and processes give us a false sense of solidity and certainty. However, if we are to continue to survive the turbulence of uncertainty, we must be prepared to change—sometimes incrementally, sometimes radically. This is not a complex idea.

Organisationally, we could be better at change. Widespread evidence that organisational change is effective is difficult to find. It is simpler to find evidence that organisational change often fails. More often than not, when leaders initiate change, they tend to manage the organisation toward ‘no net gain’. So, there is a reason why the workforce is apathetic when confronted with a ‘new’ reform agenda.   

Two alternatives for those undertaking fundamental organisational reform share a common starting point—human behaviour. We can take the view that many people of goodwill and intent in the organisation genuinely desire reform, or we can take the opposite view. The choice of starting point determines the method and approach. However, shared by each perspective, there should also be a clear acknowledgement that in the face of uncertainty, many seek the stability of known structure and routine. This does not make them ‘bad’, ' obstructionist’ or ‘lazy’—it makes them people.

So, the options for leaders initiating change seem to be to manage the reform program toward inevitable failure while doing the minimum harm or to take the time to learn from repeated failure and work with the social forces that shape behaviour in organisations to bring about change over time. 

The first requires no thought whatsoever. 

The second requires us to reconsider our starting assumptions about people, work and organisation. It requires us to understand what it is to be people at work and in organisations. 

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that:

The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and the transfer of old words to new objects. 

We need more of this if we are to retain a common sense view of the world of work and organisation. 

It might be simpler than we are making it out to be. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

Sources:

Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950 

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Waldo, 1813, can be found here.  

Photo credit:

Photo by t.klick - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License