Some notes on Bureaucracy

by

In 2005, I wrote – Seth Godin’s quotable Bureaucracy = Death raises a number of issues on why preventive actions are seldom taken by bureaucratic organisations. Seth talks about the effects of bureaucracy on marketing, but it also results in inertia in healthcare, education, et al. I doubt that his idea of a Chief No Officer would be embraced by many companies or institutions.

My belief is that it is the basic nature of managerial organisations that is the prime contributor to a reactive versus a preventive mindset. Why were the levees around New Orleans not maintained? Why is there no funding for programmes such as Canada’s Participaction, but we continue to add more expensive acute care machinery to our hospitals? Why is early childhood education ignored when it is a prime contributor to healthy, contributing citizens? And finally, what can we do to change this?

My belief that bureaucracies are a key contributor to many of our societal and economic problems has not changed in six years, and I’ve picked up a few more references confirming this.

Bureaucracies can amplify psychopathic behaviour, writes David Schwartz, a psychotherapist:

Since psychopaths are usually very smart, they can be quite competent at impersonating regular human beings in positions of power. Since they don’t care how their actions affect people, they can rise to great height in enterprises dealing with power and money. They can manufacture bombs or run hospitals. Whatever the undertaking, it is all the same to them. It’s just business.

Daniel Lemire looks at bureaucracies from a computer programmer’s perspective:

Bureaucracies are subject to the halting problem. That is, when facing a new problem, it is impossible to know whether the bureaucracy will ever find a solution. Have you ever wondered when the meeting would end? It may never end.

Bureaucracies are the enemy of innovation, as they favour self-preservation over change. They are self-serving. They are preventing organizational growth and we don’t need them any longer.

Bureaucracies are (finally) outliving their usefulness, as the economy changes. Valdis Krebs wrote on Adapting Old Structures to New Challenges:

When change was slow, and the future was pretty much like the present, hierarchical organizations were perfect structures for business and government. The world is no longer predictable, nor are solutions obvious. Old structures are no longer sufficient for new complex challenges.

And bureaucracies may be in danger from social media, says Peter Evans Greenwood:

Social media – as with many of the technologies preceding it – streamlines previously manual tasks by capturing knowledge in a form where it is easily reusable, shareable and transferable. What is different this time is that social media is focused on the communication between individuals, rather than the tasks these individuals work on. By simplifying the process of staying in touch and collaborating with a large number of people it enables us to flatten our organizations even further, putting the C-suite directly in contact with the front line.

This is having the obvious effect on companies, eliminating the need for many of the bureaucrats in our organizations; people whose main role is to manage communication (or communication, command and control, C3, in military parlance).

However, some bureaucracies, like the Canadian military,  just keep plugging along, as Mark Federman notes:

On resistance to this report [LGen Leslie’s Report on Transformation].

“[At] a large meeting in December 2010 involving the generals, admirals and senior DND civil servants … it became apparent the tendency was to argue for the preservation of the status quo. … Though grimly amusing, these interactions proved that consensus has not and probably never will be achieved on any significant change.”

We need to reinvent management so that it does not include bureaucracy. Steve Denning suggests dynamic linking as a better alternative to bureaucracy:

Even the best intentions to delight clients or empower staff will be systematically subverted if the work is coordinated through hierarchical bureaucracy. Meshing the efforts of autonomous teams and a client focus while also achieving disciplined execution requires a set of measures that might be called “dynamic linking,” The method began in automotive design in Japan[1] and has been developed most fully in software development with methods known as “Agile” or “Scrum,”[2]

“Dynamic linking” means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the management sets priorities in terms of the goals of work in the cycle, based on what is known about what might delight the client; (c) decisions about how the work is to be carried out to achieve those goals are largely the responsibility of those doing the work; (d) progress is measured (to the extent possible) by direct client feedback at the end of each cycle.[3]

 

Sharing in need of some creativity

by

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.” – G. K. Chesterton – via @albybisy

@umairh – “Being airlifted into a triathlon is probably a pretty bad way to check if your leg’s broken. And similar is true for social contracts.”

Economist – “The Internet has been a great unifier of people, companies & online networks. Powerful forces now threaten it.” – via @dhinchcliffe

Yet it is another kind of commercial attempt to carve up the internet that is causing more concern. Devotees of a unified cyberspace are worried that the online world will soon start looking as it did before the internet took over: a collection of more or less connected proprietary islands reminiscent of AOL and CompuServe. One of them could even become as dominant as Microsoft in PC software. “We’re heading into a war for control of the web,” Tim O’Reilly, an internet savant who heads O’Reilly Media, a publishing house, wrote late last year. “And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform.”

IBM poll of CEOs (2010) found they deemed creativity to be “the NUMBER ONE leadership competency of the successful enterprise of the future” – via @charlesjennings

Image by ibmphoto24

 

 

Communities across the chasm

by

How do you get ideas to spread, especially in organizational communities of practice (often behind the firewall) to encourage innovation?

In Connecting Ideas with Communities, I figured that if you want to foster large-scale change in an organization or even a network, then you would:

  1. Connect the right Mavens with the potential Innovators,
  2. target the Early Adopters via the Connectors, and then
  3. find the Salespeople who will influence the Early Majority.

The oft-quoted 90-9-1 rule, would infer that you only need 1% Creators (Mavens):

User participation in an online community more or less follows the following 90-9-1 ratios:

  • 90% of users are Lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users are Commenters. They edit or rate content but don’t create content of their own.
  • 1% of users create content and are Creators.

This article goes on to disprove 90-9-1, as do others, indicating that as more people get used to sharing online, the figure rises to 10% or more Creators in active communities. This is further reinforced by research that shows that a 10% level of commitment is necessary to spread ideas:

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

One percent just doesn’t give you the necessary critical mass. Going back to my original premise from two years ago, I would think that a good rule of thumb would be to nurture communities of practice from a kernel of Mavens & Innovators plus Early Adopters & Connectors, aiming to engage enough to compose 10% of what will be the actual community. Inside organizations, this is relatively easy to calculate. Let’s say you have 100 nuclear scientists in R&D. These professionals already feel an affinity to their field but they are spread across the world. Some of them get together once a year while others may seldom travel. Knowledge is often kept in silos or sits on a hard drive or in some lost shared-drive folder. How would a newly-minted community manager help this community of 100 share its knowledge?

Ignoring technology selection (which is usually the easiest aspect), I would start to identify the Mavens; those who are respected by their peers for their knowledge and experience. Then I would find the Innovators. Now comes the hard part, getting these two groups to dance. This requires a lot of listening and preparation in order to see and seize opportunities for collaboration. Once something innovative is identified that interests the Mavens, such as sharing conference notes and views on the Intranet with the greater community, then it’s time to get the Connectors to help spread the word, but not to everyone, just the Early Adopters who don’t take all that much convincing. Once this group becomes about 10% of the desired size it’s ready for an open launch. Given the gentle hand of the community manager, a bit of publicity and easy ways for Lurkers to drop in, you may have the roots of a community of practice.

A major difference with this approach is that you don’t try to convince the Majority from the onset. You cross the chasm once you have a bridge, not before.

 

"Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust"

by

Here are some interesting things that were shared via Twitter these past two weeks.

I was called a Bandwidth enhancer by @WallyBock – I like that term!

“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.” ~Peter Ustinov – via @CBurell

“if managers really managed, they wouldn’t need performance consulting. Performance is the managers job.” – @BillCush

(organizational / institutional) “Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust” … Warren Bennis .. an original leadership guru – via @JonHusband

BPM, overpromised & under-delivered: Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes … are the management & anticipation of the unknown – by @pevansgreenwood

Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.

Social & Workplace Learning through the 70:20:10 Lens – by @CharlesJennings

The shift in focus to workplace and social learning by HR and Learning professionals over the past few years is a significant one. And it’s not just a passing phase or fad. It is reflecting a fundamental change that is happening all around us – the move from a ‘push’ world to a ‘pull’ world, and the move from structure and known processes to a world that is much more fluid and where speed to performance and quality of results are paramount.

The Progress Principle: “One of the best business books I’ve read in many years.” … @DanielPink

[Teresa Amabile] Our survey showed that most leaders don’t understand the power of progress. When we asked nearly 700 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators (incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and support for making progress in the work), progress came in at the very bottom. In fact, only 5% of these leaders ranked progress first – a much lower percent than if they had been choosing randomly! Don’t get me wrong; those other four motivators do drive people. But we found that they aren’t nearly as potent as making meaningful progress.

“And no, there was no need for a training department”; comment by @UFrei on Training Departments will Shrink

And why did these experts spend so much of their valuable time coaching us newbies? … And no, there was no need for a training department (our branch had been too small anyway). But there was an attitude to passing on the expertise from the best SMEs to the ‘apprentices’ and this attitude had been sponsored by senior management.

My conclusion: We need Sponsors facilitating learning (something former ‘Training Departments’ could probably do) and motivated Coaches among the experts with the allowance to spend part of their time to develop new expertise.

It's about networks

by

Rob Paterson writes at FastForward Blog on how the UK riots show us that everyone needs to be plugged into the Web to get things done; for good and for bad:

The Police and the community are learning also in real time how to help each other – by also using social media. Citizens are using Twitter and Facebook to help the police have better intelligence and the police are learning this week how best to respond and to monitor.

I noted in a post on Agility & Autonomy that a culture of perpetual Beta is critical. Perpetual Beta means we never get to the final release and that our learning will never stop. Agile organizations realize they will never reach some future point where everything stabilizes and they don’t need to learn or do anything new. Networks are in perpetual Beta too. Unlike hierarchies, they continuously change shape, size and composition. Our thinking needs to continuously change as well.

Euan Semple talks about the power the Web gives us:

This is why I am so passionate about the web and the ability it gives us, to quote David Weinberger, to “write ourselves into existence”, to see the world as made up of connected individuals with the ability to shape their shared future rather than as a mass or ideologically driven herd.

This is also why I feel so motivated to work with the large corporations and institutions that so dominate our modern world. If I can help any of the individuals who make up those organisations to feel a little bit more self aware, a little bit more capable, and a little bit more able to think for themselves and speak for themselves, and to do so as part of networks of others doing the same – then I will have done my job.

I’ve observed that one of the biggest hurdles facing organizations, and people working in them, is to stop thinking of hierarchies and start thinking of networks. Asking, “What do you do for a living?” shows hierarchical thinking, as does “What is your job title?”.  Network-centric questions would be, “What is happening?” or “What are you learning?” or “Who are you learning from?”. No wonder Twitter asks, What’s happening?; Socialcast asks you to share something; Google+ prompts you to share what’s new and Yammer asks, What are you thinking about?

Both Rob and Euan posted their thoughts online today and I have woven them together with my own perspectives. My thinking is a product of my networks. Understanding networks, weaving networks and contributing to networks (the integration of learning & work) are now critical skills in all organizations. Like Euan, I am making progress one person at a time, and there has been progress. I hope it’s fast enough to deal with the increasing complexity and violence.

It’s about networks, stupid, or, as Searls & Weinberger conclude in World of Ends, “We have nothing to lose but our stupidity.

Those hard soft-skills

by

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than traditional hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. Soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and management support. Soft skills for the networked workplace are foundational competencies.

So what are these so-called soft skills?

Participating in a decentralized world/society/economy/business requires trust.

Cooperation – in our work is needed so that we can continuously develop emergent practices demanded by increased complexity. What worked yesterday won’t work today. No one has the definitive answer any more but we can use the intelligence of our networks to make sense together and see how we can influence desired results.

We are moving to an economy that values – emotional intelligence, imagination, and creativity.

Putting yourself out there as a learner first means that you may need to check your attitude before going online.

Acting & Improvisation:

  • Failure is an Option
  • Practice Passionate Followership
  • Don’t Act, React
  • Go with your Gut
  • Don’t be a Blockhead
  • Trust Others
  • Make Others Look Good

Tolerance for ambiguity – is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments.

Noticing: the first step to a learning organization

by

Five years ago I suggested that those who teach will not test:

  • Anyone who teaches is not allowed to test.
  • Those who design the tests are answerable to those who learn and those who teach.
  • Those who teach are only responsible to those who learn and are subjected to tests.

Keith Lyons points out some more fundamental questions about the efficacy of providing feedback:

“Royce [Sadler] observed that “feedback is about telling … that is the problem”. He discussed this dilemma and noted its roots in the transmission model of education. He proposed an alternative model in which teachers were the bridge in students’ journeys from what they know to incorporating information they did not know to develop their knowledge.”

Directed feedback and assessment keep learners in a dependent situation whereas the real aim should be to get learners to notice their own progress.

“Royce argued that ‘traditional’ assessment practices require the assessor to judge a problem, repair the response and give advice. Yet these are a student’s responsibility.  He argued forcefully that Noticing is a key to student flourishing.”

My observations are that trades or craft schools often get students to notice their own progress but this is lacking in general education and corporate training. There is still a culture of dependence, stemming from early school years and copied by so many training and educational bodies:

“The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.  Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.  It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.  The expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions which I enforce.”

Shifting from external to internal assessment reinforces what we already know about social learning from Albert Bandura:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Self-ownership of our learning, taking responsibility for our mistakes, all in a collaborative work environment that helps us learn socially — these are the hallmarks of a real learning organization.

building tolerance for ambiguity

by

High tolerance for ambiguity is becoming an important leadership trait in increasingly complex, networked environments, explains Riitta Raesmaa in Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions. Three factors that can increase this tolerance are:

  1. Systems Intelligence Theory of Esa Saarinen,
  2. Value and Importance of Serendipity (the weak links and the edges),
  3. Value and Importance of Listening.

I had not heard of Esa Saarinen, but here is how it was described (2007):

By Systems Intelligence1 we mean intelligent behaviour in the context of complex systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She experiences herself as part of a whole, the influence of the whole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By experiencing her own interdependence in the feedback intensive, interconnected and holistically encountered environment, she is able to act intelligently … The Systems Intelligence approach is basically about taking [Peter] Senge’s discipline of Personal Mastery and the systems perspective as fundamental, and considering systems thinking only secondary. —Systems Intelligence: A Key Competence in Human Action and Organizational Life

Riitta’s three associations align with our initial work on core skills for our 21st century leadership project.

An example of “intelligent behaviour in complex systems”, is understanding when using a Probe — Sense — Respond approach would be appropriate, as per the Cynefin framework:

Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe — Sense — Respond and we can sense emergent practice.

In Solving Tough Problems, Adam Kahane explains what his colleague at Shell, Alain Wouters, told him about complex situations:

There is not “a” problem out there that we can react to and fix. There is a “problem situation” of which each of us is a part, the way an organ is part of a body. We can’t see the situation objectively: we can just appreciate it subjectively. We affect the situation and it affects us. The best we can do is to engage with it from multiple perspectives, and try, in action-learning mode, to improve it. It’s more like unfolding a marriage than it is like fixing a car.”

Enhanced serendipity can be an emergent property of personal knowledge mastery. PKM increases the chances of serendipitous learning or as Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favours the prepared mind”. Steven Johnson says that “Chance favours the connected mind.”  According to Ross Dawson: “You cannot control serendipity. However you can certainly enhance it, act to increase the likelihood of happy and unexpected discoveries and connections. That’s what many of us do day by day, contributing to others like us by sharing what we find interesting.”

Listening, to others and ourselves, often gets lost in the deadline-driven organizational environment. We really need to listen to the environment. My friend Graham Watt shows that when you rely solely on technology in adapting to complex environments, the result can be death:

In Roland Huntford’s book, SCOTT AND AMUNDSEN, a full account is given of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott’s epic competition to reach the South Pole first. Both parties relied on technologies. However, with the arrogance of so-called civilized societies of the time, Scott believed the Inuit to be savages with nothing to teach, and relied on current technologies as well as the British sentimentality towards animals. They wore Burberry cloth clothing, used gasoline tractors as well as ponies, and forsook dog teams for manly man-hauling of sleds. Amundsen, on the other hand, was a lifelong student of Inuit technologies. His sleds were lighter, he and his team dressed in various phases of Inuit clothing. Amundsen used dogs, a proven source of power in the Arctic, able to curl up and snooze at 50 below, and readily edible. A harsh use of them, but no worse than ponies freezing to death in their own sweat.

In the end, the Inuit-based technologies won, and the Amundsen team returned so comfortably they actually gained weight, and at one point, re-climbed a 1000 foot descent from the glacier in order to have another ski run. Meanwhile, Scott and his party, with admittedly bad weather, perished, Scott’s remaining moments spent penning poignant notes to his and his team’s loved ones. Scott emerged as the perceived romantic hero of the whole affair, instead of signaling the death of imperial arrogance. Ironically, Amundsen, the unbiased user of available technologies suited to the task, was dismissed in British circles as perhaps lacking in feeling.

Thus did glory and icy death trump Aquavit and a thousand years of winter experience.

Roald Amundsen portrait wearing fur skins
Roald Amundsen c. 1923

Learning is social, Design is not

by

Here are some of the things that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@jonhusband – “Noticed in office … article titled “Learning Is Social, Training Is Irrelevant” .. from Training Magazine, November 1997 … yes, 1997 ;-)”

Jack and Marilyn Whalen, the IRL researchers contracted by Xerox to advise it on the ICS project, suggested that training need not take a full year; that it could, in fact, be dramatically shortened. How? By moving the service reps out of their isolated cubicles and bringing them together in shared work spaces, where a group of six or seven ICS staffers would be in constant contact with one another. In this communal environment, the workers would teach each other how to do their respective jobs; sales reps would share what they knew about selling, service reps what they knew about service and so on. And one other thing . . . the ICS workers would take customer calls from day one, putting into practice what they learned as soon as they learned it.

The response to this proposal from the corporate training unit back in Leesburg was a long, anguished wail that could be heard all the way to Texas. But Cheryl Thomas, the manager tapped to head up the ICS project, decided to seek a second opinion – actually, 30 second opinions. She asked the employees who’d been selected to be the ICS guinea pigs what they thought of the idea. To the question of whether or not workers could teach each other, the answer she heard was, “Why not? It’s what we do already.”

NYT: The Auteur vs. the Committee – via @petervan

AT Apple, one is the magic number.

One person is the Decider for final design choices. Not focus groups. Not data crunchers. Not committee consensus-builders. The decisions reflect the sensibility of just one person: Steven P. Jobs, the C.E.O.

By contrast, Google has followed the conventional approach, with lots of people playing a role. That group prefers to rely on experimental data, not designers, to guide its decisions.

The contest is not even close. The company that has a single arbiter of taste has been producing superior products, showing that you don’t need multiple teams and dozens or hundreds or thousands of voices.

What do you do if you don’t know what to do? by @nickknoco

Creation in the wrong place is called re-inventing the wheel. Re-use in the wrong place is called flogging a dead horse.

Valeria Maltoni: People don’t Converse: they Comment. Big Difference – via @raesmaa

Conversation with the right intent, or influence, is about turning together, connecting. Conversation is the opportunity. You don’t get that from commenting alone.

@justsitthere – “Face chaos without hesitation.”

@marksylvester – ‘”I can explain it to you, I can’t understand it for you” via an extremely smart woman we met on Friday.’

Experience-Performance-Reflection

by

The above diagram, by Nick Milton, shows some important aspects of what influences performance [hint: blue]. First, knowledge is the result of information (e.g. learning content) AND experience. Knowledge is directly influenced by one’s own experience. Therefore there is no such thing as “knowledge transfer“. Second, performance is taking action on knowledge. This is what is evident to others in the workplace. They observe what we do. It’s not what we know that is important to others, but what we do with it. In the workplace, what we do with knowledge is usually in a social context. This influences the third key point, that reflection of one’s performance is an important part of the learning process and this is often in a social context as well. Learning from what others do is the foundation of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory:

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”

Nick Milton’s diagram shows the inherent weakness of the pervasive workplace technology called learning management systems. LMS are disconnected from 1) Experience, 2) Performance & 3) Reflection. Their focus is on formal learning (a mere 10% of workplace learning) usually in the form of information transmission. As Jane Hart explains, the LMS is not part of the experience-performance-reflection workflow:

Although the LMS has in recent years become the de facto place to store learning content in the form of courses, it is not the first port of call for a worker when they need to solve a problem – since an LMS is generally a separate, password-protected system, which is not easily searchable and the content within in it is not available in a usable format.

Smart Work starts with an understanding of what is important for the 21st century workplace. It’s not content delivery. We are awash in content. Smart workers need ways to enhance their experience-performance-reflection processes, not have more information dumped into the pipeline.