@dhinchcliffe and @oscarberg have been reading The End of Management by @alansmurray (WSJ, 21 Aug 2010). Dion points to the rise of "mass collaboration" as the new economic model. Oscar points to Alan's comment that "old methods won't last much longer".
@oscarberg "I see how old mgmt methods fail every day, but mgmt does not see their failures because they're stuck in old thinking."
As it happens, I'm in the middle of rereading The Tree of Knowledge, by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. (If you think it's an easy read, then you probably haven't understood it.) What management is capable of seeing is a function of what Maturana and Varela call structural coupling.
@jhagel "Trying to change yr life/the world w/o changing yr own mind inherently doomed to failure." @ethannichtern, Radical Buddhism and the Paradox of Acceptance (Huffington Post, Aug 2010)
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Organizational Intelligence after Drucker
@roundtrip via @gagan_s discusses whether Enterprise 2.0 counts as a technological phenomenon (which Greg calls the Technarian position) or a social phenomenon (which Greg calls the Proletarian position).
Greg offers a third position, which he names Druckerian after Peter Drucker, nominating Drucker and Doug Engelbart as the patron saints of Enterprise 2.0. He quotes Drucker's vision
and suggests that
In other words, neither purely technical nor purely social, but sociotechnical. (Many people think of a socio-technical system as a composite system, containing some social subsystems and some technical subsystems. This is a simplification, which can sometimes be dangerously misleading. I tend to see sociotechnical systems as a quasi-fractal decomposition, in which all the subsystems are themselves sociotechnical.)
Twenty years ago, Takehito Matsuda defined organizational intelligence as "the interactive-aggregative complex of human intelligence and artificial intelligence in an organization". In other words, the intelligence is neither located solely in people (human intelligence, group intelligence), nor in software and other technical artefacts, but is an holistic (and indivisible) property of the organization regarded as a sociotechnical system.
(There are some important implications of this, which I need to come back to.)
Greg talks about "the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together". I may be reading too much into this, but I am uncomfortable with the connotations of such words as "noble" and "ordinary", especially in a post that also contains the word "proletarian", because it makes it sound as if re-engineering is something done by the ruling classes to the working classes.
Instead of seeing Drucker's vision of the organization as something that can be engineered, we should instead see it as self-referential. The most extraordinary thing that "ordinary human beings" can do in an organization is to enact this extraordinary and yet vital purpose for themselves. As Steve Hodgkinson says, "Think like a gardener, not an engineer" (via @ITSinsider).
(Politics aside, there are some fairly fundamental questions about leadership and change here, which I need to come back to.)
Greg offers a third position, which he names Druckerian after Peter Drucker, nominating Drucker and Doug Engelbart as the patron saints of Enterprise 2.0. He quotes Drucker's vision
"The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary humans beings to do extraordinary things." Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Chapter 28, The Spirit of Performance, p. 361 (1974)
and suggests that
" ... although both technology and broad bottom-up participation are necessary to achieve the Druckerian vision, neither element alone is sufficient to achieve the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together to achieve the ends of enterprises they choose to affiliate with".
In other words, neither purely technical nor purely social, but sociotechnical. (Many people think of a socio-technical system as a composite system, containing some social subsystems and some technical subsystems. This is a simplification, which can sometimes be dangerously misleading. I tend to see sociotechnical systems as a quasi-fractal decomposition, in which all the subsystems are themselves sociotechnical.)
Twenty years ago, Takehito Matsuda defined organizational intelligence as "the interactive-aggregative complex of human intelligence and artificial intelligence in an organization". In other words, the intelligence is neither located solely in people (human intelligence, group intelligence), nor in software and other technical artefacts, but is an holistic (and indivisible) property of the organization regarded as a sociotechnical system.
(There are some important implications of this, which I need to come back to.)
Greg talks about "the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together". I may be reading too much into this, but I am uncomfortable with the connotations of such words as "noble" and "ordinary", especially in a post that also contains the word "proletarian", because it makes it sound as if re-engineering is something done by the ruling classes to the working classes.
Instead of seeing Drucker's vision of the organization as something that can be engineered, we should instead see it as self-referential. The most extraordinary thing that "ordinary human beings" can do in an organization is to enact this extraordinary and yet vital purpose for themselves. As Steve Hodgkinson says, "Think like a gardener, not an engineer" (via @ITSinsider).
(Politics aside, there are some fairly fundamental questions about leadership and change here, which I need to come back to.)
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