#kfleadership Excellent lecture at @TheKingsFund this evening by Professor Michael West. Here are some of my notes.
When he left college West was short of money, so he took a job in the coal mines. Productivity was important to everyone, and the pay at the end of the week depended on the quantity of coal extracted. But there was one thing more important than productivity, namely safety.
In many organizations this would just be lip service. But in the coal mines, safety was taken very seriously, and management actions were completely congruent with this.
West argued that the same should apply in the Health Service. Of course productivity is fundamentally important, but the number one priority should not be productivity but high-quality and safe patient care.
Valuing patients and staff turns out to be good management. West's argument is not merely based on rhetoric, but is supported by data. Patient outcomes and patient satisfaction are highly correlated with staff satisfaction and morale, and these in turn are correlated with staff engagement, which West defined in terms of three things: pride, intrinsic engagement and involvement in decisions. Ultimately this links back to improved productivity.
Someone in the audience objected that productivity must always be the top priority, otherwise you risk running out of money to pay for patient care. West replied that productivity follows from good people management. He agreed that the NHS has a great deal to learn from the private sector, and expressed a hope that private sector expertise (including non-executive board members) would not be limited to the Marketing and Finance perspectives.
West affirmed that the NHS is full of intelligent and highly motivated people, and said that the traditional command and control mode of leadership was such a waste of resource. The key role of leaders is to learn from staff, and to realize the potential of the people.
People at all levels require courage to accept challenging targets - in other words, to strive for things that they won't always achieve. The organization must accept and learn from failure to reach these targets. Blaming people for failure to excel is not only stupid and unfair, it is also counter-productive, because it makes people risk-averse and inhibits them from striving for anything that isn't guaranteed in advance.
Leadership includes the courage to seek unwelcome information - for example feedback that indicates things not going well.
After the lecture, I was chatting to a group from a London teaching hospital about accountability. As I see it, accountability doesn't only mean taking responsibility for the consequences of one's decisions (such as short-sighted cost-cutting) but also taking responsibility for what one chooses to pay attention to. One of the classic examples in Moral Philosophy concerns a ship owner who sends a ship to sea without bothering to check whether the ship was sea-worthy. Some argue that the ship owner cannot be held responsible for the deaths of the sailors, because he didn't actually know that the ship would sink. I think most people would see the ship owner having a moral duty of diligence, and would regard him as accountable for neglecting this duty.
In the current climate, the NHS leadership has a duty to achieve high quality patient care and productivity, and the evidence from Professor West is that this can best be achieved by engaging staff at all levels. Executive boards must surely be held accountable if they neglect to do this.
See also Culture of Fear (Storify, 27 Feb 2013)
The ship-owner example can be found in an essay called "The Ethics of Belief" (1877) by W.K. Clifford, in which he states that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence".
Related post: Ethics and Intelligence (April 2010), Agility and Fear (February 2013)
Updated 28 Feb 2013
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Saturday, February 9, 2013
How Offices Make People Stupid
@benhammersley at #RSAwork talks about the future of office work, and identifies some of the ways that organizations make themselves stupid. The irony is that a lot of these mechanisms were supposed to make offices more productive and efficient, and to promote collaboration and creativity. As Ben puts it
Let's start with open plan offices. As Ben tells the story, these were introduced in an ideological attempt (supposedly originating in North California) to flatten the office hierarchy, to remove barriers between people, and to encourage people and technology to work together in perfect harmony. There are various dysfunctional versions of this Californian Ideology - see my post All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2011).
In practice, various interesting forms of behaviour emerge in open plan offices. Ben notes the widespread practice of more powerful workers grabbing the desks near to the wall, leaving juniors huddled in the middle in a state of permanent anxiety, as if they were antelope anticipating the lion's pounce.
Many offices are designed as semi-open plan, with people huddled in cubicles, but with the constant chance of someone popping a head over the partition.
In some offices, there is a deliberate policy to move people around - sometimes called hot-desking. One of the supposed benefits of this policy is that it encourages workers to constantly develop new relationships with their transient neighbours. For companies whose workers don't spend all their time in the office, this policy also reduces the amount of office space required. However, the uncertainty and anxiety of getting any desk, let alone a decent desk near the wall and away from the more irritating co-workers, might be regarded as a negative factor.
Putting aside the economics and culture and psychological impact of open plan offices, the essential justification is that they promote communication and collaboration. These elements are necessary but not sufficient for productivity and innovation in a knowledge-based organization. Not sufficient because productivity and innovation also depend on concentrated hard work.
However, many offices are not conducive to either productivity or collaboration. @mkonnikova writes,
And the open plan office certainly doesn't help people focus. People are forced to defend themselves, either by doing the serious work outside the office (I find I can usually focus better in a cafe than in the office) or by donning noise-cancelling headphones to signal their unavailability for casual conversation.
Another mechanism that supports superficial communication and collaboration while destroying focus is email. For a summary of Ben's critique of email, see my post Towards the Carbon Neutral Office (Feb 2013).
Besides the technical problems with email, there are also major social problems. For example, there are organizations whose employees feel under pressure to receive and respond to emails at all times. If your boss (or a major customer) sends you an email at the weekend, you may feel obliged to answer. Some people can stand up to this kind of pressure, and ask the boss politely but firmly whether the matter can possibly wait until Monday. Others cave in, and find themselves working extreme amounts of unpaid overtime.
Both open plan offices and email can be seen as a manifestation of a deeper force undermining organizational intelligence, namely hyperactivity. In his book Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992) Albert Borgmann extends the concept of hyperactivity to society as a whole, and defines it as
In many contexts, hyperactivity is literally counter-productive - it impairs productivity. See for example @tonyschwartz 's opinion piece Relax! You’ll Be More Productive (New York Times 9 Feb 2013). And as @ebase tweeted from the #RSAwork event, changing the tempo of communication often improves the quality of communication.
We may find some elements of hyperactivity in organizations with low levels of motivation, where people drag themselves reluctantly to work. But it is perhaps even more common in organizations where talented and successful people are praised and rewarded for exceptional levels of effort and achievement, where everyone appears to be highly motivated, and where behaviour that doesn't conform to the hyperactive norm is regarded negatively. In an otherwise impressive presentation on Netflix Culture Freedom and Responsibility, Netflix indicates that it expects this behaviour.
For more ideas on Organizational Intelligence, please read my Organizational Intelligence eBook.
We have optimized being on top of things rather than getting to the bottom of things.
Let's start with open plan offices. As Ben tells the story, these were introduced in an ideological attempt (supposedly originating in North California) to flatten the office hierarchy, to remove barriers between people, and to encourage people and technology to work together in perfect harmony. There are various dysfunctional versions of this Californian Ideology - see my post All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2011).
In practice, various interesting forms of behaviour emerge in open plan offices. Ben notes the widespread practice of more powerful workers grabbing the desks near to the wall, leaving juniors huddled in the middle in a state of permanent anxiety, as if they were antelope anticipating the lion's pounce.
Many offices are designed as semi-open plan, with people huddled in cubicles, but with the constant chance of someone popping a head over the partition.
In some offices, there is a deliberate policy to move people around - sometimes called hot-desking. One of the supposed benefits of this policy is that it encourages workers to constantly develop new relationships with their transient neighbours. For companies whose workers don't spend all their time in the office, this policy also reduces the amount of office space required. However, the uncertainty and anxiety of getting any desk, let alone a decent desk near the wall and away from the more irritating co-workers, might be regarded as a negative factor.
Putting aside the economics and culture and psychological impact of open plan offices, the essential justification is that they promote communication and collaboration. These elements are necessary but not sufficient for productivity and innovation in a knowledge-based organization. Not sufficient because productivity and innovation also depend on concentrated hard work.
However, many offices are not conducive to either productivity or collaboration. @mkonnikova writes,
In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.(The Open-Office Trap, New Yorker January 2014)
And the open plan office certainly doesn't help people focus. People are forced to defend themselves, either by doing the serious work outside the office (I find I can usually focus better in a cafe than in the office) or by donning noise-cancelling headphones to signal their unavailability for casual conversation.
Another mechanism that supports superficial communication and collaboration while destroying focus is email. For a summary of Ben's critique of email, see my post Towards the Carbon Neutral Office (Feb 2013).
Besides the technical problems with email, there are also major social problems. For example, there are organizations whose employees feel under pressure to receive and respond to emails at all times. If your boss (or a major customer) sends you an email at the weekend, you may feel obliged to answer. Some people can stand up to this kind of pressure, and ask the boss politely but firmly whether the matter can possibly wait until Monday. Others cave in, and find themselves working extreme amounts of unpaid overtime.
Both open plan offices and email can be seen as a manifestation of a deeper force undermining organizational intelligence, namely hyperactivity. In his book Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992) Albert Borgmann extends the concept of hyperactivity to society as a whole, and defines it as
a state of mobilization where the richness and variety of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been suspended to serve a higher, urgent cause(p. 14).
In many contexts, hyperactivity is literally counter-productive - it impairs productivity. See for example @tonyschwartz 's opinion piece Relax! You’ll Be More Productive (New York Times 9 Feb 2013). And as @ebase tweeted from the #RSAwork event, changing the tempo of communication often improves the quality of communication.
We may find some elements of hyperactivity in organizations with low levels of motivation, where people drag themselves reluctantly to work. But it is perhaps even more common in organizations where talented and successful people are praised and rewarded for exceptional levels of effort and achievement, where everyone appears to be highly motivated, and where behaviour that doesn't conform to the hyperactive norm is regarded negatively. In an otherwise impressive presentation on Netflix Culture Freedom and Responsibility, Netflix indicates that it expects this behaviour.
We’re all working online some nights and weekends, responding to emails at odd hours, spending some afternoons on personal time, and taking good vacations.
Someone at the RSA commented that the traditional protection against
this kind of organizational pressure was the trades union. One purpose
for collective representation was not to resist any progress, nor to see
every management initiative as an opportunity to get something in
return for their members, but to act as a voice against unsafe,
unreasonable or unfair working conditions. Maybe it's hard to complain
about the occasional weekend phonecall, but if the boss is making a
habit of phoning staff at weekends, someone needs to tell them that this is not helping anyone achieve greater productivity or
effectiveness.
The trades union has disappeared from many offices, there are various social and political reasons for this, and I'm not going to waste any time campaigning for their reinstatement. But what I think is worth noting here is that some useful feedback loops, formerly provided by trades unions, are no longer operational, and this makes it easier for organizations to spiral into uncontrolled, destructive hyperactivity.
To sum up, there are some interesting relationships between intelligence and physical environment (open plan offices) as well as some interesting relationships between intelligence and virtual environment (smartphones), together with a power structure that fails to protect people and organizations from the worst effects of these environmental factors.
Andrew Armour, What Happened To The Office Of The Future? Ben Hammersley Speaking At The RSA (February 2013)
Bryan Borzykowski, Why open offices are bad for us (BBC Capital, 11 January 2017)
Ben Hammersley, Tomorrow's Work - Why Yesterday's Expectations are Ruining Today's Future (RSA, February 2013)
Related posts: On Working At Home (March 2014)
Updated 4 Feb 2017
For more ideas on Organizational Intelligence, please read my Organizational Intelligence eBook.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
On Agility, Culture and Intelligence
Deal and Kennedy (1982) proposed a model of organizational culture, which depended on two factors, risk and the speed of feedback.
Meanwhile, speed of feedback also affects organizational intelligence. Shorter feedback loops are associated with greater agility and responsiveness, and faster learning, and is a popular meme of the Agile Software movement. Shahzad Bhatti is one of those who emphasizes the link with John Boyd's OODA loop.
So that seems to associate Agile with the upper two quadrants of the Deal and Kennedy model, and OODA with the top left quadrant.
So then what are the cultural implications of Agile for the host organization?
Notes and references
Lisa Crispin, Shortening the Feedback Loop (March 2011)
Ilan Kirschenbaum, What does a butterfly say at the end of the day? (May 2012)
Rune Larsen, Know your feedback loop – why and how to optimize it (Oct 2012)
Thomas Sundberg, Why should you use different technical practises when you develop software? (April 2011)
Places are still available on my Organizational Intelligence workshop, November 22nd.
 |
| Source: Deal and Kennedy |
Meanwhile, speed of feedback also affects organizational intelligence. Shorter feedback loops are associated with greater agility and responsiveness, and faster learning, and is a popular meme of the Agile Software movement. Shahzad Bhatti is one of those who emphasizes the link with John Boyd's OODA loop.
"One of key finding he made was that shorter feedback or iteration loop of OODA with low quality was better than longer or tiring cycle of OODA with high quality. Despite the fact that everyone calls his/her organization agile, this feedback loop is real essense of agility."
So that seems to associate Agile with the upper two quadrants of the Deal and Kennedy model, and OODA with the top left quadrant.
So then what are the cultural implications of Agile for the host organization?
Notes and references
Lisa Crispin, Shortening the Feedback Loop (March 2011)
Ilan Kirschenbaum, What does a butterfly say at the end of the day? (May 2012)
Rune Larsen, Know your feedback loop – why and how to optimize it (Oct 2012)
Thomas Sundberg, Why should you use different technical practises when you develop software? (April 2011)
Places are still available on my Organizational Intelligence workshop, November 22nd.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Notes on the Value of Culture
Following my previous post Meeting of Minds, about the cost of meetings and of the "meeting culture", @j4ngis asked "Would you also consider value of meeting culture?"
There is a more general discussion of culture to be had here. Culture is often blamed when things don't go according to a rational managerial ethos. As Oscar Berg blogged yesterday, Did you ever hear anyone shout "culture failure!"?
But an organization without culture - well, it just wouldn't be an organization at all. Culture is what gives an organization its identity - it is a kind of deeper structure that protects the organization from incoherence, instability and inconsequentiality. Culture tells us how an abstract business model is embodied in a particular organization.
Arjo Klamer identifies several ways of talking about the value of culture. In an anthropological sense,
Edgar Schein identifies three levels of organizational culture - behaviour and artefacts, values, and assumptions and beliefs. [See Wikipedia. See also notes by Ted Nellen.] We can use the VPEC-T lens to unpack and identify these different elements.
An organization has various mechanisms to prevent random changes to the way-we-do-things. Much of the time, these mechanisms are accepted uncritically as part of normal management control - like an immune system that prevents the organization being taken over by destructive memes. @AndreaMeyer calls these mechanisms corporate antibodies. However, when managers themselves want to change things, these mechanisms turn out to be inconvenient obstaces, whose aggregate effect is to suppress innovation.
Vincent Kenny and Philip Boxer describe culture as follows.
The reason why leaders struggle with culture is because there is a creative tension or asymmetry between culture and identity on the one hand, and viability (or effectiveness or survival) on the other hand. This is a critical element of the Asymmetric Design lens, which Philip Boxer describes in When is a stratification not a universal hierarchy? (See also the sociological distinction between structure and agency.) This provides a rigorous framework for reasoning about complex structural change.
Coming back to @j4ngis's question - what is the value of the meeting culture - I guess the key question here is what other cultures (more flexible, less bureaucratic, or whatever) we'd be comparing it with, in what context. What function does this culture serve in the context of this particular organization, and how does it affect the strategic outcomes and energy profile of the organization?
Related posts: Vaccination (September 2004), Meeting of Minds (January 2010), Easier Seddon Done (June 2008)
There is a more general discussion of culture to be had here. Culture is often blamed when things don't go according to a rational managerial ethos. As Oscar Berg blogged yesterday, Did you ever hear anyone shout "culture failure!"?
But an organization without culture - well, it just wouldn't be an organization at all. Culture is what gives an organization its identity - it is a kind of deeper structure that protects the organization from incoherence, instability and inconsequentiality. Culture tells us how an abstract business model is embodied in a particular organization.
Arjo Klamer identifies several ways of talking about the value of culture. In an anthropological sense,
"‘culture’ ... refers to the shared values, stories and aspirations that distinguish one group of people from another (think of a community, an organization, an ethnic group, a nation or a continent). The economic value of culture would be the economic contribution that those shared values make. As the sociologist Max Weber famously argued, the culture of Calvinism may have contributed to the rise of capitalism and the economic growth that came with it. A particular culture may improve economic performance or hinder it. A culture of distrust can seriously hamper the market process. A culture of consensus, such as exists in Japan and the Netherlands, can stifle entrepreneurship but may also be responsible for stability in the event of crisis." [Value of Culture (pdf)]
Edgar Schein identifies three levels of organizational culture - behaviour and artefacts, values, and assumptions and beliefs. [See Wikipedia. See also notes by Ted Nellen.] We can use the VPEC-T lens to unpack and identify these different elements.
An organization has various mechanisms to prevent random changes to the way-we-do-things. Much of the time, these mechanisms are accepted uncritically as part of normal management control - like an immune system that prevents the organization being taken over by destructive memes. @AndreaMeyer calls these mechanisms corporate antibodies. However, when managers themselves want to change things, these mechanisms turn out to be inconvenient obstaces, whose aggregate effect is to suppress innovation.
Vincent Kenny and Philip Boxer describe culture as follows.
"Anyone who works in businesses will have encountered the notion of culture, and the incredible extent to which a culture lives on in a way which defies anyone's attempts to bring about change. It is not only a question of dealing with the issue of anxiety as an individual issue - the whole fabric of the organisation seems to be caught up in the conservation of identity however much change individuals may make." [Economy of Discourses, 1990]Kenny and Boxer go on to talk about "the levels of extreme inflexibility and 'stuckness' which we witness in large companies" and ask "how can we explain the increasing degrees of rigidity and loss of power for self-transformation evident in the invariant identities and cultures of organisations?"
The reason why leaders struggle with culture is because there is a creative tension or asymmetry between culture and identity on the one hand, and viability (or effectiveness or survival) on the other hand. This is a critical element of the Asymmetric Design lens, which Philip Boxer describes in When is a stratification not a universal hierarchy? (See also the sociological distinction between structure and agency.) This provides a rigorous framework for reasoning about complex structural change.
Coming back to @j4ngis's question - what is the value of the meeting culture - I guess the key question here is what other cultures (more flexible, less bureaucratic, or whatever) we'd be comparing it with, in what context. What function does this culture serve in the context of this particular organization, and how does it affect the strategic outcomes and energy profile of the organization?
Related posts: Vaccination (September 2004), Meeting of Minds (January 2010), Easier Seddon Done (June 2008)
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Boosting Business Acceptance
This is the title of an article by Bob Becker (Intelligent Enterprise, August 2004) aimed at the Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence (DW/BI) community.
Nothing wrong with his advice of course; I guess most IT professionals know this stuff (although they may not always practise it consistently).
But feedback of this kind suggests a first order learning process: the business community has some decision-making practices, and the target for DW/BI solutions is to support these practices more effectively. The feedback recommended by Bob enables the IT requirements to be refined and extended, but don't directly address the decision-making practices and their organizational context.
Decision-making is an important aspect of management activity. It is has an economic value that depends on several variables, including significance, scope, complexity, uncertainty and time-horizon (higher paid managers typically engaging with higher-value decisions.) Many decisions are taken collaboratively, involving complex social interaction between decision-makers.
If you want a business organization to accept and assimilate meaningful changes in the DW/BI platform, you have to think about meaningful changes in the organization itself. Roles and responsibilities may have to be realigned. Managers need to learn new capabilities – not just learning to operate the DW/BI systems, but learning to ask more complex questions, interpreting the answers, and integrating this into how they run the business. In general, IT systems may be used to produce a range of effects on the business organization (for example, affecting the visibility of some business processes, or altering the communication/delegation between different locations). But of course these effects are produced not by IT systems alone, but by the socio-technical systems into which IT is embedded. It's the people.
IT practitioners often see people first as a source of requirements, then as a source of resistance.
Business acceptance is all about making effective and appropriate changes to these socio-technical systems. (Among other things, this means users experimenting, adopting and learning, not being coerced.) Designing the technical pieces may be important, but what is more important is giving the users good opportunities to discover better ways of doing their jobs. Thereby enabling the organization to deploy the intelligence of the people together with the intelligence of the tools, to achieve measurable improvements in organizational intelligence. This is a (cultural) change management challenge that goes way beyond simple feedback.
Bob Becker, Boosting Business Acceptance (Information Week, 28 July 2004)
The article focuses on alignment between business requirements and technical solution, and gives a lot of very basic advice about getting feedback from users: find out what they think.One of the more troubling DW/BI maladies is the business acceptance disorder. In layperson's terms, the business community isn't using the DW/BI environment — it's just not a critical component of the business decision-making process. Frankly, this is a frightening diagnosis for project teams. It's impossible to declare DW/BI success if no one in the business has embraced the results of your hard work and best intentions.Becker
Nothing wrong with his advice of course; I guess most IT professionals know this stuff (although they may not always practise it consistently).
But feedback of this kind suggests a first order learning process: the business community has some decision-making practices, and the target for DW/BI solutions is to support these practices more effectively. The feedback recommended by Bob enables the IT requirements to be refined and extended, but don't directly address the decision-making practices and their organizational context.
Decision-making is an important aspect of management activity. It is has an economic value that depends on several variables, including significance, scope, complexity, uncertainty and time-horizon (higher paid managers typically engaging with higher-value decisions.) Many decisions are taken collaboratively, involving complex social interaction between decision-makers.
If you want a business organization to accept and assimilate meaningful changes in the DW/BI platform, you have to think about meaningful changes in the organization itself. Roles and responsibilities may have to be realigned. Managers need to learn new capabilities – not just learning to operate the DW/BI systems, but learning to ask more complex questions, interpreting the answers, and integrating this into how they run the business. In general, IT systems may be used to produce a range of effects on the business organization (for example, affecting the visibility of some business processes, or altering the communication/delegation between different locations). But of course these effects are produced not by IT systems alone, but by the socio-technical systems into which IT is embedded. It's the people.
IT practitioners often see people first as a source of requirements, then as a source of resistance.
We gave them what they asked for, dammit, now let's force them to use it.
Business acceptance is all about making effective and appropriate changes to these socio-technical systems. (Among other things, this means users experimenting, adopting and learning, not being coerced.) Designing the technical pieces may be important, but what is more important is giving the users good opportunities to discover better ways of doing their jobs. Thereby enabling the organization to deploy the intelligence of the people together with the intelligence of the tools, to achieve measurable improvements in organizational intelligence. This is a (cultural) change management challenge that goes way beyond simple feedback.
Bob Becker, Boosting Business Acceptance (Information Week, 28 July 2004)
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