Focus for results
Where you look depends on how you're looking
“We are very largely devoted to doing the wrong thing right. That’s very unfortunate because the righter you do the wrong things, the wronger you become.” — Dr Russell Ackoff 1
Where should you focus to improve organisational results?
The answer ultimately depends on what you think organisations are.
In his seminal book Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan describes how thinking of organisations as machines “has shaped our most basic conceptions of what organization is all about”. 2
He observes that the word organisation is itself derived from the Greek organon meaning tool or instrument, and that:
“No wonder, therefore, that ideas about tasks, goals, aims and objectives have become such fundamental organizational concepts, for tools and instruments are mechanical devices invented and developed to aid in performing some kind of goal orientated activity.” 3
This instrumentality, Morgan says, is evident in the organisations that built pyramids, empires, churches, and armies all the way back to the fifth century BCE. 4
But the metaphor of organisation as machine has become particularly deeply embedded and entrenched over the past couple of centuries:
“However, it is with the invention and proliferation of machines, particularly along with the industrial revolution in Europe and North America, that concepts of organization really became mechanized. The use of machines, especially in industry, required that organizations be adapted to the needs of machines.” 5
So, if you think of an organisation as a machine, how do you improve its results, outcomes, performance?
You drive it harder.
You swap out any broken parts and replace them with new ones.
You tune the organisation up to be more efficient.
You upgrade its control and monitoring systems.
And every so often you redesign and rebuild it.
Sound familiar?
And it sort of worked adequately in the relatively stable, predictable world of the past when life was simpler, more straightforward, and slower changing.
When there was the time to tinker about with different bits of the organisation.
Or, if things needed more of a shake up, bring in a big consulting firm to reorganise, restructure, or reengineer it.
But in today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world of blazingly fast changing technologies, competition, and societal expectations there’s no longer the time to revisit, revise, and roll out new organisation designs because by the time you’re ready to throw the switch, they’re already out of date…
As Russ Ackoff pointed out in the quote above, we need to give up our damaging devotion to doing “the wrong things righter”.
The machine metaphor has run out of steam — and out of time.
But old habits die hard, and countless companies and careers still rest on the machine metaphor’s crumbling foundations.
Whole industries in fact, including management consulting, HR, leadership development, business schools, and IT vendors to name a few.
So many vested interests, living on borrowed time, limping along on legacy logic, failing to get fit for the future because, as Upton Sinclair famously foresaw:
“It’s difficult to get someone to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.” 6
But, as someone even more famous almost said, we will not solve today's complex systemic problems by using the same thinking that created them. 7
So where should we focus for results?
In 35+ years of helping organisations create cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness so they’re fit for an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future, I’ve found the fundamental shift in thinking that’s required is from organisation as machine to organisation as human community.
This was one of the most palpable experiences when I moved to Cambridge (UK) in 1983 to join one of the world’s leading open innovation labs, having previously worked for two machine metaphor based organisations. 8
Before the move, I’d felt like a low-level cog in a rigid, change-averse machine. After the move I felt like a valued member of a community that was doing inspiring work that made a real difference, even though I was still relatively junior.
What was different at the lab was the culture.
The way people acted and interacted was more creative, collaborative, and connected — with clients as well as colleagues.
After I’d been at the lab a few years and had experienced taking on technology challenges, managing project teams, and leading the Digital Systems Group, one of our long-standing clients said to me: “We like working with your people more than our own people. You couldn’t come and make our people behave more like your people could you?”
That fateful question launched the career path I’ve been on ever since.
What I’ve learned since then is not just the importance of culture, but of organisations developing a deep understanding of how their own cultures form, evolve, and adapt.
I was fortunate to have worked early in my journey with Joan Lancourt, formerly of MIT Sloan where, along with Ed Nevis and Helen Vassallo, she conducted extensive research into organisational culture transformation, their findings published in the 1996 book Intentional Revolutions. 9
The research identified seven channels through which people pick up the clues, cues, signs, and signals from which they infer the culture, making sense of “the way we do things round here”.
The seven channels of culture they identified are:
Persuasive communication. This is where “a communicator attempts to introduce a change in the belief, attitude, or behaviour of others via messages that recipients receive with a degree of free choice”.
Participation. “Involvement in defining and shaping the future, allowing for the generation of good ideas and encouraging support and commitment for implementation”.
Role modelling. The “observation of social cues that people are often unaware of observing” in the attitudes and behaviours of influential individuals.
Expectancy. The most subtle of the seven channels, “Expectancy is often referred to as the inducement of self-fulfilling prophecies, in which expected behaviour becomes a reality”.
Structural Rearrangement. A ‘go to’ lever that senior executives have instinctively grabbed when attempting organisational change. It includes various forms of “altering work design, organisational structure, or core processes” such as restructuring, reorganisation, written rules, processes, procedures, policies, etc.
Extrinsic Rewards. Another traditional change lever, often pulled without sufficient consideration of likely adverse side effects, “based on the assumption that the behaviour will not be maintained without extrinsic reinforcement”.
Coercion. Any practice “based on the assumption that people will comply because they see themselves as unable to leave the field in which the power is applied”.
In machine metaphor organisations, channels 5, 6, and 7 get nearly all the attention. 10
However, all seven channels are still sending signals all the time, even the channels not consciously attended to.
As a result, people receive mixed messages.
For example, someone senior may speak eloquently about the importance of teamwork (Channel 1) whilst, at the same time, extrinsic rewards (Channel 6) continue to be based on individual performance metrics. When this happens, people conclude that the sensible way to behave is to stand out as the best individual team player — which, of course, makes no sense whatsoever... 11
Or someone managing a reorganisation project (Channel 5) exhibits attitudes and behaviours (Channel 3) that violate the supposed “organisational shared values’’. When this happens it sends the signal “Some of us are so valuable we can get away with violating the values”. 12
Future-Fit Leadership
The nature of leadership in the traditional machine metaphor organisation was captured succinctly in Harvard Professor John Kotter’s 1996 book Leading Change: “Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen”. 13
In this legacy leadership worldview, an elite few define a future vision and align and inspire others to make it happen. The defining/aligning/inspiring is done by this elite — “the leaders”, and done to everyone else — “the followers”.
Shortly after Kotter’s book came out, my former Society for Organisational Learning colleague Dr Peter Senge put forward a much more future-fit definition: “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. 14
This worldview doesn’t segregate people into those who do leadership and those who have it done to them. Therefore, instead of creating followers, it develops more leaders — or, to be more precise, it develops the organisational community’s leadership capacity.
Kotter did eventually acknowledge this failing in his book’s 2012 update, noting in the preface: “more agility and change-friendly organisations” and “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” are increasingly vital.
Bottom line: There’s no longer time to redesign organisations as machines quickly enough to keep up with the ever more rapidly evolving complexities of our increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
Instead, there’s the urgent imperative to create organisations as communities of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness where sense making, decision making, and action taking are ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
This requires more effective focus on all seven channels of culture to ensure they become, and remain, well aligned. 15
Questions for reflection
Which of the seven channels of culture get the most attention in your organisation?
What signals are influential people, not necessarily in the most senior positions, sending, especially via Channel 3 — Role Modelling, and Channel 4 — Expectancy?
What signals are you personally sending via Channel 3 — Role Modelling, and Channel 4 — Expectancy?
Where are the most significant misalignments between different signals people are receiving via the seven channels in various parts of the organisation?
Russell Lincoln Ackoff (February 12, 1919 – October 29, 2009) was an organizational theorist, consultant, and professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. A pioneer in operations research, systems thinking and management science, this quote is at 09:31 in a speech he gave on systems thinking — direct link here.
Images of Organization (p13)
Ibid (Images of Organization (p15)
Ibid (Images of Organization, p381) Morgan points out that “elements of mechanistic theory appear in the ideas of the Greek atomists of the fifth through third centuries BC such as Democritus and Leucippus”.
Ibid (Images of Organization, p15
Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968) was an American writer, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California. He was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century and wrote nearly 100 books and other works.
Variants of this phrase are often attributed to Albert Einstein. However the closest thing he said that may have inspired this attribution is “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels” in Atomic Education Urged by Einstein (New York Times 25 May 1946), and later quoted in the article "The Real Problem is in the Hearts of Man" by Michael Amrine, from the New York Times Magazine (23 June 1946).
I joined Cambridge Consultants in 1983 having previously worked in engineering at British Aerospace and the BBC.
Intentional Revolutions “A Seven-Point Strategy for Transforming Organizations” (1996)
Some attention is paid to Channel 1 — Persuasive Communication, and Channel 2 — Participation: but typically not that effectively.
Sociologist Erving Goffman calls this behaviour “Impression Management”. It’s typically very prevalent in machine metaphor organisations.
This is what happened at the BBC, where work I conducted with my late colleague Dr Peter Scott-Morgan entered the public domain with the publication of Dame Janet Smith’s report into the Savile Inquiry. DJ and presenter Jimmy Savile was able to get away with sexual abuse because in the BBC the culture of the time, some people — especially high profile on-air ‘talent’ like Savile were “more valuable than the values” (Smith Report p20, p187).
Leading Change (1996)
Dance of Change (1999).
For more on the seven channels of culture, see this previous article.