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It starts with perception. From the ends of our hair blowing in the wind to the soles of our feet feeling their way over shaky ground, we survive as an organism because we accurately record the sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of our environment. We work those perceptions into our systems: neural, digestive, pulmonary, and the others.
To thrive as an organism, we have to work those perceptions into more abstract and complex behavioral systems: problem-solving and decision making.
To thrive as a species, we have to share. Sometimes, we're good at sharing for mutual benefit.
To thrive as a professional, you have to answer some basic,
practical questions:
What works?
How well is it working?
How do you know?
To answer those questions well, you need good information. To get it, you're going to have to share, and sometimes, we're not good at sharing for mutual benefit.
When we share, we make a clear distinction between perception from nature:
it rained
on my flowers
a car sped straight toward
me
perception from humans
you won't
be sexy unless you buy my product
you won't be successful
unless you fund my project
Now apply these ideas to organizations. To thrive, organizations made of people must share not only data -- words, numbers, images -- but also interpretations and analysis of that data. This terrific, beautiful idea flat out doesn't work in practice because of two phenomena:
Human-processed data can be wrong in a way that natural data cannot. A cloud cannot be wrong. It can lead you to a wrong conclusion -- that it will rain -- but that's my point.
Humans misinterpret and mis-analyze data, which makes the interpretation and analysis bad.
I boldfaced those words because I want to emphasize the moral aspect. When we have behavioral options, we generally consider good the ones that tend to help us survive as an organism and as a species; those that don't help, we consider bad. Hugging is good. Hugging to death is bad.
Yet look what's happening in our organizations. Most share two
common structural principles:
top-down authority in a
pyramid structure
information hoarded by
default and distributed on a need-to-know basis
Just think if our bodies ran like that. The brain would say to the hand: Listen, I'm really busy right now reaching to that high pantry shelf and I can't deal with the fact that you're touching a burning stove. Why don't you, the other hand, and both feet form a committee and report back to me in a week or so?
Bashing is too easy and it has been done too well by others, many of whom have clearly superior alternatives that will never work. Instead, I'm pointing out two structural principles that new media challenges, not to bash the organization but to help you understand what's at stake and why change will be so hard.
We aren't talking about fancy typewriters for the secretaries. We are talking about organizations that neither look nor act like the ones we're used to because many jobs will no longer be tied to a common place of work. Just as the Industrial Age brought us in from the farms and villages to gather around the factory, so the Digital Age will send us back out to our wired villages. Where we physically reside won't matter as much.
When I was a child, my father worked for Gulf Oil Corporation,
one of the world's largest petroleum and petrochemical companies. I was eighteen
before I ever went into 1) a store that sold alcohol, 2) a church that wasn't
Lutheran, and 3) a gas station that wasn't Gulf. By the time Gulf went away
(Chevron bought the drilling rights, assumed the pension liabilities, and threw
away the rest), my father had retired. He worked his whole career for one
corporation -- it seemed so large and so rich -- as many breadwinners in Western
New York spent their lives at the steel mill. Like my father, they believed that
momma and daddy company would always be there and would always take care of
them.
There are a lot of reasons why Gulf went away, but I discovered one of them in 1969. Through my father, I got a summer job in the archives. Just north of downtown Houston is a massive four-story warehouse. I don't know the square footage -- it's in the hundreds of thousands -- but I used to drive my very own little forklift up and down the aisles to search for the correct shelf numbers. You know what was in that huge warehouse? Paper.
Nothing but paper -- decades' worth of paper -- half a century's worth of paper -- that had been generated by the management of that huge corporation. Nobody, it seems, ever threw anything away. They filed it and it ended up in Houston in ten-ream cardboard cartons, miles of shelved cartons.
A fair-sized army of secretaries had typed untold billions of word, often in triplicate. The number of different forms must have run way into five figures. The vast amount that was handwritten was inaccessible because it was too hard to read. You could tell when they switched to acidic paper in the 1940's because it was slowly burning. Some sheets would disintegrate if I tried to pull them out.
My job was to sort through the requests, largely from corporate lawyers and engineers, for an often vaguely identified document. The archive's organizing principle was chronological -- by year. Then it broke into the departmental structure and nomenclature of that era. The handful of permanent archive employees could read the requests well enough, but they weren't about to exert any brain power let alone detecting techniques to find the individual single correct document. I tried to find it, was admonished, and was trained to get more or less in the ballpark, shelfwise, and then grab all the cartons within reach. Thus the forklift. Most of the cartons that went out also came back and had to be re-shelved. Right. They were at least two years behind on the reshelving.
The poor corporate lawyers would send in a request, often from a foreign country, for one or two documents. In return, if at all, and often months later, they would get a few cartons delivered. Ever wonder why corporate lawsuits drag on and on? Can you imagine how much payroll was expended for those law school graduates to rifle those heavy cartons for something they weren't sure was even there? Can you imagine the cost of internal distribution of those heavy boxes from Houston to Kuwait and back?
Clearly, Gulf didn't know what it knew. Its main capital asset, the knowledge, skills, and experienced judgment of its employees, was locked in the filing drawers and brains of the current employees and in the corporate archives in Houston. More importantly, the structure of the organization reinforced and perpetuated an information flow that, if it happened in our bodies, would wipe us out as a species within a generation.
So what did Gulf die of, cholesterol of the archives?
Dana Gardner
Infoworld April 6, 1998
The crown jewels of many companies reside as "wetware"
-- between the ears of skilled workers and in the finely-honed talents and
movements of their bodies, says Marcelo Hoffmann, a senior industry analyst at
the SRI Business Intelligence Center, in Menlo Park, Calif. ...
Our culture of compensation in many ways creates a distrust between the skilled
worker and the company: To safeguard against downsizing or layoffs, workers
hoard, rather than share, their knowledge.
The culture is so steeped in the primacy of the individual that many companies
lack even a simple way beyond the telephone directory to identify who in a
company possesses the most precious skills in particular areas.
"How are you going to convince people to give up what's in their
head?" asks Don DePalma, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, in
Cambridge, Mass. "This is very deep in our personalities."
Ideally, an information system is valuable for the information tools it provides about:
Information on each aspect of the environment is crucial to effective decision-making. Information gathering can be serendipitous or planned. While not all environmental information needs can be identified in advance, it is possible to approach research and information systems planning with an eye to setting up ways of collecting information in an on-going fashion.
If environmental forces cause the company to seek information in a larger context, customer needs and wants focus the attention on the target market. Without information, identifying need and wants is guesswork.
Innovative organizations not only identify competitive actions and offerings, they also consume competitors' products -- in small quantities, of course. For example, to understand the value of a competitor's automobile, it makes sense to drive it for awhile as a customer would and evaluate it in that fashion.
What should we do next? Problem solving depends upon accurate and timely information most of all.
In reality, how are problems often solved? In spite of
the organization's policy,
perhaps even its training program
what people say (and write
in reports) that they do
what people believe they
do
in spite of all that, here's what often happens:
not using any data
not having access to data
using bad data
planning poorly
saying that it's not my problem
excluding key people
overlooking some data
jumping to conclusions
being opinionated
not clearly defining the problem
reworking
making faulty inferences from data
Let's take a small example from every college and university: over the course of four years, how many times does one student have to write or print his or her name? Does his or her name keep changing? Are fraud and impersonation that big a problem? Does the school keep misspelling students' names?
Or can't the school remember them?
Let's take a million-dollar example from a nearby bank. It sends monthly mortgage statements to over 240,000 customers. In October 1997, 11,299 customer phone calls questioned the printed monthly statements and 5,234 calls questioned the EFT (electronic funds transfer) statements.
Think of it this way: the current mortgage statement is ineffective more than 10,000 times per month. What changes would make it more effective?
Whether it knows it or not, the bank has plenty of answers to that question. I can bet the answers will fall into three categories:
conception
and development; writing, document design
production and
distribution; printing, mailing
customers' reception and
reading
The bank has 40 customer service reps (think about the salaries and office overhead along!) to deal with the third category, over which the bank has no control. What about the first category? The bank has total control over it ... in theory, at least.
The 40 service reps have a huge amount of information in their heads about the mortgage statement's exact strengths and weaknesses. It's the kind of information that usability experts crave. It's the kind of organizational intelligence that upper management sometimes doesn't understand. Organizations who do understand it often call themselves learning organizations. That's a good search phrase if you want to learn more.
In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge lays out five characteristics of a learning organization.
People in the organization look intuitively, like a child, at the patterns that connect events, processes, and documents. If the design of the mortgage statement turns out to be what was on the the last screen the computer programmers used when they finally got the programming to work right, then it also turns out that the information technology department has a lot to do with customer service. That may well be news to the folks in IT.
People in the organization continually clarify and deepen their personal vision. To do their jobs well, the bank's 40 customer service reps have developed patience. The customers' real problems force the reps to see reality objectively. The reps are continually redoing the work that the document designers, who at the time had the job title of computer programmers, didn't do well in the first place.
In concrete form, they're concept maps. Again, we have them
whether we know it or not. People in a learning organization continually
question their deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, and images that
influence how they understand and react to the world. What if we turn this fish
into a Ferris wheel or a round of rye bread or a peelable orange?
There's the official vision / mission statement. Then there's the picture of the future that develops from everyone's personal vision. It can't be "told." Every organization has one whether they know it or not. At the bank, is it fair to say that one department doesn't connect to another? That decisions made are very hard to unmake? For example, a mortgage document once designed is frozen even to the tune of a million dollars a year.
Groups are smarter than the individual people in them. An example: in my undergraduate business writing course, I used to give a nasty true-false, multiple-choice grammar test. In ten years, no one got a perfect score; the mean was around 80. Yet every time I gave it, the group got a perfect 100. That is, every question was answered correctly by someone in the room.
Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly
intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.
--Laurence J. Peter
Sometimes, the wisest thing for a leader to do is to stay out of the way.
wicked problems: accountability vs responsbility
skyhooks and cranes: managers as skyhook providers vs managers as crane-makers
Peter Senge's characteristics of the learning organization
The Society for Organizational Learning's Purpose and Principles
A global learning community dedicated to building knowledge about fundamental institutional change. We aim to help build organizations worthy of people's fullest commitment
Transforming an
Existing Organization into a Learning Organization
by Douglas Guthrie
Group Decision Support Systems, 1996
A learning organization incorporates the practice of continually challenging its paradigms and accepted ways of doing things. Built into the structure of the organization is a system that allows for the institutional structures and routinized models of action to be constantly questioned and transformed.
Wicked Problems:
Naming the Pain in Organizations
by E. Jeffrey Conklin & William Weil
Group Decision Support Systems
There is a subtle but pervasive pain in organizations. You can recognize it in such complaints as "How am I supposed to get my work done with all these meetings?" and "We always have time to do things over again, but never time to do them right." It is the pain of expecting things to be one way and repeatedly banging into a different reality. It is the pain of trying to do good work in an environment full of motion and effort but few results.
Mental
Model Musings
by Gene Bellinger, OutSights
turning disruption into innovation
the organization as machine or body?
the organization as system
the organization as part of larger systems
.. which gets us to the knowledge in the 40 reps' heads that would help put some of them out of a job if the bank did a good job of re-designing the mortgage statement. In fact, this customer service group takes up most of a floor in a big building and has a payroll over a million dollars a year.
What would you do if you were the boss at the bank? Keep the reps isolated, make them all take individual grammar tests so you can justify your hiring and promotion decisions? Or make them pool their collective knowledge so you can service the customer better?
If you were the boss, I would say that you had a wicked problem. Here's what happened according to my students who worked at that bank. Turns out that:
no one has ever asked the service reps what might be the cause of the
problem
the
service reps would be happy to identify the four areas on the mortgage statement
that generate almost all the questions
the
service reps make no attempt to sell the customer anything else while they're on
the phone
And, of course, it turns out that ...
the bank had had a committee several years previously. It had studied the mortgage statement thoroughly and decided to keep it exactly as it was.
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