Imagine your dismay when this hypothetical product has all manner of dysfunctions that require endless workarounds to compensate for its bad design. Would you settle for that? Not likely. Odds are excellent that in short order you'd be on your way back to the store and standing at the returns desk.
If we won't tolerate badly designed products in our lives (MS Windows notwithstanding), why do we tolerate badly designed businesses? When you consider the relative importance in our lives of that from which we derive our livelihood, we should have far less tolerance for dysfunction at work than we do at home.
The problem is that dysfunctional organizational environments is mostly all we've ever known.
The great anthropologist Edward T. Hall in his classic book The Silent Language said that "culture is largely invisible to its participants." In our lifetimes there has been much research and education and popular awareness of corporate cultures. However, what has remained invisible is the culture of business.
For those who are not conversant with the concept, culture can be thought of as that set of beliefs and assumptions about reality that order all personal and social activities. In the culture of business, there are many assumptions which are never seriously questioned. An example would be how many direct reports a manager should have. The rule of thumb is six to eight. No one questions job costing as a legitimate accounting technique.
As a reality check, i personally know a CEO of a $600M company who has 500 direct reports and the people who invented job costing were very aware that it introduces very serious distortions into understanding how companies make money.
One of the great failings of Western culture is that we tend to fixate on symptoms when systems are dysfunctional (like our health) rather than striving to understand what the underlying causes are that are giving rise to the observable symptoms. Nowhere is this more true than in organizational life.
We have created a massive infrastructure of consultants, writers and thinkers who exhort us to have emotional intelligence, have fierce conversations, understand the five dysfunctions of a team, be one minute managers and remain calm when someone moves our cheese. This infrastructure virtually without exception if focused on treating symptoms and never really asks the hard question, "What is it about the way in which we have designed businesses, leadership and management that is giving rise the the many dysfunctions of which anyone who has spent any time in any kind of organization is intimately aware?"
Asking this question, brings to visibility, the heretofore invisible layer of business culture. It puts us in the uncomfortable position of having to question our most sacred assumptions, to bump off our sacred cows, to throw ourselves into the non-linear space of not knowing.
Most people do not find this a happy experience.
Sadly most of us are willing to accept the corrosive effects of chronic pain of living with dysfunction for the short spike of acute pain of working through the unknown and arriving at a new way of being and doing in which the dysfunctions have disappeared.
We know that organizations cannot remain static. The world is changing rapidly and organizations that fail to adapt and evolve become obsolete and incapable of delivering adequate value to their constituents to survive. The Quality disciplines (TQM, Six Sigma, Lean) are powerful tools and have had a huge impact on our ability to do more with less.
In recent years, the body of work that perhaps has come closest to challenging the norms of business culture has been Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. If you haven't read The Goal
But the issue remains that from a design standpoint, if organizations were better designed, we would not have to deal with the incredible dysfunctions that organizations manifest and I would make the case that we cannot remotely afford the cost of these dysfunctions in what is rapidly becoming a just-in-time world.
How do we attack this problem? The starting point is to realize the assumptions that went into the design of what i call traditional management practice.
The inventors of management as we know it were 19th century intellectuals whose worldview was Newtonian, that is they understood the universe to be a cosmic machine. At some levels this understanding was accurate, but a long way from complete.
We now know the universe is self-organizing and that below it's more superficial machine-like qualities, creation is much more complex and unpredictable. The fact that Complexity Theory has shown us that all systems have a natural propensity to self-organize should help us begin to see how we need to attack the redesign of organizations, leadership and management.
The key elements are how we structure organizational relationships, how we compensate, how we provide feedback, how we educate, train and orient our employees.
If you look at traditional management practice from the point of view of Complexity Theory, it becomes apparent that much of traditional management is designed to prevent self-organization. Surely it makes more sense to design organizations which swim with the currents of how the universe appears to actually work rather than against them.
