Beyond Management Workplace_6

126 BeyondManagement Alternativestocontrolandcompliance If you learn to manage the MBA way, it can’t be done. Viewed from the top, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between flexibility, or agility, and cohesion. As you must come down firmly on one side or the other, the answer to which is the right side is clear: the one that involves rules, structures, and systems; the side with “control.” Having everything under control and running smoothly—like clockwork—is what’s impor-tant, and compliance creates cohesion. If you have to reign in flexibility and trade off adaptability for the certainty that comes with having con-trol, it’s a small price to pay. You start with structures, plans, schedules, and deliverables, specifying what people must do, when, and how. Then, you overlay this with compliance-oriented practices: performance crite-ria people must meet, ways of measuring performance, and systems and procedures for generating data, so that whoever is in charge knows what is going on and can take appropriate action. Next, add a dash of supervi-sion: to see that workers follow procedures; to monitor data; and to report, upwards, on performance. Finally, you cap the entire apparatus with rewards and penalties, ranging from bonuses to pink slips, to “motivate and incentivize” people to do efficiently what they are required to do. The general principles as well as many of the practices that define high-control management today go all the way back to Fredrick Taylor. Acknowledging that his ideas fitted more comfortably into an age of machine-dominated industrial production and social circles mesmerized by anything claiming to be science, I still can’t explain his conviction that, for the sake of efficiency, profits, and, ultimately, “social progress,” managers could and should treat workers, in Matthew Stewart’s words, as “mute, brainless bundles of animal muscles...subject to minute con-trol from above.”1 Yet Taylor’s ideas received an enthusiastic reception in many quarters and, by the time people began to express reservations, which they did, it was already too late. Nurtured by a rapidly growing band of apostles, who, eventually, would turn into the management con-sultingprofession,thepracticestookonalifeoftheirownandhaveproved incredibly durable. So far they’ve resisted the arrival of post-industrial society and all talk about “new science” and “work–life balance.”2 The practical consequences of Taylor’s model are twofold. People who follow orders, locked into what their superiors tell them to do, focused on rules, requirements, and long-term plans, don’t pay attention to what is actually going on. They don’t need to and aren’t expected to. In fact, it is just the opposite. If your goal is machine-like compliance, you want them compliant, not thinking and acting on what they see and hear. If they’re Insearchoflow-controlorganizingpractices 127 doing what they are expected to do, which is to get with the plan, fol-low the schedule, and deliver on time and on budget, they ought to be functioning—well—on automatic pilot, like machines. Then, they don’t care. It is not that they can’t care or don’t want to care. High-control environments are care-less and when there is no reason for people to care about what they do there are breakdowns. There is also no way to “make them care” without restoring their humanity. They will care, act responsibly, and be accountable for what they do when they are responsible: when they have authority. If you aren’t happy with the status quo—trading off responsibility and flexibility for control and compliance—then people ought to organize themselves. But, for a lot of managers, the fundamental dilemma would be how to get cohesion. Where does it come from? They believe that without the structures that make compliance possible you’re on a slippery slope. Itisthisbeliefand,forthoseatthetop,whohavepower,theadditionalfear that they will lose it, that are the two main reasons why senior managers won’t seriously contemplate knowledge workers organizing themselves. Executives are usually willing to go part of the way. For example, they’ll consider decentralizing decision-making as long as it only involves moving a bit of authority down the hierarchy and changing structures or processes, like taking out layers of the org chart to “flatten” an orga-nization, or altering spans of control. In my experience, however, if a conversation about organizational change moves vaguely toward self-management or self-organizing, they are no longer interested. In fact, they seem to regard the idea as utterly absurd (you get the impression that plan-ning a cab ride to the bottom of the ocean would be less of a waste of their time) and, if there are any questions before you abruptly drop the subject, the one that usually comes up is, “Who will be in charge?” “Who is going to be in charge?” is the catch-22 for anyone seriously interested in organizing practices that chart the territory beyond manage-ment, and it’s a difficult question to circumvent because it means the most to “leaders” at the top with the power to support or thwart change. Rigid structures aren’t compatible with knowledge-work, which thrives on flexibility and adaptability. But, for many, not just senior managers and administrators, running an organization successfully (i.e. “efficiently”) depends on having a small number of people in charge, to do the “plan-ning, coordinating, and controlling,” according to one familiar definition of management. “In charge” means “supported by robust structures plus systems of compliance,” and for “robust” you can substitute “rigid.” Are we doomed to run knowledge organizations badly, in ways that aren’t good for either knowledge workers or their work, that are counter 128 BeyondManagement to reason and good judgment, because of what people fear will happen without high-control structures? As far as cohesion is concerned, is there no alternative to compliance? The answer to the first question ought to be “no” and to the second one “definitely no.” There are alternatives, but it is difficult is to get anyone to consider them, let alone to contemplate putting them into practice. Communitiesofpractice To open the subject of alternatives for discussion I’m going to turn to a topic that has generated considerable interest in recent years: commu-nities of practice, or “CoP” for short. In the hands of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who introduced the idea in a study on apprenticeship and learning-in-action, or through practice, CoP weren’t primarily about management or organizations. The authors were interested in the learning trajectories of workers who learn on the job and how they “move” from “peripheral participants,” at the edge of the work, to being at the center of it.3 But, especially after Wenger began writing more extensively about CoP, people took to the idea as something that management, always on the lookout for ways of improving performance, ought to pay attention to.4 Withthehelpofmanagementconsultants,CoPfellintothelapsofexec-utives at the right time, as they struggled to manage knowledge workers using standard management practices, not knowing why they were strug-gling or what they were struggling with. They wanted high performance from work teams, believing this was desirable and having been told it was possible, but it always seemed an elusive goal.5 And, with “knowledge management” becoming a buzzword, many organizations where commit-ted to some or other large-scale enterprise resource planning initiative, which promised to make data available wherever it was needed across an organization. But getting people to “communicate and share knowledge” was another matter entirely.6 CoP seemed like an answer to everyone’s prayers. Few groups actually qualify as CoP. Those that do meet three condi-tions: their members are actively engaged in the same kinds of practices; they are working together to accomplish something and have a mutual interest in the work and their results; and they have a shared reper-toire of routines, symbols, stories, and actions.7 Usually on the advice of consultants, who sold them as a solution to the perennial problems of team work (and a fast-track solution at that), many organizations began Insearchoflow-controlorganizingpractices 129 experimenting with CoP, expecting to find them everywhere, or to create them, in spite of Wenger’s clear and fairly narrow definition of who quali-fied. To encourage employees to set up CoP, or something similar but with adifferentname,organizationscontinuetoprovidecollaborativetechnolo-gies, like SharePoint sites, and, via their budgets, to allocate real money as inducements.8 Like business process reengineering and for essentially the same rea-sons I wrote about in Chapter 8, unfortunately, CoP have become another oversold management tool. Frankly, without more fundamental changes in the way organizations are run, the potential for CoP to emerge and change the way people work is limited. But this doesn’t diminish the importance of the concept or the practical insights into what makes for good orga-nizing and when, why, and how people self-organize, which come from studying CoP in practice. There are now a number of instructive, documented examples of CoP that formed spontaneously and lasted. Covering a range of professions and practices, from flute makers to insurance claims clerks to technicians who service office equipment, the studies show the communities as liv-ing, breathing, practical examples of people organizing without control or compliance, doing it well and doing good work because they organize themselves.9 While they work inside the usual organizational structures, they do a lot of their work without these, finding ways to skirt them when necessary, inventing their own practices and procedures simply because this is how they do their work best. Echoing Jeff’s views about project teams, the studies consistently highlight that members take pride in and are conscientious about doing their work well. To highlight what they reveal, I’ll use Julian Orr’s excellent, fine-grainedstudyofan“occupationalcommunity”offieldservicetechnicians, who repair photocopiers. As they are technicians, you’d probably assume they spend most of their time with their heads inside machines doing the technical work of repairing them. But, as knowledge-workers, much of their work qualifies as organizing. They spend a lot of time in conver-sation with one another, their customers or clients, or their managers, making meaning, together, of what they are doing, should be doing, or the problems they’re having and how to deal with them: generally, “talk-ing about machines,” which is how Orr’s book got its title. As members’ conversations are windows onto their work, including their relationships, interests, attitudes, and motives, the data in studies like Orr’s comes from researchers’ observations of members at work and from listening to their conversations and the stories they tell in conversation. 130 BeyondManagement Talk, in which members negotiate meaning together as they share knowledge,isthelife-bloodoftheirpracticesandagooddealofitcanonly be described as storytelling; and, as technicians become more proficient by swapping stories, their storytelling is vital to their work. For exam-ple, when one has a machine that continues to make poor quality copies despite numerous visits to the same customer to fix it, another will tell of his experience with a similar model where the usual fixes didn’t work and how, eventually, he solved the puzzle. Copiers are complex, quirky, and unpredictableand,quiteapartfromwhetherpeopledolearnfrommanuals, thereisonlyacertainamountyoucanlearnfromamanualwhichassumes, wrongly, that machines are alike and that electro-mechanical problems can be diagnosed simply by following directions. Even though the problems are tame, in the sense that they are techni-cal and, potentially, can be solved by isolating the fault, without a group of like-minded people, who have similar qualifications and interests, to bounce ideas around, technicians’ work would be much harder and take longer. And, whether it is flute makers, who pass their work back and forth, using their eyes as well as hands to tell whether they’ve got it just right, or technicians, round a table in a diner talking, unpacking their prob-lems with a recalcitrant machine, the things they work with are always in their conversations. The relationship between talk and tools in identifying and solving problems, hence in their getting work done, is unmistakable. Talk, among members, is always “business mixed with personal touches.” This is because their work is social and relational and the line between what is “work” and “personal” is always blurred.10 Out on the road, early in the morning, technicians are having breakfast together and talking about their work: about problems with machines, about their schedules, and so on. Conversation “flows freely from technical detail...topeopletheyusedtoknowthroughthecorporation...Thenom-inally personal and nominally professional cannot be separated...and may be substantially indistinguishable in their experience.”11 In their talk they make assessments of one another’s capabilities that shape their colleagues’ social identities and reputations, joking about a technician, known for not making mistakes, who now has others at a client’s premises working to solve problems he created. It may come as something of a revelation that the technicians, “focused on the work, not the organization,” are largely disconnected from the cor-poration for which they work and do their work with little thought for what is happening there. They spend most of their time on the road between customers, or on customers’ premises, out of sight and earshot of the orga-nization and they don’t have a work space there to call their own. But, ... - tailieumienphi.vn