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Organic and Mechanical Approaches to Complex Systems: Part II – Philosophical Differences

After the discussion of my HBR blog, “Stop Trying to Engineer Success”, died down on the Harvard site it continued, at least in name, on a thread in Systems Thinking World (STW). With over 17,000 members, STW is an unusually active group, with a comment to topic ratio of about 25:1. In contrast, the Center for Creative Leadership site has over 28,000 members, but the comment to discussion ratio has deteriorated over the past four years to 1:1.  In other groups that struggle to get participation discussion topics outnumber the comments by a wide margin.

I say that the discussion “continued in name” on STW because it is a notoriously fragmented group and whatever the nominal topic is, the comments can go anywhere. What the discussion highlighted for me was the predominantly analytical (engineering) approach to systems thinking held by many participants, based on what seemed to be a scientific materialist view of the world. This belief is on the right hand side of what can be thought of as a spectrum of beliefs about reality, ranging from idealism (on the left) to materialism (on the right). On the left, spirit or mind is prime and matter is secondary; on the right it’s just the other way around. Of course that simple dichotomy vastly oversimplifies the situation and there are a huge number of positions in between.

Here is a one response from STW:

“Engineering, the selection and arrangement of technologies to suppress a problem, works fine if a) done properly and b) the stated problem actually exists. However, in most cases the presumed problem is sheer fiction so even the best engineering is not going to result in enterprise success. The key lies in discovering the problem(s)…”

Of course it is the discovery of the problem that requires an ecological approach so that one can tell what one is dealing with – complex, wicked “mess” or a just a complicated problem that is amenable to engineering solutions.

Another (software engineer) seemed to favour engineering solutions, except when applied to himself:

“You can mess with machines and chemicals and they won’t notice your interventions. But when you mess with people, they notice. Personally, I am one of the “cats” and I don’t respond well to being herded, regardless of the herdsman`s intentions.

We generally expect to be able to predict secondary effects of material systems and engineer appropriately. However, predicting secondary effects in human systems is somewhat more difficult. Nevertheless, it can be done. It is an additional speciality.”

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Posted in Change, General | Tagged analytical, baseball umpires, change, complex systems, constructivism, ecological perspective, engineering.systems thinking, epistemology, idealism, objectivism, ontology, scientific materialism, software engineer | Comments Off on Organic and Mechanical Approaches to Complex Systems: Part II – Philosophical Differences

Organic and Mechanical Approaches to Complex Systems

The last week a blog I wrote for the Harvard Business Review and the Drucker Forum was published on the HBR site. It brought together a number of issues that I have been talking about in the past few months and when it was posted by the HBR editors with the title “Stop Trying To Engineer Success” it attracted comment, both favourable and critical.

Some of the posts were by engineers who took umbrage at the title. Of course my criticism was not of engineering as such but of its misapplication when it is used to short-circuit essential organic processes. When faced with a complex, “wicked” problem, an engineering methodology goes like this:

1. Find examples of organizations that have coped with this problem successfully.
2. Reverse-engineer the reasons for their success, looking for features that they share in common.
3. Present these shared “success factors” as rules, principles or precepts that should be implemented by all those who would emulate their performance.

Unfortunately this approach does not work and it has the effect of crushing the natural creative processes within the organization. The examples I gave were of the American effort to introduce democracy into Iraq and Kim and Mauborgne’s attempts to reverse-engineer the success of enterprises like the Cirque du Soleil with their “blue ocean” strategy. I supplemented this with an analogy from baseball from my blog of September 3.

Instead I advocated a more ecological approach:

1. Look at other organizations to understand the contexts and processes involved – their history – not to derive precepts and principles
2. Focus intensively on the organization at hand to understand the opportunities and challenges – the potential – inherent in the current situation
3. Control the controllable, pre-empt the undesirable and exploit the inevitable to produce strategies that could not be anticipated by anyone

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged change, Cirque du Soleil, constructive, creativity, critical, Drucker Forum, ecological perspective, ecology, engineering, guba, innovation, Iraq, Kim, lincoln, Mauborgne, narrative, philosophy, positives, reverse-engineer, success factors, The New Ecology of Leadership | Comments Off on Organic and Mechanical Approaches to Complex Systems

Renewing Rome Part III: The Future is the Means – the Present is the End

Last week I took an ecological perspective on Pope Francis and his efforts to renew the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). His chosen role of prophet (rather than the other two religious offices of priest and king) is to bring passion – faith, hope, confidence, trust – back into the institution. One of his vehicles for doing this, apart from his own humble lifestyle and actions, is his choice of poetic, metaphorical language and the use of narrative – stories – as his medium.

Pope Francis’ use of evocative language, dynamic analogies and his emphasis on the role of narrative, rather than philosophical and theological arguments are quite striking compared with that of his predecessors, yet characteristic of the creative leadership required on the back loop of the ecocycle. Professor Jay Conger identified the key elements of transformational leadership in a 1991 Academy of Management Executive article called “Inspiring others: the language of leadership”. The first is the ability to frame the purpose of the organization in a meaningful way; the second is the skill to use language to give emotional power to the message. Last week we saw how Pope Francis expressed the mission of the RCC as a military field hospital whose primary role it is to deal with the spiritually wounded. This image embodies all the values and aspirations that he believes to be important and supplies a test against which all action can be measured. It even suggests an approach to the problems of sexual abuse that have plagued the institution:

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity. And the church is Mother; the church is fruitful. It must be. You see, when I perceive negative behavior in ministers of the church or in consecrated men or women, the first thing that comes to mind is: ‘Here’s an unfruitful bachelor’ or ‘Here’s a spinster.’ They are neither fathers nor mothers, in the sense that they have not been able to give spiritual life.”

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged analogy, bureaucracy, change, community, context, ecocycle, Fritz Roethlisberger, leadership, metaphor, narrative, Pope Francis, renewal, Roman Catholic Church | Comments Off on Renewing Rome Part III: The Future is the Means – the Present is the End

Renewing Rome Part II: Pope Francis and Creative Leadership

Six months ago, before the election of Pope Francis, I wrote (as a non-Catholic) about the challenge of change in the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). I depicted the church as wandering the wilderness for the past 50 years, ever since the failure of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) to deliver on its promise of renewal. I showed the church entering the back loop of the ecocycle and suggested that if the church were a secular organization this would be the time to hire an outsider, a turnaround guy, who would shake up the bureaucracy, strip the formal organization down to its essential core and set about revisiting the institution’s mission. I wrote that it would take a miracle for this kind of change to happen…

So far Pope Francis seems to fit the billing. His selection was a surprise and he is about as radical an outsider as could be found in the College of Cardinals – the first non-European pope in 1300 years, the first from Latin America and the first Jesuit. The latter choice is particularly interesting as historically the Jesuits, like some of the other holy orders, have been change agents in the Church. It was the Jesuits who lead the Counter-Reformation that curbed the excesses of the Renaissance Church, put the focus back on parish and community and the Christian way of life, together with an emphasis on the education of priests on how to perform their functions.

Pope Francis, beginning with the selection of a name that none of his predecessors dared choose, for fear of the expectations it would create, has set out to distance himself from “business-as-usual”. As Hans Kung has pointed out, Pope Francis has set out to demonstrate his humanity, eschewing the jeweled mitres, ermine capes and other trappings of office. One might say that he has, quite literally “come down to earth”, bringing the papacy with him. Even his language is down to earth. Last week Pope Francis gave a wide-ranging interview that has instantly changed the tone of the institution. It suggests that he has a very clear idea of what has to be done.

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged change, community, ecological perspective, ecosystem, Jesuits, king, leadership, narrative, Pope Francis, priest, prophet, Roman Catholic Church | Comments Off on Renewing Rome Part II: Pope Francis and Creative Leadership

Harvard Business School: The Reality Show?

A fascinating front-page article in the New York Times reported on Harvard Business School’s attempt to achieve “gender equity”. HBS has had problems attracting and retaining female faculty. They comprise 22% of the faculty and the “pipeline” that leads to tenure for them is a slender one (this is slightly worse than most fields of science and engineering). In addition, female students seemed unable to keep up with the men in class participation, which comprises up to 50% of the grade for courses. There were reports of men, particularly those with finance backgrounds, taking control of the discussions and intimidating female faculty and students alike with weapons ranging from their knowledge of arcane mathematics to inappropriate comments about the women’s clothes. They “openly ruminated” on who they wanted to “kill, make love to or marry” (they used cruder language). The NYT journalist, Jodi Kantor, described the classes as developing the “overheated dynamics of reality shows”. And that set me thinking…

I don’t watch reality shows so I was interested to read what the critics had to say:

“Reality television has faced significant criticism since its rise in popularity. Much of the criticism has centered around the use of the word “reality”, and such shows’ attempt to present themselves as a straightforward recounting of events that have occurred. Critics have argued that reality television shows do not present reality in ways both implicit (participants being placed in unusual situations) and deceptive or even fraudulent, such as misleading editing, participants being coached in what to say or how to behave, storylines generated ahead of time, and scenes being staged or re-staged for the cameras. Other criticisms of reality television shows include that they are intended to humiliate or exploit participants (particularly on competition shows), that they make celebrities out of untalented people who do not deserve fame, and that they glamorize vulgarity and materialism.” (Wikipedia)

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Uncategorized | Tagged change, complex systems, context, ecocycle, ecological perspective, ecological rationality, gender equity, Harvard Business School, Jonathan Haidt, leadership, means and ends, New York Times, power, Rakesh Khurana, reality television, The New Ecology of Leadership | 1 Comment

Syria – complexity, dilemmas and a quest for leadership

The theme of the Drucker Forum to be held in Vienna November 14-15 is “Managing Complexity” and Richard Straub, the President of the Peter Drucker Society Europe has been posing various provocative questions to publicize it. Recently he posed a question on Syria as a complex problem: “What should political leaders do? There is no simple answer to a situation of high complexity and unpredictability. We need politicians who are better than that. Any ideas?”

My reply had to be shortened because of the space limitations on LinkedIn. Here is the full response:

One thing we know from the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan (and even in Vietnam) is that we don’t want any more attempts at engineering solutions to complex , “wicked” problems. Basically an engineering approach examines the current situation, envisions a desirable future and then identifies “excellent” organizations that have already reached this enviable condition. The organizational engineers then “reverse-engineer” these excellent organizations and identify the “key success factors” that led to their success. These are then condensed into “principles” that must be “implemented”.  This approach is widely used in corporations, where its effectiveness is highly debatable but it has also been a longtime feature of American foreign policy. The result is storefront democracy, a nominal veneer applied to politics that can neither conceal not contain the raw power dynamics that rule behind the scenes.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Ecology versus Engineering: Why Reverse-Engineered Strategy Is No Better Than A Paint-by-Numbers Kit

Recently there has been a lively discussion on LinkedIn about the similarities and differences between Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean strategy and Michael Porter’s strategic frameworks. What became clear in the debate is that the shared methodology behind both approaches was one of reverse engineering: find examples of successful companies and “reverse engineer” the generic reasons for their success. Then these “success factors” are presented as desirable outcomes or required achievements for companies that also wish to be successful. Porter looked for clues in the structure of industries, while Kim and Mauborgne emphasized the organizations themselves.

At the root of the reverse engineering of strategy and its use in this way is an “as if” argument. When Kim and Mauborgne examined the emergence of the outrageously successful entertainment company, Cirque du Soleil, they ignored the character of its founders and their experiences, the firm’s idiosyncractic history and the unique rural Quebecois context in which it had developed. Instead they are argued that it was “as if” the Cirque had implemented their “Blue Ocean” strategy and had reinvented the circus in a way that all but eliminated competition.

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy, Uncategorized | Tagged as if arguments, baseball, Blue Ocean, Cirque du Soleil, ecological perspective, implementation, Kim and Mauborgne, Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Porter, rationalist delusion, reverse-engineered strategy, strategy | 2 Comments

Is Storytelling a Strategy or a Competency?

Several weeks ago a blog appeared on the Harvard Business Review site entitled “Good Companies are Storytellers. Great Companies Are Storydoers.” In it its author, Ty Montague, outlined the characteristics of a storydoing company:

1. They have a story

2. The story is about a larger ambition to make the world or people’s lives better

3. The story is understood and cared about by senior leadership outside of marketing

4. That story is being used to drive tangible action throughout the company: product development, HR policies, compensation, etc.

5. These actions add back up to a cohesive whole

6. Customers and partners are motivated to engage with the story and are actively using it to advance their own stories

He then went on to produce some statistical evidence to support his claim that storydoing companies are superior to their storytelling counterparts in many ways.

His sample was small and it was not possible to assess the validity of the evidence. I would like to believe that it is correct. From an ecological/systems perspective, narrative constitutes the centre of gravity, the identity of every organization. And identity is central to everything that humans do. Organizations (and humans) without a narrative have weak identities. I was concerned, however, about the implications of the findings (if valid) for managers. My concern was triggered by Ty Montague’s last sentence in his blog: “We think that over time the data set itself can become a valuable public source of inspiration and evidence for agents of change to begin to apply the principles of storydoing inside their own companies.”

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged competency, Cynthia Kurtz, deliberate practice, ecology, engineering, feedback, narrative, principles, story, story being, story doing, storytelling, strategy, Ty Montague | Comments Off on Is Storytelling a Strategy or a Competency?

Addicted to Heroes: The Struggle to Improve America’s Schools

I have been reading Diane Ravitch’s 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. She was an appointee to the Department of Education by both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and initially a supporter of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program. NCLB, which was begun in 2002, set the goal of having 100% of American children pass tests for proficiency in language and mathematics by 2014.  For this to happen, the number passing the tests would have to increase steadily every year. The watchwords of the program were “measurement”, “accountability” and “choice”. The philosophy came straight from the business world and the belief seems to have been that over the twelve-year period poor teachers and administrators would be replaced by good ones and the schools would become better with choice fueled by vouchers and private, charter schools available to replace poorly-performing public ones.

By 2009 Ravitch was thoroughly disillusioned with NCLB, arguing that it was a strategy without any vision for public education. It was framed in such a narrow, mechanical way that for teachers the program turned out to be a version of Jack Welch’s rank-and-yank system. Developed in GE, this system demanded that the top 20% of all performers were rewarded with bonuses, while the bottom 10% were fired. The implementation of such programs has had many unintended consequences in the private sector and many of these soon began to show up in the schools. Teachers started to “teach to the tests”, narrowing the curriculum and doing practice tests to improve their pupils test-taking ability. They began to ignore both the bright and slow students and to focus on the middle segment, members of which who could be most readily pushed across the proficiency line. As one might imagine, the teachers in the next grades receiving children who had been declared “proficient” in this way faced an uphill battle getting them through their classes. Cheating on the tests became widespread, with some cases of outright fraud taking place as answers were adjusted after the fact to boost scores. More generally NCLB reduced cooperation throughout the system and set teachers against each other. It turned out to be a great boon to the private consulting and testing industry; one wag quipped that NCLB really stood for “No Consultant Left Behind”.

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Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Alan Bersin, American schools, Bill Clinton, community, complex systems, Diane Ravitch, ecocycle, ecological perspective, education system, factory, farmers, George Bush, heroes, Jim Womack, Joel Klein, lean, market, Michelle Rhee, NCLB, No Child Left Behind, rank-and-yank | 1 Comment

See-Feel-Smell-Change? Changing Behaviour Without Changing Minds Part II

The essence of an ecological perspective on human behavior is that our minds are rational, but in an ecological way. That is we automatically take into account myriad aspects of our environment using all our senses and adjust our behavior accordingly. When the context changes, our behavior often changes, without necessarily reaching the level of consciousness – we are unaware that we “changed our minds”.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the Stockholm congestion charge and how Swedish motorists had changed their driving habits once that had been exposed to the behavioural reality of the road tolls. In many cases they were unaware that they had changed their minds. This week I came across another neat example of behavior change created by changing the context rather than by appealing to people’s intellect. The problem being addressed was the annoying one of dog poop in public spaces. In Canada local municipalities usually put up signs that read something like “Clean Up After Your Dog” to encourage pet owners to do the right thing. When I was in a London park recently I came across the British equivalent, which, in typical British fashion, uses humour to make its point. I liked the poster but wondered how effective it really was. Then I read about the Spanish approach.

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Posted in Change, General | Tagged Brunete, context, dog poo, dog poo fairy, ecological perspective, John Kotter, see-feel-change, Stockholm congestion charge | 1 Comment ← Older posts Newer posts →