Perplexities

Citation

Lundberg, C. (2007), "Perplexities", International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Vol. 15 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijoa.2007.34515daf.002

Perplexities

Article Type: Perplexities From: International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Volume 15, Issue 4

In this issue, I again offer for your consideration some things within the organization studies domain that have surprised, puzzled, and bothered me. As you read these perplexities, pay attention to your reactions - agreement or disagreement - and ask yourself from where they might have come. You may discover a lot by doing so, such as unrecognized feelings and biases, your own perplexities, and new questions to pursue. For each of these perplexities I have indicated the mundane thoughts or experiences that started me thinking, hoping by example to encourage you to become increasingly open to the unfinished business of our own experiences as organizational scholar-teachers.

The thick Handbook of Organization Development (OD) recently published (Cummings, 2007) was long anticipated. It features 35 chapters by many contemporary spokespersons, chapters about theory and practice, diagnosis and interventions in business and non-business organizations. I confess to reading my chapter first (I am always jazzed at seeing how the messiness of thinking and writing appears so neat and convincing in print). After reading several other chapters, I paused to reflect … OD is planned change. In other words, change that is engineered - that is intended, designed, initiated and managed. As such, it is clearly supportive of management’s goals, hegemony, and survival. OD seems to assume organizations are naturally inertial, that stability is desirable, except occasionally and necessarily corrective. However, it takes but a moment’s thought to realize that the exact opposite assumption is more viable, that everything is changing all the time, just not at the same rate. “Planned change,” thus, obliviates considerations about desirable natural changes, self-correcting circumstances, unavoidable crises, change that promotes prevention, or that management itself - including its mindset, style of relating, competency set - could be the targets of change endeavors. I find it perplexing that OD can deserve a handbook, but unplanned change, inertia and organizational stakeholders other than managers (and their agents) have next to no literature at all.

Reminiscing over my years of consulting, I had to smile at how idealistic I had become. The consulting opportunities that excited me most were those in which I had little experience, and when all data acquired were mine! I got to a point where learning and research took priority over money. That’s right. Yes, I know, you’re probably thinking, “How on earth did you ever attract any clients?” Well, believe it or not, I had clients. You can be assured that I did learn - but did these consultations end up as academic publications? Taxable income, yes; war stories in class, still; advances in theory, no. I now surmise that framing and conducting serious inquiry and doing what particular managers consider “relevant” (with the half-life of a blink) are worlds apart. That is to say, the piper is not interested in knowledge generation, just local problem solving. My mind jumps to the few instances where I exchanged my research expertise (in design, methods, data management, analysis) for access to a company, free data to chase my questions, and my expenses. Again, much learning, personal and theoretical for me, and more fundamental policy learning for the firm. If my experience is not unique, which it probably is not, I am perplexed as to why more organizational scholars do not seek projects where they can substitute research for money. I should note that real expertise that makes a real difference in organizational performance also eventually attracts consulting opportunities, too.

Reading about some variants in compensation programs reminded me of the time I participated in some fieldwork at a 3M division. The manager had heard or read about two new practices and combined and initiated them in his division - self-managed work teams and skill-based pay. These teams had been operating for a while by the time I arrived. The division was an eye-opener: Teams rotated leadership, self-scheduled, moved their own materials and products, kept records, trained and disciplined one another, maintained quality, etc., and of course became highly cohesive, and all outcome indicators were positive from safety to profitability, from zero turnover to zero defects, etc. And there was no need for mid- or first-level managers. The division was, in essence, a successful managerial experiment (corporate executives, however, were upset because the manager, in their terms, simply was not managing). I then recalled a field experiment in a multi-unit service company. It was conventionally organized and managed with several layers of management, functional staff groups at corporate headquarters gathering data and initiating policy changes, centralized decision making, high formalization in very standardized branches, the branch managers, all of whom were very experienced in the industry, felt very much “in the middle,” and chaffed at not being able to manage in light of local circumstances. The experiment had 24 branches as the control group and three as the experimental group.

The intervention had several parts: small teams were formed to manage the branch, the three branches discussed one another’s problem before taking action, branches could say no to corporate initiatives, corporate staff had to provide any information requested by a branch, and all internal branch changes were discussed by everyone affected. It took many months before branch management teams really felt empowered enough to attend to their employees and customers and not to corporate and regional management. Within a year, however, the three experimental branches were clearly outperforming those of the control group - another management experiment that succeeded. Again, this company’s top executives were upset - lower level managers could function well or better without much “top-down” assistance. There are other stories, of course, but not many, and they are seldom reported in the literature. This is perplexing. Unless managers really know what they are doing - and this seems unlikely - then most management action is actually experimental. Why, then, do not more managers think in terms of experiments and undertake bolder ones with the assistance of organizational scholars?

I have a friend who is a master teacher. We often chat about executive education, especially the elite Advanced Management Programs (AMP) in which he gets to participate. My role in our conversations is to play the skeptic. The other day my friend mentioned, excitedly, that he would be teaching AMP modules on strategy and international management next summer in two overseas programs as well as one in the USA. I teased him about the effectiveness of AMPs that are sets of functional topics (I borrowed heavily from Mintzberg’s (2004) Managers Not MBAs). A messy debate ensued. Eventually, however, we agreed that AMPs, with notable exceptions - such as those mentioned by Mintzberg, Revans, McCall, and Ohosal - had little to do with the existential realities of managers, that executive education innovations were rare and seldom spread, and that executive education seemed to be very different from the training and development of other, non-business, professions. If these points of agreement are valid, they are perplexing indeed - executive education is clearly important, widespread, and costly. The last point piqued my interest enough to examine how physicians learn and continue to learn their craft. Here are just a few practices common to ongoing physician development that have translated into the realm of management that, in my opinion, are potentially significant competence enhancers: When something goes wrong, conduct an “organizational autopsy.” After making an analysis/diagnosis, routinely confirm it by means of consultation with a senior or a specialist. Create and regularly train with crises simulations. Turn tradeshows into congresses of practice. In other words, hold workshops on new techniques within corporations featuring the equivalent of regular morbidity and mortality meetings; re-conceive formal education into a “see one, do one, teach one” recipe; participate in the development of “vital signs” for organizations, such as standardized and systematically applied indicators for system health; and so on. The question remains, why are management educators not doing things like these?

Craig LundbergCornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA