Posts Tagged ‘organizational design’
What was your uni like?
Parties with casual yet dictatorial professors?
Most of us go to university and college and find something that looks like a lawless, unruly form of school where the lecturers and professors are the biggest outlaws. And so we go out into the world thinking of universities as schools with no business-imperative and no business-sense.
The business of universities
Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities are businesses, or enterprises; but with a business model that is so opaque, few people understand it, unless they have worked in one for quite a while. If you do business with universities, if you are in a knowledge business, if you have to hire graduates to get work done, you might like to read this brilliant description of university business models.
As greedy as bacteria
“As organisms in a system, universities evolve. They eat up smaller institutions to dominate a niche, or split of side campuses to enter new spaces. They relentlessly share their DNA, as Universities heads look over their shoulders and shamelessly copy the innovations of others. Universities fight for resources, funding, students among themselves, where a Society usually co-opts all of the resources in it’s zone of control and operates without competitive challenge.”
As disregarding as dinosaurs
As mutative as viruses
I spent 6 years’ training as a psychologist and status and pecking order were rarely mentioned. Yet, both status and pecking order are central to much of what we do, and at the heart of how we feel about the way others treat us.
I think we should discuss status & pecking order more – at least in the circles of organizational designers and developers.
All important topics are subject to taboos, and status & pecking order is not exception. But it is the job of social scientists to break taboos. If a subject is too important to be discussed openly, then it is also too important to be ignored!
Status explains anger
Take this explanation for anger, for example. We are angry when we feel we have been demoted. Just writing the explanation creates a frisson of annoyance.
Resolving anger requires restoring status
Because demotion is often the cause of anger, the quickest way to restore someone’s good temper is to resolve the status issue. Apologize. Help them take their rightful place in the pecking order.
Anger often signals unnoticed shifts in status
Sometimes, someone’s anger takes us by surprise. Children, for example, sometimes assert themselves rather unexpectedly. Suddenly, they feel they should be consulted about something, and startle us with their asssertion.
We have to mark shifts in status of our professional colleagues
In professional groups, shifts in status happen too. Sometimes status changes are marked by rites-of-passage, like graduation day. We are reminded to start involving people much more deeply in decisions that affect them. But there are also moments where there are no rites-of-passage.
I not only studied psychology. I taught it too – in the last 3 years of the 6 year training period. My students were going from students to legally-qualified-and-registered-psychologists. Graduation was not enough for them. They needed to do something which marked the change. Sometimes they hired me as a consultant (they were the boss now), or they took me out to lunch (and paid)!
It took me one or two batches of students to pick up the trend, and then I began to enjoy the transition.
I also started to build ‘rites of passage’ into our professional internship system. Students could request a slot at ‘conferences’ to show off a project that (in their minds) showed them using our professional skills at a professional level. They volunteered, and no one ever missed these sessions because they were very good!
Slides down the status ladder are equally interesting. In the world of management, which pivots around power, slides-down can be quite entertaining. I’d be amazed at how quickly people noticed poor contributors, and the way non-performers began to fall off email lists and not be consulted when important decisions were being made.
How much of strife at work is due to mismanaged status?
It strikes me that many issues in the workplace come about because we haven’t considered status issues.
Active listening
Restoring a person’s status, when it has been lowered accidently and even innocently, is sometimes seen as an insult to the next person. Yet anger from accidental reductions in status is easy to resolve. Dealing with anger is one of the 3 scenarios in active listening. No one should be in management position or in a customer service role without understanding and applying these scenarios.
Loyalty to our colleagues
We are also only pleased by an increase in someone else’s status when our own status is fairly secure. Those of us who are organizational designers and developers can’t expect people to manage or deal with customers when they are uncertain about their own status. Where management have reached the LCD of asserting will, rather than talking about joint goals, we can expect status wars to erupt spontaneously.
Rituals for status shifts
We need rituals for younger people to show off their new skills and be accorded the status they deserve. Without these rituals, only a few will discover for themselves appropriate ways to claim the status that is their due. Others will be angered by the lack of recognition. And when we miss that signal too, we hurt ourselves. We should expect passive aggression or outright hissy fits.
Do you think we should talk about status and pecking order more forthrightly?
I’ve noticed that not even the new ‘service designers‘ talk about status and pecking order. Funny that. Must ask them. Why do we ignore status & pecking order?
How many problems at work do you think we could resolve if we were more thoughtful about status and pecking order?
And could we be more thoughtful about how we adjust our status rankings ‘as play unfolds’?
- Image by Nancee_art via Flickr
Quite recently, we got a TESCO’s, a little one. We have a Co-op tucked away in a side court. But we don’t have a Boots or WH Smith.
This is a little town and we don’t have a Timpson’s either. I had never heard of them until I heard one its owners talking on Radio 4. They are an odd jobbing kind of firm that do your shoes, your keys, and so on, and have branches right across the UK.
Well what is this to do with you?
They say they have two rules in their code of conduct
1. Look the part
2. Don’t steal our money
What are your rules?
I have three rules of conduct
1. Look after yourself
2. Look after us
3. Always be ready for a customer who walks through the door
Can you make them any simpler or clearer?
PS The swan is a general symbol in south-east England. The hare is a symbol of our town. There are plenty around but they are made a part of the town by Newton, the author of the hymn, Amazing Grace, which was written in our church.
5 pretty petals of future work
Posted on: July 20, 2009
I can see clearly now
Today, I visited Wirerarchy, Jon Husband’s blog. I was delighted to find the 5 principles of future work in plain language.
I do encourage you to go over and read his version.
To make sure I fully understood what Jon was saying, I rewrote his five points in my own words and compared them to other writings on the future of work.
Yes, Jon’s principles almost perfectly match the work on positive organizational scholarship, poetry and work, Hero’s Journey and positive organizational design. Jon uses much more accessible language though.
Here is my version. I’ll add links to other versions below. And then I’ll walk the talk and tell you how I used the principles in the most unlikeliest of circumstances!
1 Changing focus
The future of work is not about institutions and organizations.
The future of work is about you and me.
2 Listening to the people who do the work
We don’t want to talk about abstract theories any more.
We want to hear the stories of people. Directly. With no translation.
3 Valuing what we can do for ourselves
We don’t want organizations and institutions to decide things for us.
We ‘ll support changes that allow us to do things for ourselves.
4 Representing ourselves
We won’t listen to so-called experts who secretly represent other people.
We’ll listen to people we know or who our friends recommend.
5 Being active and positive
We aren’t interested in being told to wait.
We will begin with what we do well. Right here. Right now.
How would you phrase these rules-of-thumb?
I would love to hear what you think of these rules-of-thumb and the way I have phrased them.
Links to my previous posts and slideshare
All phrased a lot more esoterically –
Previous posts on future work
The essence of a happy life is a point of view
5 point comparison of the Hero’s Journey, Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Psychology
5 poetic steps for exiting a Catch 22
Lighten your personal burden for navigating 2009
Be still: Kafka and Joseph Campbell
Slideshare on future work
Positive organizational design
Positive organizational scholarship
So how will we get things done in this enchanting, new world?
For three years, I taught Management to a very large class of 800 to 900 students in a lecture theatre with 400 seats. You may remember attending lectures in one of these oversized rooms yourself. Hordes of students come in and sit in rows and struggle to stay awake as the lecturer drones on.
Of course, no lecturer wakes up in the morning intent on being deadly dull. But they do feel constrained. After all, how much can you do with this format and the size of the class?
Well, a surprising amount – if you follow the principles above.
The world through the eyes of the individual
I was teaching Management and Organizations. Students simply aren’t interested in perspective of the organization. But if you can think of how they view the organization from the vantage point of their part-time jobs and where their careers are going, then you have their attention.
Give me the whole story at once – circumstances, goal, steps, feedback loops, quirks and fancies
Students aren’t interested in the rules of organizing. No matter how elegant these rules are or how much work we put into thinking them up and trying them out!. They do like case studies, though, where they could follow a story. Then their active intellects take over. They imagine themselves playing a similar role in similar circumstances and start asking probing questions.
Don’t leave me out of the story – let me try out parts of it
Students don’t like being passive. Taking notes is better than sitting still. Solving puzzles is even better. I used questionnaires a lot in which they could see illustrations of concepts and relate them to themselves. Or I used two sets of power point slides – theirs had blank spaces and mine had the answers. In this way, they could anticipate (not just fill in) what I was going to say.
The way I relate to other people is part of the story – I’ll do this with others
Learning is social and students are influenced more by their peers than by us. They like to see and hear what other students think. There is a surprising amount of feedback from the noise and murmuring in a lecture room which is why so many students come to class in the first place! We also took polls often with a show of hands. It is active in an minor way. More importantly, students could see how much opinions varied. Developing a keen acumen of how much we vary in our preferences will be important to them as organizational leaders and influential citizens.
Harvard has a video of 2009 Reith lecturer, Michael Sandel, using the Socratic method with 800 students in one lecture theatre. Our students would have liked that – as long as we were able to be as courteous as Professor Sandel. Students really don’t like being put in the wrong in front of their friends, particularly in such a large room. (Who does?)
There is no journey unless I can take the first step
The jobs my students imagined after graduation were, to my surprise, not particularly ambitious. Though I didn’t fully approve at the time, now I think they had a well developed sense of starting with the ‘ground beneath their feet’ and growing from there.
These students particularly liked techniques that helped them do their jobs better, right now, or helped them put in words something that had puzzled them for some time.
Am I exaggerating the good points and dismissing the weak points?
You might be thinking that this was a University – we set the curriculum and the exams and the students did not have much control.
It is true that we began each year with a ‘classical’ textbook. But we would take topics that students had responded to well and use those as cornerstones to introduce new topics -or extend the conversation, so to speak. Thus as the year proceeded, a theme would emerge that was distinctive for that class.
One year, for example, the refrain became: “I will be me as I am. Not who you want me to be”.
You might recognize this line as coming from the film about Steve Biko, Cry Freedom.
Organizing for “Me as I am. Not who you want me to be.”
The challenge of management, as we put it to that class, is to design organizations where each of us can be “Me as I am. Not who you want me to be.”
What do you think?
Can you imagine organizing along these lines? Would you like to give me a case and see if I can rephrase it using Jon’s five principles?
Day One at Xoozya (cont’d)
Mary, the HR Body put her cheerful face around the door and said “Lunch”. Yep, I was keen. There is just so much that I can take in at one time and the Dashboard at Xoozya is pretty comprehensive.
She dangled a key. “Bring valuables,” she said, “but leave everything else as it is. We’ll lock the door”.
The canteen wasn’t far and I could hear the buzz as we approached. It was just as hyped. Salads, fruit and hot food and the refreshing absence of the cloying smell of old fat and overcooked vegetables. Sweet.
Mary, ever the professional, asked nimbly whether I ate fish. I do, and she said, “I’ll get two fish pies – they’re good. You grab some salads. I’d like plain lettuce and tomato and pear or some fruit. Water OK to drink?” I caught up with her at the cashier where she introduced me as noobe and I put my food on my tab. We grabbed napkins and cutlery and she led the way to a corner table. “We’ll join Peter Wainwright, the HR Director. You remember him, of course?”
As we approached, Peter rose, smiled warmly, and said “Hello, Jo. Welcome to Xoozya! Here’s to a prosperous and happy alliance.”
We fumbled around, as one does, arranging trays and getting comfortable and he asked about my morning. I told him it was clear I have some thinking to do to set up a communication system that leaves me informed but not overwhelmed with information.
He nodded and added: “Well, take your time. Every minute that you spend in exploration now pays off handsomely in comfort and organization later. We also want you to base your judgments on what matters. You’ve joined us with your skills, as has everyone else here,” he said, waiving his hand at the crowded canteen.
Future capability and value
“There are skills that are essential to what you do and there are skills that will change with technological change.”
- “We want you to jot down the skills that are absolutely essential to what you do. These we will nurture and respect.”
- “Then there are skills that are going to change significantly over the next five to ten years. We want those on a separate list because those require significant investment in time and energy”.
- “And there are skills that we don’t use anymore. Those we give a respectful burial.” He smiled. “When we have identified a skill or process that we no longer use, we get an occupational psychologist to document it and we make a display for our skills museum. Then we have a little wake,” he chuckled, “to see it off. It’s quite cathartic.”
Nostalgia for skills & practices of the past
“So which skill in the museum is best-loved?” I asked. “Which grave attracts the most flowers?”
“Ah, we hadn’t thought of doing that. Good idea. We should put the skills up on the intranet with the choice of . . . flowers or . . . a good kick . . . or a big ? mark for ‘who was this!’. And see what we get back!”
My induction so far
Well, I obviously have some thinking to do. It is only lunchtime and I have to think about
- my future avatar
- my pattern of friending and following
- my skill base and future investments
BTW
Which skills are utterly essential to your work?
And which will change so fundamentally in the next five years that you will need to retrain?
And which skills deserve a respectful burial?
Which are you happy to see go and which will you miss?
And if you are enjoying this series, please do feel free to join in!
- Leave your thoughts in the comment section
- Grab the RSS feeds for posts and comments top right
- If you comment on this post from your blog, please link back to this post from the words Jo Jordan, flowingmotion, or Xoozya
- Tweet the post
- Stumble the post
And PS, if you are new to this blog, Xoozya is an utterly fictitious organization. This series began on the spur of the moment as I started to explored the principles of games design and Ned Lawrence of Church of Ned mentioned how much time people put into designing their avatars, or online identities. Xoozya is an attempt to imagine what an organization would look, sound and feel like if it were run along lines recommended by contemporary management theorists.
And PPS Ned is an online writing coach and is available for hire.
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- Avatar as a role description (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)
Simplicity is a world-beater
There is a wonderful cartoon about computer interfaces doing the rounds contrasting the simplicity of Apple and Google with the interfaces most of us construct.
Simple rules of communication
That reminded me of a place I worked at for many years, which had inherited three simple rules of communication.
FIRST. Write down what you want on ONE side of a piece of paper – no more. And the top third of the side will be used for routing instructions – you don’t get more paper for that.
SECOND. Send it to me in time for me to read it before we meet.
THIRD. When we meet, explain what you want fom me verbally or through your emissary.
What I will do
If I cannot understand what you want in one minute, with a further one minute for questions, I ask you very courteously whether “you would like to withdraw your paper”.
It is possible to keep things simple!
PS The accountants had another simple rule. On no account, ever, will we approve expenditure retrospectively. Decisions occur before actions.
flowing motion 
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