For the most part, our ideas about the way organisations function once inhabited a common sense world. There was a time when we could form a mental picture of our work and our organisational relationships, and we could map this to what we saw around us. 

The machine analogy of industrial organisational was the dominant mental picture. We were each parts in a tightly integrated system of processes. We took in inputs added some value and passed our products to the next link in the chain. It was a Newtonian physics view of work – one billiard ball hits another to produce an effect that can be observed, tracked and measured. You could see yourself in the bigger pattern of production.

Increasingly, our knowledge of organisation is letting slip the moorings of common sense. For instance, billiard ball physics on which we once relied to explain our organisations has been replaced by theories of relativity, uncertainty principles, a cat that is neither dead nor alive and theories about strings.

Similarly, we have called on biology to describe our organisations. We could once liken our organisations to common sense pumps and plumbing but biology now has cells, immune systems, DNA, genomes, moral issues about life. Our once easily grasped metaphors borrowed from other disciplines can now only be understood in the abstract. 

Reform, change and adaptation are sweeping the public and private sector alike. The rise globalism on the back of new information and communication technologies, the collapse of the financial markets through greed and poor regulation and the rise of consumer expectations driven by a desire for status are all forces driving organisational reform and change. Our common sense view of organisation seems to be crumbling under the pressure. Everything has become ‘complex’ and ‘uncertain’. 

To shore up our sense of certainty, the gurus of business and management are reaching for complicated models to explain how it all fits together. We speak about emergent relationships, networks of multiplicity, small-worlds, boundary conditions, the wisdom of crowds and energetic equilibrium. Making common sense of how organisations work from this mishmash of abstract concepts is difficult. 

How then do we understand our organisations and what do we need to do to adapt to a changing environment?

First, we acknowledge that organisations are an agglomeration of people and relationships that are arranged in such a way to produce islands of stability in an otherwise chaotic world. 
Recent management theory draws heavily on the analogies complexity theory to explain ‘self-organisation’ and ‘emergence’ in organisations. The analogies used include flocking birds spontaneously reshaping their group in response to changes in wind, the social rules for foraging ants, the shared outcomes that emerges from individual termites following a few simple rules. The list goes on.   

However, as interesting as these examples are (and many of them are fascinating), people are not birds, termites or starfish. We are human. Our common sense view of the world should be human-centric rather than become bird- or bee-centric. It should draw on the strengths and weaknesses of humans working together in groups. 

Uncertainty and complexity are not ‘new’ ideas. As the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted, the objective of all human groups remains straight forward:

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. 

The way we organise gives us the means to make sense of uncertainty. It is a common sense view of the world and our interaction with it. If that view no longer makes sense, then we need a new way to think about the world from which a new organisation will follow.  
Today’s organisational structures and processes give us false sense of solidity and certainty. However, if we are to continue to survive the turbulence of uncertainty then we must be prepared to change—sometimes incrementally, sometimes radically. This is not a complex idea.

Organisationally, we are not good at change. Widespread evidence that the practice of organisational change is effective is difficult to find. It is simpler to find evidence that organisational change often fails. It seems that more often than not when leaders initiate change they tend manage the organisation toward ‘no net gain’. So, there is a reason why the workforce is apathetic when confronted with a ‘new’ reform agenda.   

There are two alternatives for those undertaking fundamental organisational reform that each share a common starting point—human behaviour. We can take the view that there are many people of good will and intent in the organisation that have a genuine desire for reform or we can take the opposite view. The choice of starting point determines method and approach. However, shared by each perspective there should also be a clear acknowledgement that in the face of uncertainty there are many more who seek the stability of known structure and routine. This does not make them ‘bad’ or ‘obstructionist’ or ‘lazy’—it makes them people.
So, the options for leaders initiating change seem to be to manage the reform program toward inevitable failure while doing the minimum harm, or to take the time to learn from repeated failure and work with the social forces that shape behaviour in organisations in order to bring about change over time. 

The first requires not thought whatsoever. 

The second requires us to reconsider our starting assumptions about people, work and organisation. It requires us to understand what it is to be people, people at work and people in organisations. 

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. We need more of this if we are to retain a common sense view of the world of work and organisation. 

It might not be as complicated as we are making it out to be. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.

Sources:

Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950 

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Waldo, 1813, can be found here.  

Photo credit:

Photo by t.klick - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License