Organising

Perhaps a “problem-solving” approach isn’t enough!

Oct 20th

Posted by Phillip Bonser in Difference

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Management of Complexity
Image by michael.heiss via Flickr

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a relatively simple client project – helping a group of people refine their plan.

It is simple in one respect. In the end we will produce a written plan – one they can use both to guide their work and to come back to and reassess when they can see that things have shifted. In another respect, however, it is much more complex.

Because this group has been brought together relatively recently and because the work they are being asked to do is set in a context that is emerging, i.e. constantly changing in response to each thing that happens, many of the conversations we have had haven’t had much to do with defining the problems to be solved and the tasks to be completed. They have had a great deal more to do with questions of identity. No-one has asked it explicitly and directly but it seems to me that two questions they are exploring are:

  • Who and what is it that people expect us to be and to do?
  • How does that fit with our sense of what this situation seems to be calling for?

Sitting with questions like this can be really difficult. Here’s how UK consultant Johnnie Moore puts it:

… there is so much temptation to take big, decisive action, and take it quickly. It’s easy, for patience and sitting with ambiguity to be denounced as indecisive.

Well known US consultant and author, Peter Block has a similar view:

…  we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs.  We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing.  We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

I am not arguing here against problem-solving per se. When the issues we face are known and understood and the ways to work on them are known or at least knowable, then all is fine. The difficulties we are trying to overcome then, are difficulties of the intellect. Trying to figure out what to do based on known principles and good data.

It is when we are faced with difficulties that are more about emerging situations and particular circumstances that the conventional approaches seem to be less than helpful. What is most frequently a feature of these situations and circumstances, at least for people who lead, manage and organise, is what I will call the participative complexity of them. By this I mean that what happens is dependent on how the people who are participating in the situation act and respond to what’s going on and to each other. As a consequence, in these kinds of situations cause and effect is never linear or predictable. At best we can anticipate a range of possibilities – but even that is constrained by our own view of things.

As I reflect on the work we have done so far I am struck by how much we have begun to identify two different types of situation and to “plan” what will come next accordingly. In some instances the desired “outcome” is clear and a project plan will be very useful (provided we don’t kid ourselves that everything will go exactly to plan). In other circumstances a much more exploratory/experimental approach seems to be called for.

So my questions for this week are:

  • To what extent are the difficulties you face in your work “solvable” by the application of known principles and good data (even if you don’t have it yet!)?
  • To what extent do the difficulties you face in your work need to be approached “from within” – because you are a participant as much as anyone else – and because you won’t know what will happen until it happens?
  • Whichever kind of difficulty you face, are you using methods or disciples that are useful in the circumstances?
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“Yes and” … or perhaps … “Yes, but I”.

Aug 4th

Posted by Phillip Bonser in Conversation

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Self-Organizing Molecules with Impurities
Image by Hiro Sheridan via Flickr

“Conversation between people is a simple system that is relatively easy to implement and has massive implications for scaling up to more and more complicated and complex challenges.”
Chris Corrigan

Chris Corrigan is a facilitator and consultant who is well-know, at least in facilitator circles, for his commitment to “opening and holding space” for conversations about important issues. The quote comes from the end of a short piece he wrote recently as he contemplated his reading of David Holmgren’s book on permaculture, and permaculture principles more generally, as a metaphor for how we might take on complex challenges.

Reading this I was reminded of two other articles I have read recently, both of which explore questions relating to the role of conversation or dialogue in organising and suggest that we need to look more at how extra ordinary things (including that which we might name as leadership) can emergence from apparently quite mundane behaviour in the form of conversation.

In the first of these Swedish researchers Mats Alvesson and Stefan Sveningsson reported on some suprising results from a case study of managers in a large, international, knowledge-intensive company. In the study, managers and leaders gave accounts about their work that placed more emphasis on listening and informal chatting than would be expected on a reading of the leadership and management literature.

They make three points about what they found:
1.    That a lot of leadership is fairly mundane, not differing that much from what other people do, at least on a behavioural level
2.    That these fairly mundane acts are understood to be more significant when they are framed as acts of leadership
3.    That the significance of the position of the manager is vital for this framing

In the second article well-know theorists of social constructionism, Ken and Mary Gergen and Frank Barrett, explore the idea of dialogue. They argue that the pervasive tendency in organisational studies to view acts of communication in terms of individual agents, “ … suppresses perhaps the central feature of such actions, their function within relationships”. Alternatively they propose that it is from within relationships  “ … that the very possibility of individual sense-making comes into being, and without the existence of ongoing relationship, communicative acts lose their status as communication.”

In a broad review of the field they suggest that current notions of dialogue generally tend to be somewhat vague and that there are in fact a multiplicity of definitions most of which ignore (or dismiss) “ordinary” conversation. They also suggest that the tendency to define dialogue in terms of a favoured ideal may not always be helpful. As an alternative they suggest an “elemental descriptive definition” of dialogue as “discursive coordination in pursuit of social ends”.

In the article they propose that what we need is not so much a recipe for how to have good conversations as a better vocabulary for talking about the conversations we do have. They suggest that a starting point might be to talk about: the pivotal act of affirmation; productive difference; the creation of coherence; and narrative and temporal integration as particular core elements.

I’m going to deal with each of these elements in more detail over the next few weeks.

As a taster though it seems to me that the first of these – the extent to which any response in a dialogue or conversation affirms rather than negates the statement or utterance that immediately precedes it – is of great significance. This is not some prescription based on an ideology of niceness but a practical observation that, if the goal of our conversation is coordination in pursuit of social ends (ie ends that in some way transcend our individual wants and needs), then to negate what has just been said is to, at least partly, destroy or damage the relating. This is not to say that the response should or will agree – merely that it will acknowledge and build on what went before. Perhaps, in the broadest of terms this might be in the form of either a “YES … AND” or a “YES … BUT I ….” (I have written on this second option previously.)

I suspect it is this kind of capacity in the mundane conversations that Alvesson and Sveningsson’s study uncovered. They called it the “extra-ordinization of the mundane”!

“ … as people’s words and actions become co-ordinated so do forms of life come into being – friendships, marriages, families, and organisations large and small …”
Ken Gergen, Mary Gergen and Frank Barrett

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