Bulldozer00's Blog

In Seeing Your Company as a System, Andrea Gabor cites Weick and Sutcliffe’s book, “Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty“:

Mindful organizations, they (Weick and Sutcliffe) explain, are characterized by a broadly defined “deference to expertise” in a setting where “expertise is not necessarily matched with hierarchical position.” Mindful organizations are also capable of seeing weak signals of systemic failure and responding with vigor. To support this capability, such organizations strive for open communication, recognizing that if people refuse to speak up out of fear, this capability will be undermined.

In unmindful orgs (“unmindful” is the politically correct way of referring to CLORGs and DYSCOs), most people in the borg are conditioned to auto-think that expertise equates to hierarchical position. Thus, the infallibles in the upper layers, while espousing otherwise, don’t strive for open communication and they ignore both weak and strong negative feedback signals from the DICs in the lower, less “expert” layers. To add insult to injury, since the DICsters down in the boiler room are conditioned to auto-think the same expertise-position relationship, they don’t “speak up” out of fear of looking, or being told that they are, stupid. Bummer.