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Idea Approvability
The scientifically backed and indisputable graph below shows the “approvability” percentage of an idea as a function of the perceived (by the person(s) who have the power to approve the idea) distance of the idea’s implications from the status quo. For reference, traces for two example orgs are shown. How would you plot your org’s behavior on the graph?
G-Spot
In chapter 3 of “In The Plex“, Steven Levy describes the culture within Google. Check out these “behaviors“…
The highlight of the TGIFs is always the no-holds-barred Q and A. Using an internal program called Dory, employees rate questions submitted online, with the more popular ones rising to the top. Brin and Page respond to even seemingly hostile questions with equanimity, answering them in all seriousness with no offense taken. In a typical session, someone asked why the newly hired chief financial officer had gotten such a big contract. Sergey patiently explained that the marketplace had set salaries high for someone filling that role and Google couldn’t fill it with a quality person if it underpaid.
Even more time is saved by Google’s ubiquitous “tech stops” spread about the buildings: these are, in essence, tiny computer shops, indicated by neon markers. When a piece of equipment fails or there is a sudden need for a new mouse or phone charger, all a Googler needs to do is walk no more than a few hundred feet to one of those locations, and almost instantly he or she will be made whole.
What are some of the behaviors, or (maybe more importantly) lack thereof, that your company exhibits that characterize its culture? Fuggedaboud what is espoused. What is actually “visible and feelable” that sets your company apart from the mooo-herd?
If you were an employee who saw evidence every single day that your company valued your presence, would you not be more loyal? The Montessori kids who started Google thought about those questions and asked, Why? Why? Why? If Google ever hits really hard times, it will be telling to see whether the sushi quality falls and the power chargers disappear from the conference rooms.
Don’t Be Evil
If you don’t know that Google’s informal corporate motto is “Don’t Be Evil“, then either you were born yesterday or you shouldn’t be reading this ridiculously inane blog – or both.
While reading Stephen Levy‘s well written, informative, and entertaining book, “In The Plex“, Mr. Levy tells the story of how the controversial and tough-to-live-up-to Google war cry came into existence. Here, he describes the first triggering event:
Mr. Levy goes on to say:
Note that 15 employees were assembled from across a broad swath of the company. Do you notice something amiss? Uh, how about the fact that the two founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page weren’t involved?
As the group debated the motto, here’s what one group member said:
Note that everyone had a chance to weigh in, and thus, “Don’t Be Evil” was internalized by the whole org. It wasn’t handed down from on high by a politburo or junta or God-like individual that “obviously knows what’s best for all the children in the borg“.
Did, or do, you have the chance to provide feedback on your corpo values or philosophy? Are they authentic like Google’s and Zappos.com’s, or are they a copy-and-paste job from a 1970’s vintage management book? If they’re a copy-and-paste job, have you suggested revisiting them? If so, how was your suggestion received?
Structure And Behavior
One of the principles of systems thinking is that structure facilitates or inhibits specific behaviors. For example, if we didn’t have hands (or, in some cases, neither hands or feet), we wouldn’t be able to write – the structure wouldn’t allow it. If we didn’t have vocal chords, we wouldn’t be able to speak – the structure wouldn’t allow it. If a car’s engine didn’t connect to the drive shaft, it wouldn’t be able to “transport” – the structure wouldn’t allow it. If a system didn’t have redundant elements, it wouldn’t be able to automatically recover from failures – the structure wouldn’t allow it.
The same holds true for organizational structures that group people together for a purpose. The org structure can be an enabler or inhibitor of the behaviors required to fulfill the purpose for which the group has been assembled. A mismatch between purpose and structure usually leads to failure at some unknown time in the future.
The table below lists several org structures concocted by BD00, including the ubiquitously pervasive and manager-revered “hierarchy“, along with the obscure, Fuller/Beer “octahedron“. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each structure?
Expertise And Position
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.
The Future Is Already Here…..
….for those people who are lucky enough to work in truly enlightened orgs that really walk the talk.
Check out this case study: “How Microsoft Netherlands Reinvented the Way of Work”. Yes, you read that right. It’s a division of that polarizing behemoth, Microsoft.
Just in case you don’t have the time, but you’d like the cliff-dozer00 notes version of the article’s highlights, here they are:
- There are no assigned desks as well as no private offices for managers (not even the General Manager).
- There are no physical “Departments”, each of the 900 employees of MS Netherlands can work anywhere in the office building by using a laptop, headset, webcam, or Windows based Smartphone and connecting to the network either wirelessly or by plugging in at a desk.
- People are encouraged to work from home more often, whenever it is appropriate and are allowed to work whatever times they wish to work. The only requirement is that they “get the job done”.
- If you wish to work until late at night on a project and take the morning to see your son’s school play, you can do that too – and you don’t have to ask your manager for the time off.
So, how can one judge whether these Theory Y policies have worked out? Managers love metrics (cuz metrics give them the illusion that they’re in control), so here are a few:
Of course, managers who who are dead set on clinging to their FOSTMA thinking UCBs (regardless of what they espouse) won’t believe the results; or they’ll play ostrich and ignore their existence – because it would take too much courage and “work” to effect a similar, massively positive change in their CCFs.
The Ideal Quadrant
Zappos.com operates on the simple principle that happy people make productive workers and productive workers make a successful enterprise. Thus, the policies and cultural accoutrements instituted at Zappos.com are thoughtfully and proactively designed to foster happiness without totally abdicating control. For Zappos.com, it’s not enough to have a “competitive” benefits and pay package – everyone (still in business) has to have one.
With that in mind, let’s explore the four quadrants in the simplistic table below. Right off the bat, we can ditch the two quadrants in the second row. After all, no org can remain viable for very long with an unproductive workforce – regardless of whether the emps are happy. No?
So that leaves us with the two quadrants in the first row. One would think that the holy grail for excellence-seeking orgs is the Productive-And-Happy (PAH) quadrant. However, a multitude of circumstantial evidence leads me to believe that most orgs are either consciously or unconsciously incompetent at catalyzing the development of a PAH workforce – regardless of what is espoused in the annual report. The legions of enterprises that fall into the CLORGs and DYSCOs category don’t even make an effort to develop “happy” employees. The SCOLs that run the show are too macho and they delude themselves into thinking that happiness doesn’t matter or it’s “not in their job description“. Should it be?
What comes first, productivity or happiness? Is one attribute a pre-requisite for attaining the other?
Snap Judgments And Ineffective Decisions
In the software industry, virtually all people agree that Winston Royce‘s classic paper titled “Managing The Development Of Large Software Systems” was the first widely publicized work to describe the linear, sequential, “waterfall” method of building big systems. He didn’t coin the term “waterfall“, he called it a “grandiose process“.
Here’s one of the pics from Mr. Royce’s paper (note that he shows stage N to stage N-1 feedback loops in the diagram and note the “hopefully” word in the figure’s title):
What seems strange to me is that most professional’s that I’ve conversed with think that Mr. Royce was an advocate of this “grandiose process“. However, if you read his 11 page paper, he wasn’t:
The problem is…. The testing phase which occurs at the end of the (waterfall) development cycle is the first event for which timing, storage, input/output transfers, etc., are experienced as distinguished from analyzed. They are not precisely analyzable. They are not the solutions to the standard partial differential equations of mathematical physics for instance. – W. W. Royce
This lack of due diligence to dig deeper into Mr. Royce’s stance reminds me of bad managers who make snap judgments and ineffective decisions. They do this because, in hierarchical command & control CLORG cultures, they’re “supposed to look like” they know and understand what’s going on at all times. After all, the unquestioned assumption in hierarchies is that the best and brightest bubble up to the top. But, as Rudy sez…..
“You have to know a lot to be of help. It’s slow and tedious. You don’t have to know much to cause harm. It’s fast and instinctive.” – Rudolph Starkermann
Of course, all human beings suffer from the same “snap judgments and ineffective decisions” malady to some extent, but the guild of management-by-hierarchy, fueled by its ADHD obsession to jam fit as much attention/planning/work into as little time as possible, seems to have taken it to an extreme.
UCB Reinforcement
Oh crap! I’ve done it again. I’ve scanned the horizon and found more evidence to further cement my Unshakable Cognitive Burden. I’ve started reading the classic “Human Side Of Enterprise“. It’s a classic because it was written in 1960 by Douglas McGregor and much of it remains relevant today – over 50 years later.
At the beginning of the book, Mr. McGregor asks his targeted audience, corporate managers, to truly “tune in” the next time they’re at a policy making meeting. By “tune in“, he means “listen to what hidden, implicit assumptions about human behavior are embedded within the discussions“.
Mr. McGregor asserts that the probability is high that policy discussions will be based on the assumption that those who will be affected by the policy are stupid, lazy, and not-to-be-trusted people. Has your personal experience indicated that he was, and still is, right?
Saving Face
In CLORGs, the act of saving face by individuals and groups always takes precedence over the health of the organization has a whole. Actually, this behavior defines a CLORG, because without it, the assemblage of people wouldn’t be a freakin’ CLORG. It would be as Charlie Sheen sez: “winning“.
If an org is well led, its leaders will be skilled at detecting, exposing, and squashing face-saving behavior when the long term health of the org is put at risk. Sadly, those same people who should be diligently eradicating selfish, face-saving, behavior from their orgs are the greatest practitioners of it. D’oh!
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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