Category: Organization

I’ve talked about the interplay between actors and crew during a performance; how everything needs to come together to deliver an experience to the audience. None of that experience is accidental. All of it is designed; the actors’ lines, where they move, sets, costumes, props, lights are all the product of careful thought.

All of these elements first come together during tech rehearsal. Tech rehearsal is when you work out all of the details that the audience won’t be  aware of yet are essential to their experience. As an example, consider just the lighting in a scene. Is it a beautiful morning in Oklahoma? The lights won’t simply be bright; the color balance will be some version of straw or amber. That level and balance gets worked out and adjusted during tech.

In the theater, those environmental elements are designed and controlled. I think this is where I first began to tune into the role of the environment on performance. We tend to think of the organizational environment as a fixed background if we think of it at all.

The theater teaches a different lesson. Any element is potentially mutable. And it is the interaction of multiple elements that contributes to the overall effect. Eventually, this leads you to a systems perspective on performance. Sure the lights need to be bright enough to see the performers, but what color balance do you want to set the tone?

One of the particular challenges in organizational settings is that we lack the theater’s appreciation for the complexity of how elements interact. Or for the time it takes to understand and adapt to a new arrangement of elements. Instead, we are likely to turn down the lights or move the sets in the middle of a live performance and wonder why the actors are angry and the audience has left.

On days that I teach, I take the train into Chicago and then walk from Ogilvie Station up to the Loyola Watertower campus. Generally takes me about 30 minutes. Yesterday, as I was mulling over what to write here, I came to an intersection. The “Don’t Walk” sign was lit and several other pedestrians were waiting patiently. I looked both ways, saw that there was no oncoming traffic, and continued on my way.

It always strikes me as odd that Chicago pedestrians simply comply with the traffic signals and don’t adjust their behavior to the actual environment in the moment. I used to think it was simply because I learned to be an urban pedestrian in New York City, where getting from train station to office on foot was a blood sport.

I don’t think I can be accused of being a scofflaw; someone who is merely rebellious by nature. If anything, as an eldest child, I am a rule follower. Courtesy of my parents and a string of enlightened teachers, however, I also learned that rules are elements of larger systems. In good systems, there is a deeper logic; rules exist to advance the goals of the system.

One choice is to simply comply with the rules and assume that the goals of the system remain relevant and the design of the system matches the realities of its environment. In stable and slow-changing environments, that is a reasonable strategy. Waiting for the traffic signals to change doesn’t hurt, although it might slow the world down a little bit.

There is another choice, which is to look at the design logic driving whatever system you are engaged with. This is the dangerous path you set people on when you start teaching them how to program. Programs are the explicit rules for realizing the design goals of a bigger system.

The differences between a working computer program and a working organization are differences of degree not of kind. As you learn to see how rules, information, structure, and goals interact, you learn to see the commonality that unites systems across disparate environments. It can take time to work out the value and the limits of the analogies, but it gives you a path.

I remember my parents as being light drinkers. One beer at a Saturday barbecue would be typical. I never thought too much about it, even as my peers began their introductions to alcohol.

Extended families became a larger element of my environment when we moved to St.Louis, where my mother’s siblings and their children all lived. Dad’s family was back East and weren’t part of my life. While it was never a specific topic of discussion, I eventually pieced together that my father’s move west was a very deliberate act. His two older brothers and his twin brother were all essentially functional alcoholics. Leaving that environment was his plan to avoid the same fate.

I think this must be one of the seeds of my sensitivity to context and the environment. The environment–social, organizational, physical–sets boundaries on what is easy and what is hard. And history shapes the environment.

Technology pretends to be ahistorical. We are here now and the future looks bright. There is nothing to be gained by wondering how we got here; press on.

Organizations are all about history. Jerry Weinberg was fond of reducing his insights into aphorisms or laws. There’s one he attributes to economist Ken Boulding;

Things are the way they are because they got that way

Understanding how things “got that way” is a necessary step to making things better. And that is true for organizations, technology, and their intersection.

[There’s a reason for the woodpecker but that is for another day]

My mom’s been gone for almost sixteen years now. I still marvel at how she managed to wrangle seven kids between the ages of 8 and 1. I recall one conversation about reading when my boys were young. I was the absolutely stereotypical bookworm. Getting my first library card at the age of 10 still ranks among my signal memories. On a recent visit to my home town, I actually stopped at the local library simply to thank the librarians for existing.

From time to time, my dad would grumble about getting my nose out of whatever book it was buried in and go outside. Mom, on the other hand, never once complained or pushed me to do something else. When I asked her about my relationship with books and why she sided with me rather than my dad she said,

You were compelled to read. I didn’t know what was driving you but I could see that it was something you had to do. I decided it was more important to let you follow your own curiosity than try to tell you what you ought to be doing.

I was pretty indiscriminate in what I would pick up. Early on, one vein that I started to mine was science fiction. I tore through the “age appropriate” material quickly and moved on to the grown up science fiction shelves in the library.

Muggles generally don’t “get” science fiction. But there is a core premise that has immense relevance in the world we’ve all grown up to live in. It has little to do with whether some author “predicted” cell phones or waterbeds or the internet. What science fiction makes you think about is the interaction between the relentless advance of technology and the equally relentless commitment to the status quo of groups and organizations. People are gonna people whether they travel by covered wagon or starship.

What science fiction encourages you to do is to think about how people will react in any kind of scenario. And, it gives you permission to imagine a much richer variety of possible scenarios beyond what history or contemporary society serve up.

There was a period in the 1980s, or so, when scenario planning was a popular technique in strategy circles. Turns out I had been studying scenario planning at the feet of much more accomplished story tellers than the strategy types could bring to the fight.

Technology change does trigger organizational change but the process is as human and messy as any other human system. Because it is fundamentally human, story is an essential entry point and vantage point.

“Julie! It’s 10th grade algebra!”

We were sitting in an MBA classroom along with the rest of our section and Peter, our professor explaining how he had derived a particular economic formula. Julie was stuck and Peter had walked through the equation for the 3rd time when I burst out with my unsolicited comment.

Julie had the flash of understanding that had escaped her and I patted myself on the back for my clever intervention. Until the women in the class rebuked me for my clearly sexist and misogynistic attitude and insensitivity to Julie’s plight. The fact that Julie and I were friends, that I knew Julie majored in mathematics in college, and that I knew my comment was the fastest way to break her out of her confusion were all for naught.

For someone who claims to be a smart guy, I can be a slow learner.

The beauty of mathematics and technology is that not only are there right answers but that any question is appropriate at any time. Throw people and organizations–that is, people in groups–into the mix and simplicity is gone.

In technical settings, facts have no feelings and no question is ever out of bounds. In organizational settings, some of the objects you would like to treat as objective facts are other people with their own feelings and agendas. Questions don’t simply elicit data, they provoke reactions. Learning to be human includes many lessons on the limits of how and when you can pose questions.

For most of us, most of the time, it is enough to learn the boundaries and opt to stay within the lines. If you want to change organizations, however, you have to learn how to set up and sequence your questions to provoke the responses and the reactions you are seeking.

Developing an interest in the interplay between technology and organizations isn’t something you know is going to happen when you’re in middle school. There’s no teacher or coach to emulate. There’s no hero’s quest to set out on. But there have to be roots.

One of the constant elements in my life has been live theater. Books come from some magical place and appear on a shelf. TV shows and movies arrive from somewhere else, appear for a brief time on the screen, and disappear.

When the curtain opens on a play, there are real people before you on the stage. They wander off into some hidden place and reappear moments later. Perhaps you catch a glimpse of someone in the wings and wonder what they are up to. If you are a curious sort, you start to look for how to get back into those hidden places.

The conventional route is to aspire to be one of those people performing on the stage. Another path is to find work in the wings, to learn how the magic gets put together. Which was the path I chose. I started working in various backstage roles in high school and continued on in to college. I built and moved sets, I hung and focused lights, I searched out and managed the props  the actors used on stage. Much of this work took place while the performers rehearsed. During a performance, however, while the actors delivered their lines on the stage there was a crew in the wings making everything else happen on cue.

All of that activity was coordinated by one person with a three-ring binder in front of them and a headset covering one ear–the stage manager. The stage manager never seemed to actually do anything expect read the binder and talk with other people wearing headsets. But nothing happened until the stage manager gave the order.

Claire was the stage manager I apprenticed myself to to learn the craft. She taught me how all the pieces came together to create the magic that the audience experienced from their seats. How the technology that moved sets, illuminated actors, and amplified their lines was woven together in support of their performances and how all of that was focused on creating a specific emotional experience for the people sitting in the audience.

The magic depended foremost on the talent and craft of the performers. Done well, all the other elements of a production amplify the magic. Done poorly, any element can destroy it.

The seed that this planted was a hint of how the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Watching magic from the audience was entertaining. Putting it together night after night was empowering and humbling.

Magic doesn’t happen. It gets designed and then it gets made. How can you not want to learn more?

I wrote my first book with Larry Prusak 25 years ago, while we were both working for Ernst & Young. In the intervening years he turned out another 8 or 10 books while I’ve only managed one more so far. I think he’s done writing books for now, so there’s some chance I may yet catch up.

When I was teaching knowledge management at Kellogg, I invited Larry as a guest speaker. He’s an excellent storyteller, so my students benefitted that afternoon. He opened with a wonderful diagnostic question for organizations: “Can you make a mistake around here?”

Organizations spend a great deal of energy designing systems and processes to be reliable and not make mistakes. This is as it should be. No one wants to fly in a plane that you can’t trust to be reliable.

But what can we learn about organizations from how they respond to mistakes? Do they recognize and acknowledge the fundamental unreliability of people? Or, do they lie to themselves and pretend that they can staff themselves with people who won’t make mistakes?

If you can’t make a mistake, you can’t learn. If you can’t learn, you can’t innovate. You can extend the logic from there.

Have you ever wondered what’s behind the conflict between geeks and suits? Sure, they think differently, but what, exactly, does that mean? A Jesuit priest who passed away in 2003 at the age of 90 may hold one clue.

Walter Ong published a slim volume in 1982 titled “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” that explored what the differences between oral and literate cultures suggest about how we think.

Remember Homer, the blind epic poet credited with “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”? If we remember anything, it’s something along the lines of someone who managed to memorize and then flawlessly recite book-length poems for his supper.

The real story, which Ong details, is more interesting and more relevant to our organizational world than you might suspect. Homer sits at the boundary between oral culture and the first literate cultures.

In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell—without visual aids. Ong’s work shows that oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop: literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.

While this may be interesting for a college bull session, it’s particularly relevant to organizations. For all their dependence on the industrial revolution, organizations are human institutions first. Management is fundamentally an oral culture and is most comfortable with thought organized that way. Historically, leadership in organizations went to those most facile with the spoken word.

At the opposite extreme, information technology is a quintessentially literate activity with a literate mode of thought. In fact, IT cannot exist without the objective, rational, analytical thinking that literate culture enables.

How does the nature of this divide complicate conversations between IT and management? Can understanding the differing natures of oral and literate thought help us bridge that divide?

IT professionals have long struggled with getting a complex message across to management. In our honest and unguarded moments, we talk of “dumbing it down for the suits.” But the challenge is more subtle than that. We need to repackage the argument to work within the frame of oral thought. The easy part of that is about oratorical and rhetorical technique. The more important challenge is to deal with the deeper elements of oral culture; of being situational, engaged, and conservative. The right abstract answer can’t be understood until it is placed carefully within its context.

What management recognizes in its fundamentally oral mind is that organizations and their inhabitants spend most of their time in oral modes of thought. The oral mind is focused on tradition and stability because of how long it takes to embed a new idea. The techniques of change management that seem so obtuse to the literate, engineering mind are not irrational; they are oral. They are the necessary steps to embed new ideas and practices in oral minds.

Repeating a calculation or an analysis is nonsense in a literate culture. Management objections to an analytical proposal rarely turn on objections to the analysis. Walking through the analysis again at a deeper level of detail will not help. What needs to be done is to craft the oral culture story that will carry the analytical tale. It’s not about dumbing down an argument, it’s about repackaging it to match the fundamental thought processes of the target audience.

That might mean finding the telling anecdote or designating an appropriate hero or champion. Suppose, for example, that your analysis concludes it’s time to move toward document management to manage the files littering a shared drive somewhere or buried as attachments to three-year old e-mails. Analytical statistics on improved productivity won’t do it. A scenario of the “day in the life” of a field sales rep would be better. Best would be a story of the sales manager who can’t find the marked up copy of the last version of the contract.

These human stories are much more than the tricks of the trade of consultants and sales reps. They are recognition that what gets dressed up as the techniques of change management are really a bridge to the oral thinking needed to provoke action.

Seen in this light, what is typically labeled resistance to change is better understood as the necessary time and repetition to embed ideas in an oral mind.

Management understands something that those rooted in literate thinking may not. Knowing the right answer analytically has little or nothing to do with whether you can get the organization to accept that answer. What literate thinkers dismiss as “politics” is the essential work of translating and packaging an idea for acceptance and consumption in an oral culture.

The critical step in translating from a literate answer to an oral plan of action is finding a story to hang the answer on. The analysis only engages the mind; moving analysis to action must engage the whole person. Revealing this truth to the analytical minded can be discomforting. It’s equivalent to explaining to an accountant that the key to a Capital Expenditure proposal is theater, not economics. You might want to check out Steve Denning’s book, “The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations,” for some good insights into how to craft effective stories inside organizations.

In addition to helping the analytically inclined see the value of creating a compelling story, you need to help them see how and why story works differently than analysis. The best stories to drive change are not complex, literary, novels. They are epic poetry; tapping into archetypes and cliché, acknowledging tradition, grounded in the particular. You need to bring them to an understanding of why repetition and “staying on message” is key to shifting an oral culture’s course, not an evil invention of marketing.

Assume you teach the literate types in your IT organization how to repackage their analyses for consumption. They’ve now learned how to pitch their ideas in ways that will stick in the organization. What might you learn from their literate approach to thought? Is there an opportunity if you can get more of your organization and more of your management operating with literate modes of thinking?

Being able to write things down done permits you to develop an argument that is more complex and sophisticated. On the plus side, this makes rocket science possible. On the negative side, you get lawyers.

On the other hand, if you are operating in an environment whose complexity demands a corresponding complexity in your organizational responses, then encouraging more literate thinking by more members of the organization is a good strategy.

What would such an organization look like compared to today’s dominant oral design? The mere presence of e-mail and an intranet is insufficient. E-mail tends to mirror oral modes of thought, particularly among more senior executives. Intranets tend to be over-controlled and, to the extent they contain examples of literate thinking, are rooted in an organizational culture that strives to confine the literate mind to the role of well-pigeonholed expert. The presence of particular tools, then, isn’t likely to be a good predictor, although their absence might be.

What of possible case examples? A few knowledge management success stories hold hints. Buckman Labs used discussion groups successfully to get greater leverage out of its staff’s knowledge and expertise. Whether this success built on literate modes of thought or simply on better distribution of oral stories is less clear. The successes of some widely distributed software development teams are worth looking at from this perspective.

Although it’s a bit too early to tell, the take up of blogs and wikis inside organizations may be a harbinger of management based on literate thinking skills. They offer an interesting bridge between the oral and the literate by providing a way to capture conversation in a way that makes it visible and, hence, analyzable. As a class of tools, they begin to move institutional memory out of the purely oral and into the realm of literate.