Category: Organization

I used a picture of a woodpecker last week and I promised the story that went with it.

Jerry Weinberg was a computer programmer and author who wrote often about the impact of information technology. He was pretty sharp with his observations. One I encountered early in my career building technology was:

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

This was a plea for programmers to get better at their work but it also planted a question about what makes some systems stable and others not. That’s the kind of open-ended question that can get you in trouble and eventually lead you back to graduate school for a deeper dive into all kinds of systems–technological and organizational.

One of my advisors was a deep thinker about systems. He was also a decidedly non-linear thinker and lecturer. My notes from Jim’s seminars were typically a wild profusion of boxes and arrows attempting to discern his train of thought. The aha! moment would sometimes arrive at 3 in the morning, but it did arrive.

As those aha moments accumulated, I developed some facility at making sense out of complex systems, whether they were constructed out of technology, organizations, or some blend. While I was getting better at figuring systems out, explaining what I was doing or seeing was more difficult. People prefer simple stories. If I couldn’t find simplicity in the systems I was exploring, perhaps I could find some in how I thought about my underlying process. I eventually found an answer in the title of a 1981 essay by Wendell Berry, “Solving for Pattern.” It nicely captures the clarity of the goal and the complexity of the journey.

If my mother were still around, I’m sure she would be a Bernie Sanders supporter. At heart, she was a communist. Dad was your classic engineer. Both were from blue collar roots. In that environment, business in general and big business in particular was the enemy.

Against this backdrop, working with technology was acceptable. It was a form of engineering. It was inherently rational. Rational was good. Good was opposed to evil.

Business, on the other hand, was not good. It might even be evil. Big businesses were led by selfish and uncaring people. The system was rigged against the little guy.

This was the environment I swam in. Like a fish blind to the existence of water, I happily built systems anchored in rationality. But I was also building these systems inside business organizations.

When you are a junior member of the team, technical rationality prevails. When organizations reject technology, it is easy to fall back on stories of rigged systems and selfish leaders.

I tried this path.

As I took on more responsibilities and rose within organizations, that story started to fall apart. I didn’t feel as though I was becoming uncaring or evil. And my colleagues seemed to be fairly normal as well. I needed a better story about why the leaders in organizations did what they did.

I recall of conversation with my thesis advisor in the early days of my journey to understand technology and organization. He wanted to know what version of organization I believed in. Were organizations about power and politics? social relationships? technical rationality? economics and strategy?

All of these elements are at play in any organization. In healthy organizations, the play is balanced. The dominance of any one perspective is an indicator of underlying trouble.

The place I arrived at is to view organizations as complex systems subject to one major constraint. The systems perspective trains to you look for and see how elements interact. The constraint is the idea of bounded rationality. Most of us would prefer to base our decisions and actions in the systematic analysis of facts and data. But there are always boundaries and limits on our ability to discover or do the most rational thing. This perspective is what has evolved into today’s notion of behavioral economics.

When I take these notions into actual organizations populated with real people, I remind myself that no one is the villain in their own story. For all that my mother liked to start her complaints with “that’s crazy” you’re better served by looking for what makes things look sane for each of the players.

Above my desk is a wall of pictures. It’s not the “brag wall” of executives or politicians showing off all the famous or important people I’ve met. No, it’s pictures of family and moments going back over thirty years. It’s a practice my wife taught me. We’ve had one in every place we’ve ever owned.

There weren’t very many pictures around the house when I was growing up. There were occasional photo albums but hanging fragile things on walls wasn’t a great idea in a house with lots of boys moving at high speeds.

My professional curiosity centers on how technology changes how organizations function. I started that exploration from the realm of technology. One of the appeals of technology is that it does only and just what you tell it to. Working that out can be tricky but it is ultimately an exercise in rationality.

I came to the exploration of organization with a naive assumption that rationality was enough. I am less naive now but I still want to make sense of organizations. When the complexities seem overwhelming, I can look up at that wall. It reminds me that the complexity is built on the stories behind each picture. The big story is built up from the unfolding of each little story over time. You grasp the big picture by working your way through each individual story.

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?