WHY WORK ISN’T WORKING LIKE IT USED TO

We have been flummoxed by the present turning into the future without warning.  A spate of books a score of years ago attempted to ease our discomfort by explaining the contradiction away.  We read Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” and Dennis Gabor’s “Inventing a Future” and Barbara Ward’s “Lopsided World” and C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures.”  These were just the reasonable books, but nothing changed. 

To be fair, they described the fundamental dislocations of society, but failed to increase our understanding of where we were, how we got there, and why we wanted to go in one direction, but ended up in another.  “Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches,” also published a score of years ago, attempted to address this conundrum.  The book was called “angry,” but still was reviewed positively by such publications as Industry Week (named one of the ten best business books of 1991), The Business Book Review Journal (one of the four major works of 1991 in its category), and NPR radio’s All Things Considered.

Work Without Managers suggested that the Industrial Revolution stopped in 1945:

A shocking look at American business; why it operates in ‘1945 nostalgia,’ as six silent killers threaten to destroy it; and how only American Leadership can still save the day!

About the same time, control theorist Russell L. Ackoff was proposing that the world was going through a Second Industrial Revolution.  He writes:

Since World War II, we have entered into a period, which will be to the future what the Renaissance was to the past.  We have moved into a new age that is fundamentally different from the age, which we have come, an age that began with the Renaissance and ended essentially with World War II.

This fits with sociologist Pitrim Sorokin’s hypothesis.  He published Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937) three quarters of a century before Ackoff presented his thesis, arguing that we were at the end of a 600-year Sensate Day. 

Since the High Renaissance commenced in 1500 in Italy, we are leaving Ackoff’s First Industrial Revolution and entering Sorokin’s 600-year Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow, or the Second Industrial Revolution.  The two men view the phenomenon with similar eyes but different nomenclature.

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We are leaving the Machine Age of hardware and entering the New Machine Age of software, robotics and cyberspace.  Workplace behavior and the problem solving is prime territory for an organizational development (OD) psychologist especially in these times of cultural change.

“Reductionism” broke everything down to its elemental form: atoms in physics, cells in biology, indices in economics, and Freud’s atomistic elements of personality (id, ego and superego) in psychology.  Reductionism has been modified or abandoned in these disciplines in the Second Industrial Revolution.  Yet, our perspective is governed by reductionism, as it is much in evidence in our values and behavior.  It is one of the reasons why management in the workplace is so out of sync with the times.

Logic ruled in the Machine Age:

If “Y” causes “X,” then we don’t need anything else to explain it because the explanation is complete.  If “X” is necessary and sufficient to cause “Y,” then nothing else matters. 

Despite this reductionism failing us again and again, its explanatory model has held fast.

During the First Machine Age, the concept of environment (climate) and culture was considered irrelevant.  It was a “closed system” of unchanging laws that dictated the structure and function of a world, which was reduced to parts, and then these parts were explained as to how they came together.  We came to understand and to be limited by the persuasion that the world could never be greater than the sum of its parts.

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Machine Age thinking also relied on a process called “analysis,” which was also governed by reductionism.  To explain something, it was systematically reduced to its elemental parts.  These parts were analyzed, and then reassembled to its ultimate components.   Consistent with the linear logic of Socratic thinking the components were then explained in the context of the problem.  Management called it “cutting the problem down to size.” 

Unfortunately, most problems don’t respond to this breakdown because of complexity.  The result is that the problems solved are not always the problems faced.  This can lead to paralysis of analysis with the actual problem lost in the process.

This gets a little dicey when breaking down work into jobs and then reassembling the work performed by these jobs into expected and achieved “results.”  On paper expected-achieved results match, but in reality there is a mismatch. 

Take the Machine Age idea of “Management by Objectives.” (MBOs).  Peter Drucker, a master of reductionism, designed MBOs as a way to realize rationally ordered corporate goals.  His intensions were noble, but the practice swiftly was reduced to a ritualistic exercise.  This has happened to many other well-intentioned corporate practices, which were designed for a factory oriented society of the First Industrial Revolution, such as the performance appraisal system, the role of supervisors, middle managers, and executives in a chain-of-command, and corporate offices separate from professionals in cubicles.

From the mid-twentieth century on, new ways were percolating as to how to assess workers and gauge the problem solving.  These included the value of symbols, communications, and cybernetics, the place of control theory in operations, and finally the idea of “a system,” which has assimilated all these previous iterations.

OD benefits from a systemic approach as organizational behavior falls into the patterns of a system, as you shall see in reading this book. 

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Make no mistake we are still essentially in Machine Age thinking using reductionism, but in a rather more vigorous way.  The system consists of a set of parts, a collection of elements (departments, divisions, functions, technologies), which must satisfy three conditions according to control theorist Russell Ackoff:

The performance as a whole is affected by every one of its parts.  That is a basic characteristic of a system. 

If you think of a corporation as a system, this means that every department (division, technology, function) can affect the performance of the corporation. 

That is the first condition of a system.  If you have a department, which has no effect on the performance of the corporation, the one thing you can be sure of is that it is not a part of the corporation.

A second characteristic of a system is that the way that any part affects the whole depends on what one other part is doing.  No part of the system has an independent effect on the whole.

What this says is that the way marketing affects corporate behavior depends on what other departments do, and visa versa.

Now the third condition is the most complex.  If you take these elements (components) and group them in any way, they form subgroups.  These subgroups will be subject to the same first and second conditions as the original elements were, that is, each subgroup will affect the performance as a whole and no subgroup will have an independent effect of the performance of the whole.

It is in the difference between an indivisible part and an indivisible whole in which the roots of the Intellectual Revolution lay.

Systems Thinking is the new approach to the problem solving.  It means moving from a preoccupation with the parts of which things are made, to a new concentration on the whole and on the wholes of which they are a part.  

This represents a shift from analysis to synthesis.  

With analysis, if you wanted to explain a problem, you took it apart, explained the parts, then put it back together again, explaining the problem in terms of the parts.  

In synthesis, if you wanted to explain a problem, you did exactly the opposite.  You didn’t look at the problem to be explained as a whole to be taken apart, but as a part of a greater whole.  You explain the whole of which it is a part, and then extract an explanation of the thing you started with from an explanation of the whole.

If this sounds confusing, it is only because it is counterintuitive thinking, which often comes into play in OD work.  Ackoff again comes to our aid:

If you consider a system and take it apart to identify its components, and then operate those components in such a way that every component behaves as well as it possibly can, there is one thing of which you can be sure. 

The system as a whole will not behave as well as it can.

The corollary is this, if you have a system that is behaving as well as it can, none of its parts will be.

Imagine the power of this counterintuitive thinking.  It is nullifying the practice of interdepartmental competition and alerting us to the synergistic power of cooperation. 

It is implying that the drive for excellence by comparing and competing, which is to say imitating excellent companies, is counterproductive.  More importantly, it won’t get the enterprise where it wants to go. 

It is also providing unassailable evidence why work isn’t working like it used to.  Counterintuitive thinking may not have been critical to Machine Age thinking, but is essential to Systems Thinking in the Second Industrial Revolution.

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Ackoff’s theorems have special significance to this work (WWMs).  In my more than forty years working in and acting as consultant to corporations at every level of organization on four continents, I have found the absence of control theory of debilitating consequences.  In this original work (1991), I wrote:

Take Corporate America.  Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation.  The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers.  Trauma is written on the face of American enterprise.  Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening.

Were it only possible to declare that Corporate America has changed, but as you read what follows, you will see it has changed little.  The workforce has gone from brawn power to brainpower, from blue to white collar, from managers to professionals, from assembly lines to software manufactured products, from brick, mortar and steel institutions to online universities at a fraction of the cost of higher education, from distinctive technological disciplines to complex hybrids, and from hierarchies and position power to Skunk Works and knowledge power.   

As you read, you will see how the failure to embrace System Theory continues to throw Corporate America off its stride, and thus every worker. Think of how you can apply the lessons learned here to your job, and by extension to operations in general.  The first step is to take charge of your work and therefore of your life.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 5, 2012

Tampa, Florida