Managing in Uncertainty

Complexity and the paradoxes of everyday organizational life

Chris Mowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317550341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The reality of everyday organizational life is that it is filled with uncertainty, contradictions and paradoxes. Yet leaders and managers are expected to act as though they can predict the future and bring about the impossible: that they can transform themselves and their colleagues, design different cultures, choose the values for their organization, be innovative, control conflict and have inspiring visions. Whilst managers will have had lots of experiences of being in charge, they probably realise that they are not always in control.

So how might we frame a much more realistic account of what's possible for managers to achieve?

Many managers are implicitly aware of their messy reality, but they rarely spend much time reflecting on what it is that they are actually doing. Drawing on insights from the complexity sciences, process sociology and pragmatic philosophy, Chris Mowles engages directly with some principal contradictions of organizational life concerning innovation, culture change, conflict and leadership. Mowles argues that if managers proceed from the expectation that organizational life as inherently uncertain, and interactions between people are complex and often paradoxical, they start noticing different things and create possibilities for acting in different ways.

Managing in Uncertainty will be of interest to practitioners, advanced students and researchers looking at management and organizational studies from a critical perspective.

1

Why are uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox important for managers?

In today’s organizations leaders and managers are dealing with a great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity and must straddle a number of paradoxes. They are obliged to exercise a degree of control, and yet they must encourage their staff to be creative and independent thinkers. On the one hand, they may be very experienced but, on the other hand, their experience may blind them to novel opportunities which emerge in complex environments. Senior teams are often encouraged to change and to innovate, and at the same time they are expected to stand firm for the traditional values, and the ‘brand’ which their organization represents. Paradoxically, they are enjoined to change in order to stay the same: in other words they have to innovate to sustain organizational continuity.

And yet, despite the uncertain environment and contradictory injunctions, a lot of talk in organizations, and in management literature, is highly purposeful and deals in certainties. For example, the ideal for senior teams is that managers and leaders choose the future for their organizations, they set the ‘right’ conditions for their staff to be productive, and they can even change the culture. By implication senior managers and leaders get to their exalted place in their organizations from knowing what they are doing, and acting ‘appropriately’, decisively and authoritatively. Of course, this is no different from the dominant assumptions in a whole variety of different professions, where there is an equivalence drawn between being a professional and certainty. In this context uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox, profoundly disturbing and potentially paralyzing contradictions, might seem like very abstruse subjects to write about in a book about management and organizing. It might seem counterintuitive and unhelpful to deal in the ambiguous when I might instead be offering prescriptions to managers about how to act, which is the conventional tack to take in a book on organizing.

However, I do so because of my conviction that, ultimately, it is more helpful and more realistic to try to find ways of understanding organizational life in all its complexity, its blooming, buzzing confusion as William James once referred to experience, rather than relying on the thin simplifications which constitute the recommendations of much management literature. They are thin simplifications, a phrase I borrow from the political scientist James C Scott (1999), because they are abstractions from the rich and complex reality from which they are abstracted: in being general they are only generally useful. In my view it is just as important to treat what is, no matter how complex and messy, than what we think should be if it means that we have to reduce our ideas beyond recognition. It is my contention that managers both understand and do not understand at the same time what is going on in their organization, and this is a phenomenon worth thinking about and exploring.

First, though, I should deal with the terms I am using to explain briefly what I mean by them. As the book proceeds we will look at some of these ideas and how they manifest in organizational life in more depth. However, at this stage of the proceedings I understand uncertainty to arise from the interweaving of everyone’s intentions. We may start out by forming intentions that are permeated by our world view, which we formalize in plans, but this is also what everyone else is doing at the same time. So uncertainty arises in social life because we act into a web of other people’s actions and intentions: we can no more predict how we will respond when we encounter other people’s actions than we can always anticipate what their actions will be, although we may have strong hunches. We often experience a great deal of ambiguity, that is to say, where we are alert to a variety of different meanings of what is going on, without there necessarily being a relationship between the meanings we make. Meanwhile, contradictions, for example the injunction to stay the same/innovate, may form part of this ambiguity and produce a relationship of negation between two different interpretations. Finally, paradox is a particular form of contradiction where to think one thing is automatically to call out its polar opposite, both at the same time. Paradox is a particular property of thinking which I explore as the book unfolds.

When contradictions present themselves in organizational life there is usually no obvious way to proceed, or perhaps there are a variety of ways which all have their upsides and downsides (or perhaps all choices are equally bad). Nonetheless and in my experience most managers and leaders are already coping relatively well with their own environment of uncertainty. They are able to sustain managing and not managing in their various contexts reasonably well. However, I experience a lack of facility in being able to talk about precisely what they are doing when managers are coping with uncertainty: although they know that organizational life is unpredictable, if you ask them directly, managers seem to have precious few opportunities to explore this consciously and publicly. So what I intend to do in this book is to focus a bit more on being in control and not being in control, on those interstices in organizations when it is not always clear what to do, and when there are contradictory pressures on managers. If we could dwell with the contradictions for a while and think about what might be going on this might be just as helpful as producing a generalized piece of advice which bears no relation to the contexts in which managers are obliged to operate.

The central premise of this book, then, is that exploration of ambiguous, contradictory and paradoxical experience, where sometimes mutually informing but contradictory ideas arise at the same time and potentially confound us may help us understand how to act into the unknown. This will involve enquiring into how we make our way with contradictions, and what we need to pay attention to and reflect upon as we do so. It requires paying attention to how we act when we are not sure what to do and a different way of thinking than using logic alone, or disaggregating parts/whole thinking.

Perhaps it would be best to illustrate why I think this area of enquiry is important by means of an incident that happened between a colleague and me when I served on a board of trustees. Using this as a practical example I can then go on to explore some of the themes at the heart of the matter for me.

Having values about not having values

A couple of years ago I was on the board of a not-for-profit organization along with a another academic with whom I had some quite large intellectual differences. For the most part we could cooperate fairly easily since the job of a board of trustees is to act as a critical friend to the director and her senior management team. In general it is not hard to develop a way of working together, within the board and between the board and the senior management team.

One day my academic colleague and I were both asked to talk to staff about our different views of social science to help them with the task they had of carrying out research to evaluate the work they were doing. My colleague was director of a unit which specialized in running randomized control trials (RCTs) of social development projects. RCTs are at the heart of contemporary medical research, and turn on the idea of measuring differences of response between groups of randomly selected patients to a particular medical intervention. Who receives the treatment is not known to the patients or to the researchers administering the trial, and therefore the intention is to remove researcher (and patient) prejudice as completely as possible from the experiment. The idea is that it does not matter what a particular expert, or patient, might believe will be effective: what counts is whether the experiment shows what is. In medical research a randomized control trial produces the highest form of evidence and is taken to be the ‘gold standard’ against which all other forms of evidence are measured.

So in what is known as a double blind randomized trial there would be a large group of patients chosen at random and with a particular medical condition who receive a trial drug or intervention, a similarly large randomly chosen group of patients with the same condition who receive a placebo, i.e. some kind of pill or intervention which is known to have no effect, and a randomly chosen group of patients with the same condition who receive nothing at all. After a given period measurements are taken to find out if there are any statistically significant improvements between the group which actually received the treatment and the two which did not. Other statistical tests are run to control for other possible confounding variables, such as age or social background, which might be affecting the results. The experiment would be written up in a systematic way so that it could be copied by any other group of researchers who would then run the experiment again and get the same results. If they do, and yet more experiments showed the same outcomes, then the results would over time be deemed to be robust. The experiment needs a statistically significant number of respondents involved in the study so that variable responses are averaged out.

When he took his turn to talk to members of staff about social research, my colleague on the board extolled the virtues of randomized control trials in social projects, arguing that they are the only method which produces scientific evidence. He claimed, rightly in the opinion of many natural scientists, they are equally applicable in a social setting; for example in projects which are designed to discourage underage young people living in the country in developing countries to migrate to the cities where they are easily exploited, the kind of project that this particular not-for-profit was designing and managing and was concerned to find out if they were effective.

My colleague was setting out the case for what is known as methods-driven research, which has a number of theoretical assumptions: in other words, a stepwise, logical, linear, controlled experimental approach, keeping the researcher as much out of the experiment as possible, is the only scientific way to design social research. This method treats a group of individuals as separate, discrete units, and looks to find out if a large enough number is affected to a large enough degree by a carefully defined social intervention: the central causal relationship is between the intervention, broken down to a number of variables, and the individual.

No account is taken of how individuals may interact with each other in response to the intervention. It produces results which count as evidence and which are assumed to be replicable in other settings because it expects the average human responses to be similar between groups. Once a researcher finds out ‘what works’, a specific intervention has a measurable effect on a significant number of individuals in a group, then a researcher can apply this knowledge to ‘scale up’ the intervention or do the same thing elsewhere. Scaling up, choosing a much larger group to receive the intervention, will be similarly successful because it is merely the same thing on a bigger scale. Implicitly he was also making a case that any other form of research, i.e. any argument I was about to make, might be interesting, but would be inferior to what he had just said, because it would be less scientific.

There are a variety of experimental methods used in research in the natural sciences, and many of them have migrated over to researching social phenomena as well, including in organizational research. RCTs are simply the purest example of a broader phenomenon. The overwhelming majority of research papers published in academic journals is of an experimental nature along the lines discussed above, where the researchers keep their ‘objects’ of research as much at a distance as possible in the quest for evidence. They put forward a hypothesis about the application of a particular and definable approach to management, and then they measure the results as to whether this proved effective or not.

However, and from my perspective, in social settings RCTs in particular have severe limitations and also lead to what I consider to be some very distorting behaviours, which call into question their usefulness. For example, it makes sense in a medical trial to standardize the dose of whatever treatment you are administering to patients. In social settings this attempt to standardize leads to the development of manuals and scripts so that social workers, for example, are encouraged to behave in exactly the same way and deliver as similar a social work intervention as possible so that there are not too many confounding variables in the project. In other words, and in my view, social development workers are encouraged to behave like robots so that they do not get in the way of the experiment.

It seems to me that in social development it is precisely the improvisational activities of development workers, negotiating a slightly different response with the people they are working with in every case, which can make the difference to success or otherwise, because of the uncertainty and ambiguity in any given situation, which I started out by defining at the beginning of this chapter. It seems to me that methods-driven approaches are trying to exclude the very factors which will cause the intervention to succeed. This is beside the point as to whether one adopts a theory of causation that it is the ‘variables’ which make a social project work, rather than how the people in the project are cooperating together to make it work. There are a number of other critiques that one could make about the use of RCTs in social development, for example the tendency to measure quite trivial and observable things and to have no views on broader phenomena such as culture, history and power relations, and whether a larger group is simply an aggregate of smaller groups, which I do not have the space to expand upon here.

When it came to my turn to speak I made an alternative case for what is known as problem-driven research, as opposed to methods-driven, where the first question arises from a particular practice context and focuses on what it is we are trying to find out, which then informs the question about which research method is most appropriate. In doing so I was pointing out what I saw as the weaknesses in my colleague’s case, based on some of what I have set out above. Inevitably, when my colleague responded by reiterating his claim that his was the only scientific approach, the discussion became heated. This was particularly at the point when my colleague informed the staff that he operates according to three principles when designing an RCT: that he involves the client group he works with in the design, but only if they could offer suggestions which were logically consistent, and whatever they said had to be backed up with evidence (i.e. the sort which is provable by RCT), and that everyone, including him, left their values at the door.

As well as engaging with his argument more broadly, noting how he was silencing people who did not conform to his world view (just as I felt he was trying to silence me) I also pointed out to him that he had just demonstrated, paradoxically, that he had strong values about not having values and that logic alone was insufficient for stating or resolving practical problems. His stated values were of universalism and disinterestedness as a higher order of social engagement, but he was unaware of how he might be silencing people. Despite claiming that his position was logical and scientific, I told him I thought his argument also rested on rhetoric, paradox and power relations, as well as questions of method.

Engaging with uncertainty, contradiction and paradox as a way into ethics

Looking back on this incident now I am wondering what possessed us both to get so caught up with each other in front of staff whom we were supposed to be helping. I wonder what they thought of this back and forth between two academics who were members of their board, and who mostly were able to cooperate together to support their work, but here were clearly unable to do so on this occasion. And I suppose the short answer is that we could not help ourselves because what we were talking about mattered to us. This was not just a difference of opinion over technical considerations but a struggle over power and influence, which called into question who we were and what we thought was important: it raised questions of power, politics and ethics. Despite the fact that we were both experienced academics, neither of us could resist making our different cases as strongly as possible and to present our arguments to the good.

Although I want to explore further some of the different intellectual assumptions involved in our two positions, it’s worth dwelling on this point, that my colleague and I were caught up in the moment despite ourselves, because I think it goes to the heart of my motivation to write this book. It might have been a memorable incident, perhaps for the two protagonists, and I suspect also for everyone present exposed to the warmth of the encounter, but in many ways it was also quite an ordinary, everyday experience in organizations. We found ourselves engaged in a conflict involving contradictory ways of understanding human interaction, which, rather than bringing about greater certainty, might have created greater uncertainty amongst those who were present. If they were looking for advice about how to proceed with their evaluation, they may well have left the meeting confused. The encounter also centred on different conceptions of the good, the role and function of the evaluation, as well as questions of method: there is no separating them. It was both an argument about the best method to use in a particular evaluation, but it was also a moral argument and a discussion about how we think about and resolve our problems.

One of the central contentions of this book is that daily life in organizations is far from ideal, and involves many such encounters where people try to persuade each other, more or less politely, more or less forcefully, of the strength of their position. They cooperate and compete to get things done together, they cajole and try to sway each other, frame their arguments using rhetoric, become impassioned about what they think is the right thing to do, and are generally caught up in the game of organizational life. This is a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a book arising from uncertainty in everyday organizational life
• 1. Why are uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox important for managers?
• 2. Taking paradox seriously
• 3. The paradox of involvement and detachment: the importance of practical judgment
• 4. Attempts to change organizational culture: the paradox of the local and the global
• 5. On the predictable unpredictability of organizational life: change and innovation
• 6. The paradox of cooperation and competition: conflict and the necessary politics of organizational life
• 7. Ambiguity, contradiction and paradox in the natural sciences: creative entanglement between the knower and the known
• 8. Uncertainty, contradiction and paradox: so what can managers do?
• Index