The Paradox of Control in Organizations

Philip Streatfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134577040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Business leaders are expected to be 'in control' of the situation in which their businesses find themselves. But how can organizational leaders and managers control matters entirely out of their hands; such as the next action a competitor takes, or the next law a government may pass? In this book, Philip Streatfield reflects on his own experience as a manager to explore the question: who, or what is 'in control' in an organization?

Adopting the perspective of complex responsive processes developed in the first two volumes of this series, the author takes self-organization and emergence as central themes in thinking about life in organizations. He focuses on the tension between spontaneously forming patterns of conversation and intentional actions arguing that the order of organizations emerges through a combination of collective interaction and individual intentions. The argument is developed by considering the day-to-day experiences of life in a large pharmaceutical organization, SmithKline Beecham.

In today's organization, managers find that they have to live with the paradox of being 'in control' and 'not in control' simultaneously. It is this capacity to live with paradox, and to continue to participate creatively in spite of 'not being in control', that constitutes effective management.

1 Introduction

• The central question for organizations: who is “in control”?
• Real life management: making it up as we go along
• Outline of the book

This book explores management praxis, that is, the art of acting in an organizational context in order to change that context, changing personally in the process. My central concern is to explore how accounting for and reflecting upon my management experience may help other practicing managers to make sense of their own experience. In my search for accounts and explanations of actual management experience, I have encountered two approaches. On the one hand, there are subjective accounts taking the form of biographies and autobiographies of masterful, charismatic leaders and entrepreneurs (for example, Grove, 1996; Tichy and Sherman, 1995). These are stories about the actual experience of successful business leaders who realize visions and fulfill the ambitions of their companies, getting it “right” in a rather rational, orderly way. On the other hand, academic researchers report on management practice, taking the position of objective observers, interviewing, questioning and tape recording conversations with managers. Some adopt a descriptive approach and point to the piecemeal nature of actual management practice (Mintzberg, 1973). They talk about the co-existence of both deliberate and emergent strategies (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985). Others describe the messiness of management practice, labeling it “muddling through” (Lindblom, 1959) or “garbage can” decision making (March and Olsen, 1976). Mostly, however, writers on management are more concerned with prescribing what ought to happen rather than describing what actually does. The more conscientious of these observe what managers are doing, analyze their observations and then produce propositions and hypotheses to be tested in the work environment, as potential prescriptions for success. These prescriptions are invariably a sequence of rational steps to do with measuring, planning and monitoring, which are supposed to enable the manager to stay “in control.”

A key question for me is whether any of these approaches yield insights that assist managers to make sense of the sometimes painful experiences in the actual messiness of ordinary, daily life in organizations. That question arose for me, in a particularly acute form in 1989, when the company I worked for, SmithKline Beckman (SKB), was widely reported to be failing to deliver the results required by its shareholders and so merged with another company to form a new organization (see chapter three). I found that experience both painful and challenging, as did most of my friends and colleagues. I am sure that none of us wanted to repeat it, although most of us subsequently had to. At the time, I tried to understand why this had happened. I had great respect for the senior executives of the company and their management capabilities, and I had believed that they could steer the business effectively into the future. Surely, there had to be some rational explanation for what had happened and prescriptions for avoiding its recurrence. Surely somebody had been there before and written the prescription for success. If only senior managers at SKB had read the right papers or books, then we should have been able to avoid what had happened. In searching for explanations, I returned to what I had learned on my MBA course a few years earlier. I looked for accounts that described and made sense of experiences similar to mine but found nothing that offered explanations which resonated with my lived experience. Neither the subjective accounts of the successful practitioners, nor the objective, descriptive and prescriptive accounts of the researchers, helped me to make sense of my experience.

My dissatisfaction with what I will call mainstream approaches to making sense of management experience has led me to take my own experience seriously. It is mainly my own experience that I am presenting in this book and now, in reflection, trying to understand. I am trying to present it as I felt it, with all its mess and mixture of success and failure. In doing this, I use a narrative approach, telling the story of my experiences and then reflecting upon them in order to make sense of them. My purpose in undertaking this personally reflective approach is to gain insights that enable me to make more sense of my experience and so improve my praxis. For me, such reflection on personal experience is a more powerful way of getting at the richness of experience as I and others lived it, than that advocated by mainstream approaches. This personal approach does not produce generalizations that can be “applied” by others to their experience. However, my stories and reflections may resonate with the experiences of others and so assist in their sensemaking processes.

Why should it be unusual for practicing managers to reflect publicly on the “real” messiness of their own experience? The answer is not difficult to find. Managers are supposed to be successful all of the time and it is rarely acceptable to own up to not knowing or failing. Many of the processes of management are political and involve the pursuit of personal agendas. Adopting a personally reflective approach is, therefore, potentially dangerous in terms of one’s further career progression. Nevertheless, I think it is worth taking the risk to convey something of the messy “reality” of management.

The central question for organizations: who is “in control”?

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As I came to reflect more and more on my practice as a manager, a key question emerged for me: who, or what is “in control” of an organization? This book is an attempt to shed light on that question by exploring the ordinary experiences of life in a large pharmaceutical manufacturing organization. I will be paying attention to the dynamic nature of the way in which managers construct meaning in their interactions with each other. In this book, I will be arguing for an alternative to mainstream thinking about organizations and their management. This is a perspective in which an organization is thought of as complex responsive processes of relating (Stacey et al., 2000; Stacey, 2001). This perspective provides an understanding of the self-organizing, transformative processes of organizing. In particular, I will be attending to fives themes.

The first theme is that of dynamic pattern formation. By pattern I mean coherence or order as “a combination of qualities, acts, tendencies, . . . forming a consistent or characteristic arrangement” (Webster’s Dictionary, 1989). Patterns are about relationships, and human relationships are fluid in the sense that they are continually forming and changing. I therefore see them as dynamic and evolving. These patterns of meaning, with which I will primarily be concerned, emerge in our conversations and our actions as members of our organizations.

The second theme is that of self organization and emergence. Self organization means that there is no agent doing the overall organizing but rather numerous agents interacting to produce an overall pattern. It is the pattern of meaning that is organizing itself in the bodily interaction of people. Organization is a sense of order, or recognition of patterns, and dynamic processes form those patterns. Self organization and emergence are central themes in the thinking of complexity scientists in fields as diverse as economics (Arthur, 1988), evolutionary biology (Kauffman, 1993), physics (Gell-Mann, 1994) and urban studies (Allen, 1982). The complexity sciences provide analogies for complex responsive processes in human organizations. This theme of self organization introduces the notion that intentions emerge in spontaneously self-organizing interactions.

The third theme follows from the second and has to do with the qualities of interaction, or relating. This particular theme reflects an assumption that the development of political, social and cultural order is the collective result of non-linear interactions (Mainzer, 1996).

The fourth theme is that of anxiety. The importance of this theme became more and more apparent as I reflected on the relationships and experiences described in this book. There were two major sources that triggered this as an area of interest for me. The first was Stacey (1996) who explores the importance of emotion and living with anxiety for the creative processes in an organization. He extended the work of Isabel Menzies-Lyth whose studies of nursing in a general hospital led her to question how “nurses could tolerate so much anxiety” (Menzies-Lyth, 1988: 45). The exploration of the institutional aspects of living with anxiety in hospitals helped to identify the underlying nature of anxiety in that kind of work and pointed to the importance of exploring the impact of anxiety for organizations and institutions generally.

The fifth theme is that of conversation as a self-organizing phenomenon in which meaning emerges. Here the definition of conversation is broad. It incorporates verbal discourse at a surface level and deeply reflective thought, writing and discussion. It covers dialogue, the search for new meaning and the making sense of experience. Conversation may arise spontaneously in the moment, or it can take the form of a slowed down reflective act of reporting, story-telling or writing narratives. When reading a book we are in conversation with the author. When we are interacting with each other, verbally and in the medium of feelings, we are in conversation. When we are reflecting on events and trying to see a pattern in them, we are in conversation with ourselves. Similarly when we write, we are in conversation with ourselves. Shotter places conversation at the center of the way we develop our sense of reality. He argues that “present in the conversational background to our lives are many forms of talk, with their own peculiar properties, currently without a ‘voice’ in the contests within this sphere. If they were to gain a voice, it could change our lives” (Shotter, 1994: 18). In this book, I attempt to give voice to some of these different forms of talk in the stories about my experience.

For me, these themes illuminate in various ways the central question of whether or not managers in an organization are “in control.” As I have already said, this was a question raised in a particularly powerful way for me in 1989.

A striking experience

I was deeply shocked on that day in 1989 when it was announced that SKB was going to merge with Beecham. I could not understand, at that time, why such a great and thriving business had come to the point where it had to give up its identity in order to survive. What were the senior executives of the company doing to get us into such a mess? There was a great sense of loss, anguish and failure. We all seemed to be doing our very best and yet it was just not good enough. This event had a significant impact on my life and on the relationships that I had built up in my organization over many years. It jolted my sense of what it was that made people in business successful.

I thought about how the situation had been managed in an attempt to figure out what it was that we had done wrong. None of this seemed to help. In many cases it seemed that what we had been doing complied with accepted recipes for success, yet we had failed to sustain our business in its own right. Even more frustrating was what seemed to be a complete disconnect between the feelings many of us were experiencing at the time and what I read, which seemed so cold and distant. Here I was involved in a real life drama of huge proportions and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn to in the management “body of knowledge” to help me make sense of what was happening at an ordinary day-to-day level.

How was it that highly paid and seemingly wise and experienced people, who I had respected greatly, had lost control of the situation? What were they doing up there? How could they let us all down so badly when we were doing everything we felt they needed us to do to ensure success? The teams I belonged to at the time were hitting new output records in manufacturing and our costs were coming down. How could it be that we had to merge with this other company that we all knew was second rate compared to our operation? I was in uncharted territory and feeling quite insecure as a result.

This experience raised, for me in a very powerful way, the question of control. In this book, I attempt to address the basic question of whether managers are in control of their business or not, one which has troubled me since the merger occurred. This is coupled to another question: is there any way to ensure that such events do not happen again, or do I have to accept that it is not possible to manage events to ensure success in the way I had thought?

Real life management: making it up as we go along

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Prior to the merger everything had seemed so orderly and in control. We all thought we knew our places and what we had to do to be successful in them. Suddenly it was as if we had gone over a cliff and nothing really made sense any more. During the merger, it seemed that we were making things up as we went along. There was nowhere to refer to for a prescription, and nobody seemed to have had any experience of doing what we were doing on the scale we were doing it. This was both exciting and unsettling at the same time. This experience drove me to take an interest in conversations and articles that seemed to offer a different perspective on the nature of management. It eventually led me to the sciences of complexity, which seemed to have potential for helping me to make sense of a world that was ordered but in which no one was “in control.” As I explored notions from the complexity sciences, I began to realize that on their own these new sciences would be no more successful in helping me make sense of my experience than those of my original scientific training as a chemist. They were not going to reveal any more to me than I had already found in the accepted classics of management. Potentially, I was going to be stuck in a rather unproductive and frustrating loop unless I could find another way.

Casting around for other ways of thinking, I began to explore the notion of dialogue. In fact, I found this so interesting that I joined a group of like-minded people who met informally in an attempt to make more sense of change at SmithKline Beecham (SB). It seemed that the most meaningful route to making sense of my question would be to explore experiences in dialogue with the material I was reading and with some of the people I was meeting in a doctoral group at the University of Hertfordshire. Since then, I have been attaching increasing importance to participation in reflective dialogue with people in my day-to-day work practice, with others in my research community and with the written word. I have come to see this activity as central to effective management. I have deliberately kept myself in the stories in this book because I have become increasingly convinced that it is not possible to separate the “reality” out there from myself “in here.”

The key argument

In the stories of my experience in the following chapters, I hope to convey the paradoxical position in which managers find themselves, namely, that of being simultaneously “in control” and “not in control” of their business. I also hope to convey something of the emotion and anxiety of living with this paradox. I believe that when managers are able to live with this paradox, the resulting tension opens up the potential for new patterns of meaning, which carry the organization forward. Originally, I thought that the effective manager was one who was “in control” of predictable outcomes. This view dominated my thinking at the time of the merger. It seemed to me to be obvious that somebody must be “in control” of SKB. It was unthinkable that perhaps nobody was. I now believe that being “in control” is an illusion and that no one was in control of SKB in any simple sense. Having reached this insight, the danger is to move to the other extreme and conclude that there is no control at all. In this book, I seek to avoid that extreme as I attempt to explain the paradox of control, holding the tension between mainstream thinking – “manager in control” – and the other possibility – “manager not in control.” I argue for a perspective that understands an organization in terms of complex responsive processes of relating, which enables me to avoid collapsing to either pole of the paradox.

For me, management has come to mean living with both sides of the control paradox at the same time. This means acting on the basis of an expectation of an outcome, knowing full well that it is unlikely to materialize, requiring me to be ready to handle the consequences whatever they may be. It involves developing effective ways of handling the anxiety of “not knowing.”

It seems to me that we, as individuals, have a fundamental need to feel “in control” of situations in which we find ourselves. This need for control is connected to the experience of anxiety, in that the individual need for some sense of control is a way of dealing with the anxiety of not knowing. Since this anxiety is too powerful for most of us to meet on our own, we project our needs for control onto our organization in the hope that it will provide a sense of being “in control” and so defend us against anxiety. We generate the illusion of being in control through a variety of tactics such as talking to others to see if we can modify their behavior to suit us. We measure things in the hope that this tells us whether they are performing as we would wish. We design and attempt to impose our own patterns on the world in the hope that this makes it more predictable and we set targets or goals which we hope come to fruition. We try to emulate patterns of behavior that we believe to be connected to particular achievements in the hope that repeating these patterns will lead predictably to repeated success. When we go to work we try to remove emotions from the workplace, believing that if they are expressed they will open up a Pandora’s box of not being in control. The fear is that this would lead people to become dysfunctional instead of working in an aligned fashion. We seem to need to believe that since an organization consists of many potentially diverse elements, there has to be some way of ensuring that all the parts work together for the good of the whole and to deliver for the business overall. Without the control exercised by those in positions of authority, we fear that the organization will not succeed since it will lack purpose and direction.

Mainstream thinking about management approaches the matter of uncertainty by trying to eliminate it through the creation of powerful hierarchies that are supported by the generation of huge amounts of information intended to reduce unknowns and to quantify risks of potential unknowns so that decisions can be made about them if they do arise. This tends to lead to detailed control, which stems from the belief that order and certainty can be imposed on inherently disorderly situations. Major, inexplicable changes in our organization are experienced as very powerful blows to our personal security. Increasingly, organizations fail to adequately serve the purpose of defending us against the anxiety provoked by uncertainty. Instead, as managers, we have to find the courage to carry on participating creatively in the construction of new meaning, in spite of not knowing. This requires an alternative explanation to mainstream thinking, which makes sense only in a world in which it is possible to be in control.

In my exploration of a possible alternative perspective, that of complex responsive processes of relating, I will be highlighting the following points:

• The paradoxical position in which managers find themselves. They are both “in control” and “not in control” at the same time.
• Thinking of an organization as complex responsive processes of relating in which patterns of meaning emerge. Conversations between those working together are the primary form of communicative interaction in organizations in which transient patterns of meaning emerge.
• The qualities of relationships, the influence of power, fantasies and searches for new meaning, all greatly influence conversational interactions. The actions managers take flow from the meaning they make of the circumstances in which they find themselves.

Outline of the book

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Chapter two tells the story of my first experience of line management when I became responsible for the production of one of the company’s products at a factory in Welwyn Garden City. Even at that level, where I t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series preface: Complexity and Emergence in Organizations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Controlling quality?
• 3 The emergence of new products: the story of SmithKline Beckman and its merger with Beecham
• 4 Managing in a post-merger situation
• 5 Making sense of the paradox of control in merger situations
• 6 Measuring performance is not quite as simple as it seems
• 7 Supply chain management is messier than one might expect
• 8 Are managers “in control”?
• Postscript
• References