Rethinking Management

Radical Insights from the Complexity Sciences

Chris Mowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317063964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

What do business school graduates learn, and how helpful is it for managing in the everyday, messy reality of organisations? What does it mean to apply 'best practice', or to take up 'evidence-based management' and what kind of thinking does this imply? In Rethinking Management, Chris Mowles argues that many management courses still largely assume a linear and predictable world, when experience tells us that the opposite is the case. He questions some of the more orthodox conceptual assumptions that underpin much management education and instead, encourages leaders and managers to take their everyday experience of working with others seriously. People in organisations co-operate and compete to get things done, and constrain and enable each other in relationships of power. Because of this there are always unintended consequences of our actions - uncertainty is inherent in the everyday. Chris Mowles draws on the complexity sciences, the sciences of uncertainty rather than certainty, and the social sciences to explore more helpful ways to think and talk about our lived reality. He takes concrete examples from contemporary organisations, to argue that understanding the radical implications of uncertainty is central to the task of leading. Rethinking Management explores narrative alternatives to the ubiquitous grids and frameworks that are routinely taught in business schools, and encourages management professionals and educators to recognise the importance of judgement, improvisation and the everyday politics of organisational life.

1 Why Write This Book?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606125-1

There are tens of thousands of books on management, ranging from more popular books available in airport bookshops which offer shortcuts for busy managers through to more academic, even critical management texts. The first popular category of books may still be written by academics, usually from north American business schools, and will usually contain words such as ‘clear’, ‘successful’, ‘secrets’, ‘effective’, and increasingly ‘evidence-based’. The point of buying these books is presumably to gain access to nuggets of wisdom which have been boiled down by academics and presented in a way that is accessible and digestible. There is usually a broad appeal to common sense, and practicality and sometimes to spirituality and values. Some of these books are driven by current fads in management, and confusingly, there is even a genre of books which purport to counter faddism to reveal the ‘real truth’ about management (for example, Pozner and Kouzes, 2010). The more academic management books are not necessarily easily accessible to practising managers and are sometimes geared more towards other academics than intelligent managers with some time, but not with all the time in the world. Current management literature is certainly a many-layered phenomenon with a plethora of genres and competing truth claims.

In many ways then, it is a brave author who dares to declare that what they are saying is in any way radical or different, and particularly if he then goes on not to offer any prescriptions, grids, frameworks, tools or best practice tips offering to make managers more successful or more effective. Instead this book attempts to do two things: it tries to engage with the practice of management as experienced by managers in a variety of organisations and by myself, and it tries to theorise from this experience. But rather than offering idealised, rulelike prescriptions for how to go about managing people and getting things done in organisations, it tries instead to generalise from practice drawing on specific examples in particular contexts, and further it tries to explore how management generalisations get taken up in practice and some of the difficulties that arise as a consequence. This book tries to hang on to the generative tension between theory and practice by enquiring into what managers actually do in organisations. It asks what some of the consequences are of pursuing some taken for granted ways of understanding what they are doing. By writing in this way I am trying to write about management grounded in the experience of managing, and I am trying to encourage managers to think more about how they are thinking and experiencing their day-to-day work. I am assuming that action, thinking, feeling and speaking are all different phases of getting things done: that what we experience informs the way we talk about what we are doing, which is concurrently informing our thinking, which in turn influences further action and speaking about our activities.

I hope it will become clearer during the course of the book why it is important to write about the experience of managing, but as an introduction I think it is necessary to explain how I myself came to management and what my experiences of organisational life have been. As my explanation develops I will begin to demonstrate the method that I will be using throughout this book.

Developing as an Organisational Development (OD) Consultant

My first introduction to the world of management theory was when I was signed up for a Diploma in Management Studies (DMS) at the business department of the local university. I was a youngish manager in the public sector, and the managerial revolution that had washed over Mrs Thatcher’s Britain was now rippling through public services, and thereafter into the not-for-profit sector.

Like many other managers who were being sent off on management courses, we were being prepared for the new managerial age that was said to be long overdue in the public sector. We were exposed to a wide range of theories that had been taken up with enthusiasm in the private sector and were thought to apply in similar measure in any sector. In the module on operations, for example, I learnt to apply Michael Porter’s (1985) value chain analysis over the services we were offering in my department. The value chain was a way of systematically breaking down a production process into its constituent parts, inputs, manufacturing process, outputs, as a means for managers to identify how they could ‘add value’ to each of the production stages to enhance customer satisfaction and therefore increase profit. This expression, ‘add value’, has now passed into common usage in contemporary Britain and is used by many managers I come across, although mostly they have no idea of the provenance of the phrase and have never read Michael Porter, or Karl Marx and Adam Smith upon whose original thinking Porter, as a classical economist, derived his thinking. At the time my colleagues and I, still new to management, were quite sceptical about the relevance of this Harvard Business School Professor’s ideas derived from private sector industry and from economics to the public services where we were managing. Nonetheless, it was introduced to us relatively unproblematically by the academics, and in the absence of our having any other theory of how we should work in a sector which historically was considered weak on management, we ourselves became quite enthusiastic about it. It enabled us as new managers to appear as though we knew what we were talking about, and to offer a framework for understanding the work processes we were engaged in. We never questioned to what extent it might be possible to talk about adding value to public services nor noticed the growing primacy of economics as a way of interpreting the world.

Meanwhile I learned that personnel departments were in transition to becoming human resource departments as a way of maximising the benefit to the organisation of the people who worked for it. This was another way of considering people as ‘human capital’ for whatever enterprise an organisation was undertaking. People were at the centre of business and needed to be taken seriously if they were to ‘buy in’ to the organisational mission and strategy – the days of command and control were over and it became important to win over hearts and minds. The enterprise was no longer something that was deemed to be an antagonistic undertaking, something that managers would propose and workers would oppose, but was something that could be shared, each of us striving to put the ‘customer’ first. Increasingly workplaces were about sharing vision and values and putting aside our differences for the good of the organisation. This was an interesting development for me as an ex-trade union shop steward, since I had always assumed that the interests of workers and managers were not necessarily shared. Of this I still needed convincing.

Additionally, the Director of the department where I was working had come across Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982), and had started to send round cryptic memos telling us that we should ‘stick to the knitting’ and that we should develop ‘loose/tight’ properties in the services for which we were responsible. Although we were serious about our jobs and wanted to do our best for the clients we were working with, we had no idea what these prescriptions might mean, and knitting jokes abounded in the department for a number of weeks.

This was my first exposure to the already burgeoning management literature where there were a certain number of lessons to follow, in Peters and Waterman’s case eight, that would guarantee success. After a time as a manager, I began to be drawn into internal consultancy within the department, and thereafter, as the market for consultancy began to expand in the private and public sectors, into external consultancy where these sorts of ideas and approaches seemed to have some cachet with the people I was working with. I had often read the books and they had not, and this gave me something of a head start. I began in the game by being half a step ahead of the people I was working with. They trusted me to know what it was I was talking about.

Over the course of the next decade I undertook consultancies across the private, public and third sectors which included strategic planning, evaluations, organisational review and organisational development (OD), the last of which was the subject of a burgeoning literature. I became one of a myriad practitioners who styled themselves OD consultants. OD is a very broad church of concepts drawing on psychological and humanistic theories and systems dynamics (principal adherents would be thinkers such as Argyris, 1982, 1990; Schein, 1987; Senge, 1990) which nonetheless is now practised in a way which has a number of assumptions in common. These are that an organisation can be thought of as a whole, or a system made up of different sub-systems. What interests contemporary OD practitioners is the way the parts are interacting and the relationships between them, not all of which are knowable. The organisation is taken to be a self-influencing system that arises out of the interaction of the different parts. It is not always possible to know how intervening on one part of the system will affect the other parts, since cause and effect can be separated by distance and time. However, it is possible for the organisation understood as a system to evolve into a different state. An organisational consultant who thinks of themselves as an OD practitioner can make an analysis of the organisation and by intervening on certain leverage points can act as a midwife to the new equilibrium state, which is more suited to the environment the organisation now finds itself in. Sometimes OD practitioners use metaphysical descriptions to describe this process such as when the organisation, understood as a self-regulating system, is described as a ‘living, breathing, whole’, or an organism. This particular phrasing reflects the origin of much systems theory from the biological sciences (von Bertalanffy, 1968): the implication is that the OD practitioner is some kind of doctor making a rigorous diagnosis which can bring the organisational organism back to health. In bringing over theories from the natural sciences which have proved so successful in both medicine and engineering, there is a tendency to clothe organisational theory in the language of natural science, a phenomenon I will be exploring in the course of this book.

At the heart of systems dynamics is an essential contradiction: on the one hand the organisation is thought of as a self-regulating system which evolves continuously into new states of greater harmony with its new environment. On the other hand, managers and/or consultants are thought to have a unique role in identifying, choosing, and propelling the organisation and its employees to this new desired state. The organisation is self-regulating and controlled by managers at the same time. Where the role of managers is to choose an ideal future for the organisation, and to develop a motivating vision to excite employees, the function of the consultant is to help the manager design the appropriate organisational systems for the organisation to evolve towards this ideal. One of these systems is thought to be the organisational values, which is the preserve of managers to articulate and for others to adopt and share through a process of discussion. A very common invitation to OD consultants is to help change the organisational ‘culture’, which is usually thought of as the enacted values of all staff, so that it becomes more fitting for the imagined future than the current one is deemed to be. There is usually a great emphasis on agreement, harmony and alignment towards an idealised future, and consultants often use the vocabulary of gap-closing between the inappropriate state we currently find ourselves in, and the ideally adapted state to which we aspire. I will be exploring each of these concepts, culture, vision, values as we proceed through the book.

During my time as an OD consultant, evaluator and facilitator, I have used and promoted a lot of these theories in my work in organisations. However, a number of difficulties began to arise for me in my practice. The first of these was the implied ability of the outside consultant to come up with an accurate ‘diagnosis’ of what was required and for this to lead to a remedy which would be guaranteed to work. My difficulty frequently occurred in contexts where I was invited to facilitate only one- or two-day away-days, as though this would be enough for me to understand what was going on in an organisation so that I could help. I felt under pressure to get it right: in an environment where there were more and more people offering what I had to offer, there was an increased tendency for consultants to claim that what they could bring would guarantee increased organisational effectiveness. Our methods would ‘work’. However, instead of being able to close a gap, I found that the distance between what we promised and what we were able to achieve, particularly in the time frame that managers were prepared to commit to any investigative process, began to widen significantly. It was very difficult to know what was going on. Although I could always claim that I was making some difference to the organisations I was working with, it became increasingly clear to me that there were no organisational levers, or intervention points which could bring about the changes that we all said that we wanted in the way that we wanted them. I could see that sometimes my interventions were effective and sometimes they were not so effective, and I did not always know why there was a difference.

In fact, the more I ran facilitation events or intervened in organisations, the more I realised that I had little idea about what was really happening day to day in any organisation I was working with. It is possible on occasion to get glimpses of the rich hinterland of experience and history that staff bring with them during such interventions, but in general it is not usually these histories that are valued by the methods OD practitioners use, since they are drawn to more abstract idealising towards an organisational vision or mission, or sharing values. Systems theories are predicated on the concept of getting organisations to work in similar ways. OD methods suggest an ideal state, comprising eight characteristics of excellence or five systems disciplines, which employees are invited to take up, or on which they are encouraged to converge. My job, then, was less about enquiring into what they were doing and more about telling them what they ought to be doing from my unique perspective of being a detached observer who could compare their efforts with the ideal. On a number of occasions I was invited back to the same organisation some months after an event that I had facilitated or an intervention I had made, only to find myself confronting very similar problems manifesting themselves in different ways. Had I not prescribed the right advice? Had the employees not taken the medicine, or had they shortened the course of treatment?

On a number of occasions the intervention I had designed with managers was disrupted by some unforeseen confrontation between members of staff, or a well-articulated objection to the schema or framework that I was offering. What was clear to me was that bringing people together to talk about ostensibly neutral subjects like strategy or evaluation often provoked very strong feelings amongst those who had gathered together to discuss, including me. Sometimes these strong feelings were directed at me. When outbursts occurred I had to work with the expectation that this kind of intervention had created, that somehow I would keep the show on the road irrespective of what was happening, and I would fulfil the objectives that we had determined in advance. To do otherwise, to address the nature of the objection being raised or to enquire into the difficulty between employees, would be to act unprofessionally. As temporary leader in my role as consultant, I had to show that I was in charge and could ‘manage conflict’. Increasingly I felt as though I was expected to be some kind of performer, to distract from what...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Why Write This Book?
• Chapter 2 Consultancy as Practical Engagement in Organisational Politics
• Chapter 3 Leaders, Managers and Consultants as Researchers: Using the Self as an Instrument of Research
• Chapter 4 Theories of Leadership as Magico-Mythical Thinking
• Chapter 5 Charisma and Passion — Visioning the Future
• Chapter 6 Choosing Organisational Values, Changing Culture
• Chapter 7 Choosing the Future
• Chapter 8 Performance Management and Targets — Control, Resistance and Improvisation
• Chapter 9 Rethinking Management Drawing on Radical Insights from the Complexity Sciences
• Index