Checking In With Reality

It’s easy to begin thinking things may be changing in massive ways. Heck, it’s not only me … Bruce Mau is famous, even … and he just named his most recent travelling exposition Massive Change - The Future of Global Design. Here’s what his home page boldly states:

Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces.

It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility…

… and in places where the exposition opens, I believe there’s often a keynote speech at the opening by Alvin Toffler, author of a number of well-know books, including Power Shift

If Mau’s statement is correct (and who am I to argue, huh ?) then surely the new types of persistent visually-aided communications we have experienced since the advent of the Web, the browser, ubiquitous email, blogs, and blawg, blawg, blawg … might also be heralded as a “new, unprecedented period of human possibility”.

In musing on how interconnected interlinkage might have impact on social structures and the dynamics within and without those structures, I have no doubt been guilty of naive utopianism. Many thinkers, writers, bloggers, pundits and punters ( added this group since I needed to belong somewhere in this) have opined on the democratizing forces of exchanging information and views (and probably evidence, too via the Web.

Some recent exchanges involving the term “wirearchy” and my definition and other mutterings, have prompted some curiosity (hey, when I google “wirearchy” the references are at about 20,000, up from 7,000 or so a month and a half ago).

I’ve been roundly dismissed and criticized … often … by many bright and aware people, who have virtually all said some form or other of “hierarchy is natural”, and gone on to offer their opinion as to how naive and overly optimistic I am or have been.

Generally, I agree with them … but only up to a point.

I do think hierarchy is endemic in our daily lives, all around the planet. It’s in our institutions, it’s in our groups, it’s often even in our friendships and it’s in our private lives. And as an organizing principle it’s been around for a long time - pretty much ever since humans began trying to explain things to themselves.

You know … the arrangement between God and the archangels, and then God’s representatives on earth (Kings, Queens, Cardinals and Bishops), and then various other social arrangements that have flowed from set-ups favouring aristocrats and owners. Some wag once suggested that in today’s context, wherein corporations have a lot of power, CEO’s and senior management are what royalty and the top layer of clergy were in the Middle Ages.

And certainly, these types of social arrangements predominate to this day. Hierarchy informs our daily lives from birth through to our ingress to the modern workplace, and most of us understand it more-or-less unconsciously. There are ways to escape from it … either by going off on a personal, iconoclstic route, or by coming up with a lot of money, so that no one else really can tell you what to do and why. There’s a reason it’s called “Fuck you money”.

For many years, my work consisted of helping corporations design and implement organization charts, with the attendant salary grades or classifications, perfromance management schemes, rules of engagement (otherwise known as competency models) and other sundry people management arrangements.

There are rules (believe me, rules with a capital “R”) for designing and implementing these processes.

The rules are manifest in a boring, dry and exceedingly widespread domain known as job evaluation. The core methodology for this domain was invented in the early 1950’s and reflected efforts on the part of some large-ish corporations at that time to bring greater structure and clarity to the work currently being carried out in those organizations.

The invention of this method was simple … it consisted of rank-ordering the jobs that were extant in a corporation at that time, and then seeking a consensus amongst the group of people examining the jobs what it was .. which factors… that differentiated amongst the jobs. This was supplemented with an “Input - Problem-Solving - Output” model which suggested that all work could be defined as the product of it’s inputs, problem-solving efforts and activities, and its outputs.

Factors were teased out, and codified into a set of language-based definitions. Three or four main methods quickly became prevalent in the marketplace for designing and structuring work - the Hay Guide-Chart method, the Aiken Plan, the Wyatt WJQ Method. Each of these methods are essentially the same … carbon-copies of each other … and have very similar factors and language. There have been various spin-offs since the early ’50’s but they still rely on the basic assumptions about the nature of work in an organization that were uncovered in that early, experimental work (with the possible exception of Elliott Jacques’ Time-Band Decision-Making methodology - but it relies even more on hierarchy, in some ways).

From the invention of these methodologies till today, job evaluation has been used at almost any organization or corporation that has more than a handful of people, and has come to define work almost universally.

What interests me … a lot … is that these methodologies, and the beliefs about work that they have embedded in its design and the dynamics of the workplace, have their roots in the time-and-motion studies of Taylorism and the fundamental view of work as a linear mass-production process, a sequential series of supervisable tasks.

This methodology has missed - completely - the impact of information technology and more importantly - the fact that work now takes place in an interconnected and interlinked environment. It’s interesting to note that any sense of computers aiding in the work, or even defining the processes of work, were completely absent in the founding assumptions of work design as it is still practiced widely today. It doesn’t consider the every-which-way linkages, and the persistence of those links, that point to useful information, other ways of think about some issue or problem (thinking out-of-the-box, anyone ?) or the relevant, useful and catalytic conversations people can and do get into with the help of software, linking and the Web.

The experts in this field today will tell you - quickly and adamantly - that the methodologies have incorporated the language describing work environments and challenges in an environments built on information systems. And I’d agree … and yet in a very important way that’s the core of the problem.

The fundamental issue of what is creative and constructive knowledge work, and how it must necessarily be human-centered and rooted in collaboration, has not been as widely agreed upon.

It has been studied endlessly, and there have been many interpretations of new and emerging organizational designs. And there have been important experiments with people-centered work design methodologies (the one that makes the most sense to me is Emery and Trist’s work on Participative Work Design). But nothing definitive in terms of how to design working in distributed networks has taken the place of the 1950’s Industrial Age ways of looking at work, production and service. Yes, people have identified trust as critical to succeess, and much work has gone into the development of effective communications skills.

Today, work IS communication. How work takes shape in a human-centered design process will be an interesting field to watch evolve as we all move deeper into an interconnected and interactive future.

About five years ago (the fall of 1999) I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Peter Drucker, titled “Beyond The Information Revolution”. That was the brief era when the dot.com boom was in full eruption … stock options were being used to attract smart people and talent to all sorts of blossoming startups, and all sorts of articles had begun to appear describing various views on the new, less hierarchic workplace cultures that seemed to be springing up everywhere.

Here’s one excerpt of Drucker’s thinking and writing in that article, found on the unreasonableman’s blog:

Peter Drucker draws social lessons from the impact of the Printing Press (c. 1455) and the Railways (c. 1855).

Software is the reorganization of traditional work, based on centuries of experience, through the application of knowledge and especially of systematic, logical analysis. The key is not electronics; it is cognitive science. This means that the key to maintaining leadership in the economy and the technology that are about to emerge is likely to be the social position of knowledge professionals and social acceptance of their values.

Drucker went on in this article to speculate a bit more deeply about his sense that “knowledge workers own the means of production now”, and the long-term implications this held for organizational design and dynamics.

Here’s a bit more, from the blog of Rick Klau … he’s taken Drucker’s insights and added what I think he suggests is the “missing link”. I’ve added bold font as emphasis.

In October, 1999 Peter Drucker wrote an article for The Atlantic that put the “information revolution” into historical context. His last paragraph is a prediction for where he expects the modern corporation to be within 10 years:

The technology to promote such sharing exists today (CRM, portals, etc.), yet too few firms have “leaders” who are capable of evangelizing the benefits of sharing their knowledge. Where Drucker fails to close the loop (and who knows, he may have done it since this 10/99 piece) is to point out that the modern organization must not only “attract, hold and motivate” knowledge workers - it must also provide an infrastructure for them that will enable and reward the active dissemination of that knowledge

Back to the check-in with reality.

As far as I know, almost all organizations are still using the basic methodologies I described above to design their organizations, create job descriptions, manage the people in their workplace … Competency models have rivalled job descriptions and used with team matrices are the current unit of work design. Great care has been taken to maintain the fundamental hierarchic structures, so of course the competency definitions are rolled out by organizational level. At the same time throughout this structure, employees are linking to each other, even if only by email, linking and talking with customers via electronic links, interacting with large information systems that integrate and reconstruct information, and of course being watched by these same systems.

There’s a reason for this continuance, and for the general lack of appetite many organizations have for innovation, or for structuring work so that it leads to better, more genuine and human outcomes on a consistent basis. Control and predictability are much prized attributes in the current economic structures and markets around the world. In addition, those who happen to find themselves in the top layers of hierarchies have little, if any, incentive to let go of the power, control and privilege that they find there. Why would they even consider it, other than on some basic level of values that they may hold personally ? It’s much harder to manage, and execute when authority is challenged, or open to a proces of building consensus before acting.

Mitigating against that these days is, of course, the difficult challenge posed by millions of smart, aware, adept people who can find out much about almost any given subject with the right information search tools and a couple of well-placed questions.

The challenges to established structures and ways of doing things have, indeed, seen the first successful instances of fundamentally redefining and redesigning work and organizations (the ubiquitous examples are Amazon, eBay, Dell, and the ongoing reconfiguration of the entertainment and communications industries).

Will such challenges continue as people who learned to think, write and work before personal computers appeared continue to retire at an accelerating pace ? Will the rapidly-growing presence of the Digital Generations (homo zappiens, as Wim Veen likes to call them) in the workplace add to the pressures for re-designing organizations and work ? Will traditional hierarchy persist in these conditions, as the conditions widen and mature ?

Here’s Drucker’s concluding paragraph in “Beyond The Information Revolution” (my emphasis added in bold):

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years, running a business with (short-term) shareholder value as its first - if not its only - goal and justification will have become counterproductive.

When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

I wonder what Bruce Mau has to say about the impact of design principles on the structure and dynamics of social institutions in the first decade of the 21st century. No, I mean it, really … I’m curious.