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Left-brain management and right-brain organizing has to do with people’s interactions, so they manage and organize, or organize in order to manage. In fact, as we are all knowledge workers, managers included, we are all organizers, organizing. But, you wouldn’t know this from the way we talk about work or from what we pay attention to. In Figure 5.2, the text over the right brain is almost invisible, as a reminder that the work of organizing doesn’t count as work. “Work” means what is on the left. Jeff puts the tension between management and project teams over what matters down to values. The bulleted lists on either side of Figure 5.2 highlight what is “necessary” (i.e. valued) in each universe. I’ve summarized the differences in two words: “tools” and “talk.” In the management universe, tools matter. Organizing depends on talk. By “tools,” I mean IT systems, org charts, financial data, and the like. “Talk” is just that: people engaging and making meaning together. Because it is crucial to understanding why tool-oriented management practices are completely unsuited to organizing talk-oriented knowledge work, I want to explain how I boiled down the differences between management and organizing to tools and talk, what these mean, and what happens when we become too attached to one and we ignore the other. At the same time, I’ll outline my case for new work practices, or for taking organizations “beyond management.” Visible Management Hidden Organizing The view from the top The view from practice Facts Possibilities Analysis Interpretation • Results • Deliverables • Bottom line • Systems • Technologies • Compliance Technology Stories Data Meaning Structure Relationships Quantitative Qualitative Numbers Stories • Making meaning • Quality work • Relationships • Flexibility • Social spaces • Participation Efficiency Creativity Tools Machines People Control Cooperation Rules Accountability Figure 5.2 What we see and don’t see Talk 57 58 Beyond Management Organizing practices: talk and tools Whether you are planning a social event, checking on a patient, asking a colleague to stand in for you at a conference, formulating strategy, or holding a meeting with clients, organizing begins with people talking. Although it’s quite possible that you’re not aware of them or the connections, earlier conversations, most probably with other people, led to these ones. So, you can think of every conversation as part of an enormous, but invisible, dynamic web of ephemeral conversations on all sorts of issues, which connect multitudes of people in a myriad of ways. As there is enormous variety in the web, the people who are connected now may well have entirely different purposes and be in different circumstances.5 This web is without bounds and, nowadays, many of the conversations are not face-to-face meetings in an office, or impromptu chats in the elevator, but happen when people connect “virtually,” by phone, email or text message. In every instance the reason why they explain themselves and their problems, ask questions, tell stories, and make jokes is the same: they are “sharing knowledge” to get something accomplished. To give the web, or network, the knowledge-sharing, and the organizing a context, imagine what conversations lead to a group of German specialists in tropical diseases discussing with municipal health officials in Kenya their plans for clinical trials of a vaccine. And imagine how small the common ground is that the two groups now occupy. So much for “talk,” but what about “tools”: what are they and how do they fit the picture? While they’re sitting round a table talking, one of the participants takes notes and, later, distributes minutes of their meeting as a record of what was covered and what decisions were made. During that meeting, when there was disagreement over who would be eligible to take part in the clinical trials and how they’d be selected, one of the doctors handed out a protocol drawn up by the pharmaceutical company and they looked over the material together. Besides the minutes, documents with data, slides, spreadsheets summarizing costs, and notes they take while working together, they have access to online databases, survey forms, strategic plans, personnel manuals, organization charts, timesheets, and many, many other artifacts that help people do their work. As they work, they will move seamlessly between their talk and these tools. After they’ve looked at a draft budget (a tool plus talk), a committee member will update the spreadsheet (tool), circulate it, and wait for the others to comment (more talk). Eventually, when the committee meets again, they’ll review the latest version (more talk around the tool), and the chair will sign off on appropriations they’ve approved (another tool). Left-brain management and right-brain organizing Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between tool and talk: for example, when an email (talk) is the means of verifying what commitments were made (tool). But, most conversations are ephemeral, though we carry snippets of them in memory and pass on to others what we’ve heard. Tools, however, like minutes of meetings and org charts, have the advantage of what Don Lavoie calls “returnability.” You can circulate them, hence share them and come back to the contents in another context, at another place and time, with other people.6 The relationship between talk and tools is a symbiotic one. Though it would be much harder to organize without notes, lists, and plans, and perhaps impractical to run organizations without them, it is impossible to imagine organizing without conversations. Talk, after all, is how we make meaning. It is how I establish whether there is a problem or confirm whether my idea really is a good one. Tools may be indispensable, but they are useless without talk. Spreadsheets and databases have to be interpreted, analyzed, summarized, and reviewed, and so on. Whenever we use tools, from project schedules to driving directions, balance sheets, and lists of requirements, we make meaning of them, mostly by talking to one another. The unmistakable message, when you learn to manage the MBA way, is that words don’t matter—numbers do. You’ll learn to create and handle tools: to read a balance sheet, formulate a competitive strategy, calculate the net present value of a stream of anticipated earnings, understand exchange rate movements, estimate the risk associated with different portfolios, map work flows, and measure performance. Perhaps you’ll also practice negotiation skills, but, most likely, not with an emphasis on finding common ground, but on reading body language and using psychology to trump your opponents. This is an industrial era mindset and you can tell, just by looking at office work spaces designed for “maximum productivity” that the mindset still prevails at work. Spaces are arranged so that it is difficult for people working a few feet apart to have a conversation. Few managers are open to the possibility that the substance of work— both theirs and their subordinates—is conversation. And, even if it is not a conscious decision to push talk to the periphery of work rather than have it at the center, the very ethos of management—control coupled with competition and compliance—undercuts people’s ability to engage, to talk, and to align. Hierarchy and bureaucracy, both integral to the way management is practiced, keep people apart, while competition among employees discourages them from sharing their knowledge. If good conversations nourish knowledge-work, for all these reasons conventional management practices provide entirely the wrong diet for knowledge workers. 59 60 Beyond Management Taking on the work of organizing There are hardly any production lines left in the West. We are nearly all knowledge workers now. And, with people everywhere looking for new organizing practices, the metaphor of parallel universes turns out to be a useful way of framing the options for the activists out there who are thinking about what they can do to change things, weighing up possibilities for new ways of managing or organizing work. One option is to try to patch up and/or revitalize “old” management, which means improving existing tools and techniques and looking for new ones, in the hope of dealing with serious flaws in current practices while maintaining essential elements of the management philosophy we know and use and some even seem to love. Perhaps the solution lies in a new generation of IT tools which allow people to access and share information more easily. It is an idea management consultants like to peddle (remember, their livelihoods depend on maintaining the status quo) and, given encouragement, it’s the option lots of people are drawn to because it is an evolutionary route to new practices. There is nothing radical here. “Use this new tool. You can keep doing what you know and keep doing it the way you’ve been doing it. Just make a few changes at the margins and everything will be fine.” These are common threads in consulting-speak. A much more revolutionary idea is to abandon management for organizing, so knowledge workers aren’t waiting for instructions from above, which may never come, or, if they do, turn out to be misguided. Instead, regarding it as their responsibility to do so, they take it on themselves to organize and to do this well. The third option is to compromise, finding the middle ground, if it exists, between left-brain management practices and right-brain organizing ones, where top-down management coexists with people self-organizing. This would mean bringing the organizing everyone already does (i.e. the “informal organization”) out of the closet and having it accepted as legitimate work, which is necessary and at least as important as managing. Perhaps it is obvious why the third option isn’t a practical one. In the middle ground, between management and organizing, managers would not only accept employees doing their own thing but also encourage them, allowing them to organize themselves and disregard any directives they felt were unnecessary. Employees would be equally comfortable organizing themselves and accepting directives from above. I can’t imagine anyone being satisfied with this arrangement, can you? High-control management and low-control (self-) organizing rest on such fundamentally different values and beliefs, about people—e.g. whether they are Left-brain management and right-brain organizing dependable and capable of sound judgment—and work—the purpose and how to achieve this—that I don’t believe there is a middle ground.7 Which means only two options for going beyond the kind of management we all know: evolutionary change, or management-as-usual with minor adaptations; and radical change, with everyone organizing themselves, without a top or chain of command. In the chapters that follow, I begin by having a good look behind the scenes, at why knowledge workers organize themselves, how they do it, and at what works and what doesn’t. Then, with the help of some case studies, I’ll explain why nothing can be done to patch up management and cover its deficiencies. By this time it ought to be clear that the “radical” option, of abandoning management, is actually the sound and sensible one. If it has to be either management or organizing, which I believe it does, I’m for organizing, and I’ll explain why we all ought to be.8 I’d like you to think of the rest of my story as a journey in search of effective organizing practices. Thinking of the left and right brains, the destination is the “other side” of management. En route, I’m going to explain why that is the right place for knowledge workers to be, that it is a practical option for organizing work, and where activists can start. I will also explain what they can do to take on organizing. On the next leg of the journey, the object is to understand what it is about knowledge-work that makes it necessary for knowledge workers to organize themselves. 61 CHAPTER 6 Knowledge-work in close-up What is knowledge-work? It may be one of the great paradoxes of work life that we spend so much time at work but have so little to say about the nature of work. In business books, hundreds of writers have had their say about organizations, management, and leadership, but haven’t shown much interest in work.1 When they do, they don’t distinguish one kind of work from another. It is all just “work.” As a result we are surrounded at work by talk, images, and practices of factory-work. These aren’t helpful because this isn’t what people are doing.2 If someone says “that was hard work” or “it took a lot of effort,” doesn’t it sound as if they’ve been doing something physical? What about words like “training” and “rewards”? What do these conjure up? Doesn’t training sound like rote learning? We train sniffer dogs and performing seals, rewarding them with a pat or a treat when they repeat what we’ve taught them. You can train people to feed material through a cutting machine repeatedly or to pull a lever whenever a component reaches a particular step in the manufacturing process, but the learning that stands knowledge workers in good stead is something completely different. We’re talking about being able to “read” people, to use one’s imagination to “see” potential pitfalls, and to think laterally. Meanwhile, in IT companies, consulting firms, and government agencies, where work talk is about “efficiency,” “productivity,” “feedback,” “optimization,” “benchmarks,” and “performance,” you can be forgiven for thinking you are in a workshop, dealing with engineering problems; although, as a knowledge worker, you may actually be interpreting a report or facilitating a meeting of school administrators. “Supervision,” “billable hours,” “performance evaluations,” and the obsession with metrics, are, like training, all vestiges of the shop floor; legacies of practices initiated by Fredrick Taylor for standardizing factorywork. He and his assistants stood by, stopwatch in one hand, clipboard in the other, instructing workers to repeat sets of motions while they determined which were the most efficient. He hoped to devise a performance 62 Knowledge-work in close-up benchmark for every kind of industrial activity, but it didn’t take very long to see this couldn’t be done. And, although the mindset lives on, if it can’t be done for factory-work it is even more futile to apply these practices to knowledge workers and knowledge-work. Little about knowledge-work can sensibly be measured, but this hardly discourages people from trying. One of the consequences of attempting to satisfy the promiscuous desire for “suitable numbers” is that knowledge workers spend their time doing things that are peripheral to their work, distracted by management’s focus on performance measures. Almost everyone has examples. Here are a few from Jared Sandberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal.3 David Fahl [who] worked for an energy reseller . . . noticed that getting things done right wasn’t always as high a priority as making deadlines, meeting deliveries or being on budget. “You can get all those things done without doing any good work,” he says . . . “Managers create all sorts of surrogate measures that they can measure, like PowerPoint slide counts and progress charts,” says consultant Tim Horan . . . Jon Williams once worked in an auto-claims department where the number of new-claim calls . . . [was] tallied with the same weight as brief reminder calls to customers. . . . His greatest sense of accomplishment was transforming an initially angry and frustrated customer into someone who was satisfied and even laughing. “That wasn’t measured at all.” A definition To understand why the usual ideas about work are so wrong-headed, we should get to know knowledge-work and, to do this, I’m going to begin with a definition. “Knowledge-work” is what people do when they interact, talk to one another, and share knowledge, so they can accomplish something together. Sharing knowledge means posing questions and listening to the responses, offering and receiving advice, getting clarification, asking permission, telling others how you feel, or explaining what has been happening. People share knowledge by making meaning together, typically by talking and listening, but also with gestures, facial expressions, and other body language. They do it to decide what to do; to assign roles and responsibilities; to agree on places, dates, and times; and to check on what they are doing and whether they’ve done what they agreed to do; in other words, to organize. 63 64 Beyond Management Notice that my definition doesn’t refer to categories of work or workers, but to practices. It is deliberately broad, covering anyone whose work involves organizing and who shares knowledge in the process, including anyone who serves others, whether as a secretary or a chief financial officer. Everyone does some knowledge-work and you are a knowledge worker because of what you do, not because of your position, job title, qualifications, or the industry you are in. The kind of “doing” that defines knowledge-work is human and social: negotiating meaning with others. Those who do the least knowledge-work work alone, without the benefit of others’ knowledge (it is difficult to think of examples, perhaps a hermit or an artist who prefers his own company), or they’re employed on an assembly line or do repetitive manual labor like digging trenches or dispensing espresso coffee. Being routine or mechanical and largely physical, their work doesn’t require much sharing of knowledge. Here is an example of knowledge workers at work: After a few formalities, an Italian aide introduced her to . . . the embassy press spokesman. [They] . . . walked across the embassy’s walled grounds and sat down for a cup of coffee in the cafeteria. [She] . . . told [him] . . . that she had some documents about Iraq and uranium shipments and needed help in confirming their authenticity and accuracy. [He] . . . interrupted her, realizing he needed help. He made a phone call summoning someone else from his staff as well as a political officer. [She] . . . recalled a third person being invited, possibly a U.S. military attaché. She didn’t get their names. “Let’s go to my office,” [he] . . . said.4 This description of a man and a woman talking to each other and to at least one other person by phone, as they walk across a garden to a cafeteria, makes a rather charming picture, particularly if you ignore the fact that their work appears to be international espionage, to do with Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. While walking and talking, they are working and, clearly, also, organizing. To knowledge workers, “work” could mean phoning colleagues to ask for information, scheduling a meeting to plan the next steps, or circulating a draft proposal. To do it, people talk, telling one another what they think, listening to what they have to say, asking for their advice, or, more generally, sharing knowledge. Why? They are getting organized, so they can get their work done. Press officers and journalists, financial advisors, lawyers, consultants, and others, in almost every walk of life, do the same. Teachers prepare lessons, draw up schedules of classes, and devise exercises Knowledge-work in close-up for students. Then, in the classroom, they’ll divide them into groups for a particular activity, tell them about next week’s project, and give them their homework. Work is organizing. For knowledge workers, work and organizing are indistinguishable. Picturing knowledge-work I want you to be able to picture knowledge-work, but this isn’t easy to do. It is much easier to picture industrial work, which, to me, means machines and people: either people performing like robots and turning out hundreds of identical objects, or some sort of assembly line, or a forest of machinery interspersed with a few workers who attend to the machines that are a dominant presence. When I think of industrial work, two films in particular come to mind: Charles Chaplin’s timeless almost-silent classic Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, an even earlier dystopian vision of industrialization and the “tyranny of the machine.”5 To picture knowledgework it probably helps to start with industrial work and contrast the two. The two images I have chosen, from the heyday of manufacturing, come from ‘Behind the Scenes in the Machine Age,’ a part educational, part propaganda film, about the importance of avoiding ‘human waste’ in industry, produced by the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor in 1931 (Figure 6.1)6 . Now, for my representative knowledge workers, I’ve settled on telecommuters, who could be doing anything from accounting to wedding planning. How you picture knowledge-work depends in part on how I contrast what they do with the kind of work you see in the pictures. I certainly want to emphasize that the differences boil down to much more than their computers and the technologies that make telecommuting possible. One of the most important differences is talk. You’ll notice that the factory workers aren’t speaking to one another. In fact, they’re not even paying attention to what the others are doing. They don’t need to do either to do their work and the rules of the workplace probably forbid them from talking on the job. The combination of rules and the repetitive, practically mechanical work they’re doing means each worker is both a robot and an island. A telecommuter, on the other hand, might well be in her own home, or in the car or train, at the airport, or in a client’s office, but this doesn’t mean she’s isolated, or works alone. Her machines connect her into her networks of colleagues and customers and she’s in constant contact with them, on the phone, or by email, or face to face if they’ve arranged a meeting or if she’s on a service call. Why? Knowledge-work is collective 65 Beyond Management 66 Figure 6.1 Two pictures of factory-work, ca. 1930 Source: “Behind the Scenes in the Machine Age,” 1931, a film produced by the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor. and highly social. She, her colleagues, and clients are together in the work, doing it together, mainly by talking. Another difference is that factory-work starts and finishes with each shift, whereas knowledge-work rolls on, more or less continuously. At the end of her work day a factory worker can say, “I’ve done my work. I met my production quota.” To a knowledge worker, work doesn’t have clearcut beginnings, or nice, neat endings, which allow him or her to draw a line and say, “That work is finished. I will make a new start tomorrow.”