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126 Beyond Management Alternatives to control and compliance If you learn to manage the MBA way, it can’t be done. Viewed from the top, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between flexibility, or agility, and cohesion. As you must come down firmly on one side or the other, the answer to which is the right side is clear: the one that involves rules, structures, and systems; the side with “control.” Having everything under control and running smoothly—like clockwork—is what’s important, and compliance creates cohesion. If you have to reign in flexibility and trade off adaptability for the certainty that comes with having control, it’s a small price to pay. You start with structures, plans, schedules, and deliverables, specifying what people must do, when, and how. Then, you overlay this with compliance-oriented practices: performance criteria people must meet, ways of measuring performance, and systems and procedures for generating data, so that whoever is in charge knows what is going on and can take appropriate action. Next, add a dash of supervision: to see that workers follow procedures; to monitor data; and to report, upwards, on performance. Finally, you cap the entire apparatus with rewards and penalties, ranging from bonuses to pink slips, to “motivate and incentivize” people to do efficiently what they are required to do. The general principles as well as many of the practices that define high-control management today go all the way back to Fredrick Taylor. Acknowledging that his ideas fitted more comfortably into an age of machine-dominated industrial production and social circles mesmerized by anything claiming to be science, I still can’t explain his conviction that, for the sake of efficiency, profits, and, ultimately, “social progress,” managers could and should treat workers, in Matthew Stewart’s words, as “mute, brainless bundles of animal muscles . . . subject to minute control from above.”1 Yet Taylor’s ideas received an enthusiastic reception in many quarters and, by the time people began to express reservations, which they did, it was already too late. Nurtured by a rapidly growing band of apostles, who, eventually, would turn into the management consulting profession, the practices took on a life of their own and have proved incredibly durable. So far they’ve resisted the arrival of post-industrial society and all talk about “new science” and “work–life balance.”2 The practical consequences of Taylor’s model are twofold. People who follow orders, locked into what their superiors tell them to do, focused on rules, requirements, and long-term plans, don’t pay attention to what is actually going on. They don’t need to and aren’t expected to. In fact, it is just the opposite. If your goal is machine-like compliance, you want them compliant, not thinking and acting on what they see and hear. If they’re In search of low-control organizing practices doing what they are expected to do, which is to get with the plan, follow the schedule, and deliver on time and on budget, they ought to be functioning—well—on automatic pilot, like machines. Then, they don’t care. It is not that they can’t care or don’t want to care. High-control environments are care-less and when there is no reason for people to care about what they do there are breakdowns. There is also no way to “make them care” without restoring their humanity. They will care, act responsibly, and be accountable for what they do when they are responsible: when they have authority. If you aren’t happy with the status quo—trading off responsibility and flexibility for control and compliance—then people ought to organize themselves. But, for a lot of managers, the fundamental dilemma would be how to get cohesion. Where does it come from? They believe that without the structures that make compliance possible you’re on a slippery slope. It is this belief and, for those at the top, who have power, the additional fear that they will lose it, that are the two main reasons why senior managers won’t seriously contemplate knowledge workers organizing themselves. Executives are usually willing to go part of the way. For example, they’ll consider decentralizing decision-making as long as it only involves moving a bit of authority down the hierarchy and changing structures or processes, like taking out layers of the org chart to “flatten” an organization, or altering spans of control. In my experience, however, if a conversation about organizational change moves vaguely toward selfmanagement or self-organizing, they are no longer interested. In fact, they seem to regard the idea as utterly absurd (you get the impression that planning a cab ride to the bottom of the ocean would be less of a waste of their time) and, if there are any questions before you abruptly drop the subject, the one that usually comes up is, “Who will be in charge?” “Who is going to be in charge?” is the catch-22 for anyone seriously interested in organizing practices that chart the territory beyond management, and it’s a difficult question to circumvent because it means the most to “leaders” at the top with the power to support or thwart change. Rigid structures aren’t compatible with knowledge-work, which thrives on flexibility and adaptability. But, for many, not just senior managers and administrators, running an organization successfully (i.e. “efficiently”) depends on having a small number of people in charge, to do the “planning, coordinating, and controlling,” according to one familiar definition of management. “In charge” means “supported by robust structures plus systems of compliance,” and for “robust” you can substitute “rigid.” Are we doomed to run knowledge organizations badly, in ways that aren’t good for either knowledge workers or their work, that are counter 127 128 Beyond Management to reason and good judgment, because of what people fear will happen without high-control structures? As far as cohesion is concerned, is there no alternative to compliance? The answer to the first question ought to be “no” and to the second one “definitely no.” There are alternatives, but it is difficult is to get anyone to consider them, let alone to contemplate putting them into practice. Communities of practice To open the subject of alternatives for discussion I’m going to turn to a topic that has generated considerable interest in recent years: communities of practice, or “CoP” for short. In the hands of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who introduced the idea in a study on apprenticeship and learning-in-action, or through practice, CoP weren’t primarily about management or organizations. The authors were interested in the learning trajectories of workers who learn on the job and how they “move” from “peripheral participants,” at the edge of the work, to being at the center of it.3 But, especially after Wenger began writing more extensively about CoP, people took to the idea as something that management, always on the lookout for ways of improving performance, ought to pay attention to.4 With the help of management consultants, CoP fell into the laps of executives at the right time, as they struggled to manage knowledge workers using standard management practices, not knowing why they were struggling or what they were struggling with. They wanted high performance from work teams, believing this was desirable and having been told it was possible, but it always seemed an elusive goal.5 And, with “knowledge management” becoming a buzzword, many organizations where committed to some or other large-scale enterprise resource planning initiative, which promised to make data available wherever it was needed across an organization. But getting people to “communicate and share knowledge” was another matter entirely.6 CoP seemed like an answer to everyone’s prayers. Few groups actually qualify as CoP. Those that do meet three conditions: their members are actively engaged in the same kinds of practices; they are working together to accomplish something and have a mutual interest in the work and their results; and they have a shared repertoire of routines, symbols, stories, and actions.7 Usually on the advice of consultants, who sold them as a solution to the perennial problems of team work (and a fast-track solution at that), many organizations began In search of low-control organizing practices experimenting with CoP, expecting to find them everywhere, or to create them, in spite of Wenger’s clear and fairly narrow definition of who qualified. To encourage employees to set up CoP, or something similar but with a different name, organizations continue to provide collaborative technologies, like SharePoint sites, and, via their budgets, to allocate real money as inducements.8 Like business process reengineering and for essentially the same reasons I wrote about in Chapter 8, unfortunately, CoP have become another oversold management tool. Frankly, without more fundamental changes in the way organizations are run, the potential for CoP to emerge and change the way people work is limited. But this doesn’t diminish the importance of the concept or the practical insights into what makes for good organizing and when, why, and how people self-organize, which come from studying CoP in practice. There are now a number of instructive, documented examples of CoP that formed spontaneously and lasted. Covering a range of professions and practices, from flute makers to insurance claims clerks to technicians who service office equipment, the studies show the communities as living, breathing, practical examples of people organizing without control or compliance, doing it well and doing good work because they organize themselves.9 While they work inside the usual organizational structures, they do a lot of their work without these, finding ways to skirt them when necessary, inventing their own practices and procedures simply because this is how they do their work best. Echoing Jeff’s views about project teams, the studies consistently highlight that members take pride in and are conscientious about doing their work well. To highlight what they reveal, I’ll use Julian Orr’s excellent, finegrained study of an “occupational community” of field service technicians, who repair photocopiers. As they are technicians, you’d probably assume they spend most of their time with their heads inside machines doing the technical work of repairing them. But, as knowledge-workers, much of their work qualifies as organizing. They spend a lot of time in conversation with one another, their customers or clients, or their managers, making meaning, together, of what they are doing, should be doing, or the problems they’re having and how to deal with them: generally, “talking about machines,” which is how Orr’s book got its title. As members’ conversations are windows onto their work, including their relationships, interests, attitudes, and motives, the data in studies like Orr’s comes from researchers’ observations of members at work and from listening to their conversations and the stories they tell in conversation. 129 130 Beyond Management Talk, in which members negotiate meaning together as they share knowledge, is the life-blood of their practices and a good deal of it can only be described as storytelling; and, as technicians become more proficient by swapping stories, their storytelling is vital to their work. For example, when one has a machine that continues to make poor quality copies despite numerous visits to the same customer to fix it, another will tell of his experience with a similar model where the usual fixes didn’t work and how, eventually, he solved the puzzle. Copiers are complex, quirky, and unpredictable and, quite apart from whether people do learn from manuals, there is only a certain amount you can learn from a manual which assumes, wrongly, that machines are alike and that electro-mechanical problems can be diagnosed simply by following directions. Even though the problems are tame, in the sense that they are technical and, potentially, can be solved by isolating the fault, without a group of like-minded people, who have similar qualifications and interests, to bounce ideas around, technicians’ work would be much harder and take longer. And, whether it is flute makers, who pass their work back and forth, using their eyes as well as hands to tell whether they’ve got it just right, or technicians, round a table in a diner talking, unpacking their problems with a recalcitrant machine, the things they work with are always in their conversations. The relationship between talk and tools in identifying and solving problems, hence in their getting work done, is unmistakable. Talk, among members, is always “business mixed with personal touches.” This is because their work is social and relational and the line between what is “work” and “personal” is always blurred.10 Out on the road, early in the morning, technicians are having breakfast together and talking about their work: about problems with machines, about their schedules, and so on. Conversation “flows freely from technical detail . . . to people they used to know through the corporation . . . The nominally personal and nominally professional cannot be separated . . . and may be substantially indistinguishable in their experience.”11 In their talk they make assessments of one another’s capabilities that shape their colleagues’ social identities and reputations, joking about a technician, known for not making mistakes, who now has others at a client’s premises working to solve problems he created. It may come as something of a revelation that the technicians, “focused on the work, not the organization,” are largely disconnected from the corporation for which they work and do their work with little thought for what is happening there. They spend most of their time on the road between customers, or on customers’ premises, out of sight and earshot of the organization and they don’t have a work space there to call their own. But, In search of low-control organizing practices the point is that, while they are without constant oversight and reminders about their mission, this doesn’t prevent them from doing a good job. Members of this CoP generally do their jobs very well and a lot of their talk has to do with the quality of their work and how they can improve it, though not in so many words. What is the secret? We’re back, once again, at considerations of control, compliance, and self-organization. Members of this CoP manage themselves. Yes, they do have targets to meet, but in many ways these are irrelevant. Working mostly without direct oversight, their motivation comes from the CoP, from the members themselves who encourage and assist one another in doing good work. Conventional wisdom has it that, if you want efficiency, employees must be bound up in a common culture, believe in a common mission, and share a common vision, and that it’s management’s responsibility to set these up and weld everything together. Orr says of field service technicians that they “shar[e] few cultural values with the corporation; technicians from all over the country are much more alike than a technician and a salesperson from the same district,” adding that “the only valued status [among them] is that of full member of the community, this is being considered a competent technician. In pursuit of this goal, they share information, assist each other’s diagnoses, and compete in terms of their relative expertise.”12 Apart from what this says about conventional wisdom, it reveals something about the technicians’ secret to success. Each one probably doesn’t come to work with any more, or less, motivation, enthusiasm for their work, or interest in doing it well, than you or I. But, what the technicians have going for them, which many people in high control organizations don’t have, is a community of practice, which Wenger defines, simply, as a “group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”13 Orr’s field service technicians don’t have their own work place, but, as a CoP, they do have a rather special social space: one that they create and hold together because they’re a CoP, which is different from the spaces associated with hierarchy and superior–subordinate relationships that are common at work. The secret to their success is community and it’s the social space they make for themselves as a community that contributes to their commitment to their work and their effectiveness in doing it.14 131 132 Beyond Management Caring relationships make the difference What makes their space different is the combination of elements you find in a CoP, including a shared repertoire of practices and genuine, mutual interest in one another’s work; in what they do, how they do it, and what they accomplish. What is most important is that CoP spring from caring relationships. You can tell from how they engage and talk to one another and from what they talk about that the members care both for each other and for their work. When there is rivalry it is friendly rivalry. They set up contests to find ways of solving problems or of reducing mistakes. When they rebuke one another it’s a gentle rebuke and if they criticize one another it isn’t to show up a rival but to guide or teach. There are recognized experts as well as novices in the group, but there are neither big egos nor slow learners and there isn’t any aggressive competition. They’re not only good to one another but also, together, are good at what they do. They’ll walk one another through ways of solving problems and dealing with difficult customers and, when things are quiet, they will make courtesy calls on important customers: all this without a set of directives or regular briefings from management about what to do, when, and how. For people who believe that compliance is the only reliable way to get things done properly, the way CoP work is too good to be true—but that is a cynical position. Most of us have little to no experience of an alternative. When you have, you know what is possible and it doesn’t take a full-blown CoP for people to organize together well. As I’ve said before, it requires caring relationships and a sense that “we’re in this together, jointly responsible for what happens.” Caring relationships enable “an open process of communication and responsiveness,” which I’ll refer to, simply, as “openness.”15 Openness, together with their personal pride in doing good work (various authors, including Wenger and Orr, explain that individuals’ identities are linked to their work), is vital for cooperation. Add to this the sense that they’re participants in a joint enterprise, which is reinforced when they engage each other as peers every time they make meaning together about their work. With these factors in play, members want to align and, as they talk together, they make and get commitments and establish accountability. The upshot is that, as a group, they are intent on doing good work (this is in their commitments) and, because they each feel accountable to one another and are willing to hold one another to account, they keep each other’s attention on their work. In search of low-control organizing practices The spirit of ubuntu Of course, communities of practice aren’t perfect. At one extreme it is possible that their joint enterprise is morally offensive. There is nothing to say that crime syndicates or drug cartels can’t be CoP, although, because of members’ attitudes and behavior, not least their competitiveness and lack of care, not to say their disregard for the lives of anyone they consider opponents, these are unlikely to be good examples. Under more conducive circumstances, where participants have much in common and are willing to cooperate with one another, breakdowns still happen. Perhaps someone feels her team has let her down. In another situation, someone else’s stubbornness is to blame. When personal animosities that have simmered for a while eventually boil over, everyone treads lightly until things settle down or somebody steps in and tries to patch up relationships. With or without the occasional bad press, CoP help us to answer important questions about organizing, in particular illuminating the kinds of circumstances in which people are good at self-organizing. You may know Ubuntu as a brand name for a version of the open-source operating system, Linux.16 It’s a name that suits software produced by a large network of mainly voluntary programmers and which is freely distributed, because the word is an abbreviation of a very old expression that, to the indigenous people of southern Africa, expresses their communitarian philosophy of life. To understand why members of CoP are good at self-organizing, it helps to understand the spirit of ubuntu.17 Ubuntu stands for a human and humanist way of life. Words like care, accountability, responsibility, friendship, consideration, charity, and love (or domination, carelessness, and heartlessness) all describe human qualities that are expressed in interpersonal relationships. One meaning of ubuntu is that we are human (and distinct amongst all species) because we live our lives showing charity, making commitments, caring for, and being accountable to, one another. A life without relationships is a lessthan-human life. In Xhosa, the expression from which ubuntu comes is “ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu.”18 It says that people achieve their humanity through other people. So, ubuntu is also the idea that we fulfill our human potential through our relationships, in cooperating to do things together; and that, together, we know more and are much more capable than we are alone. From this perspective, organizing, which has to do with the fact that we are social beings and live our lives with others, epitomizes human values, human relationships, and human capabilities. We organize to be of service 133 Beyond Management 134 to one another: to help or to care for others or to provide something—food, fun, money, jobs—for someone, a group, or even a whole community. When we organize we do so out of consideration, a sense of commitment or responsibility, or in order to please them. Members of CoP may or may not embrace these sentiments but, whether they intend it or not, if their practices reflect these values, which they usually do, you are going to find the commitment and responsibility to each other and to their work that makes for good organizing. The kinds of practices that support good knowledge-work—engaging, networking, cooperating, sharing knowledge, aligning for action—come down to attitudes, values, relationships, and the social spaces that people hold collectively. It’s important, too, that they are adaptable, are willing to embrace uncertainty, are forgiving of genuine mistakes, and are open to listening to and learning from one another and to relearning. I think you’ll agree that the values and relationships associated with the spirit of ubuntu are very different from those associated with conventional management practices. Although we might like to believe that these are universal human values, they aren’t values that management practices encourage and reward. In some cases the differences are quite blatant. Cut-throat competition (“aggressive” is the preferred word in management-speak) is the antithesis of cooperation and collaboration. In general, though, community and care, with consideration, commitment, and cooperation, is a universe apart from hierarchy and competition, both of which are self-centered.19 Crossing boundaries It is clear, now, why abandoning compliance-oriented practices in favor of ones that support knowledge-work and good organizing isn’t a technical matter and certainly isn’t about tools. It takes a shift in values, to openness and showing care, both for the people we work with and for the things we do. This, in turn, is contingent on being responsible—having responsibility, both individually and jointly—for the things we do, knowing that the work we’re doing is our work and that we can do what we want to do on our own (joint) authority. If you’re an activist, if you like the sound of new practices and think you are willing to take on the kinds of responsibilities that go with them, there are at least three obstacles to actually making this shift. One is simply the difficulty of kicking old habits. The values we know, like being efficient, being task oriented, being an expert (having the answers), and being in In search of low-control organizing practices charge are values we believe in and respect (otherwise they would not be our values). Giving them up, which is what a shift in values means, is hard, but that is what it takes to get into new practices. Another obstacle has to do with the politics of new practices. Knowledge-work—organizing—doesn’t respect job titles, departments, or other formal boundaries. To do it well, you may have to network with all sorts of people up and down your organization and organize across organizational boundaries. But, working in organizations that combine hierarchy with bureaucracy, most of us have limited authority, so any time we wish to step outside our narrow spheres we are supposed to get permission. Negotiating with superiors to be allowed to assume additional responsibilities is an unwieldy and unsatisfactory process for a variety reasons: one being that you are asking someone else if you can take on and take away some of his or her authority. This kind of request will not endear you to your boss. A third obstacle is perhaps the most obvious one: how do I—we—make this shift. We understand we should be doing things differently, but how do we get from “here”—conventional management practices—to “there”— practices characterized by openness and care, which enable people to selforganize and align for productive action? And what is “there”? How do we know if we’ve made the shift successfully? What does work look like on the other, organizing side of management? I can address the first and last of these, kicking old habits and how we get to new practices, at the same time. This is what I’m going to do next. Afterwards, I’ll get to the politics of changing practices and getting permission when I discuss how we can take on the work of organizing. They are especially wicked issues. 135