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Tools are the empty heart of management stuff you’re dealing with, so summaries, agenda items, and bullet points aren’t enough. If feelings, relationships, interests, and values aren’t on the table and you aren’t dealing with them, you aren’t getting to what is at the heart of the work of organizing. Then there is no way of aligning for action and, when people aren’t aligned, they are just going through the motions. This is when work gets done badly, if at all.9 Work that relies on presentations, agendas, and executive summaries, along with spreadsheets, databases, and reporting structures, is two dimensional. Without talk, in which people engage one another around what they mean, think, and feel, there is nothing behind the tools. In this way, tool-oriented practices are a bit like those cardboard cutouts of a film’s characters that you sometimes see in the foyer of a movie theatre. They are intended to trick you into thinking that the real characters are standing there. Of course, they don’t. Those fakes are easy to spot because they are two dimensional and lifeless. With management tools it’s a bit harder. Unless you stop and think about what is missing, you could—as people constantly do—mistake tools for the real thing. But, tools actually keep us from focusing on what really matters: on the ideas, perspectives, attitudes, relationships, and values of the people behind them, using them. I’m going to use Business Process Reengineering (BPR) as a case in point, to explain why. The genie that turned ugly BPR became big business for management consultants during the 1990s, even though controversy swirled around it from the beginning.10 Its champions claim BPR brought great success to some organizations,11 while equally vocal detractors say that in many cases the impact was little short of disastrous. Tom Davenport is one of the architects of reengineering. In 1995, when this movement wasn’t very old, he made a point of expressing his misgivings about the direction it had taken.12 Lamenting that BPR never realized its potential for improving management processes, he complained, even then, that management viewed BPR very narrowly, using it primarily to justify layoffs (i.e. “downsizing”). “Once out of the bottle,” he says, “the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly.”13 BPR never had a chance to deliver on its promises. It was always destined to become another tool because this is what happens to all ideas once they fall into the hands of executives or consultants with a management mindset.14 In the early 1990s managements were looking for yet another way to boost their bottom-line performance. The stated goals of 103 104 Beyond Management business may vary. At times it is “maximizing shareholder value,” while at other times it is ensuring that earnings beat the quarterly estimates of Wall Street’s pundits.15 Both objectives tell the same story. A few decades ago corporate management became utterly obsessed with the bottom line, to the point where little else mattered or matters. BPR became the latest in a line of tools for increasing profits, this time by downsizing: replacing people, especially middle managers, with information technologies, in order to slash costs.16 BPR at Jet Propulsion Labs Looking for a study of BPR that I could use to show why strategic initiatives fail, I was fortunate to find an excellent one. In the 1990s, top management at Jet Propulsion Labs in California (JPL) implemented two “change management” initiatives: total quality management (TQM), followed by reengineering (i.e. BPR). In-depth, retrospective accounts of management strategies are rare but, based on a close study of documents and correspondence plus interviews with some of the protagonists in the drama that unfolded at JPL, Peter Westwick has written a detailed and highly illuminating account of what happened there. It provides just the perspectives I need, because the interviews and his access to memos allow us to go inside work and see the effects of BPR, not from the top, but from and in practice.17 We get a good sense of the turmoil that accompanied these efforts, the wide gulf between the expectations of senior managers about what each initiative would accomplish (framed by the view from the top) and what actually happened as a result of their efforts (people’s practices), and of the ambiguous and contradictory consequences of reengineering. Understanding the reasons for the gulf between expectations and results explains why, inevitably, genies that seem benevolent to “ideas people” turn ugly in the implementation, when translated into management practices. BPR came to mean many things as consultant writers and managers all jumped onto the bandwagon and, as was certainly true at JPL, people came to different conclusions about these management initiatives, even holding contradictory views about what they meant and what they would accomplish. A successor of sorts to TQM, BPR was supposed to incorporate many of the goals of that movement, including a shift from a hierarchical to a participative organization, where employees or workers “owned” their work (i.e. the processes) and had a voice in how things were done. As far as I know no one used the term “social network,” which seems misplaced Tools are the empty heart of management alongside an expression like “process reengineering,” but, if BPR had fulfilled some of its architects’ dreams, reengineered organizations might look a lot like highly client-oriented teams in a network. Even in JPL’s technical environment there was talk of “enabling” and “nurturing” and an emphasis on satisfying the customer.18 Sounding like Jeff describing a team’s relationship with their client (see pp. 34–5), Ed Stone, JPL’s director through the 1990s, used to say “when you do your own job you’re actually doing it for somebody else.”19 Ideas like “participation,” “client-centeredness,” and “owning the work” (which I take to mean being responsible and accountable for what you do) all have to do with how knowledge workers work together and with their clients, not forgetting their relationships with one another. In other words, these ideas have to do with how they organize their work and how they, themselves, are organized. Now, as a consultant to JPL seems to have realized, going from hierarchy to participation is a huge leap and would have meant a managementparadigm shift, with the emphasis falling on new organizing practices. (Perhaps this is what Tom Davenport meant by “improving management processes.”) But, the managers and consultants responsible for bringing the new ideas to fruition weren’t prepared for this sort of paradigm shift: they never are. Both groups are myopic. They don’t see organizing, only the organization. So they did with the ideas what their counterparts always do: tried to squeeze them into conventional management practices and make sure they fit. What was the point of reengineering? “Practices” translate into “tools” in management-speak: obviously the point was to use tools—some old ones, like org charts together with some new ones, such as process-maps—to restructure, downsize, and improve bottomline performance, cutting costs to increase profits. This is when the genie turned ugly. BPR through a management lens Imagine yourself as a corporate vice president for strategy. BPR experts have advised that you’ll be more efficient and more profitable with less hierarchy. You stare at your org chart, wondering what you can do to “flatten the organization.” What options do you have? The top and bottom are accounted for. Top management has to run the show and, at the bottom, workers have to do the work. But, you should almost certainly get rid of the “fat,” in the belly of the organization. Those layers of middle management, whose main function is oversight, add to your overheads but don’t 105 Beyond Management 106 contribute to the bottom line. If you do this you’ll have technology on your side too. A panoply of IT tools that move information around will allow you, safely, to bypass middle management; or so the IT consultants have told you. As long as you can feed data all the way up, which is what their tools do, you can fire lots of people and, using your “dashboard” to monitor the data, you’ll be able keep a close eye on what is happening below. Doesn’t having a dashboard tell you that you are in the driving seat? Just like technicians in a power-generating plant, who watch dials and gauges to see that everything is working normally, you’ll have the knowledge you need at the top to stay in control. All you need to do now is to reengineer your processes so there is no middle, warning those who are left that unless they “do more with less” they’ll go the same way. What is a process? BPR experts say you should be paying much more attention to processes, but you haven’t heard of “processes” before. What do they mean? It didn’t take long for people who were invested in the idea that “practices = tools” to figure out that “processes” meant “process mapping,” which meant “flowcharts.” Here is Peter Westwick’s perspective:20 Reengineering replaced the standard hierarchical organization chart with multiple flowcharts. Flowcharts, of course, were not new to JPL, since systems engineering also relied on them; any historian working on large technical systems in the United States after 1960 will recognize the flowcharts of PERT and similar techniques of computerized systems management. But reengineering raised flowcharting to an art form and new level of abstraction (in addition to its new status as a verb) . . . These new flowcharts traced the generalized transformation of information and resources as the inputs and outputs of each process. An important part of the work at JPL is spacecraft design. It is highly innovative and extraordinarily creative work, and the Labs is, without doubt, a knowledge organization. Yet, with process reengineering as the goal, consultants and managers took this imaginative and ingenious knowledgework, which benefits from tough peer reviews of new designs, to be something resembling factory-work and treated it this way. They erroneously equated the interpersonal connections, in which people negotiate meaning together to share knowledge and come up with new ideas—the “magic of organizing” to use Jeff’s expression—with physical production of the type where activity A is followed by B which is followed by C in Tools are the empty heart of management predetermined sequence, as inputs are mechanically transformed into outputs. Why did they make the mistake of substituting flowcharts for social networking and process maps for the talk that comprises the work of organizing? The answer is a management paradigm that can’t see beyond tools. The view from the top doesn’t and cannot differentiate between processmaps and social interaction, which is in a different universe. So, ideas for organizing, which at heart are what BPR was all about, were rendered sterile as all energy was turned toward creating tools to improve the organization and the bottom line. Lay down those tools Unpacking the failures of reengineering is like holding up a mirror and seeing all management practices reflected in it. Reengineering qualifies as a “reorg”; management-speak for “reorganization.” Reorgs come in all shapes and sizes: from efforts to reengineer the whole organization, like BPR; to introducing a new technology, like an Enterprise Resource Planning system that is going to require substantial changes in the way people work; or, remembering an earlier case, redefining jobs to get better results and secure more funding. Spokespersons announcing corporate reorgs, which usually involve layoffs, say these are both necessary and desirable to “strengthen the bottom line” or to “build a secure foundation for future growth.” Seldom do the business media either question these premises or report in detail on the results of reorgs, but they do add platitudes like “new management, showing that it means business, is aggressively cutting costs.” Is there a conspiracy of silence surrounding reengineering and other types of reorg? Why do the experts—consultants—not say how difficult it is to “manage change,” how small the chances of success are when management tries to move the organization in a particular direction, or what internal turmoil is likely to result and how people’s lives, including their work lives, are going to be affected as a result of trying? The fact is that management myopia is a serious, widespread malady and the tool-oriented mindset behind strategic initiatives that fail isn’t limited to corporate businesses. A Department of Homeland Security The congressional committee which investigated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that took place in September 2001 found that security and intelligence organizations (of which there are a great 107 108 Beyond Management many in the USA) had not acted as they said they could and should have done to prevent them, because they were not adequately sharing the information they had. They weren’t doing this either within each organization or between one organization and the next. Intelligence professionals have to share knowledge when organizing because intelligence work is knowledge-work and sharing information is integral to it. For example someone, uncovering what looks like a security breech, might say, “I’d better inform my supervisor and talk to my counterpart at central division to find out what they know about it.” If you believe they aren’t doing a good job in sharing knowledge, the way to reveal where the problems are is to look at how people organize—at whether, why, and how they share knowledge and at what knowledge they do and don’t share—then try to do something about it. Every one of those US intelligence organizations was and, a decade later, still is, highly hierarchical, bureaucratic, and secretive, and it is widely known and well accepted that both hierarchy or bureaucracy are notoriously bad ways of organizing to share knowledge, especially when combined. Hierarchy is useful when you want to control people, for example soldiers during a military campaign, but giving orders isn’t the same as sharing information, because it doesn’t allow people to make meaning together, which is obviously crucial to intelligence gathering. Bureaucracy is useful when the work is mechanical, in the sense that it involves doing the same thing over and over again, such as processing applications for drivers’ licenses. But this doesn’t describe either intelligencework or knowledge-work in general. Then, factor in the question of secrecy and of course there are major issues when it comes to sharing knowledge. What did Congress do about this? In order to come up with ideas for reorganizing intelligence with the object of sharing knowledge, you have to know—to see and understand—intelligence work in practice. Congressional committee members don’t have the right lens for this. So, adopting view-from-the-top thinking, they turned to experts, who looked to tools, particularly the org chart, for “improving communications and organizational efficiency.” Intending to make information flow through the system more efficiently, they focused on redesigning the overall reporting structure, while tinkering with the chain of command. It is almost beyond belief that the experts who recommended creating a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a way of making the United States more secure could have thought it sensible to combine more than 30 separate, mostly very large, competing, bureaucratic, and hierarchical organizations into a single mammoth one and have employees cooperate Tools are the empty heart of management and share knowledge.21 Although, officially, the jury is still out on whether this reorg will work, you don’t have to know a lot about the situation to realize that creating the DHS was bad, not to say expensive, policy. The only reason for doing it, that I can think of, is congress was desperate to show they were in control and would quickly do something to improve the security situation. And the only way for them to do this was to find a tool—the org chart—that made the wicked problems of national security seem tame. Redesigning processes or structures isn’t the real work In every reorg I know of, management says “let there be change” and thinks “if we have a plan, redraw an org chart, and design a process chart there is change: we’re making it happen.” It is all tools, tools, tools for as far as they can see. Once they get started, they depend on more tools: new job descriptions; Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator [MBTI] workshops to help new teams function; and technology, such as knowledge portals, to connect people with the information they need to do their jobs. Tools do have a role in change initiatives but you can create new job descriptions or draw and redraw org charts, process maps, or flowcharts until you are blue in the face and still not move an initiative along, because tools don’t do the work of organizing and guiding people to new practices. If practices don’t change, reorgs go nowhere and the tools end up as wallpaper (process charts) or bookends (strategic plans). For a reorg to produce movement, the initiative has to “move” from process charts or strategic plans (what is on walls and in documents) into everyone’s (not just top management’s) conversations, discussions, negotiations and practices. There has to be talk to complement the tools and there has to be lots of talk. Practices begin in conversations, in the space between people, as they talk about what they’re doing, why, how, and so on. If their conversations continue for long enough they’ll stay focused on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and eventually the practices will be in their hearts and minds and they’ll be doing their work differently. Going from a chart or a plan or a spreadsheet (someone’s ideas about how things ought to work) to action (practices) is what the work of organizing is all about. It is where the work of aligning comes in and it is adaptive work. Ron Heifetz describes adaptive work as “the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face . . . It . . . 109 110 Beyond Management requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior.” Add “relationships” and you have a neat summary of why the work of organizing is seldom straightforward.22 The work of reorganizing At the best of times the work of organizing can be a tricky, complicated business, and more so with reorganizations. A reorg layers on uncertainty and ambiguity. Somewhere, someone has decided to change the system and the rules. A formal announcement preceded an all-hands meeting, which was followed by a flurry of emails from the top asking for “patience and cooperation in what will be a trying time for everyone.” But, what exactly does “trying time” mean? Formal communications don’t and can’t prepare people for what is ahead and for what they should do; but they can and do spur their imaginations. As most reorgs result in people being fired, one of the main concerns will be, ‘Am I going to lose my job?’ Then, suddenly, changes are taking place in different areas, there is an enormous amount of reorganizing to do. As usual, no one has the blueprint for how to do it, and it’s difficult to fathom out what is going on.23 “Creativity” is now about figuring out situations that don’t make much sense and making up what you do as you go. That’s what people are doing. They’re trying to find out more about what is going on. They’re also lobbying for their ideas, forming alliances, staking their claims to positions and roles in the unfolding organizational drama, learning to break old habits, finding and adopting new practices, and so on. Of course, they have different ideas about what is sensible, what to take seriously and what to ignore, who is or ought to be responsible for doing what, and where they can get the most leverage for themselves or their units. The wicked problems start to emerge when people are actually “in action,” making meaning, and doing something—and it’s a case of different groups with different problems. “What is expected of me in this process? What are we expected to do? What am I going to get out of it? Are we willing or able to do what is expected? What is it going to take? Is it worth the effort? Am I up for this? Are we up for this?” Everyone is looking for answers but their problems and questions vary depending on who they are, where they are, and what they do, and I’ve used the sample questions to emphasize there is both an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ in what is going on. There is a personal element to change, which involves people’s identities, interests, and values and, because the work of organizing is social (collective work), Tools are the empty heart of management there is an interpersonal element as well. Reorganizing means new commitments and involves new responsibilities, all of which requires people to realign. With a reorg the executives closest to planning and implementing the initiative are seldom on the same page and if they aren’t you can imagine what happens down in the bowels of the organization, where people get fragments of information and disjointed instructions from the top. Speculation and rumors are rife. Disjuncture is normal in work life but, now, employees are dividing into camps based on their affiliations, their interests in what is happening, or their expectations about what will happen and how they ought to position themselves for the future. Should they seek new allies or send out their résumés? Their convictions about what ought to be happening also play a role (e.g. that matters are moving too fast, too slowly, or in the wrong direction), as does the extent of their commitment to the “old ways” of doing things. The more committed they are, the more likely they are to drag their heels and resist change. Finally, consider the consequences of the rounds of layoffs in the course of downsizing and you begin to appreciate why reorgs undermine confidence and why they are often accompanied by cynicism—“no one seems to know what they are doing” (which is probably true)—and an overall mood of resignation—“this, too, will pass eventually. In the meantime I’ll sit back and watch.” When management expects movement in one direction or another and doesn’t see it, a typical response is to try a tool or two: team-building workshops; departmental off-sites; even a new mission statement. When you’re up to your neck in wicked problems, it is appealing to think (and to be told) that another tool will get you out of the mess. (Of course, if we weren’t beguiled by tools, we might be more careful about what we get into in the first place.) At any rate, practical movement happens only if and when people realign, so they are working together and organizing their work differently, because they are thinking differently about their work, Real movement is in the organizing and, first and foremost, has to do with talk (i.e. conversations) and with relationships, attitudes, and values; not as the management handbook has it, with charts and directives. This is how Michael Schrage describes the heart of work: The real basic structure of the workplace is the relationship. Each relationship is itself part of a larger network of relationships. The fact is that work gets done through these relationships. As Bell and Flores put it, “The ingredients of work are . . . the questions and commitments and possibilities that bring things forth.”24 111 112 Beyond Management The Achilles heel of restructuring, reengineering, and, indeed, all strategic initiatives is that, under “old” management, work is without its heart—talk and organizing. Until and unless these become the centerpieces of change up and down the organization, strategic initiatives are largely exercises in futility that are simply disorganizing. But, now we know what is missing and why it matters, we can turn attention to practical questions to do with new practices. What does a heart transplant look like? How do we restore the missing parts?