Abstract
Organizing is often hard work. Aligning, which I’ve called the “bottom-line of organizing,” takes experience, ingenuity, and, sometimes, tough bargaining. Assignments that seem perfectly straightforward turn out to hide wicked problems that reveal themselves only when you are trying to clarify something or when you are looking for agreement from the team about what still needs to be done. Reaching agreement may take all kinds of compromises and could depend on knowing: which rules and procedures to follow, which you can bend, and how to circumvent others entirely; when to sidestep long-winded procedures even though you’ve been told “this is the way we do things here”; what you can do to free up funds, yet stay within budget.
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Notes
The idea of social spaces helps to explain why mindsets and attitudes matter so much at work. Unfortunately, Western, post-Enlightenment thinking is inherently critical, and criticism is also the prevailing mindset in high-control management environments. You pick apart data or arguments until you have established the facts. Through scientific management, management practices inherited Cartesian rationalism and the belief that you “get to the truth” by critical analysis. Additionally, as management methods evolved in regimented, controlling environments, like military establishments and industrial-age factories, there is a pervasive attitude of “follow the rules or be punished,” which is hardly conducive to creative experimentation and learning. It is a depressing attitude rather than an uplifting one. It instills fear at work rather than inspiring joy in work. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977). For some time, writers have argued for adopting an alternative, “appreciative” approach. Their concerns are valid but as the attitudes they’re concerned about are inherent in management ideology, a truly appreciative workplace isn’t possible without an entirely different way of organizing work. Hierarchy, competition, and compliance all have to go. They are not compatible with appreciativeness, which is closely associated with care and caring for others and for the work you do. A good deal of information on appreciative methods and the history, principles, and practices of appreciative inquiry can be found on the “Appreciative Inquiry Commons” website of Case Western University, Ohio at http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/. See also Tojo Thatchenkery and Carol Metzker, Appreciative Intelligence: Seeing the Mighty Oak in the Acorn (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2006).
See Georg Von Krogh, K. Ichijo, and Ikujiro Nonaka, Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
You don’t want bridges or houses to be built to less-than-minimum specifications. In some situations, especially where standards in use are well established, matters are quite straightforward. You work with established standards. But technology moves quickly today and we are often at the edge of what is known and of established rules and standards: from nuclear energy, to the safety of drugs and aircraft design, to the impact of particular activities on the environment. At this point, whether we want to or not, we are in the process of organizing, although it might be called “policymaking” or “strategy formulation.” We may be in search of answers to technical problems but the process is a social one of people making meaning together and sharing knowledge in order to find solutions. Seeing the situation as a problem to do with organizing and aligning helps us to understand why there are all the attendant problems and questions. How safe is safe? Who are the experts and whose interests do they represent? How far can established analytical and statistical methods take us in terms of providing answers? Finding answers to these reveals them to be wicked problems which interweave social—including moral—and technical considerations, which goes some way to explaining why there is an increasing awareness of the limits of human knowledge in general and the severe limitations of a “pure” technical education and of statistical tools like probability estimates, in particular, in dealing with the problems. See Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). On the standard, probabilistic approach to risk analysis see Terje Aven, Foundations of Risk Analysis: A Knowledge and Decision-Oriented Perspective (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003).
Douglas Stone and colleagues provide a very useful “how to” for having difficult conversations in Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Roger Fisher, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
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© 2011 Mark Addleson
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Addleson, M. (2011). Conversations for aligning: openness, commitments, and accountability. In: Beyond Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_12
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