Leading organisations without boundaries: quantum organisation and the work of making meaning

January 2nd, 2013

by Philip Boxer PhD

The following is the abstract to a paper accepted for presentation at the 13th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations (ISPSO) at Oxford UK, July 2013:

Doing many different things at the same time
What happens when an organisation has to be many different things at the same time in how it relates to its clients? Digitalisation and the internet lead every client to expect more dynamic interaction with their particular situation, context and timing. Familiar examples from the perspective of the client are healthcare, financial services, air travel, mobile apps and the home delivery of food. Organisations that are interacting dynamically in different ways with each of their individual clients are best understood as being without boundaries. This paper uses a ‘quantum’ metaphor to think about this, considering each individual client interaction as a ‘quantum’. Quantum theory argues that the ‘classical’ reality of which we are conscious is quite different to the underlying reality of distributions of quantum states [1, 2]. This quantum metaphor provides a way of thinking about something very similar going on in relation to the underlying reality of organisations. The work of ‘quantum organisation’ by these organisations becomes that of making meaning within the client’s particular situation, context and timing. The paper uses examples from healthcare to elaborate on this use of the quantum metaphor, and draws conclusions about the leadership needed by these organisations without boundaries.

When Jack Welch asked for a ‘boundaryless organization’, General Electric didn’t get rid of its boundaries [3]. It rearranged its vertical, horizontal, industry and geographic boundaries so that it could better thrive, and shifted its focus to creating structured networks [4, 5]. Structured networks are a response to the need to address value creation at the level of the business ecosystem [6, 7]. This shift is apparent in manufacturing [8], and it is even more apparent in healthcare [9]. Organisations that interact dynamically with their clients are presented with demands that are multi-sided, in the sense that the context of the demand becomes at least as important as the demand itself [10, 11]. Thus, it may be clear that you need a heart transplant, but your healthcare has to be at least as concerned with the context of your body and your lifestyle if the transplant is to be effective. To create value for the multi-sided demands of patients within a healthcare ecosystem, a healthcare clinic must align a unique care pathway to manage the chronic symptoms of each of its patients [12]. The organisation of such a clinic is not easily understood as a socio-technical open system with its boundary conditions “directly dependent on its material means and resources for its outputs” [13]. How then is the work of such an organisation to be understood, if not in terms of how it manages its boundaries?

Distinguishing the ‘operative’ from the ‘regulative’
Emery and Trist argued that while open-systems models enabled material exchange processes to be dealt with between the organization and elements in its environment, “they did not deal with those processes in the environment itself which were the determining conditions of the exchanges”. “Those processes were themselves often incommensurate with the organisation’s internal and exchange processes” [14] p30. This led Trist to restrict the term “socio-technical” to ‘operative’ organizations, distinguishing them from ‘regulative’ organizations. Regulative organizations are “concerned directly with the psychosocial ends of their members and with instilling and maintaining or changing cultural values and norms, the power and the position of interest groups, or the social structure itself” [13]. Trist later called these regulative organisations ‘referent’ because they were defined by their relation to the ecosystem as a whole [15], and by their boundary conditions. These regulative or referent organisations were instead focussed on aligning the behaviour of an ecosystem to particular interests, in a way that parallels the work of the healthcare clinic to align care pathways to the interests of its patients. Accepting this difference means losing a direct identification between a physical system and the system of meaning of which it is a realisation. This forces us to abandon the direct identification of boundary with container [16] and re-examine the concept of containing.

Implications
In place of this direct identification, the paper argues that the work of regulative or referent organisations has to be understood as one of making meaning rather than managing across a boundary. This work involves a container-contained relation that returns meaning to the other (the patient) with respect to what the other experiences as ‘bizarre’ or anxiety-inducing (the symptoms). Containment involves making sense through a work of transformation within the context of a ‘vertex’, or a way of organising meaning [17]. Two conditions follow from this for the healthcare clinic to be effective in organising the care of its patients:

  1.   The ecosystem must act as a supporting infrastructure that is appropriately ‘agile’. This means that it can simultaneously support a wide variety of alignments of care services[18]. In this sense, the ecosystem must be able to sustain many different states of alignment at the same time, each of which is a ‘quantum’ state. For the patient, this quantum state is the singular behaviour of the ecosystem, while for the ecosystem, it is one of many simultaneous states it must be able to support.
  2. Its leadership must make it in the interests of its clinicians to contain the patient’s particular experience within its local multi-sided context, and must make it possible to form effective workgroup collaborations able to align appropriate care pathways [19, 20]. This process of containing the patient’s experience of his or her symptoms becomes the process by which a singular state of the ecosystem is aligned to the local environment of the patient in the form of a unique care pathway. The paper argues that the regulative or referent role of the clinic makes it an organisation without boundaries; the processes by which it is enabled to create agility and alignment are better described in terms of quantum organisation. The paper explores these two conditions characterising quantum organisation using examples from healthcare. It draws conclusions on the leadership demanded of such an organisation, and on its psychoanalytic implications.

 

References
1. Rosenblum, B. and F. Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: physics encounters consciousness. 2006: Oxford University Press.
2. Atmanspacher, H., H. Romer, and H. Walach, Weak Quantum Theory: Complementarity and Entanglement in Physics and Beyond. Foundations of Physics, 2002. 32(3): p. 379-406.
3. Ashkenas, R., et al., The Boundaryless Organization: Breaking the Chains of Organization Structure. 2002: Jossey-Bass.
4. Goold, M. and A. Campbell, Designing Effective Organizations: How to Create Structured Networks. 2002, London: Jossey-Bass.
5. Provan, K.G. and P. Kenis, Modes of Network Governance: Structure, Management, and Effectiveness. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 2007. 18: p. 229-252.
6. Trist, E., A Concept of Organizational Ecology. Australian Journal of Management, 1977. 2(2): p. 161-176.
7. Porter, M.E. and M.R. Kramer, Creating Shared Value: How to reinvent capitalism – and unleash a wave of innovation and growth. Harvard Business Review, 2011(January-February).
8. Iansiti, M. and R. Levien, The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability. 2004, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
9. Porter, M.E. and E.O. Teisberg, Redefiining Health Care: Creating Value-based Competition on Results. 2006, Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
10. Silverthorne, S., New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets: an interview with Andrei Hagiu, in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge2006. p. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5237.html.
11. Evans, D.S., Some Empirical Aspects of Multi-Sided Platform Industries. Review of Network Economics, 2003. 2(3).
12. Rouse, W.B., Health Care as a Complex Adaptive System: Implications for Design and Management. The Bridge, 2008. 38(1): p. 17-25.
13. Fichtelberg, J., H. Murray, and B. Trist, Social Engagement of Social Science: A Tavistock Anthology: The Socio-Technical Perspective. 1997: University of Pennsylvania Press.
14. Emery, F.E. and E. Trist, The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments. Human Relations, 1965. 18: p. 21-32.
15. Trist, E., Referent Organizations and the Development of Inter-Organizational Domains. Human Relations, 1983. 36(3): p. 269-284.
16. Palmer, B., The Tavistock paradigm: Inside, outside and beyond, in Organisations, Anxieties and Defences: Towards a Psychoanalytic Social Psychology, R.D. Hinshelwood and M. Chiesa, Editors. 2002, Whurr: London. p. 158-182.
17. Bion, W.R., Learning from Experience. 1962, London: Heinemann.
18. Boxer, P., et al. Systems-of-Systems Engineering and the Pragmatics of Demand. in Second International Systems Conference. 2008. Montreal, Que.: IEEE.
19. Bion, W.R., Attention and Interpretation. 1970, London: Tavistock.
20. French, R.B. and P. Simpson, The ‘work group’: Redressing the balance in Bion’s Experiences in Groups. Human Relations, 2010. 63(12): p. 1859-1878.

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Timespan of discretion and the double alignment of ‘know-how’

November 7th, 2012

by Philip Boxer PhD

John Kotter, in his article about how to stay competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption, introduces the idea of “two systems, one organisation“, one system being about the organisation of the vertical linkages associated with the hierarchical North-South, and the second being about the way East-West networks of horizontal linkages are organised. He makes the point that competition is more and more about managing the complex on the edge of chaos, far different to the demands of the 20th Century corporate era.  How are we to think about the demands this shift is imposing on individuals?

Elliott Jaques, in his book The Form of Time, makes a distinction between two kinds of time (p14):

  • chronos – that of “chronological, seriatim time of succession, measurable by clocks and chronometers”; and
  • kairos – that of “seasonal time, the time of episodes with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the human and living time of intentions and goals”.

Jaques, and the Brunel Institute he founded, developed an approach to career path appreciation within bureaucracies – organisations in which the work of subordinates within a hierarchy were aligned under the strategy ceiling of the whole.  This approach was based on the timespan of discretion expected in the exercise of a particular role within the hierarchy.[1]  This timespan of discretion reflected the extent to which the exercise of the role was under-determined, i.e. left to the judgement of the role-holder. In a role that was over-determined, there was a chronos logic to the succession of events that left the role-holder with no discretion.  But with under-determination came the opportunity for the role-holder to impose kairos through the exercise of judgement.  The importance of the hierarchy was of course to ensure conformance to the overall expectations from above the strategy ceiling.  Seven levels could usefully distinguished, described as follows:[2]

  1. Prescribed output: responding to concrete demands – use expertise in practical judgement in such a way that resources of time, skills, equipment and materials are not wasted or misused.
  2. Situational response: assessing concrete needs – comprehend each particular situation by exploration, imagination and appraisal, and then resolve it; explain why work is to be done in a particular way; explain/demonstrate how a particular task is to be done.
  3. Systematic provision: handling concrete systems – imagine all the possible practices and systems that might be used; select those that are appropriate in the light of local conditions; make the most of the people, the finances and the technologies in order to realise those that have been chosen.
  4. Comprehensive provision: developing multiple services – coordinate and supply resources for the practices that are already in place; develop new systems or practices; meet changes in purpose; terminate those means that are no longer realising the purpose.
  5. Field coverage: shaping overall operations – represent the organisation to the external context; act as the source of the mission and as the source of both current and new technologies; relate the separate activities of level 4.
  6. Multi-field coverage: framing operational fields – monitor, obtain and shape intelligence about external contexts; protect the strategic units against excessive turbulence, alerting them of opportunities and likely pressures; representing the organisation in external contexts; judge priorities for corporate investment.
  7. Total coverage: defining basic parameters – state and disseminate the values of the whole; consider how these values may best be expressed in contexts with different value systems and different social and political economies; design contexts for the future of the whole in places or activities that may appear peripheral but will eventually be sources of strategic advantage; sustain the whole by producing new strategic units by acquisition, mergers and joint ventures and divesting where appropriate.

The difficulty with this framework emerges when there needs to be no strategy ceiling, and the behavior of the enterprise needs to be relational, delivering type IV quality. The alignment of the levels must therefore not be determined by a prior design-time strategy ceiling but in response to the present ‘WHY’ of the client situation representing an opportunity.[3] [4] This requires a subtle change to the way the levels are understood; and an explicit alignment of them to the four quadrants relating to the particular client situation.

The first four remain the same, being about the way infrastructural capabilities (1-2) and intra-unit organisation (3-4) operate.  The changes come in the levels 5-6 which deal more explicitly with inter-unit alignment, and with the superstructural assumptions in level 7 which become primarily about creating value in the client situation:[5]

  1. Prescribed output: responding to concrete demands.
  2. Situational response: assessing concrete needs.
  3. Systematic provision: handling concrete systems.
  4. Comprehensive provision: developing multiple services.
  5. Field coverage: shaping overall operations -align units to the external contexts-of-use within an operational field; act as the source of the mission and as the source of both current and new propositions; relate the separate activities of units at level 4.
  6. Multi-field coverage: framing operational fields -monitor, obtain and shape intelligence about external contexts-of-use across multiple fields; protect the operational fields against excessive turbulence, alerting field coverage of opportunities and likely pressures; represent the whole in external contexts-of-use; judge priorities for strategic investment..
  7. Total coverage: defining basic parameters -state and disseminate the values of the whole; design operational fields for the future of the whole in places or for activities that may appear peripheral but will eventually be new sources of value; sustain the whole by creating new units and potential alignments by acquisition, mergers and joint ventures and divesting where appropriate.

In effect, therefore, these two sets of levels can be used to examine the ‘double alignment’ of ‘West’ know-how[6]:

  1. To ensure that roles are defined in terms of the first hierarchical set, aligning role-holders’ interests to supporting the edge; and
  2. To ensure that the dynamic processes of collaboration and co-creation align the relations between the edge and the client situation, conforming to the second set.

These correspond to Kotter’s “two systems, one organisation“, the first being about the organisation of the hierarchical North-South, and the second being about the way the East-West networks are organised.  Managing the tension between these two forms of alignment are fundamental to enabling the enterprise to sustain relational behavior.

Notes
[1] Two kinds of insight emerged from the use of career path appreciation: (i) a critical examination of the numbers of levels in a hierarchy, and whether they were necessary to its effective operation – leading to the identification of pseudo-levels; and (ii) a comparison between the level at which the role was defined as compared with the level of which the role-holder was capable – here mismatches led to difficulties in fulfilling expectations of the role and/or behaviors going beyond the remit of the role itself.
[2] In his book on levels of abstraction in logic and human action, Jaques approximates these timespans chronologically in terms of where the breakpoints came: levels 1-2 ~ 3 months; levels 2-3 ~ 1 year; levels 3-4 ~ 2 years; levels 4-5 ~ 5 years; levels 5-6 ~ 10 years; and levels 6-7 ~ 20 years.
[3] ‘Client’ is used here in the sense of the position of the client in tempo, entanglement and East-West dominance – the problem is local to the client’s situation or context-of-use, and the models for delivering value have to be actively aligned to that situation.
[4] Remember that the strategy ceilings are derived from the 4-quadrant analysis of the theory-of-use implicit in the behavior of the enterprise.  The ordering of these quadrants comes from the ways in which their timespans of discretion are nested – it takes longer to shape behaviors supporting the ‘WHY’ than too shape the behaviors supporting the ‘WHAT’.
[5] Thus levels 1-2 relate to the infrastructural capabilities of the ‘WHAT’; levels 3-4 relate to the intra-unit organisation of the ‘HOW’; levels 5-6 relate to the inter-unit organisation of the ‘WHO-for-WHOM’; and level 7 relates to the superstructural assumptions of the ‘WHY’.
[6] Referred to in a footnote to the last point 4 of tempo, entanglement and East-West dominance.  This is what leads to the need for ‘tripartite leadership’ – see The Double Challenge: working through the tension between meaning and motivation in a large system.  Tripartite leadership involves top leaders, professionals and clinicians e.g. in “Leading Psychological Services: A report by the Division of Clinical Psychology”, British Psychological Association, February 2007. For clinician you can substitute any edge role that is about shaping the response to the particular situation. The religious domain is another domain in which I have had particular experience of the challenges facing tripartite leadership e.g. Asymmetric Leadership: supporting a CEO’s response to turbulence.

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Tempo, Entanglement and East-West dominance

October 9th, 2012

by Philip Boxer PhD

A provider-supplier may face new challenges when it becomes actively involved in supporting a client-purchaser’s experience of value.  This depends on whether or not the client-purchaser’s experience of value is dynamic i.e. on the demand tempo at which the client-purchaser’s experience of value is changing.  In the following diagram this is shown as a move into the top-right-hand quadrant.

But why should this quadrant require an approach to governance that is East-West dominant?  To understand this, we need to say more about ‘tempo’:

‘Tempo’ refers to the rate at which structural changes take place in the way a system relates to its environments. In the figure above, three spaces are identified – that of the suppliers, of the Provider and of Clients. Within the suppliers’ space, the supplier’s environment is their users within the Provider. Within the Provider’s operational space its environment is the multi-sided demands presented by its Clients; and within the Client’s space the environment is the context-of-use within which each Client’s demand arises. This allows us to distinguish three tempos:

  • Acquisition tempo – the rate at which suppliers are able to meet new requirements.
  • Alignment tempo – the rate at which the Provider is able to align new value propositions to new demands from Clients through processes of orchestrating and synchronizing multiple products and services, including those of complementors.
  • Demand tempo – the rate at which new forms of multi-sided demand emerge from Clients that need to be satisfactorily addressed.

The normal assumption is that the tempo of change within each space can be considered independently – the spaces can be ‘disentangled’ from each other. This allows the classical purchasing cycle in the figure below to be used. This is the framing assumption characteristic of North-South dominance, implicit in which is the assumption that the ‘design time’ of the supplier can be disentangled from the ‘run-time’ of the Provider’s operational space [1]:

A different framing assumption is that the Provider is part of a socio-technical ecosystem, containing many systems of systems using overlapping and interlocking components, in which the way these systems are brought together has to be dynamically aligned to Clients’ needs.  This is the assumption of East-West dominance – there is no ‘design-time’.[2]  Under these conditions, a supplier is always adding a new component into the already ‘live’ environment of the Provider.  Its supplied component cannot therefore be ‘disentangled’ from the multiple contexts in which it is to be used:

This entanglement demands asymmetric leadership of the Provider.  This involves keeping a balance between four different aspects of the Provider’s behavior:

  1. the leadership of the organisation as a whole (North);
  2. the ‘agility’ of its infrastructures, i.e. the variety of behaviours the infrastructure is able to support (South);
  3. the variety of different ways in which the separate behaviours of the infrastructure have to be aligned to Clients’ demands, for which managers ‘at the edge’ can be held accountable (East); and
  4. the ways in which the Provider makes it in its employees’ interests to work in a way that is driven from the East rather than from within separate silos – including providing the means of managing alignment effectively (West). [3]

Notes
[1] ‘Design-time’ and ‘Run-time’ are ways of distinguishing a time prior to engagement with the Client during which a new proposition may be developed. ‘Run-time’ is the time within which there is a ‘live’ interaction with the Client.
[2] And no strategy ceiling therefore, since all aspects of the Provider’s response to the Client have to be ‘live’.
[3] ‘West’ involves a double alignment because there is both an alignment of the interests of those exercising know-how and also an alignment by that know-how of ‘South’ capabilities to ‘East’ demands.

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Quality as the driver at the edge

June 20th, 2012

by Philip Boxer PhD

Much has been said on the subject of quality, including its tendency to focus on the quality of outputs rather than on the quality of outcome for the user of those outputs.1 See, for example, ‘Quality Management Gets Strategic and Discovers (Gasp!) The Customer‘.  The figure below approaches quality in a way that relates back to the challenges of working at the edge, of describing what-is-going-on at the edge in terms of 4 quadrants, and of addressing the limitations on quality created by a low strategy ceiling.2

The horizontal line represents the way primary task is defined, and the vertical line represents the way primary risk is defined.3 This gives us a way of distinguishing 4 types of Quality, each one built on the foundations of the one before:

  • Type I – the behaviour conforms to its contractual specification e.g. we delivered it in the time window we said we would.
  • Type II – the behaviour serves the supplier’s purpose in what it delivers e.g. we delivered it in a time window that fitted the urgency you were prepared to pay for.
  • Type III – the behaviour serves the user’s purpose in how it is delivered e.g. we installed it and ensured it was working as you expected within your environment.
  • Type IV – the behaviour continues to serve the user’s purpose over time through being adapted to the user’s changing needs e.g. we monitored its performance and modified what it was doing as your needs changed.

Using the rcKP language, the behaviours on the left are r-type and c-type, being at best customizable in ways that serve the supplier’s purpose.  In contrast, the behaviours on the right are K-type and P-type, being concerned with aligning performance to the current and/or evolving nature of the user’s situation.  Quality on the left can be defined largely independently of the context-of-use, while quality on the right cannot.

Notes
[1] A distinction can usefully be made between consumer, customer and client that speaks of increasing involvement with an active user’s context-of-use.
[2] The point being the lower the strategy ceiling, the fewer of the quadrants are judged to be relevant to quality, arms-length contracting restricting quality to the type I fulfillment of a contract to deliver.
[3] These definitions are implicit in the behaviour of an enterprise within the context of its definition of relevance, and reflect the way its managers identify with those behaviours. See ‘with what is an enterprise identified‘.

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Describing what is going on (wigo)

April 16th, 2012

by Philip Boxer
The case of the Homeless Charity uses a 4-quadrant or 4-colour model for describing the ‘being’ of the enterprise.  What does this mean?

The behaviour of the enterprise reveals assumptions that are built into its structures and processes – ‘theories-in-use’.  What we are doing with this model is trying to characterise the nature of these assumptions.1

  • First come assumptions about ‘primary task’.  On the supply-side, these are assumptions about the way the work of the enterprise needs to be organised if it is to be viable. In this example, these are assumptions about the way it is possible to help people who are street homeless to bear their own histories.  On the demand-side, these are assumptions about what particular forms of demand need to be asserted if the needs arising in the overall situation are to be satisfied. In this example, these are the assumptions that the street-homeless person is making about what will enable them to cope with their particular history.
  • Next come assumptions about ‘primary risk‘.  These are assumptions about the relationship dynamics the enterprise needs to sustain between the supply-side and the demand-side if it is to sustain itself over time.  In this example, these are assumptions about what can be done for the street homeless within the funding and time constraints created by the way the enterprise works.
  • Finally come assumptions about the ‘domain of relevance’.  These are the ontic2 assumptions the enterprise is making in the way it engages in what it is doing – assumptions built into what information it tracks, how it uses its resources, how it accounts for what it is doing, and so on.

The 4-quadrants/4-colours are therefore ways of speaking about the effects of these assumptions about task, risk and relevance on the way the enterprise ‘is’. These form the backcloth against which any attempt to ‘intervene’ on the enterprise will be played out.3

Footnote
[1] An ‘espoused theory’ emerges along the speaking-and-listening axis described in The ‘Plus-One’ exercise.  What we are trying to describe with the 4-quadrants/4-colours is the ‘theory-in-use’ implicit in the ‘wigo’ behavior of the organisation that  is being spoken about.  This wigo will itself be being organised by the (more or less) implicit assumptions built into its structures, the relationship between which is represented by the ‘other’ dotted line axis.
[2] The Oxford English Dictonary defined ‘ontic’ as follows: “Of or pertaining to knowledge of the existence or structure of being in a given entity.”  Thus ontical inquiry is concerned with the ontology of particular entities.  Thus with any ‘realist’ assertion of ontology is mediated by the ontic assumptions being made by the observer-entity making the assertion i.e. an ontology is built by an entity making ontic assumptions.  The 4-quadrant model gives us a way of thinking about what kind of ontic assumptions the entity is making. (For an example at another scale, see ‘why critical systems need help to evolve‘).  The concept of the strategy ceiling further elaborates on the way these ontic assumptions are held by an entity.
[3] In the case of the Homeless Charity, the learning cycle it is capable of supporting is defined by the author’s relationship to the charity.  This cycle is a way of describing a reflexive consultation within an ecosystem, defined by 4 relationships between 5 layers of engagement:

The 4-quadrant/4-colour model describes the bottom two layers of this ‘stack’.

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The drivers of organisational scale

December 7th, 2011

by Philip Boxer

Crises of delegation confront those at the top of hierarchies when their authority fails to be recognised by their followers i.e. when power-at-the-centre fails to command obedience. How are we to think about these crises? In what follows, it is proposed that crises of delegation arise when the complex overwhelms the complicated.

When power at the centre of an institution is effective, it creates strong vertical linkages of control between the leadership of the institution and its followers (or employees, contractors etc). A crisis of delegation happens when an individual faces strong horizontal cause-and-effect linkages that are in conflict with the vertical linkages: to survive, the individual can no longer afford to be obedient to the institution. Combining these horizontal and vertical linkages gives the following 2×2, derived from the work by Kurtz and Snowden:

  • In the simple system, cause-and-effect relations are repeatable, perceivable and predictable. Everyone knows the right answers that are easily provided by the leadership.
  • In the complicated system of systems, cause-and-effect relations are not so easy to predict because they are spread over time and space. Nevertheless numbers of experts can be expected to provide the right answers in support of the leadership.
  • The complex ecosystem emerges when cause-and-effect relations become apparent only in retrospect, and cannot be assumed to repeat. This happens when the sheer weight and circularity of cause-and-effect relations become overwhelming (corresponding to the turbulent fields of Emery and Trist). In this environment, the particular characteristics of the situation become crucial, and vertical control linkages become weak because right answers can only emerge retrospectively – not a good basis for central authority. This environment is described as an ecosystem because fromm the perspective of the situation, multiple separate institutions become involved, the individual having to work in relation to many different authorities, each spanning different areas of local control.
  • Finally, behavior becomes chaotic when no cause-and-effect relations are perceivable, even in retrospect. In this environment there are no right answers and everyone is in trouble knowing what to do.

While power-at-the-centre describes the exercise of strong vertical control linkages by leadership (North-South dominance as distinct from East-West dominance), power-at-the-edge (i.e. being edge-driven) describes the necessary approach to leadership in a complex ecosystem in which those closest to a situation need to be authorised if they are to be effective.

What, then, are the drivers of organisational scale? Any institution is going to face a gradual increase over time in the complexity of its environment, and therefore a demand for increasingly differentiated behaviors. We may therefore expect a progression in any institution from the simple to the complicated. The crisis of delegation arises when the complex nature of the ecosystem overwhelms the complicated basis of the institution’s existing authority, demanding the removal of its ‘strategy ceiling‘ so that it can make a transition to the relational form of organisation.[1]

The drivers of organisational scale are therefore the capacity of the institution to manage the complicated, set against the complexity of the cause-and-effect relations to which it is having to respond. Looked at like this, any institution is in a governance cycle through which it can learn how to respond to increasingly asymmetric demands. Or not.

Footnote
[1] The argument I made in The Twitter Revolution: how the internet has changed us is that just as the Printing Revolution precipitated the crisis on delegation associated with the Reformation, so too is the Information Revolution precipitating a crisis of delegation in our own time. The difference, however, is that whereas then the crisis heralded the emergence of the complicated as the dominant form of organisation (giving science its place in the world), the current crisis of delegation is heralding the emergence of the complex as the (coming-to-be) dominant form of organisation. With this emergence, of course, come the challenges of asymmetric leadership and asymmetric design.

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The case of the homeless charity

October 28th, 2011

by Philip Boxer

In the previous blog I introduced the whole economy of leadership.  Here I outline a case showing my diagnostic use of this economy.

The case is about a non-profit organisation that had developed a model for providing long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy to the street homeless.  It was par excellence an edge organisation, providing an organisational platform that aligned the needs of funders, psychotherapists-in-training, homeless shelters and traumatised individuals. The following describes with what I saw the organisation identifying itself:

The ‘being’ of the organisation was identified with the work of enabling the homeless to bear their traumas through the use of long term psychodynamic psychotherapy.  Within this chosen domain,

  • It drew on the skills of volunteer psychotherapists in training to work with homeless persons for up to 2 years – the ‘WHAT’.
  • It did this using a model that provided assessment (of need), supervision (of volunteers) and support (to the whole process) – the ‘HOW’.
  • Driving all this was the particular form taken by the needs of the street homeless, for example shaping where and how these needs could be encoutered – the ‘WHY’.
  • And who the organisation could be for whom was determined by the way funders were prepared to fund its work – the ‘WHO/M’. So what was the problem?

I was a Board member, and the challenge we faced in common with many other non-profits was a change in the way funding was made available, with the attendant changes this demanded in strategy.  This case was essentially about a failure of strategy – hence the homelessness.

Previously, funders had been prepared to pay for the whole service as a ‘good thing’ – this was the history that both the Director and the Board were familiar with.  But funders were increasingly wanting to link their funding to outcomes related to specific projects. The difficulty was that the needs presented by the homeless were multi-sided, and not easily fitted into simple output measures.  To be effective, the work being done had not only to address the homeless person’s direct need, but also to meet their indirect needs by the way the work ‘fitted’ alongside other things being done, for example arranging accommodation and food, managing addictions and addressing health needs.  This was not only a complex ‘narrative’ that it was difficult to get funded, it also demanded edge-driven collaboration between multiple organisations.

The organisation needed  to get funders involved with its work. But to do this, it needed to make its models more dynamically responsive to the multi-sided nature of the needs being presented by the homeless, so that its role within the larger ecosystem could become clearer.  In terms of the network-forming leadership roles, this demanded triple-loop learning of the organisation.  In practice, however, the attachment of the Director and the Board to old ways of thinking about the service made this impossible, the organisation continuing single-loop behavior under its founding model. It was not able to be strategic:

A closer look at the full economy of leadership shows why this was the case.  The full economy adds in the network-enabling forms of leadership and the relationships within the economy as a whole, the anti-patterns of leadership being shown in square brackets.  It shows how the organisation was split:

  • The ‘heart’ of the organisation was in the volunteers’ work with the clients under supervision.  For the volunteers this was a valuable extension to their training. ‘Management’, whether in the role of the Senior Management Team (SMT) or by Administrators, belonged to a different kind of agenda, being inimical to their work but suffered as necessary to complying with Board requirements. The disconnect between the work with clients and the SMT was symptomatic of this. Equally, the agenda of the volunteers in extending their training had no real relationship to the Board’s view of the organisation.
  • The ‘head’ of the organisation was in the work of the Director and her administration supported by the Board, all three of which were more identified with the past ways of doing things than current pressures for change.  Given that the allegiance of the SMT was more to working with volunteers than with the Director’s or Board’s agendas, their demands for super-reasonableness reflected their resistance to engaging with the demands for change emerging from the work with clients.  The members, who constitutionally elected the Board, were also irrelevant, with no real involvement either with the Board or with the work of the organisation, other than voting at their Annual General Meeting.

So it was a classic case of clinicians working on a Faustian basis, with ‘management’ and ‘Board’ split off and responding to a quite different set of agendas – agendas that nevertheless would ultimately determine the demise of the organisation.

Of course numbers of things were done to try to build positive connections across the economy as a whole [1] in order to try and overcome these difficulties, examples of which were:

  • the (w)edge management process, developed to provide a better alignment between the work of the organisation and the way it could be held accountable to funders.
  • Board members spending time ‘in the field’ with members of the SMT and volunteers in order to better understand the work of the organisation.
  • Research commissioned with Peter Fonagy on the long-term benefits of the work with the homeless, to better inform funders of the nature of the needs being dealt with.
  • Alliances built with the other organisations alongside which the work was done, for example St Mungo’s, so that better collaborative alliances could be built, with these other organisations becoming Members.
  • A group relations conference design by Barry Palmer enabling the organisation to develop a relationship between  its different parts and itself as a whole.
  • Research commissioned on the system dynamics between street homelessness and the behavior of the larger social care system, for which homelessness was a symptom, in order to better situate outcome measures within the context of this larger dynamic.

Ultimately, however, attempts to develop an effective relationship to strategy failed, with an attendant failure to create a place for this particular form of long-term work in the minds of the funders.[2]  The consequence was that rather than closing the organisation, the Board merged it with a larger not-for-profit within which it’s work could form a part of a larger whole, within which the multi-sidedness of its work could be better addressed.[3]  The absence of an effective relationship to strategy continued, however, and the work of the organisation was eventually closed down.

Footnotes
[1] From the perspective of the Board, these demanded consulting interventions.  The diagnostic status of the economy of leadership could therefore be thought of as framing the nature of the need for these interventions.
[2] Fundamentally, the anti-patterns on the left side of the economy were never overcome… personally, I never really grasped the extent of (and basis for) the resistance that persisted to the end. In retrospect, using volunteers in the way that it did probaly compounded this by rendering invisible much of the real demands at the edge.
[3] The merger addressed the funding issue by placing the operating model alongside a number of other services, enabling the multi-sidedness of homeless needs to be managed more effectively. The merger was an intervention’ that changed what the organisation identified itself with. But it didn’t change the economy of leadership that persisted into the new organisation.

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The economy of leadership

October 27th, 2011

by Philip Boxer

I describe an economy of leadership as the relationships between eights patterns of leadership in the way an organisation relates to its environment, four through the development of the networks from which the organisation is formed, and four through enabling its existing networks to be sustained. This economy also includes eight anti-patterns of leadership (patterns of resistance) through which individuals resist leadership. The relationships are between each network-forming pattern (or anti-pattern) and the other four network-enabling patterns (or anti-patterns), so that the whole economy appears as follows:


These four types of relationship define the ways in which each enabling pattern (or anti-pattern) is defined in terms of the different network-forming patterns:[1]

  • Pairing: the reading is the same, but the particular wigo/wiRgo relation of the network-forming pattern becomes the governing assumption of the other – they each refresh the parts that the other cannot reach.
  • Dependent: the governing assumptions of the network-forming pattern become the reading of the other, and vice versa – the dependent pattern tries to ‘spell out’ the basis of the other’s authority.
  • Parent-Child: The trace to wigo/wiRgo relation of the network-forming pattern becomes the assumption-reading relation of the other – the ‘child’ dependent pattern  tries to emulate not what the parent says, but what they do.
  • Fight-Flight: the governing assumptions are the same, but the wigo/wiRgo of the network-forming pattern becomes the trace of the other – each pattern really doesn’t ‘get’ what the other is about.

Of course these are hopelessly abstract, so in the next post I will use a case study to show how all this gets put together diagnostically.

Footnotes
[1] These enabling patterns are the perverse discourses, and the different types of relation they have to the network-forming patterns is based on how the quadripod is supported by the way the organisation ‘inscribes’ itself.

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Leadership resistance: conserving identity

October 26th, 2011

by Philip Boxer

My blog on Leadership at the Edge drew on eight leadership patterns in order to begin to describe the conditions for a successful edge organisation. Leadership resistance, or anti-patterns, were originally formulated in the context of software development, but are a way of thinking about patterns of behavior that have bad or unintended consequences.  Here I am using it to refer more specifically to the way Followership resists Leadership.

A Leader seeks to introduces some new direction into the way individuals are working together within an organisation.  From the perspective of Leadership, resistance is the refusal or blocking of the direction being introduced, but from the perspective of the follower, ‘resistance’ is conservation of (their) identity. Rick Brenner has identified eight organisational coping patterns based on the work of Virginia Satir, that serve well as patterns of resistance (anti-patterns) opposite the eight leadership patterns identified in the previous blog.  In what follows, I align these to an economy of leadership in which these anti-patterns (shown in square brackets) are the other side of the leadership patterns:

Again, I relate four of these patterns of resistance to resisting change to network formation (the quotes are from Brenner):

  • Visionary x Infatuation: The Infatuation anti-pattern “displays complete devotion to a particular person, idea or organization. It remains dedicated in the face of almost any contradictory data, which can lead it to decisions that expose itself to inordinate risk or even to organizational disaster.”
  • Exemplar x Narcissistic: The Narcissistic anti-pattern “is driven by its love of itself and disregard for everything else. No other organization, no person, nothing external to itself is of any worth or value, except perhaps as support or utility to itself. This anti-pattern is prepared to use, abuse or exploit anyone, any idea, or any other organization, including its organizational parent, to further its own ends.”
  • Connector x Loving/Hating: The Loving/Hating anti-pattern “is driven by its relationship with other organizations, people or ideas. Whether finally to destroy that organization, person or idea; or to attach itself thereto in permanent adoration and ethereal bliss, it ignores almost everything and everyone else external to the focal relationship.”
  • Truth-Teller x Incongruent: The Incongruent anti-pattern “disregards one or both of the following:  the relation between the organization’s internal representation of reality and reality itself, and the relation between its internal reality and the organization’s representation of itself to the outside world.”

The other four patterns of resistance relate to resisting network enablement (the quotes are again from Brenner):

  • Enforcer x Blaming: The Blaming anti-pattern “seeks people or things to hold responsible for any problem, not to learn from its mistakes, or to prevent them in the future, but to preserve its view of its own infallibility — and the fallibility of others.”
  • Fixer x Super-Reasonable: The Super-reasonable anti-pattern “emphasizes context, usually through a devotion to “objectivity” and at the expense of human considerations or considerations of relationship.”
  • Gatekeeper x Placating: The Placating anti-pattern “shows undue concern for possible negative consequences, being so driven by avoidance of discomfort right now that it’s willing to exchange it for far greater — even inevitable — discomfort in the future. This anti-pattern avoids confronting issues or people, preferring instead to take full responsibility itself for any disappointing outcomes”
  • Facilitator x Irrelevant: The Irrelevant anti-pattern “is coping by flight. In the face of adversity, it copes by avoiding not only the adversity, but any recognition of it.”

So far, all I have done is to set up correspondences between three sources of insight into behavior within organisations, albeit surprising in the extent of the fit.[1]  They provide a way of thinking about how leadership is exercised at the edge, and how existing patterns within organisations may resist that leadership. In my next blog I will describe how leadership patterns and/or  patterns of resistance lock together as an economy, using some case examples.

Footnote
[1] My hypothesis is that these eights are revealing of an underlying structuring of the relations by an economy of discourses, both of these sets of eight being based on extensive research into practice within and between organisations.

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Leadership at the Edge: creating an economy of leadership

October 26th, 2011

by Philip Boxer

I want to propose a way of thinking about leadership within an edge-driven organisation by drawing on the work done by John H Clippinger. In his forthcoming book on edge organisation, he states his objectives as follows:

The overall mission of this book is to provide the principles, techniques and justification for transforming hierarchical, command and control organizations, into highly agile, self-synchronizing networks. In contrast to well-entrenched economic and organizational models that assume human beings to be selfish, individualistic, and rational actors, this book considers human beings to be innately cooperative, having evolved innate strategies of collaboration, trust, and reciprocity that have proven to be highly adaptive.

His aim is to enable high-value teams to operate at the edges of organisations, focusing on the social conditions under which teams can be effective.In what follows, I propose to build on his eight forms of network leadership.

Clippinger draws on Searle’s work on the making of the social world, in which institutions are defined as contexts creating the mutual conditions under which particular propositions can be treated as being true.  He also draws on Coase’s work on the nature of the firm, which defines institutions as creating economies in the way knowledge is transferred as it relates to the coordination of particular task systems – economies that are superior to market economies.  As Langlois further elaborates, these economies of coordination apply not only to hierarchical control exercised within the single enterprise, but also to networks of coordination across independent organisations (the example langlois uses is General Motors’ Volt electric car).  These networks of coordination are edge organisations, creating economies of alignment.

Clippinger argues that eight forms of network leadership role are necessary to creating the mutual conditions for effective joint action by a network.  In the following I organise these leadership roles in a way that creates an economy of leadership:[1]

I relate four of Clippinger’s roles to the formation of a network (the quotes are from Clippinger):

  • The Visionary – “The role of the visionary leader is to imagine futures, determine what is limiting about the present, and show what is possible in the future. The visionary leader imagines new possibilities, creating new institutional facts and realities, and therefore plays a critical role in moving networked organizations in new directions.”
  • The Exemplar – “Also referred to as “Alpha Members”, these are individuals who exemplify the standards and qualities that characterize the best competencies of the peer network. These are the role models that others imitate.”
  • The Connector – “These network leaders participate in multiple social networks, connecting not only with a large number of members, but a highly diverse number of members as well. They are critical for identifying and accessing new resources and helping to get a message out.”
  • The Truth-Teller – “In every network organization, someone has to keep the network honest. This entails the very challenging task of identifying free riders and cheaters. In knowledge-based organizations, it is also about ferreting out half-truths, spin, blunders, and lies.”

And I relate the other four to the enablement of a formed network (again, the quotes are from Clippinger):

  • The Enforcer – “Enforcement can mean physical coercion, but more often entails psychological or peer pressure. Clearly, force and military means are the enforcement methods of last resort, but are necessary in order to buttress other forms of enforcement, which can vary from guilt and shame to legal redress. Most networks have their own forms of redress and enforcement that entail exclusion.”
  • The Fixer – “This is an individual who knows how to get things done and measures him or herself not just by how many people they might know, but rather by how they can get things done that others cannot. Such individuals are results oriented.”
  • The Gatekeeper – “For every network there are membership rules: criteria for being included, retained, elevated, and excluded. The gatekeeper decides who is in and who is out.”
  • The Facilitator – “In order for a network to grow and evolve, it must be able to add new members and reach across network boundaries in order to do so. The facilitator role is pivotal in creating communities or sub-networks that provide the greatest form of network value. The role of facilitator in many respects resembles that of the “community coordinator” in the development of communities of practice, a method developed for helping to create and leverage knowledge.”

In subsequent blogs, I will develop the characteristics of these leadership roles further and relate them to each other as a leadership economy – an inter-related set of leadership conditions necessary to the healthy development of a network organisation.[2]

Footnotes
[1] The Coasian view of the network describes that with which the network identifies itself, while the Searle view of the network’s institutional characteristics approach it in terms of discursive practices. The Lacanian ‘discourse’ brings these two together in a single structure, and arranging the leadership roles in this format reflects a correspondence I propose between the network forming roles and the Lacanian four discourses, and between the network enabling discourses and the perverse discourses.
[2] The strength of these inter-relationships is based on the valency the different roles have for each other and provide a way of explaining the stability of particular organisational cultures, i.e. it is the particular way in which this configuration of roles is held that defines the organisation more than the work of the organisation.

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