Subverting hierarchy

Oh, I feel like a cheapskate. There's Rosie deftly formulating great theories out of test matches and football matches and things I know nothing about (as a female participant on a movement workshop recently said to me. 'I'm more of a man than you'll ever be, Andrew.') and all I do is steal other people's ideas. Hey ho, said Rowley.

"Conversations subvert hierarchy. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Being a human being among others subverts hierarchy."

That's the last line of a section of Chapter 5 of one of the best business books ever written: The Cluetrain Manifesto.

You can read the whole chapter here but here's a bit more to keep you going. It's written around the premise that hierarchies are based on fear (with which premise you almost certainly agree if you've come to this site and are still reading):

"As a result, the company thinks it’s doing one thing while accomplishing the direct opposite with its connected employees. For example:

• The company communicates with me through a newsletter and company meetings meant to lift up my morale. In fact, I know from my e-mail pen pals that it’s telling me happy-talk lies, and I find that quite depressing.

• The company org chart shows me who does what so I know how to get things done. In fact, the org chart is an expression of a power structure. It is red tape. It is a map of whom to avoid.

• The company manages my work to make sure that all tasks are coordinated and the company is operating efficiently. In fact, the inflexible goals imposed from on high keep me from following what my craft expertise tells me I really ought to be doing.

• The company provides me with a career path so I’ll see a productive future in the business. In fact, I’ve figured out that because the org chart narrows at the top, most career paths necessarily have to be dead ends.

• The company provides me with all the information I need to make good decisions. In fact, this information is selected to support a decision (or worldview) in which I have no investment. Statistics and industry surveys are lobbed like anti-aircraft fire to disguise the fact that while we have lots of data, we have no understanding.

• The company is goal-oriented so that the path from here to there is broken into small, well-marked steps that can be tracked and managed. In fact, if I keep my head down and accomplish my goals, I won’t add the type of value I’m capable of. I need to browse. I even need to play. Without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens.

• The company gives me deadlines so that we ship product on time, maintaining our integrity. In fact, working to arbitrary deadlines makes me ship poor-quality content. My management doesn’t have to use a club to get me to do my job. Where’s the trust, baby?

• The company looks at customers as adversaries who must be won over. In fact, the ones I’ve been exchanging e-mail with are very cool and enthusiastic about exactly the same thing that got me into this company. You know, I’d rather talk with them than with my manager.

• The company works in an office building in order to bring together all of the things I need to get my job done and to avoid distracting me. In fact, more and more of what I need is outside the corporate walls. And when I really want to get something done, I go home.

• The company rewards me for being a professional who acts and behaves in a, well, professional manner, following certain unwritten rules about the coefficient of permitted variation in dress, politics, shoe style, expression of religion, and the relating of humorous stories. In fact, I learn who to trust -- whom I can work with creatively and productively -- only by getting past the professional act.

Something’s gone wrong. Or maybe something now is starting to go right.What’s wrong isn’t trivial. It isn’t fixed with dress-down Fridays, health food in the cafeteria, or learning to pretend to look into the eyes of the trembling subordinate you’re condescending to chat up on the way in from the parking lot. The power structure, the politics, the sociology, even the spirituality of work has a sick, sour smell to it."

I can't say it any better than that. It's a wonderful book. Read it here!

A bad Hair day, heterarchy and responsible autonomy

Team heterarchy, management hierarchy:

Football and cricket teams exemplify a heterarchy. This is because, in a team, the players agree to organize and work together to achieve a win, structured through the sharing of power. If things go wrong during a game and a player is sent off the field, his teammates re-organize. Players change position, regroup and fill in the gap. If it is the captain, another player immediately takes on his mantel. In football, even goalkeepers have been known to leave the sacred space of their goal, attack and score a goal when the chips are down.

Of course, there is a huge additional structure organized around the support and promotion of any professional team. The key people in that external structure are arguably the club chairman, manager and trainers who form additional units that are distinctly more hierarchical in nature. Responsible for finding the best individual players their job is to maximise the players’ ability to work within given roles and so forge a successful team. In other words, they exist to facilitate learning and to provide the necessary infrastructure.

Self-regulation and responsible autonomy:

An outside eye deals with arbitration. The FA and ICC were developed to establish the common rules and regulations for a level playing field and to select refs and umpires to make them work. Self-regulation gives everyone confidence that cheating and bad practice won’t go unpunished. It sets out an ethics of good, trustworthy sportsmanship. Potential rows during the game are averted through an assurance that a punishment of misdemeanours by the players or referees will be dealt with fairly. The trouble is that retrospective punishment rarely seems to fit the crime. Management and the regulators are also supposed to be scrutinised. Players, management and referees often seem to get away with murder and self-regulation is deemed less than satisfactory because of possible self-interest and sports’ politics.

A bad Hair day?

So what about the latest test match at the Oval? During the match, umpire Darrell Hair condemned Pakistan for ball tampering. In the early part of the day, a couple of bad umpire decisions against Pakistan exacerbated the team’s already long-standing sense of injustice and prejudice against them on the part of umpire Hair. Then the ultimate accusation of cheating was made. When they attempted a small protest by being slow to return to play, Hair applied the rulebook to their absence on the field to the letter and, for the first time in the history of test matches, declared that Pakistan had forfeited the game and that England were the winners.

This is an interesting case study for organizations that consist of a mix of hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy - all the more so because it was played out, in part under the public gaze, in part behind closed doors.

In my view, there are 4 interconnected issues:

1. The ICC had ignored Pakistan’s previous complaints and anxieties about their perception of Hair as prejudiced against their team during the winter test and in this one: in their insistence that he continue as umpire for the whole series, they had already allowed an atmosphere of discontent to build up.
   
2. The rulebook: in Hair’s accusation of ball tampering, he acted as judge and jury; the team had no right to demand evidence or to defend themselves (this seems to accord with most players’ view that there is an inbuilt unfairness that is different to that of umpire judgments about lbw, for example. In the only other such judgment, the ball was locked away and never seen again…)
3. Hair applied the rulebook so rigorously that the willingness of both teams to continue play was overruled, as was good sense.
   
4. Cultural and historical. There is a general misunderstanding of the nature of honour and shame in patriarchal societies, where public humiliation is taken really seriously, and a consequent history of upsets between teams from the sub-continent, some umpires, the ICC and some teams from here.

The incident on Sunday has resulted in general sense of perplexity, embarrassment and dissatisfaction from players, spectators and commentators which the ICC officials have compounded by extended periods of radio silence followed by statements about adhering to the rule book and the umpire’s right to rule.

The ICC office was closed on Monday. There will be an enquiry on Friday. But I doubt if their response will do anything but increase tension and dissatisfaction. The trouble is that their lack of action re Pakistan’s complaints about umpire Hair after the winter test series and during this one, their mishandling of events at the last match, and the likely delays/fudges in resolving the whole issue of what ball tampering is and how to deal with it won’t increase anyone’s confidence in the reality of impartiality.

How could things have worked better?

Common sense, diplomacy and serving the game might have made a difference – even if this might have meant bending the rules. Retired umpire Dickie Bird has said as much. I suspect that if Hair had had a quiet word about the funny shape of the ball before making any accusation, Pakistan would have been extra careful about its condition. Furthermore, if the teams had been asked, both England and Pakistan would have probably backed away from making accusations of cheating (after all, the Pakistanis didn’t complain about Cook’s remaining at the crease on Sunday morning when he surely knew he should have walked). (The teams have a better relationship at the moment than for a long time and that now risks being compromised by the very arbitrators whose job it is to avoid team conflicts.) If common sense and a bit of diplomacy had been used instead of applying the letter, not the spirit, of the rule book, Pakistan would have made their small protest (it’s happened before, ie there is precedent) before going on to complete the day’s play. The inquiry could then have taken place in a much ameliorated atmosphere.

Instead of this, a sense of unfairness and bias will now potentially fuel supporter fury, general spectator frustration, and player paranoia (where the balance against bowlers is already commonly deemed to be spoiling play and competition).

What if this had been another kind of organization?

Let’s apply the concept of regulation to another type of organization altogether. Let’s take an engineering company from China and one from the US. They are competing for a big contract. The arbitrators of the proposals, who are made up largely of Western professional bodies, give the contract to the Americans. It would surprise none of us if many people might quickly begin to accuse the arbitrators of bias and prejudice, especially if complaints and anxieties expressed at an early stage had been ignored.

What effect does poor regulation have on heterarchy?

In sporting cases, there is often no effect. As with Zizi’s chest-butting of the Italian player in the World Cup, players and spectators alike will tend to rally round the ‘offender’. The sense of team and supporter spirit consolidates and grows – even to the point of politicians exploiting it for national benefit. And, of course, that spirit is seen as a role model for other heterarchical groups because there is a rough justice at play that people tap into.

What effect does this have on the concept of responsible autonomy?

Self-regulation only works if the processes are transparent and if all parties are, and believe themselves to be, fairly dealt with. Bias in one case leads to perceptions of prejudice in another.

If self-regulators are perceived as being unfair, because they fail to self-critique in as rigorous a way as their chosen referees/umpires have judged the team’s play (in this case, the Pakistanis), then it is likely to encourage a desire to cheat (well, why wouldn’t you…). And a complete disillusion builds up around the very bodies that were set up to settle disputes on the playing field. (In the business world, in the case of Enron, the auditors Arthur Anderson went to the wall over the sense of lost integrity.) In the cricketing world, there is already some talk of a split between ex-colonial countries and the rest of the world. Maybe the ICC needs to watch its back and think about improving its own practice and transparency. Maybe they should also think about getting a group of cricketers and spectators together to discuss how to overcome the present problems and how best to reform the self-regulators. After all, it is the players and the spectators who provide jobs for these boys, just as it is the shareholders and customers who fund the executives in large organizations.

The cabbie's guide to organizational learning

I am interested in how people organize, in how they get things done. We talk about organizations as if they were inanimate things and degrade a business, a school, a corporation into a concrete form. But an organization is constituted by people with a specific purpose where the elements of doing things are arranged more or less systematically. It’s all about people working out the best way to achieve something together. Organization is people activity.

A railway is good example of how we degrade the idea of organization as people into a concrete thing. Of course, it’s a network of tracks with the trains. But the important thing is how the people systematically work out how to move people and things around. Overall a railway offers pretty useful, sustainable benefits to society by providing collective travel that’s sustainable. And employment for loads of people across different sectors.

We can thank the Victorians for seeing the importance of railways even though roads of rails called Wagonways were being used in Germany from as early as 1550. These primitive railed roads consisted of wooden rails over which horse-drawn wagons or carts moved with greater ease than over dirt roads. And yes, it was more advanced technology that made railways better but some real innovation in organizing mass travel came from the people who understood how to organize the complexities of the process: the station, ticketing, timetabling and so on.

The day-to-day running of a big station must be incredibly complicated with all sorts of unexpected problems. Some of them arise from the specific location, others from outside factors (leaves on the line, track repairs, delays on other networks - even suicides and terrorist threats). As passengers, our experiences are mixed. Especially as commuters or when we need to make connections. The uncooperative guy behind the ticket desk, the high price of season tickets, the over-packed commuter train, and the seemingly endless frustrations of delays and cancellations can make you want to use your car. Or even take a taxi.

Incidentally, cars and taxis help get us to stations to take trains; they are part of the way we self-organize ourselves to catch the train. I use both. I feel guilty about the car. I love taxis even if I shouldn’t. And I love London cabbies. That’s because they gossip and make me feel as if I am part of a huge and vibrant London village. Believe it or not, I learn a lot about organizations from London taxi-drivers.

One driver told me how his cab company often gets calls from one particular stationmaster late at night asking them to take passengers from his London station to another station miles away. This is because the last train is often cancelled and the rail company are contractually obliged to take the passengers to their final destination. The cabbies love this. They charge the full rate and it makes them loads of money.

This had only started happening when there was a change of stationmaster. The previous one, whom he rated much more highly as a hands-on manager, had moved to another station. “Why was he so good,” I asked. “Didn’t he have last-minute cancellations to late trains?” “Oh yes,” he answered. “And he still does but he doesn’t call on us.” It’s all to do with organization. Because cancellations are commonplace, and because they are known about a few hours in advance, this guy has made an arrangement with a mini-cab firm that can, at short notice, supply cars and mini-buses to take passengers on. He has estimated the number of passengers by analysing previously cancelled trains over a given period so that he can make an intelligent guess about requirements. And the firm has agreed a good discount for consistent business. “He must save the rail company a load of money, and he is looking after his customers by not keeping them waiting. The cars are always waiting for them.” In other words, railways work well when the people running them are good at organizing them.

I would like to whistle-blow on the inefficient stationmaster and celebrate the good one. But I don’t feel that I can. After all, it’s only a bit of organizational gossip overheard in a cab rather than by the coffee machine.