Triarchy Press: Changing the shape of the organization

Attribution theory and Shreddies

2007-04-13T11:12:00.000+01:00

I was just reading Guy Kawasaki's blog about the effort effect. Here's an extract:

If you manage any people or if you are a parent (which is a form of managing people), drop everything and read The Effort Effect. This is an article about Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck. It examines her thirty-year study of why some some people excel and others don't. (Hint: the answer is not "God-given talent.")

The article postulates that people have two kinds of mindsets: growth or fixed. People with the growth mindset view life as a series of challenges and opportunities for improving. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are "set" as either good or bad. The issue is that the good ones believe they don't have to work hard, and the bad ones believe that working hard won't change anything.

She recently released a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I have not yet read it, but I ordered it as soon as I read this article. I can't imagine not liking it.

To provide a further taste of the article and her work, here is a sidebar from the article called "What Do We Tell the Kids?" I took the liberty of adding [employee] to show the relevance of this article to business.

"You have a bright child [employee], and you want her to succeed. You should tell her how smart she is, right?

That's what 85 percent of the parents Dweck surveyed said. Her research on fifth graders shows otherwise. Labels, even though positive, can be harmful. They may instil a fixed mind-set and all the baggage that goes with it, from performance anxiety to a tendency to give up quickly. Well-meaning words can sap children's [employee's] motivation and enjoyment of learning and undermine their performance. While Dweck's study focused on intelligence praise, she says her conclusions hold true for all talents and abilities."

There are a lot of things I like here, both in Dweck's original and Kawasaki's piece:

The update on learned helplessness and attribution theory is good. We almost all have areas where we believe we can't improve. That stunts growth and achievement. It also pisses everybody else off. In this office we have one person who "can't understand computers", one who "isn't clever enough to contribute to the discussion", one who "can't tidy up, communicate or abide meetings", and so on.
Explaining why it isn't always helpful to tell your child or colleague that they're brilliant is a pure relief. I've always hated this kind of mechanical reinforcement and hated the fact that it probably works. I'm delighted that it doesn't.
The idea that some people, in some areas, are more concerned with demonstrating ability than improving it (and vice versa) is crucial to improving organizational learning.
Emerging from the last point, the awareness that putting a lot of people who know they're very good into a football team, board of directors or project team is a potentially dangerous thing to do, is also helpful.

Am I happy that I refused my 2-year-old children Shreddies (or anything else) for breakfast until they had correctly read the word 'Dinosaur'? Not really. But I feel less bad than I did before. Which is indicative of growth and change. Phew.

Neuroteamwork

2007-04-02T14:31:00.000+01:00

Neurobigcheese Zack Lynch recently wrote about delusions, madness and love as follows:

"The defining feature of madness is delusion, however, where the affected person holds a fixed, unrealistic belief despite persuasive contrary evidence.

People in love are notorious for their unusual beliefs and, indeed, research has shown that we tend to hold unlikely and overly positive beliefs about our lovers."

No great surprises there. Though 'overly positive' seems a touch loaded. Nor in the conclusion of the research he links to:

"The results revealed that intimates in satisfying marriages perceive more virtue in their partners than their friends or their partners themselves perceive."

These are the very murky waters of UPR and Positive Thinking/Reframing that Carl Rogers and NLP have been fishing in for some time.

I'm wondering about applications of this type of thinking to teamwork like that of Project Red Stripe (see many previous posts).

Observing a conference call between the team and consultant Javier Bajer, I was struck by the chill factor that accompanied Javier's "this is the biggest question you should have asked for the last two months" (my emphasis), and the radiator effect of his later suggestion that the team "consider being part of something that can change the lives of millions of people".

Over the last eight weeks I have seen (and been excited by) the enormous enthusiasm that can envelop team members at different times. And I've noted the ease with which that enthusiasm can be discredited or lost in the face of technical hitches, criticism from outside, delays and the inevitable tedium of doing something even as riveting as changing the world. This isn't a group that's going to hold hands and count down to the start of the working day whilst chanting, "let's change the world". Praise the lord. But I want to jump out of observer status for a moment and say, "Let me see you change the world. Even just a little. I really, really want you to succeed". On second thoughts, I'd better not.

But there's a reminder of the blindingly obvious here for all teams, everywhere. If we maintain a higher regard for our job/project than others around us have for it, we'll love it more, do it better and get better results.

Lizard brains, heuristics and koalas again

2007-04-10T14:43:00.000+01:00

Bruce Schneier, in his absorbing article on the psychology of security, talks about the process of ‘mental accounting’, whereby we use different ‘accounts’ when performing different trade-off calculations. One experiment he describes thus:

Trade-off 1: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where the admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theatre you discover that you have lost a $10 bill. Would you still pay $10 for a ticket to the play?
Trade-off 2: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where the admission is $10 per ticket. As you enter the theatre you discover that you have lost the ticket. The seat is not marked and the ticket cannot be recovered. Would you pay $10 for another ticket?

The results of the trade-off are exactly the same. In either case, you can either see the play and have $20 less in your pocket, or not see the play and have $10 less in your pocket. But people don't see these trade-offs as the same. Faced with Trade-off 1, 88% of subjects said they would buy the ticket anyway. But faced with Trade-off 2, only 46% said they would buy a second ticket. The researchers concluded that there is some sort of mental accounting going on, and the two different $10 expenses are coming out of different mental accounts.

This probably sounds familiar. We all make this kind of odd calculation all the time: things assume a different value when we’re on holiday, late, sad, in love, angry, etc. So I’ll spend half an hour on the Internet trying to save £5 on the airport car park, and then happily buy a doughnut and coffee for £8.50 or whatever it now costs on Ryanair.

Talking to the Project Red Stripe team recently, they likewise compared the press coverage given to one death in a train crash to that given to any of the 3,500 children killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads each year. (This relates to another of Schneier’s points about risk perception – that people exaggerate those that are rare and downplay those that are commonplace).

Our views of ‘good causes’ – AIDS orphans, famine victims, maltreated pets, etc. – are also notoriously subject to inexplicable perceptual bias.

Returning to Schneier’s article, he quotes the following words of Daniel Gilbert:

“The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years--and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.”

Schneier then goes on to say:

“A lot of what I write in the following sections are examples of these newer parts of the brain getting things wrong.

And it's not just risks. People are not computers. We don't evaluate security trade-offs mathematically, by examining the relative probabilities of different events. Instead, we have shortcuts, rules of thumb, stereotypes, and biases--generally known as "heuristics."

…Our social and technological evolution has vastly outpaced our evolution as a species, and our brains are stuck with heuristics that are better suited to living in primitive and small family groups.”

All of this is by way of preamble to the Project Red Stripe team’s current deliberations over a target-group or market for their Internet-based business plan. Where relatively simple ‘interest’ equations were involved in deciding what kind of Internet project would be worth pursuing, far more complex equations are now involved in debating the relative worth of plans to offer better education to third-world children, to first-world children (the most influential decision-makers of the future), to women (mothers of the poorly-educated children), etc.

While Project Red Stripe has actively solicited ideas about what they should do, they haven’t solicited the same ideas about the group(s) for whom they should implement those ideas. Should they have invited an archbishop, an aid worker, a genetic researcher and an Australian scientist researching gender issues amongst the koala population to make the case for a particular target market?

I doubt it. But maybe they could still focus on a web-based project to help us bring the heuristics and decision-making capacities of our reptilian brains into line with the demands of the 21^st century.

(As well as Schneier’s article, do also read Daniel Gilbert’s If only gay sex caused global warming.)

Ordinariness

2007-04-02T00:00:00.000+01:00

In an interview in the current edition of CAM Magazine, the 12th Earl of Drogheda reveals that he didn't join a dramatic society at university. Now why would that be?

The conventional and anticipated reason (too shy) comes first:
"I think this was because of a mixture of insecurity..."
The second, and rather unexpected, one comes next:
"...and fear of not being given star roles."

Hold it. Fear? Of not being given star roles? That looks like an unusual fear. Even in a world where we discover new phobias daily. But it echoes my conviction that much shyness and holding back reflects not our discomfort at being the objection of attention per se, but our grandiosity: our fear that we won't be seen to be as clever, important, noteworthy, funny, beautiful as we think we really are - or could be.

It reflects our unspoken expectation that we should be not just good, but significantly better than anybody else.

So, we're embarrassed to speak in public because we would like to be not just good enough but the finest orator in the land.

I've suggested this to a couple of shy people. They got quite cross. So I think I'm onto something.

I was paralysed by shyness for years.

I see there's now a drug for it. Good-oh.

Too much violins

2007-03-20T15:32:00.000Z

The ideas are pouring in to Project Red Stripe. Around 200 had arrived by last Tuesday when I visited the team – most of them, at that time, due to Red Stripe’s appearance on Slashdot. And this is only the beginning – Economist Group customers are also being invited to contribute their ideas. In fact, if there was ever any worry about getting the word out there, Project Red Stripe can surely relax: a Google search finds me 47,900 occurrences of the term (although a search of economist.com still returns me no results for the term – and thereby hangs a tale).

I keep writing about "tensions", and there’s clearly a tension involved in fishing in the murky pool that is innovation, Web 2.0 and the blogosphere. Especially if the lily pad you’re balancing on is an old world, respectable one like The Economist. To people watching from the outside, it’s an interesting – and difficult – balancing act. For every blogcry of "Way to go, Economist" there are several counterblasts of "You suck, Economist". (The principal subject of the latter being RedStripe’s decision not to make the ideas it receives public and its decision to reward the contributor(s) of any idea eventually used with a 6-month subscription to The Economist.)

To some extent this is inevitable. There are a lot of clever people out there and they don’t all want RedStripe to work. Nor do they want to play by anyone’s rules. They’re mostly rule-phobic. For example, here’s a guy whose contribution is to predict what ideas other people are going to contribute. Here’s a comment from a SlashDot reader which renders one of the sentences from RedStripe’s Terms & Conditions into Perl code. Here’s a comment from someone who doesn’t think they’re doing innovation the right way.

So, maybe more interesting is to wonder how projects like this should handle the (inevitable) adverse criticism. RedStripe have engaged a little, with a couple of blogs about this and a couple of responses to their most public critics. More would clearly be wasting their own time. Or would it? As I said in January, one of the really interesting things about the way they’re doing this is how public they’re being: website, blog, webcam, apparent transparency. They’re even publicly debating the rights and wrongs of one of the team submitting a comment to SlashDot anonymously. And you can’t go out and court publicity and then just ignore it or complain about it. Or you can, but then you get called Lady Di. So should they have allocated the job of answering their critics to one member of the team?

Perhaps, in the end, Oliver Burkeman had the answer when he wrote this in the Guardian about The Trap:

The most perceptive comment on the situation comes, in Curtis's film, from a beleaguered bus conductor, in archive footage used as a counterpoint to the visionary talk of targets and markets and freedom. It could serve as a general diagnosis of the problem of how best to approach politics, psychology, culture - the lot. "Anybody that deals with the public, you can never win," he says, flatly. "You can never win when you deal with the public. Never."

Certainly, much of the response to RedStripe’s search for ideas is underpinned by assumptions/prejudices about how an organisation like The Economist Group, or innovators like this team, or capitalists in general are likely to operate. Certainly, if you keep on telling people they’re selfish and calculating, that's how they'll behave. "We ... come to believe," as Adam Curtis says in The Trap, "that we really are the strange, isolated beings that the cold war scientists had invented to make their models work."

So, another question has to be: how can a commercial organisation like The Economist Group behave fairly in this context? How can we commercialise the lichens in your rainforest, the knowledge of your traditional medicine practitioners, the ideas of your creative artists fairly and ethically?

The answer is that you can’t. Quite. The commercialised eventually have to get savvy about exploiting their exploiters (if you frame it in that language). We have enough trouble working out how high-earning husbands can ethically draw on the resources of low- or no-income wives, and how the latter can leverage their redundancy payments when the relationship reaches full term. Or is it the other way round? We have enough trouble working out how young porn stars can commercialise their skills and assets without exploiting fat, bald, old, rich men. Or is it the other way round?

In the end, we rely on these six people to do the right thing. My guess is that they’ll do better than the board of The Economist Group (no disrespect; I don’t know them). And the board of The Economist Group will do better than the board of Halliburton. My guess, also, is that this rich seam is going to be exhausted very quickly. It reminds me of the early days of direct mail when 5% of the people you sent a mailing to would buy your product. Now it’s about 0.12%. In five years’ time, how many people will respond to this kind of solicitation for good ideas?

Justice in Organizations

2007-02-27T14:05:00.000Z

Earlier in February Triarchy Press held a seminar under the rubric of ‘Justice and Organizations’ at Tooks, the well-known human rights law chambers in London. In retrospect, I think it might have been better to call it ‘social justice in organizations’ or ‘social injustices’ as it considered social pathologies in relation to bullying and scapegoating in our organized lives. Bullying is found in our families and schools, in the organizations in which we spend much of our life and in the public realm – in this latter case, infecting our attitudes and policies to the most obvious alien other, the migrant worker and the asylum seeker. We wanted to raise awareness of social pathologies in order to search out ways to change our behaviour for the better, and felt that the best way to approach the topic would be through predominantly social scientific methods.

Is there a social pathology of bullying in our culture?

The mix of lawyers and asylum and migration experts as well as organizational leaders and artists considered the idea of a social pathology of bullying. Some of the statistics presented were shocking. For example, that 15% of employees leave their organizations because of bullying without choosing to go to a tribunal. It’s generally believed to be easier to find another job than fight your corner, leaving, of course, the problem in tact and behind. And this view is confirmed by those cases that do go to tribunal, for, here, 25% of witnesses (not even the victim or the bully) leave their employment because they find the process to be traumatic and destructive.

Yet, if bullying is such a serious, underlying problem in our organizations, why is it that the ‘Dignity at Work’ bill failed in parliament and that the laws protecting ‘whistleblowers’ is under constant threat of dilution from the government? You would think that we would want to get to grips with it. And in all fairness, eliminate it. Instead, many of the problems are pushed under the carpet. Why is that? The most obvious answer is that we are unaware of how we behave.

But what happens if we look beyond the boundaries of a specific organization to the broader cultural landscape? Bullying attitudes seem to be reinforced in our daily cultural experiences too. For don’t many cultural role models teach us how to bully better? For example, look at the recent proliferation of reality tv programmes. These depend on their audiences’ enjoyment of schadenfreude- as volunteers in Big Brother, or I am what I eat – are submitted to tirades of insulting and bullying behaviour by other participants or the presenter-experts. We watch transfixed, at the same time as we count our blessings. After all, it is someone else who is being bullied and, realistically, that is both a relief and a sort of pleasure. Or look at the behaviour of some footballers and fans. There is plenty of evidence of name-calling on the pitch and in the stands. Again, what about presenters like John Humphreys on BBC Radio 4, or Jeremy Paxman on BBC 2 TV? Their combative and provocative interrogations seem to have more to do with public humiliation and bullying than any objective desire to get at the truth: they punish those in power by brow-beating techniques of questioning.

From this perspective, we are being encouraged to ‘other’ our fellow beings. At the same time, however, we also told that this behaviour is unjust and wrong: we must learn how to play fair. This mixed message leads to confusion, fear or indifference – an effective way of disabling resistance and change. We learn to bully at the same time as we learn to fear being bullied. So, does the ‘acculturation’ of bullying reflect an intentional, cultural prejudice and a drive to gain power over people at the same time as it helps to overcome our own fear?

This last thought led me into another perspective on the problem of bullying: that of our biological make-up. For, could it be that we can’t help ourselves? That bullying is part of our selfish DNA? In The Three Ways of Getting Things Done, Gerard Fairtlough writes about the ‘pecking order’ that, he argues, underlies our addiction to hierarchies. Perhaps then, bullying is simply another manifestation of Darwin’s survival of the fittest? In which case, we will be unaware of it, and even if aware, incapable of change.

If bullying is natural and inherent, social exclusion may simply reflect our drive to get ‘on top’. It follows that negative and bullying attitudes towards those who choose to come to our shores (whether for sanctuary or for economic reasons), are little more than part of that struggle – made all the easier due to obvious identity differences, such as language, skin type, religion or culture.

On the evening itself, it was agreed that it is important to make connections between what may be a social pathology and issues of justice. But, whilst there was a general consensus that bullying attitudes are endemic in our society, it was unclear how best to move to change. Because there is a double difficulty: the devil of the detail is set against the enormous complexity of the issues. The professionals recognised the danger of falling into an immersion trap of the detail of their respective areas (law and human rights support, especially) making it difficult for them to see the broader causal picture. Alternatively, on a personal basis, many felt subsumed by the enormity of the complex connections between social behaviour and multiple issues of injustice.

Bullying and the rhetoric of justice:
If we experience bullying in almost every aspect of our lives, it may be because we have a pretty natural leaning towards bullying or to being bullied. In the most general terms, being portrayed as vulnerable and disenfranchised makes it easy to label individuals or groups either as victims or, alternatively, as opportunists or spongers.

Extremist language, interestingly enough, represents our understanding of the issue in terms of a rhetoric of justice. I have yet to come across a biological reading of justice. However, in social scientific terms, justice might be thought of as a social construct that binds a society together. Yet the language of bullying could be described as performative because speaking of people as victims or interlopers makes them so. When a child is labelled a ‘snitch’, he is inevitably alienated from the group. When a group of employees ‘gang up’ on another member of staff, they will justify their behaviour through accusations of difference which, when negatively applied, is a term that describes alienation. Thus being described as alien (in whatever way and in whichever organization) inevitably leads to social alienation and to injustice. In this sense, the adversarial language of justice plays into the violence of discourse that, ironically as such, plays into the language of bullying.

Arguably, the portrayal of the extremes of any spectrum plays through an apocalyptic scenario of fear and mistrust. Metaphors of extremes are further reinforced by our already disturbed pathologies of flawed identity and general anxiety. Seeing things clearly becomes extremely difficult. In the apocalyptic scenario, justice is a rhetorical weapon. On the one hand, it allows political opportunism (in projections of fear involving the immigrant intruder). On the other, it permits a narrative of victimisation: those who fear ‘immigrant overload’ are locked in a war against their opponents, who try to ensure equal rights for those ‘victims’ seeking refuge and economic stability. Both appeal to justice. Both are committee to a conflict of power. But in terms of overcoming the negative outcomes of bullying and social othering, the process is self-perpetuating and thus unhelpful.
Social scientific methods are useful in that they interpret social behaviours but are not always very successful at either analysing or solving problems.

The Darwinian model describes all our actions as driven by the aggressive move to get on top. The model of nature bred in tooth and claw ‘fixes’ our behaviours and can justify ones that seem unjust. Even the more subtle variants, such as the notion, described by Richard Dawkins, of the parasite/host relationship, tend only to reinforce the idea of the intruder parasite operating on its own, not its host’s terms – even if it may have a neutral or synergetic, and not aggressive, intention.

The language of justice plays into the apocalyptic narrative of extremes. It can often lead to a further reinforcement of the violent rhetoric of adversaries.

How, then, can we break free from this destructive discourse to analyse and ameliorate our social behavioural patterns? What we need is another way of seeing our social interactions and their resultant bullying actions. One that describes behaviour in less violent and more nuanced terms. In my next blog, I will look at Varela’s concept of living systems and his views of immunology to see whether this model offers an alternative to the apocalyptic narrative of the either/or of adversarial discourse.

Web 2.0

2007-02-27T15:50:00.000Z

On my way to visit RedStripe earlier this month, I’m struck by the fact that my observations so far have been a mixture of navel-gazing and soap opera. It still feels far too soon to know what I’m going to be writing about.

To assuage my conscience I read a long piece by Tim O’Reilly on Web 2.0 (a term that’s been bandied about a lot at Project Red Stripe but which I only vaguely understood). In the same vein, they talk about Economist 2.0 as the beast they are going to design and implement (perhaps).

O’Reilly - who wrote his piece in September 2005, so it’s already out of date, but still seems sensible to me – identifies a number of key differentiators between first- and second-generation Internet successes (Web 1.0 and 2.0). Since RedStripe is developing a second-generation Internet presence for The Economist, let’s look at some of these differentiators now:

Web 1.0 - Publishing

Web 2.0 - Participation

This looks, on the face of it, to be the key differentiator for a publisher like The Economist, whose business has been built on the quality of the proprietary information that it gathers and publishes. In Web 2.0 models, user participation is the key – Wikipedia vs. Britannica Online, for example. This might look alarming, except that Economist readers are highly-intelligent, well-informed people [Q. What might Wikipedia look like if its contributors were exclusively Economist readers? A. Well, better in parts. Its coverage of the OECD or trading in carbon emissions might be more extensive, informative and hotly debated, while its coverage of hip-hop or ramming speed computer games would probably be thin.]

The key phrase in all this is probably ‘hotly debated’. The conversation that would take place between all Economist readers would be potentially riveting (for other Economist readers). But, as the article also identifies, user-participation is a rather too simplistic model: “only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application.” Therefore, set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side effect of their use of the application.

In other words, knowing what other Economist readers think is useful. But limited. Knowing what other websites they use would be potentially more useful.

Other attributes:

Web 2.0 - Some rights reserved

What can RedStripe achieve by syndicating, disseminating, letting go of copyright control of its content with a view to getting more people to visit its site?

Web 1.0 - Serving the head

Web 2.0 Serving the long tail

Where The Economist’s print products have to deliver as many articles as possible of maximum interest to its core readership, Economist 2.0 has to find ways also to serve exceptional readers with outlandish or niche interests.

Web 1.0 - Static sites

Web 2.0 - Dynamic sites

How can Economist 2.0 deliver a database-backed site with dynamically generated content that matches the individual user’s needs?

Web 1.0 - Control

Web 2.0 - Co-operate

Web 2.0 services (and they’re services, not platforms or products) are built of a network of co-operating services. Therefore: offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems.

So, how might RedStripe bring all this together? Not my job fortunately. But we can match their ideas against this list. That’s if they decide for go for a Web 2.0 idea. Currently, their idea evaluation process has two levels (out of 5) that are more advanced than Web 2.0.

Assumptions and bad science

2007-02-27T17:14:00.000Z

1. The Independent recently reported that Australia had been rocked by revelations about lesbian koalas. What intrigued me was that the researchers – who had discovered that their female subjects regularly indulged in lesbian, group sex sessions – said the following:

"Our aim was to determine the extent of differences in the homosexual and heterosexual behaviour of female koalas and thereby to determine the purpose of female homosexual behaviour in the koala."

Now bite me if I’m wrong, but isn’t "determining the purpose of homosexual behaviour" a slightly dodgy aim? I mean, they could start by interviewing subjects with a greater capacity for self-analysis and expression: say, for example, 150 Australian lesbians. I imagine that their answers to the question "What is the purpose of your female homosexual behaviour?" would make interesting reading.

2. "Better-educated suicide bombers are given harder targets and succeed in killing more victims, according to research by American economists," said this weekend’s Observer.

The article continues, saying that the researchers "suggest that, since more educated bombers could earn more in the labour market, they may demand higher-profile targets, with greater potential rewards."

Somehow I doubt that the calculation goes quite like that. It seems to me that our American researchers have applied capitalist market economics to an issue that may not be entirely susceptible to that kind of analysis.
(I also now have an image of the suicide bombers union campaigning for equal rights for putative bombers educated in inner city schools and with poor GCSE results).

All that by way of preamble to the latest from Project Red Stripe. Here my word of the week is ‘gut-rounding’. Google gives me no results for gut-rounding as a term, so I’m pretty confident that Joanna Slykerman coined it yesterday. Unsure about how scientific she need be in allocating the number of people from each of six databases to be invited to submit ideas for the project, she proposed ‘gut-rounding’ the numbers rather than doing a precise, statistical calculation.

Stewart was clear that there was "plenty of room for gut-rounding", though he was on the way home (which is always a good time to ask anyone for a snappy, favourable decision).

For me, gut-rounding has been the habit of a lifetime. I never had any time for the algebraic refinements of sampling and segmenting and testing lists in the heyday of direct mail. But it would never have occurred to me to ask colleagues whether they minded my gut-rounding. Perhaps I’m not the team player I thought I was.

Gut-rounding inevitably has connotations of ground nuts and gut barging, and there’s a sense that the term is just wrong somehow (like signs advertising ‘boarding catteries’, which always distress the ear because it’s expecting ‘batteries’, I think).

But gut-rounding could be an interesting word for this team. They’re now devising necessarily elaborate ways of assessing how good and how innovative a new idea is – so that they can filter out unproductive ideas, sort and rate good ones, and not waste too long on the process of evaluation. (In a similar vein, we’re currently trying to come up with guidelines at Triarchy for when we should give away free copies of our books. My suggestion: "No guidelines; use your judgement.")

RedStripe are looking at benchmarks for innovation and at processes for presenting key ideas/themes to the team, getting feedback, brainstorming, etc. There’s an inevitable tension between the desire to systematise at the outset and the likelihood of some gut-rounding taking place in the heat of the fray as hundreds of ideas arrive (inshallah).

Maybe the eventual book on Project Red Stripe should be about how scientific to be. Or the need to start off scientific in order to break the rules later. I’m thinking of an article for Harvard Business Review, followed by a lucrative, franchise for management consultants. Anyway, I’ve registered gutrounding.com.

Corporate Anthropology II

2007-02-19T19:25:00.000Z

It's such a rare position to be in: observing a team at work, in a real business situation, under potentially extreme pressure, without having to do anything. Yes, I'm aware that I have to write about it at the end. But I'm not here in the role of facilitator or consultant or adviser or psychologist. I don't have to look for anything in particular, report back or make recommendations. I don't have to do anything that is intended to change or impact upon the group. Not rare for anthropologists, of course. But rare in business. Most corporate anthropologists are paid to research customer behaviour and help, directly or indirectly, with marketing or innovation.

Because I'm not paid by the team or the team's employers, I'm also not beholden to anyone for anything. Except that, if I behave bedly, they won't ask me back.

So, the anticipated question arises. Should I go to lunch with the team members? And, if so, should I go as observer or active participant? I notice that this mirrors the different roles of the psychotherapist. I could go as a blank sheet and work 'psychodynamically' through the transference, or I could go in the 'humanistic tradition' and engage thoroughly in the relationship. After a moment's thought, I go. And go as a fellow human. Anythging else would be absurd. But I notice that I raise the question and ask them how they would feel if I blogged about Project Red Stripe and how they would feel if I wrote weekly about them in, say, The Guardian...

Some of the first things I'm noticing are about work in the 21st Century office. Partly it's because I have been so long away from that environment (though I work in an office now, it's hardly the rat race upstairs at Axminster station). My main insight after week 1 (having reviewed their Myers-Briggs profiles and their project schedule) was that the team was in need of a mother. Probably all such work teams are likewise in need of a mother. I made them tea in a teapot and served it to them in cups with saucers (I'd already given up all hope of being an unnoticed observer). I don't know what they thought - though it struck me that it was a funny luxury for me to have the time to do this - I would never allow myself the luxury in my own office, where I still have trouble locating the hoover.

Anyway, I think those five men and one woman need a mother. They need someone to look after them, make the place comfortable, bring them lunch, remind them to send birthday cards, give them hugs, tell them to go home. It's not just at work. How do kids in schools manage without matrons? Of course, work was always like this - the emotionally-arid public school as a necessary preparation for governing in far-flung parts of the Empire. I just notice it more having been away for so long. No wonder there's bullying and victimisation and burn-out and the infernal cauldron of shadowy, unacknowledged stuff.

Red Stripe - Mapping the Process

2007-02-19T18:39:00.000Z

Talking of The Economist's Project Red Stripe I was really struck by the maps that the team produced of their first week on the job.

As they noted at the time, three of them were 'geographic', in that they plotted where the team had been physically (one used Google Earth, one used Google Maps and one used tracing paper and conventional maps - stressing the benefits of old technology).

The other three were different. Ludwig used some 'dynamic mind-mapping' software called Brain to represent the areas that the project team had been working on. Joanna (the only Feeler in a team with five other Thinkers according to their recent Myers-Briggs initiation: 15:0 to Myers-Briggs) mapped, amongst other things, her feelings - which included hesitation, trepidation and excitement.

Tom had also sorts of stuff going on including - and here's my point - Inferno under the desks. You had to crawl under the desks and lie on the trailing sockets to read the contents of Inferno. Here were to be found :

Failure
No fun
Hell
Judging
No hope
Jealousy
Blame
Undeliverables
Bitterness
Disloyalty

Gerard Egan and Bill Tate (every organization should be using Tate's audit) have both written about managing and auditing the shadow side of the organisation - but no-one else has paid it much attention. (Although, of course, it lurks under every stone in conversations about corporate governance, business ethics and the like.) And here it was, being manifested before my eyes.

I think that every work group, project or process team, department or small business should have its own version of Inferno posted somewhere significant - just to remind themselves of the things they don't get to talk about. The contents should be as specific as possible - not just greed or ambition of lust, but clear examples of these shadowy 'behaviours' in action.

So there's my first recommendation from observing Red Stripe. Should I have kept it for the book? I don't think so - there are going to be many, many more.

Ram Charan’s ‘Know How’ (Random House 2007)

2007-02-13T08:53:00.000Z

I was attracted to this book by a review by Stefan Stern in the FT in November 2006. He wrote:
"if Charan declares that something matters, the chances are that it really does.”

Since Charan's identification of the really important things for business coincides well with my own practice at Celltech and elsewhere, I agree. Particularly, I agree with his emphasis that people are the most important factor in organisations. The sub-title of the book is: ‘The Eight Skills that separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don’t’. It is these eight skills that the term know-how refers to. Of the eight skills, four are people skills:

leading the social system
judging people
moulding a team
and setting goals.

For Charan the social system is a pattern of regular meetings and task groups together with the information flow that supports these. The other four skills or know-hows relate to planning:

positioning the business
detecting patterns in the complex external world
setting priorities
and dealing with forces beyond the market.

Forces beyond the market are mainly social and political forces.

Although I admire Charan’s selection of key skills, I think his analysis can be improved in various ways.

Positioning the business could benefit from Kees van der Heijden’s concept of the business idea, while the techniques of scenario planning would greatly help in building the skills of detecting patterns and understanding forces beyond the market. My own work could enhance leadership of the social system, particularly an understanding of the Three Ways of Getting Things Done and of the innovation management techniques in ‘Creative Compartments’.

Organization homunculus

2007-02-09T15:27:00.000Z

Google hasn't got many references to the idea of the organization homunculus. No wonder really.

'What is it?', you may ask.

I was thinking about this because Tim sent me a picture of the sensory homunculus. You've probably seen it. There's a picture of one here.

It shows what a man would look like if his appearance were proportional to the area allotted by the somatosensory cortex to his various body parts.

I was thinking that a similar representation of an organization could be interesting if it showed, for example, the amount of contact each part of the organization had with external customers; or the proportion of new product ideas generated by each department or division. But, of course,, the idea doesn't work well because we don't have a way of representing the organization that is anything like as interesting as the human body. There's the organogram, which is interesting in terms of the underlying assumptions and prejudices that affect the way we draw it. But an organogram is not sexy in any sense. Not in the way the human body is. How could we respresent the organizations that we work in, so that the resulting image was intrinsically interesting?

Anyway, then I was reading about the homunculus as ouroboros (the snake that eats its own tail), which, of course, organizations often do. And the spermists, about whom Wikipedia says:

"The term homunculus was later used in the discussion of conception and birth. In 1694, Nicolas Hartsoeker discovered "animalcules" in the sperm of humans and other animals. Some claimed that the sperm was in fact a "little man" (homunculus) that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child; these later became known as the spermists. This seemed to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception (for instance, why it takes two). However it was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum, with a chain of homunculi "all the way down." This was not necessarily considered a fatal objection however, as it neatly explained how it was that "in Adam" all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins."

This is connected closely to the idea of preformation, which posits that all living beings existed preformed inside their forebears in the manner of a Russian doll.

I'm sure there's some application of all this to organization thinking and design. I'm just not sure what it is yet.

Commercial/corporate anthropology

2007-01-23T19:33:00.000Z

Starting work on one of our projects for 2007, I notice that I could see myself as a corporate/commercial anthropologist. This is a jolt.

The book will be about The Economist’s Project Red Stripe – a 6-month, 6-person project to "develop and bring to market a web-based idea" for the magazine group. In fact, it's more than an idea that they're hoping to develop - it's a workable template which can be replicated many times as the group develops a whole new shape for The Economist's Internet presence.

I’ll be observing the project team at work over the six months and recording my impressions. I expect to be writing about ‘the process’ more than about the technology or the end product, and one of my immediate interests is in the very public way that the project is being conducted. There’s a public website about the project and the project team members will be writing a regular blog. The site has already attracted considerable attention from other bloggers.

Having concluded that my role is that of anthropologist, I’ve been trying to learn a little more about the subject of commercial/corporate anthropology. An interesting article in the Financial Times, where I learn that, almost inevitably, there’s a debate running amongst academic anthropologists about whether it’s valid for anthropologists to use their skills to serve giant corporations and governments. In my experience, anthropologists are endlessly agonising about what role they can properly play.

At a recent lecture I heard anthropologist Tim Ingold say that anthropology had "lost confidence in itself" to such a point that it had ceased to be a "net exporter" of ideas to other disciplines (like psychology, sociology and history) and had become a net importer of ideas. As Gillian Tett says in her FT piece:

"Some have become so obsessed with the moral interaction between the "observer" and "observed" that their research seems more akin to introspective travel writing. Others have tried to give the discipline a harder scientific edge by moving into realms similar to psychology or linguistics. And a few seem to commit intellectual suicide, by writing essays that essentially declare there is little moral justification to studying other ‘cultures’ at all."

I also learn from this piece and from a collection of related articles that much of what corporate anthropologists are doing is related to technology and product development (observing how consumers live and use existing products, like mobile phones or breakfast cereals) and then developing better ones. To this extent, they are filling a gap between the focus group and office-based market research.

As I research this field more, I’d be grateful for any thoughts or comments from anyone with an interest in this field.

Organizational and movement approaches to change

2007-01-16T10:24:00.000Z

I was mumbling incoherently last night about the “comfort of despair” when my companion (as they say in restaurant reviews) congratulated me on the term and asked if I had coined it. I was sure that I hadn't and guessed that a Google search would reveal about 1500 occasions of its use on the Web. Take a guess how many occurrences you can find of the phrase on Google. (Answers at the bottom of the page*).

One of them led me to an article by Parker J Palmer, of whom I had never previously heard. He writes about different ways of effecting change. He is talking about education, but his point applies to society as a whole and had, I think, fascinating implications for those interested in organizational change.

He characterises the organizational approach to change thus:

The organizational approach to change is premised on the notion that bureaucracies - their rules, roles, and relationships define the limits of social reality within which change must happen. Organizations are essentially arrangements of power, so this approach to change asks: “How can the power contained within the boxes of this organization be rearranged or redirected to achieve the desired goal?” That is a good question except when it assumes that bureaucracies are the only game in town.

Now that, of course, is music to Triarchy's ears. But not so rare or revealing in itself. He continues:

This approach pits entrenched patterns of corporate power against fragile images of change harboured by a minority of individuals, and the match is inherently unfair. Constrained by this model, people with a vision for change may devote themselves to persuading powerholders to see things their way, which drains energy away from the vision and breeds resentment among the visionaries when ‘permission’ is not granted. When organizations seem less interested in change than in preservation (which is, after all, their job), would-be reformers are likely to give up if the organizational approach is the only one they know.

But our obsession with the organizational model may suggest something more sinister than mere ignorance of another way. We sometimes get perverse satisfaction from insisting that organizations offer the only path to change. Then, when the path is blocked, we can indulge the luxury of resentment rather than seek an alternative avenue of reform and we can blame it all on external forces rather than take responsibility upon ourselves.

Then comes the good bit. He talks about the ‘movement way’ thus:

But there is another avenue toward change: The way of the movement. I began to understand movements when I saw the simple fact that nothing would ever have changed if reformers had allowed themselves to be done in by organizational resistance. Many of us experience such resistance as checkmate to our hopes for change. But for a movement, resistance is merely the place where things begin. The movement mentality, far from being defeated by organizational resistance, takes energy from opposition. Opposition validates the audacious idea that change must come.

And he clinches it like this:

The genius of movements is paradoxical: they abandon the logic of organizations in order to gather the power necessary to rewrite the logic of organizations.

It's a fascinating piece and we've republished it on our website. Follow the link to Divided No More at http://triarchypress.co.uk/pages/articles/articles.htm

*In fact there are only 12 occurrences of “comfort of despair” on Google. 32 on Yahoo.

Values, beliefs and information

2006-04-10T20:30:00.000+01:00

The feedback to us at Triarchy on The Three Ways of Getting Things Done has been incredibly positive in that people know that they feel oppressed, often depressed, by hierarchical organizations and that they are excited by the idea that there may be alternatives. However, what they really want and need is to find helpful ways of making the change away from hierarchy to more dispersed systems. It is the 'how to' that is difficult. This may be what the debating pages here end up being concerned with -but it is not going to be easy...
I am not going to offer any pragmatic suggestions about how to move from hierarchy to flatter systems but raise a question that seeks to engage with Peter Farnden’s critique (read it on our Forum ) of Gerard’s book. I thought that, as we are communicating here via the internet, it might be interesting to consider this by thinking about global communication as an example of a flat system. First, I consider its impact on hierarchy. Then, I ask whether, as a flat system, it ends up behaving like hierarchies in terms of power and ultimate control. If so, how should we be viewing our place in the global network organization? My thoughts play through Peter’s comments on values and information.

The internet provides the freedom for people to participate in a flat system, and anyone who contributes to debates and blogs forms part of revolutionary social change in the way we organise ourselves.

An example of this is the way recent blogs from Iraq have impacted on our view of the war. These views, no doubt, put pressure on governments to make changes, if nothing else to the way in which they present and justify their intervention in Iraq. From this, it is fair to say that the voices from the net are seriously beginning to impact on and create tensions in hierarchical systems. Not just on governments, but also, for example, on newspapers. Because they are changing our view of publishing, of professional journalism and even on what constitutes literature (a recent blog from Iraq has been published and put forward for a literary prize...).

The mobile network is another loose organization and a technological tool that impacts on the dissemination of information.

I was recently speaking to someone who works in the military who gave me an example of how a voice from the bottom can seriously put pressure on those at the top of the command and control system. He mentioned that a senior member of the government had spoken by mobile phone to a private serving in Iraq. Having listened to the soldier's take on the war, including some criticisms, the government member used this view to immediately put pressure on people at the top. On one level, this is a sign of democracy in process – a rapid means to change. On the surface, that seems to present a good value arising out of the democratization of the hierarchy. But in reality, it may do little more than demonstrate the politician's need to interfere by using the soldier's tale as a tool to exercise power (there was no suggestion that he checked out the soldier's take before having a go at the top brass). This illustrates why Peter's point about power, values, information and supervision is a valid one.

I have no doubt that the guys (almost certainly!) at the top of the military considered that the intervention of the government agent after an informal conversation with a trooper showed a distinct lack of judgment, and probably an ill-informed one too! But how are we to decide?

Peter writes that:

All organizations are in some way in a principal-agent relationship and there are always the problems created by distortions in information and power between the two (agent & principal). Hierarchy is in a sense one response to this problem through the roles of supervision, roles and policy.

As the voices from the net begin to impress themselves on the hierarchies of newspapers and governments, the problem of 'whose values' raises its head. So too, does the question of who the principal is and who the agent. That is why the exercise of power and the problem of distortions in information are an issue in flat systems.
No doubt the military pointed this out to the politician!

As far as the net is concerned, this is a hot potato. Who exactly supervises and selects the excellent from the pernicious and ill-informed? (In the case of this website, by the way, it will be members of our team!)

So, Peter's question - How do heterarchy and responsible autonomy address these problems? - is an extremely valid and important one. He is right that hierarchy seems to be strong and clear about how it can supervise the value system. But it is probably the case in heterarchy and responsible autonomy too; the question of values and parameters must, as such, be the key to their respective success or failure.

The web and the mobile form complex, flat organizations. It is hard to work out just how to inculcate values and beliefs into flatter systems because the question always remains - whose values? If none are imposed you enculture relativism. But already most people in the west think that the fewer controls on net-voices the better - despite the dangers of the dissemination of bad information. This is exactly because we understand that supervision means someone else deciding for us what 'bad' is. And yet most of us hate the idea of free access to child pornography, right-wing politicos and extremist religious views. This is because we recognise the dangers to cultural values that most of us still share. We will trust to a hope that we will respond by resisting such information. But we know that some won’t.

So, once again, Peter's question about values, information and heterarchy and responsible autonomy hits the mark. But at the same time that we try to work out whether a common sense rejection of some information will generally prevail, are we missing something else out? In his book, Gerard talks about the hegemony of hierarchy. What this means is that the cultural ideologies are so deeply embedded that we don’t consciously recognise them, but subscribe to them without even being aware of it.

The question I would like to ask is, therefore, whether we should be thinking more carefully about the likelihood of a hegemony of heterarchy? How do we learn to recognise hegemony? For I suspect that the reality of the global network with its claims on democratization and freedom may not be quite what we think it is. We may seek supervision of fraudsters, paedophiles and terrorists on the web. But fears of supervision and invasions of our privacy are real too. And Google's recent acceptance of censorship on the Chinese web-search engine exposes the ability of this ‘invisible’ supervisory hand to control the heterarchy of the web. Hence, the recent new debate on the power of Google to survey and, potentially, intervene in all our lives. And if Google can do it, so, arguably, can governments and other institutions of power.

We are all going to have to work through these issues. One approach would be to hone our skills in ideological criticism – the ability to read the gaps and omissions in information that we are presented with. This skill applies just as much to a hegemony of heterarchy as it does to one of hierarchy. As a skill it will not entirely answer Peter’s question about the need for values, the supervision of values, and the ability to work out whose values they really are. But it sets us on our guard. This must be set in the context of the need and dangers of freedom. It is going to be just as critical to work out whether web freedom is real or being interfered with – and if the latter, to find out who is doing the distorting.

This is quite a challenge. But it is a necessary one because, whether we like it or not, the times, they are a-changing. I guess that we have to try to ensure is that flatter systems don’t just end up oppressing and depressing us as much as the hierarchical systems of which we are so critical. It is a question of being mindful about frying pans and fires.

Rosie Beckham

Feeling a little QZE

2006-11-20T13:42:00.000Z

I don't know if everybody knows this. The extract below is taken from a piece published by Strategy & Business which you can read in full at their excellent website.

I'm interested in it because it tells me something that perhaps helps to make sense of meditative practice and its effect. When I say "it helps to make sense of", I suppose I mean that it helps me to justify a belief in scientific terms - a form of justification that I'm still attached to, even though the evidence of my own experience probably ought to be good enough.

"Focus Is Power
Some of the biggest leaps in science and industry have emerged from the integration of separate fields. When the study of electricity and of magnetism coalesced to become the science of electromagnetism, the field gave us the electric motor and generator, which in turn sparked the Industrial Revolution. To understand how to better drive organizational change, we turn to another nexus, this time between neuroscience and contemporary physics.

Neurons communicate with each other through a type of electrochemical signaling that is driven by the movement of ions such as sodium, potassium, and calcium. These ions travel through channels within the brain that are, at their narrowest point, only a little more than a single ion wide. This means that the brain is a quantum environment, and is therefore subject to all the surprising laws of quantum mechanics. One of these laws is the Quantum Zeno Effect (QZE). The QZE was described in 1977 by the physicist George Sudarshan at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been experimentally verified many times since.

The QZE is related to the established observer effect of quantum physics: The behavior and position of any atom-sized entity, such as an atom, an electron, or an ion, appears to change when that entity is observed. This in turn is linked to the probabilistic nature of such entities. The quantum laws that govern the observed behaviors of subatomic particles, and also the observed behaviors of all larger systems built out of them, are expressed in terms of probability waves, which are affected in specific ways by observations made upon the system. In the Quantum Zeno Effect, when any system is observed in a sufficiently rapid, repetitive fashion, the rate at which that system changes is reduced. One classic experiment involved observing beryllium atoms that could decay from a high-energy to a low-energy state. As the number of measurements per unit time increased, the probability of the energy transition fell off: The beryllium atom stayed longer in its excited state, because the scientists, in effect, repeatedly asked, “Have you decayed yet?” In quantum physics, as in the rest of life, a watched pot never boils.

In a 2005 paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (U.K.), physicist Henry Stapp and one of the authors of this article, Jeffrey Schwartz, linked the QZE with what happens when close attention is paid to a mental experience. Applied to neuroscience, the QZE states that the mental act of focusing attention stabilizes the associated brain circuits. Concentrating attention on your mental experience, whether a thought, an insight, a picture in your mind’s eye, or a fear, maintains the brain state arising in association with that experience. Over time, paying enough attention to any specific brain connection keeps the relevant circuitry open and dynamically alive. These circuits can then eventually become not just chemical links but stable, physical changes in the brain’s structure.

Cognitive scientists have known for 20 years that the brain is capable of significant internal change in response to environmental changes, a dramatic finding when it was first made. We now also know that the brain changes as a function of where an individual puts his or her attention. The power is in the focus.

Attention continually reshapes the patterns of the brain. Among the implications: People who practice a specialty every day literally think differently, through different sets of connections, than do people who don’t practice the specialty. In business, professionals in different functions — finance, operations, legal, research and development, marketing, design, and human resources — have physiological differences that prevent them from seeing the world the same way."

Read the full article here.

A Thousand Plateaus

2006-04-26T12:13:00.000+01:00

For my sins I have been reading, or osmosing, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze, G and Guattari, F, London, The Athlone Press, 1988) and encountered an interesting section on the apparatus of capture.

Referring to Dumézil's thesis on political sovereignty, they suggest that political sovereignty has two poles:

1. The fearsome magician-emperor who "operates by capture, bonds, knots and nets"; who is a one-eyed man using signs and symbols principally.

2. The jurist-priest-king who "proceeds by treaties, pacts and contracts"; who is a one-armed man using tools and mechanisms principally.

Here we are talking about two types of hierarchy, though it's clear that the authors would think it absurd to value one above the other or to suggest that one precedes the other in any sense. However, they go on to talk about the State and the sense that any mechanism of governing or running a State in some sense anticipates this kind of authoritarian control and either flows from it or grows up as a reaction against it or its potential.

For State read Organization.

So I'm wondering whether heterarchical forms of governance must always assume a position of opposition to hierarchy and either be imposed by the jurist-priest-CEO or emerge as a means of disabling the potential of the fearsome magician-CEO. (See also the earlier blog on imposing heterarchy at http://www.triarchypress.co.uk/blog/2006/03/imposing-heterarchy_31.html)

Subverting hierarchy

2006-08-25T13:34:00.000+01:00

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!

Justice in Organizations

2006-11-01T13:24:00.000Z

Triarchy Press is starting work on the theme of Justice in Organizations - beginning by sponsoring an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Ricky Romain at Tooks Chambers and by organizing a seminar on The Shadow Organization: the Absence of Justice in Organizations on 7th February 2007

The theme of the seminar is alienation and injustice in organizations and in society as a whole. Specifically, it suggests that our attitudes to migrant workers and asylum seekers might be projections of deeper, fundamental and quasi-hidden social issues. They might, it is suggested, reflect the complexity of behaviours that we inflict on one another in the organizations of which we are constituent members - from family to workplace to government.

I think it's great that Triarchy Press is working on this theme. Here are my own thoughts to start the discussion, which will be developed at the seminar:

* Organizations are obviously not the same as society, but the huge amount of study on justice in society could be useful and should be drawn on.

* the term 'justice' has many connotations. In tabloid newspapers today it tends to mean vengeance or punishment. The criminal justice system has similar vengeful aspects, but it could also be seen as a crime-control system and unfortunately as a crime-creation system, because prisons act as universities of crime. It may be important to define what 'justice in organizations' means for the Triarchy project.

* justice is a concept that overlaps with other concepts such as fairness and respect. Exploring these overlaps might help.

* Michael Walzer writes comprehensively of spheres of justice, which often need to be kept separate if justice is to be seen to be done. Walzer says that no one should be dominant in one sphere (e.g. wealth) just because he or she is foremost in another sphere (e.g. political power or intelligence).

I'd be interested in any thoughts or comments arising from this.

Unashamed plug for a wonderful book

2006-11-01T12:25:00.000Z

Sometimes there is a book you admire so much you want to recommend it to everyone. One of these is Renate Greenshields’ A Bit of Time.

It’s rather unfair to use Triarchy’s website to praise a book not published by them. However A Bit of Time is a memoir, not about organizations or getting things done, so Triarchy wouldn’t have published it, even though it’s such a good book.

In a small town in North West Germany a happy childhood is cut short by World War II. Ten-year-old Renate has to join the Hitler Youth. In contrast, her father, a Lutheran pastor, harbours Jews in the rectory. The family is under constant surveillance from the Gestapo.

At the end of the war, Renate and the local British town commandant fall in love. In A Bit of Time Renate writes about her arrival in England in 1946, just eighteen years old, of coping with a foreign country and language, her marriage to a farmer-artist in Devon, her homesickness and bringing up her children.

The novelist Lynne Reid Banks writes: “If proof is needed – and in these noisy, in-your-face days, it is – that a book can give infinite pleasure with a low-key but fascinating story, well told, ‘Lucky Girl Goodbye’ and ‘A Bit of Time’ give it”.

To order a copy of the combined volume of these two books, send £ 7.99 to Renate Greenshields, Westhay Farm, Hawkchurch, Axminster, Devon, EX13 5XH.