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Charles Handy has long been my primary inspiration for thinking about, writing about, and working with organizations, primarily because of his depth of knowledge and humanist AND practical orientation towards the organization as a social system. His 1993 book “Understanding Organizations” should be a handy bible for any and all who work with and / or want to better understand modern organizations. I’ve had a copy for a long. long time and still refer to it on a regular basis.
Here (below) is his take on the concept of heterarchies as articulated by Karen Stephenson in the People & Strategy magazine article linked to in the previous blog post (and by extrapolation, wirearchies).
Please pay attention to the careful choice(s) of his words. One of the key reasons I have been so inspired for so long by Handy is that he maintains a steady focus on higher purpose (definitively expressed in his book “The Hungry Spirit – Beyond Capitalism: A Quest For Purpose in the Modern World“, published as “The Empty Raincoat” in the UK).
He notes that “technology without trust is just traffic“. I agree. I sense that Handy may not have experienced some of the interactivity leading to a wide range of working and other relationships that blogging, twitter, and other participative media have spawned, wherein I (and I am sure many others) have observed and participated in the building and sustenance of trustful relationships. But, his point is still extremely pertinent, as those relationships have often not been tested over-much in terms of trust.
(I heard a comment last night at a F2F meetup re: social media, where Tris Hussey’s fiancee, who does not use social media much if at all, said she felt much of the medium / social media was passive-aggressive. I understood immediately what she meant. Either people are taking shots at each other or spreading their (ersatz) sugar-plum fairy “whuffie” and nice but usually superficial thoughts and pointers all over the place with little if any sincerity).
However, as I and many others have noted time and again, these are still the very early days of a new set of conditions that will be with us for a long time forward. It behooves us to begin and continue the necessary adoption and adaptations, where and how it is pertinent to ours and others lives and livelihoods.
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Of Hidden Connectors and a Violin Quartet
Charles Handy, London Business School and the Royal Society of Arts
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Karen Stephenson has highlighted an increasingly important challenge to our organizations.
She has focused on the need for institutions of all types to work collaboratively, but through a virtual network of hidden connectors rather than some cumbersome structural arrangement. She is right but, sadly, labelling the problem does not solve it: It may even make it worse.
Organizations, and even groups of organizations, are very prone to the practice of “boxing the problem.” That is, having identified a continuing issue, they create a box somewhere on the organization chart, give it the name of the problem and put some people in it in the hope that they will deal with it.
Unfortunately, this only adds to the bureaucratic tangle that Karen Stephenson wants to avoid. My concern is this: Bringing the hidden connectors into the light by, for instance, labelling them as the heterarchy might result in them being herded into just another box, and told to sort it out – to end up as just another committee.
The answer must be to keep them hidden, but this requires, from those hidden connectors, a willingness to downplay their own significance to create something bigger together. They are only likely to do this if they feel that they can be a part, however unrecognized, of some greater cause.
This, then, is the new leadership challenge: to inspire people to want to reach beyond the bounds of their own organization to create something special, and to find the other connectors who will help them to do this.
This means that the leaders themselves need to have horizons beyond their own organizations, rather than concentrating on their purely local priorities – a quality that, I fear, is all too rare. However, Julia Middleton, of Common Purpose, in her recent book Beyond Authority has some nice examples of leaders who have done just that.
I am worried, too, by Karen Stephenson’s all-too-accurate comment that technology without trust is merely traffic. My worry, to use a modification of another of her neat observations, is that technology trumps trust: that just because we can communicate we believe we can collaborate.
After watching a violin quartet the other night, I asked one of the performers if they could play the same quartet virtually, if they were connected by some videoconferencing facility that linked them while being physically in different countries. She said that it might be technically possible but only if they had previously worked together and rehearsed in the same space. “The empathy and trust wouldn’t be there otherwise,” she said. Too true, I fear, and the same applies to any working group, be they playing violins or not.
The new heterarchies won’t work unless those hidden connectors can, in a sense, become the equivalent of that violin quartet, where leadership is so subtle as to be almost invisible; where empathy is the favored way of communicating; and where personal rivalry is subsumed in the cause of their joint creation. That won’t happen by e-mailing alone, just one more challenge thrown up by this new organizational form of heterarchy.
Karen Stephenson is right to have drawn our attention to it.
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Charles Handy is someone every thinker about organizations ought to be paying deep attention to: not just a casual read, but periodic return. As with Peter Drucker, Handy’s ideas stand the test of time. In many ways, though, they go deeper: there is always a touch of the human as object/system part in Drucker that Handy almost always avoids.
In many ways our many technologies for communication work against us: building empathy and trust virtually is difficult in the virtual world. We do far more with and for people we have met, shared time and broken bread (or at least a coffee cup) with, have talked about a variety of things with that go beyond the work at hand.
My co-host on ZenBiz Radio, Allan Holender, likes to note that “you become the sum of the five people you spend the most time with”. I am not going to quibble about whether the number is three, five, seven or fifteen, nor about exactly what is meant by “become the sum”: it’s a conversational statement, not the demonstratum of a proof. But I can assure you that the people I spend the most time with and who have made demonstrable changes in my way of being in the world over the past few years are not wired friends first. They may be on one or more social networks, but the bonds are forged — and renewed — through personal contact and long discussions.
We might well be on firmer ground, then, in thinking about organizations, to figure out how to “Goreify” (in the sense of William L. Gore and Associates) them. Small “villages” — ones that fit into the traditional Dunbar Number of 150 or less that you can know well enough to know as fully-embodied people — would do more to build the organizational equivalent of “quartets” that could flow together and be invisibly led than any amount of technology could. It would allow the breeding of leaders who are less infected with the meme of managerial perfectionism, order, and control. When Percy Barnevik became the head of the newly-merged ABB and slashed headquarters to less than 100 people, it was in part to turn the operating units into villages. This was highly successful, until it tripped over the fact that no one had copied the move in an operating unit. The “fix” of his successor — to undo the loose coupling and reassert control from the centre — has destroyed the ABB culture (and its success).
The positive contribution of the new technologies has been to make edginess in organizations — more interactions with the outside world — more likely and plausible: even those organizations that block these sites internally cannot stop employees from accessing them outside work hours and off the premises. That is slowly spreading a reforming soil into the organization. But little will really change, I think, until we find ways of rewarding leaders who lead by being first violin rather than Mr. Conductor — or a star soloist. That, in my view, will require a journey through the small to create enough safe-fail experiments because of the small scale of things to help shatter the preconceptions of the managerial/technological framework.
To know we’re getting there from the outside? Wait to see if the company’s ERP system is thrown in the bin, to be replaced by looser capabilities. That will be a lagging indicator that this cultural change is really taking hold.