About the Author. Welcome to My World: life, the universe and management in 1975-era McKinsey The world of unshakeable facts 13

Transcription

1 CONTENTS About the Author Introduction 1 ix Part I Things Fall Apart Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 PART II Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Welcome to My World: life, the universe and management in 1975-era McKinsey The world of unshakeable facts 13 The View From the Top: ideas of management in 2005-era McKinsey Instrumentalism rules OK, despite challenges from Tom Peters, Peter Senge and John Seely Brown 27 Messy Lives: life-patterns research, New Zealand style Feeling isolated in the midst of the crowd 61 Voices at the Brink Work as an Immersive Practice: Patricia Benner and Hubert Dreyfus Surfacing the unspoken knowledge of the practitioner s journey, from novice to expert 73 Feeling Forward, Responding in the Moment: John Shotter and Ludwig Wittgenstein Since our every act is a response to the world around us, our task is to go on together 92 The Movement of the Living Story: David Boje and Mikhail Bakhtin Authentic communication is always unfinalized. We continually co-create our stories from fragments 110 vii

2 viii Contents Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Together in the Past and Future of the Now: Ralph Stacey and Norbert Elias If we recognize that human organization arises spontaneously from our interactions, we can escape the deadening fantasy of systems thinking 120 The Double Prison: the autonomous individual and the yearning for transcendence Our historical inward tendency has so far been relieved only through super-ordinate agency 131 PART III Linking Voices, Making Sense, Joining Lives Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Navigating Memory: the storymaker project and the beginnings of digital orality Voices at work: retrieving, noticing and connecting our experiences through our utterances 145 Changing Conversations: Patricia Shaw and new management practice Joint Participation in the living present of everyday organizational life 188 Unmanaging Ourselves: drawing together the threads of new organizational practice and possibility Opening up ourselves to the knowledge and the skilful practices that lie between us 196 Going on From Here: from fantasy and isolation to story and concern Learning to be human together in an unmanaged world 222 Acknowledgements 226 References 228 Index 233

3 Introduction I have become used to thinking that my working life began on November 2, 1975, the day that I started work as a management consultant 1 at the London office of McKinsey & Company, Inc. This view is actually an edited recollection of my working life I had six years of full-time employment before this date but such was the power of this event that my self-story often begins at this date. I came to McKinsey after an MBA year at INSEAD in Fontainebleau. I had a head full of 1975-era business school teachings, and a sense of excitement and possibility. Two years earlier I had traveled from New Zealand with no special career plan except to learn about business and management studies not then available in that country at post-graduate level. I had started to make my way in business, and had begun to feel that my undergraduate majors in philosophy and politics were inadequate for my new-found direction. Into my ill-formed post-mba imaginings McKinsey swept like a military invasion. My senses were overwhelmed. I discovered that I was to be paid an inordinate amount of money to become a member of an unmistakably privileged elite. Every aspect of this enterprise its brochures, its letters, its communications, even its conversations was self-consciously stylish. The McKinsey branding was impeccable. There was an explicit appeal to values, beliefs and standards of behavior that impressed and fascinated me. The glamour of the office, and its mostly tall and goodlooking inhabitants, was striking. There seemed to be layers of insider knowledge and experience into which I might somehow be initiated. And the whole thing was infused with a languid air of effortless superiority that was utterly unlike anything I had previously encountered. 1

4 2 Unmanaging Though I absorbed all of this like a sponge, my McKinsey career did not turn out to be particularly distinguished. My effortless superiority, unfortunately, was neither effortless nor superior. Slowly I began to discern a harsher, more brutal reality behind the idealized facade. Eventually, I fell out of love with this reality, and very much later, with the ideal as well. Now, more than 30 years later, my six years with the Firm seem unimaginably distant. The arc of my working life has landed me on a completely different shore, from which it is scarcely possible to glimpse the place where I stood so long ago. My story is prompted by a conviction that comes from the place where I now stand: that there is another way to think about human beings in organizations, and how people can act together to discover and achieve joint purposes. This other way is profoundly different from established organizational doctrine. It can unlock human talents and capabilities that are presently invisible. Its adoption has the potential to change everything, from the way we talk to the shape of our lives at work and beyond. The sense behind this conviction is that something very important has been going on, starting over a hundred years ago and gathering momentum during the past 30 years. A revolution in our understanding of ourselves and our natures as responsive and mutually constituting beings has been under way, beginning at the margins of established thinking and steadily reaching towards the centre ground. This promises to become a shift in perspective as fundamental as that of the Enlightenment one, that in many ways, can mark the end of Enlightenment-era consciousness. Why does a discussion of our human natures become a treatise on organization and management? There are three main reasons. The first is that the views of managers about the human person are important because organizations loom so large in many people s working lives and therefore in their daily lives. Organizations are structures of power in which managers as the word suggests have most influence over other people. So the beliefs and assumptions about human beings that underlie the actions of managers are a very significant force in the world. Over the past 30 years, through the popularity and the growth of business education and the spread of managerial thinking throughout the

5 Introduction 3 public as well as the private sector for example, through processes of privatization and corporatization these beliefs and assumptions have become more and more influential and are shaping the lives of more and more people. So they are worth examining in some detail. The second is the changing nature of organizational participation. Greater access to education, more social and cultural mobility, the increasing importance of women in the workplace, and our greater connectedness through travel and technology all mean that there are now many more expressive and articulate voices in organizations that need to be attended to. This is not simply a question of workplace democracy. It is not just a matter of sampling a wider range of opinion in traditional decision-making. Rather it is about recognizing that organizational intelligence in the twenty-first century is now widely distributed: that there is a wide range of voiced and unvoiced experience within every organization that constitutes a vital collective resource. Organizational capability can therefore no longer be about an elite few directing the work of a compliant many. Instead it must be about drawing together and mobilizing the experience and ideas of as many organizational participants as is possible, from as diverse a range of sources as can be reached. The third reason to emphasize organizational behavior springs from the recognition that that our human-ness is multiple as well as individual. The emphasis on individualism and self-realization in recent years, that has filled bookshops, library shelves and other media with assertion and speculation about being who we can be, has, I think, obscured the interdependency of human consciousness and its practical importance in everyday life. Reflecting on and understanding the connectedness of our natures how this connectedness operates, and permeates our speech and our thought enables us to postulate another way of thinking about the way we relate to one another and therefore, how we can act together in organizational life and elsewhere. I also think this third reason suggests that the study of organizations and management is linked with the deepest and most fundamental questions of philosophy and the nature of existence. Many kinds of scientific and philosophical enquiry explore questions of physical and mental activity as things in themselves, in both their concrete and their abstract manifestations. It is largely left to organizational and management studies (with some support from studies in

6 4 Unmanaging communication and politics) to examine how individual intentions may be gathered and linked together in human institutions in a purposeful way. It is time, I think, to reclaim the ownership of organization and management studies from the business school, where it seems to have led such an easy and untroubled existence for the past 30 years. I suggest that the underlying questions are so fundamental that they belong in popular discourse as one of the central problems of our age. In this book I am inviting consideration of the term unmanaging for the new way of thinking that I wish to discuss. Unmanaging has two meanings, both of which I think are important. First, it is a way of proceeding that emphasizes the reality of the here and now, the world as it is and the things that we notice going on between us in our everyday working lives. Unmanaging focuses on the real, the spontaneous, the organic, the bottom-up activity that emerges from within a situation, in contrast to mainstream, instrumental management practices that are imposed from the top of the organization or from outside it, or both, and that routinely advocate and seek to achieve an idealized and often oversimplified state of affairs (for example, best practice ). The underlying suggestion here is that by admitting the existence of real-world complexity in human affairs, we will work our way towards emergent, sustainable coherence and order, not towards breakdown and anarchy. The second meaning of unmanaging is contained in the prefix un. The argument of this book is that we will not realize the real collaborative potential that lies between us in our organizational endeavors unless we make a conscious effort to free ourselves from the ever-thickening undergrowth of current management doctrine. Managerialism has now become so rampant, so invasive in its practices, so convinced of its preeminence, so all-consuming in its lust for attention, that it fills the days and nights of practitioners and managers alike in organizations around the world, with its unending requirements for measurement, assessment, evaluation, report-writing and presentation. Yet its invasion has been so drawn-out, and its approach so stealthy, that we have scarcely noticed how profoundly it has altered the organizational landscape. I am suggesting in these pages that only by unmanaging ourselves can we can give ourselves the time, space and permission to notice our own working practices, to reflect on our own experiences, and then by sharing these

7 Introduction 5 reflections to begin to develop a common understanding of how to achieve our organizational purposes together. Many things now seem to me to be pointing towards a prospect of unmanaging. There are signs of increasing impatience with the dominant paradigm. After two decades of experiments in top-down radical organizational change that have mostly proven spectacularly unsuccessful, I think there is a widespread yearning for something more grounded, more authentic, more practical, and more long-lasting. As a result, I believe that we may at last be within reach of a major shift in organizational practices in the Western world. Yet, as I come to understand more about the other way of thinking, and the larger sense of the world of human behavior from which it springs, a puzzle emerges. The ideas and the professional practices that underpin it are not so new, nor are they particularly strange. But they seem not to have been acknowledged by the management mainstream. Why not? When our ideas of human nature have changed so radically, especially over the past 30 years, why have our ideas of management not changed radically with them? How, I am also wondering, does something that seemed so fresh and original to me 30 years ago now appear so doctrinaire, reactionary and impervious to change? And so I find my way back to my beginnings at McKinsey & Company, with a series of questions that seem to me to demand to be answered. McKinsey, after all, was and is mainstream management par excellence. What were the ideas about people in organizations that underpinned McKinsey s consulting practice when I was a member of the Firm? How have those ideas changed in the intervening 30 years? By contrast, my story asks, what are the ideas of people acting together that might be said to constitute unmanaging, and where did these ideas come from? How do they differ from mainstream management practice, and why are they preferable? Might there be a shift from one to the other, and how might it occur? What could be the result? My story a substantial expansion of an earlier article (Taptiklis, 2005) is told in three parts. In Part I, Things Fall Apart, I recall my own organizational experiences against the background of developments in management thinking over the past 30 years. Part I

8 6 Unmanaging ends back in 1995, when I jump overboard from HMS Mainstream Management, striking out for a new and unknown landfall. The story begins with the assumptions about people and organizational life that, from my observations, were embedded in our working practices at McKinsey circa As top management consultants, I believe that we saw ourselves as shaping a future world: as part of a movement in thought and action that, through our relationships with individuals who possessed executive power and influence, would organize and systematize business development and decision-making across a broad landscape. In the first chapter I have sought to recall these beliefs, and the impact that they had on my own thinking, by describing our working practices of those years. In the second chapter, I trace the development of mainstream management thinking over the past 30 years, using McKinsey as a surrogate. From recently-published material, I try to compare the underlying assumptions about managing people in organizations in the Firm of 2005 with those I remember from The results are surprising even astonishing. The evidence suggests that the mainstream management position has hardened and has become even more extreme against the tide of thinking and practice development in a number of other professional domains. There have, however, been several attempts during this period to free mainstream management thinking from its straitjacket of instrumental rationality. Three stand out for me, in part because I recall how they influenced my own thinking at the time. They are: Tom Peters and his Just do it! advocacy of radical individualism; Peter Senge and his ideology of transcendent personal mastery; and John Seely Brown and his ideas around what might be called organizational constructionism : that is, managing the organizational environment and deploying new technologies to create the conditions for effective knowledge transfer and learning. These three can also be seen as representative of three of the most influential movements in mainstream management and organizational development thinking of the period, i.e. the instrumentalization of the self; explicit systems thinking; and knowledge management. My argument is that all three movements have failed, in the sense that the core assumptions of mainstream management have so far

9 Introduction 7 remained untouched and unreconstructed by these revolutionary attempts. 2 Moreover, they have all failed for the same reason: they have not crossed the divide of recognition of what it is to be a human person in a world of other human persons that is now informing the thinking and practices of professionals far from the management mainstream. In the third and final chapter of Part I, I explore a personal epiphany: a large-scale qualitative research project undertaken in 1994 that studied people s life trajectories and examined how meaning was constructed in their lives. This work brought into sudden and sharp focus for me the sense of being lost that people frequently experience in today s world, yet how bravely and doggedly they accept their isolation. Such a universal experience of isolation seemed to me to be at the same time so deeply felt but so unnecessary that it demanded from me some kind of practical response. In Part II, Voices From the Brink, I examine the basis of another way of thinking about people acting together. During the past decade, I have encountered four original thinkers and practitioners whose work has helped me to articulate a prospect of unmanaging. Part II contains five chapters, one for each of the four people whose work seems to me to be representative of the major strands of thinking in this new way, and a fifth that draws together the threads of these ideas and considers their implications and challenges as a whole in a broad historical context. These chapters go deeper than those in Part I, in examining some of the most distinctive trajectories of underlying thinking about our human selves that together lead to the conclusions of this book. Readers who are keen to move quickly to the end of the story might like to read Chapter 4 only, or may even skip straight to Part III and Chapter 9. Chapter 4 discusses Patricia Benner, whose phenomenological understanding of nursing practice reveals the potential for entirely new working practices and relationships in everyday organizational life. More than 20 years since its first appearance, her pioneering work is gradually emerging into the limelight and is attracting the more widespread attention it so richly deserves. Chapter 5 is devoted to the thinking of John Shotter. Shotter is both a practitioner of psychology and a scholar of considerable erudition: his psychological insights reframe the nature of human communication

10 8 Unmanaging and the underlying character of human lives in combination, drawing on a wide range of practical and philosophical enquiries. Chapter 6 introduces the work of David Boje. I argue that Boje s ethnography of organizational communication enlarges our understanding of the movement of thought and intention inside organizations. His most recent work grapples with the connections between complexity thinking and organizational story-telling, inspiring new dialogue and experimental organizational practices among the members of his circle. Chapter 7 turns to the ideas of Ralph Stacey, whose intellectual rigor and clarity of purpose rescues the key concepts of complexity and emergence from the controlling impulses of mainstream management, and is encouraging a generation of colleagues and associates towards the formation of a new, more grounded management practice that seeks to escape from the prison bars of systems thinking. Chapter 8 examines all of these ideas together. By acknowledging the weight of our Cartesian heritage in contrast to the historical sociological perspective of Norbert Elias, and by thinking about some of the implications of a movement away from a view of ourselves as autonomous individuals towards a better recognition of our social selves, it exposes both the scale of the opportunity and the magnitude of the dilemma we now face in realizing a different way of working together in organizations. Part III is called Linking Voices, Making Sense, Joining Lives. It looks ahead towards a prospect of infusing a new set of organizational practices with the ideas that have been so far discussed, and more generally, towards the possibility of strengthened and more productive human relationships in everyday life. It does not underestimate the difficulties entailed in such a transition but suggests some practical steps that might be taken along the path. Chapter 9 describes an extended research and development initiative called the Storymaker Project. This initiative has engaged with groups of professionals in a series of efforts over the past several years to capture and transmit their daily working practice experience and their accumulated knowledge in the form of reflective spoken-word narrative fragments. I argue that it reveals that there is a depth of reflective insight and understanding that is available from

11 Introduction 9 any organizational member in the right circumstances. Drawing on a large repository of examples, it suggests that in combination, the power and reach of these insights can be substantial. With the help of technologies that make large bodies of recorded material tractable, the complexity as well as the acuity of previously unvoiced experience can become readily apparent. This opens up the possibility that people could situate themselves within a knowledge domain at a moment of their own choosing, by recognizing the heterogeneous experiences of others through the sound of the human voice. I suggest that these findings may have significant potential value for a new organizational practice. In Chapter 10, I examine the beginnings of such a practice, focusing particularly on the radical organizational interventions of Patricia Shaw against the background of, and arising from, her association with the Stacey school. Chapter 11 summarizes all of the foregoing to suggest how human beings in organizations might now be understood by would-be practitioners. Using the work of the chosen exemplars as a foundation, and drawing on recent experience of experiments in unmanaging, I hypothesize a post-instrumental management view of organizational life, its potential trajectories, and its management practices. In Chapter 12, the final chapter, I try to look beyond the world of organizations and management, wondering what the emergence of a post-cartesian sensibility might mean for all of us. Notes 1. A consulting initiate was called an associate in McKinsey parlance. We did not generally use the term management consultant, though we might allow as how we might be referred to as top management consultants. 2. Some would include a fourth movement that includes business process re-engineering and TQM, whose treadmill character is deftly characterized by Chris Grey (2005) in his chapter entitled Post- Bureaucracy and Change Management. I would argue that this is not so much an attempt to transcend or redefine mainstream management as it is an extreme, perhaps even desperate manifestation of it.

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13 INDEX addressivity see answering word answering word in everyday conversation, 128 in an example, 156 antenarrative terse tellings, 106, 111 story half-told, 113 attention pre-occupation, 67 opening up, 103 assault on, 219 authenticity unfilled need, 68 in imperfect talk, 155 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 95 98, 115, 116, being human see personhood being struck possibility of new movement, 99 collective bodily response, 113 as basis for going on together, 184 Benner, Patricia Novice to Expert, pathway of capability, 77 Primacy of Caring, caring as cultural embarassment, 83 whole view of personhood, 83 embodied intelligence, 84 background meaning, 85 concern, 85 situation, 86 Clinical Wisdom, narratives in nursing practice, surfacing narrative exemplars, 88 criticism of personal narrative, idealization in narrative, 91 bodily noticing, 104 Boje, David narrative as idealization, 111 antenarrative, stories as wandering fragments, organization as Tamara-land, Carnival in organizations, emergent Story, controlling Narrative, 117 stories as unfinalized and partial, 119 story as invitation to participate, 119 Bower, Marvin, 16 17, 41 brand identity controlling Narrative, commodification of the self, 138 Brown, John Seely research at Xerox Parc, stories as organizational memory, 50 knowledge management, 50 social constructionism, 52 and Paul Duguid, 54 The Social Life of Information, 54 and John Hagel III, 54, problem of the disinterested observer, 55 as transitional figure, 55 Bryan, Lowell and Joyce, C.,

14 234 Index business school reclaiming organization studies from, 3 4 home of systems thinking, 139 neglect of practice, 200 disappearance of practitioners, 216 Carnival, control, fantasy of, 34 complexity as villain in organizational life, 29 as starting point for understanding, 101 as analogy for human interaction, 124 as basis for clarity, 205 as basis for confidence, 206 as enabler of new imagery, at center of human affairs, 225 Covey, Stephen, 35 Descartes, Rene quest for certainty, 94 rise of individuation, 136 double prison (autonomy, transcendence), 133 Dreyfus, Hubert and Stuart, 77 Duguid, Paul see Brown, John Seely Elias, Norbert, , on power, 128 civilizing process, 129 rise of self-restraint and shame, emergence in action, as social poetics, 104 in complex systems, 124 in thinking of Elias, 129 emergence and instrumental management contrast, 4 5 incompatible with, in action, 104 in leadership, in management, external environment idea of, 125 as self-serving doctrine, 126 abandonment of, 213 Griffin, Douglas, IBM Knowledge Socialization team, 54, 55 instrumental management accepted principles, doctrinal practice, organizations as persons and postmodernism, orientation to the future, 189 tenacious grip, 59, 133, 141, 222 knowledge objects, 32 markets, 32 management, 50 definition, 51 ownership, 51 tacit and explicit, 51 as finding one s way about, 102 emergent utterance structures, intergenerational loss, 201 leadership emergent property of organization, 214 inhabiting moving conversation, 215 life events research, nature of events, invisibility, 64 impel action, 65 grip on attention, 66 work-life balance as idealization, 67

15 Index 235 life events continued search for authenticity, rejection of self-actualization, 82 tendency to isolation, 69 wish for whole view of personhood, 83 idea of living vignettes, 70, life insurance mutuality and social context, salespeople behaviours, 84 formulating strategy in, 125 listening see noticing living vignettes, 70, 107, 146 McKinsey & Company 1975-era first impressions, 1 issue analysis, 13 pyramid principle, report production, studied detachment, approach to clients, management assumptions, business model, 25 relations with clients, era focus on knowledge workers, 29 complexity as villain, 29, elimination of spontaneity, bureaucratic overcontrol, McKinsey, James O., 17 mainstream management see instrumental management Maslow, Abraham S. hierarchy of needs, self-interest as force of nature, 137 Mead, George Herbert, 127 Microsoft PowerPoint, 55 Minto, Barbara, 14 navigable orality shifts orality-literacy balance, 144 emergence of process, starts with the utterance, 153 slows things down, 154 contains the answering word, 155 promotes collective noticing, reveals connections and patterns, as complex knowledge resource, forms Bakhtinian chronotope, unity of unmerged voices, in active-responsive teamwork, 184 and deep professionalism, 218 New Zealand Knowledge Wave, 53 impact of monetarism, 61 noticing in Tom Peters, 37 increases through repetition, as systematic practice, nursing practice historical significance, emphasis on practice, 74, 76 orality and literacy prospect of navigable orality, 144 oral history, 146 organization influence on human lives, 2 4 contestable narratives in, 114 as theatre, 115 sense of loss, 146 focus on productions, 189 as coalition of practices, 199 ritualization, 216 dehumanizing character, 219

16 236 Index personhood, 83, 84 86, 95, 222 Peters, Tom, 35 7-S, 36 In Search of Excellence, seminar, 38 process, 37, idealization of business, 41 absorption by management mainstream, Porter, Michael, 22, 56, 126, practitioners work as practice, neglect, 201, as crucible of strategy, 214 qualitative research, narrative research, criticism of personal narrative, problem of idealization in narrative, 91 Senge, Peter The Fifth Discipline, 42 organization as system, instrumentalization of culture, 42 attempt to follow Sengean prescription, struggle with dialogue, 45 impossibility of control, Shaw, Patricia importance of conversation, 189 what are we up to, responsive awareness, 192 collaborative relating, 193 non-traditional consulting, 194 working with spontaneity, 195 idea of presentness, 210 Shotter, John Cartesian view of personhood, 94 lives as problems of orientation, 95 utterances as foundational, 96 answering word, 97 being struck and authenticity, complexity as starting point, 101 focusing on the particular, 104 slowing things down, 105 withness thinking, Cartesian view as dehumanizing, 108 social poetics, Stacey, Ralph systems thinking, opposition to, complex responsive processes, local everyday human interaction, 125 Stern, Daniel, 98 Stewart, Thomas, 50 story invitation to participate, 119 testing whether safe to speak, basis for active-responsive behavior, 184 starting with the story so far, 191, 204 misplaced focus, 209 Storymaker project, storytelling organization working currency of conversation, 111 constant sense-making struggle, 114 strategy mainstream management view, external environment, critique, 126 prospect of reformulation, 127 tradition of abstraction, new basis for conducting, systems thinking fifth discipline in Senge paradox of organization as machine, 121 doctrine of faith, 122 manifestation of historical tendency, 133 dominant voice, 219

17 Index 237 technology of human communication, 144 audio fragments, new prospects, in organizational communication, 218 truth and postmodernism, 100 and striking moments, 100 and antenarrative, 112 Tsoukas, Haridimos, 208 unmanaging explanation of term, 4 5 basis for idea, retreat from assertion, and coercion, 204 alternative to doctrinal managerialism, 219 release from idealization and fantasy, 220 unmerged voices unity of, 115, 206 interplay as recordings, 207 utopian thinking, 46 utterance characteristics, in Bakhtin, 97 definition, in Bakhtin, 153 recording slows things down, 154 resonates with others, polyphonic communication, 208 Wittgenstein, Ludwig problems of orientation, 95 being struck, 99 forms of life, 101 landscape of feelingful thought, 106

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