The tragedy of a well ordered country

The murder of nurse Linda van der Giesen could possibly have been prevented.

Already for a while Van der Giesen was threatened by her ex-husband. She invoked the police several times. The police understood the danger, and could have come into action but did not because the police protocols required building a dossier first. Without that the police’s case could be rejected by the Prosecuter and the Court. So, in this case, the protocols prevented adequate and timely action.

The problem at hand here can be summarized as follows: sometimes our thoroughly regulated society prevents us to do the right thing in a given situation. For example, to say no to energy wasting nonsensical actions that the rules dictate; or to indeed  just perform that single sensible action, even though it is against the rules.

In our orderly country the creation of more rules is often the standard response to the finding of something wrong. Such is currently on the agenda after the discovery of fraud in the Amsterdam city council. In response, all sorts of rules and controls are now being built into the work of the council. While decades of experience with this kind of rules  indicate that it is a waste of money and energy. To the frustration of many employees.

What doés work, and what actually is most desirable, is that employees would act attentively and adequately, whether it be policeofficers or Amsterdam civil servants. But by enforced compliance with rules that effect is reached only marginally. For that something completely different is required than rules.

In the police organization there is a beginning of awareness to this. Leon Kuijs, chairman of the Police College, puts it as follows. “Police officers are now taught to take responsibility for what they have done, but there comes a time – and it will not take long – that we will be accountable for what we did nót do. As, for example: you could have known this or that, because you should know everything. Why did not you see it?”

Hiding behind rules will be a lot harder then, and that seems like a good thing.

Comfortably against the grain

Consultant Ben Tiggelaar is known for his successful training sessions under the name ‘MBA in a Day’. At the same time I know him as the author of provocative management critical columns in NRC. In it he shows himself comfortably against the grain.

Thus,  for example, he criticizes the fashionable emphasis on learning. That easily becomes a policy thing, he says, imposed by supervisors who are not really interested. Of them Tiggelaar says: “Do not misunderstand me, I am in favour of learning and development. But I am against impossible plans that you invent, and I must run”.

And when he reads a passage like this: “Employees in functiongroup 3 must with respect to the competence ‘situational awareness’ be at ‘expert level’”, he knows for sure: he would never again be employed. Tiggelaar actually wants not to have to do with managers any longer.

In reading his columns I sometimes wonder why Tiggelaar presents his training under the aegis of MBA. Indeed, does ‘Master of Business Administration’ not represent all those things he shoots in a refreshingly decisive way? Such as: an overemphasis on control via  budgets, financial planning and HR tools. Or, by extension, a unhealthily strong division between leaders and performers.

Tiggelaar,  I think,  fully agrees with Henry Mintzberg who in Managers, not MBA’s says about MBA’s that “too many of them are trapped in a regime of rational tunnel-thinking, schematic planning and calculating management”. Tiggelaar: “Many managers do more harm than good, they are the worst cause of stress. People do not quit jobs, they quit bosses”.

So why then this MBA advert for his trainings?

It could very well be of course that Tiggelaar puts that in his ads because the predicate MBA - rightly or not - has a strong reputation. I do not believe that the successful completion of the training day produces any title, but mentioning ‘MBA’ may act as bait. Mintzberg confirms that a scientific label, such as an MBA degree, is highly regarded in management circles.

But perhaps Tiggelaar, by the use of the term MBA, intended to for once give it a critical interpretation and to direct the managers’ attention to the absurdity of much  management rhetoric.

Given the brave waywardness of his columns I choose for this last explanation.

Bankers sincerely don’t understand

I must explain that title. I mean that bankers are not necessarily malevolent as they once more bring mathematically smart but risky financial products on the market or use perverse reward systems.

I say that because people (bankers, in this case) will not be willing to talk about their actions when they are accused of malice. But also because alarmingly often this is the case: bankers believe in what they do. They don’t necessarily have bad intentions.

Merel van Vroonhoven, head of the Dutch Regulator Financial Markets, expresses this as follows: “Bankers feel that they have done what has been agreed, so that’s it. They are, unlike the surrounding society in which they operate, insufficiently aware that there is really need for something else. Therefore, the surprise in the sector about the commotion from society is sincere.”

And Joris Luyendijk, in his book Swimming with Sharks, says: “Outsiders see that the amoral financial system leads to immoral outcome, but bankers have learned in their economic studies, especially if that was at an Anglo-Saxon top university, that the result of their work is morally right because it contributes to economic growth. That is their dogma.” That’s what they believe in and much more they sincerely do not see.
In addition, says Luyendijk, that universe is not so exceptional. Rather, the amoral mindset where everybody is so angry about now, has found broad access in society, even in sectors such as education and healthcare. So the problem is the system, in the broadest sense, and instead of furiously blaming individual bankers for succumbing to perverse incentives we should invest our energy into tackling and eliminating them.

The wide spread of Anglo-Saxon management values – such as rational cleverness, priority for thinking over doing and for policy over implementation – allows the comparison of bankers with other professions that sometimes operate in a similar dysfunctional way. Certainly for the illustration of the influence of good intentions such a comparison is instructive, because in those other professions money does not play as big a role. So the accusation of avarice and greed (often directed against bankers) is not needed for an understanding of the type of dysfunctional behavior we talk about. Good intentions and ambitious cunning explain enough.

You can see that for example in the US policy officials who had to carry Obamacare through parliament. Obama’s team consisted of super smart people. But they appeared to have little interest in the concrete implementation and elaboration of the plan. They had terminated the insurance of millions of Americans without telling them they quickly would get a new - and better - insurance.

Obama’s project then was in danger of running ashore. With understated anger the president subjected his team to a questionsession which the participants experienced as “an autopsy and as much worse than shouting”. By doing so, Obama as yet made his policymakers aware of the panic and commotion they had caused to people and which they, with all their cunning, had not seen coming. As bankers do not understand the turmoil that may cause their products in society.

The comparison shows that these policy-makers and bankers have the following in common: a great belief in complicated products, thought-out by high potentials and rolled out downward; a certain blindness to the effects of those products in the daily lives of people; the belief that their products serve a higher purpose.

Anyway, well intentioned or not, if the results of their actions are undesirable, then bankers must be addressed on the risks of their actions, as Obama did with his policy officials.

In order to protect society from this kind of smug smart guys. And also because maybe it is not so nice at all for bankers and policy officials themselves, having to live in the above described value system. Luyendijk: “That’s why I say we should hug them. Because they lead tragic lives.”

Also see Crisis of Ethics or of Thinking?

Chefsache

It seems to percolate bit by bit now, even with top-executives: primary processes and information flows are Chefsache. We may learn this from the hitches in IT that shake government services, from the near-fatal neglect by Obama of the implementation of his health system, and from the imminent demise of Polare, a big Dutch booksellerschain.

This insight requires quite a mental change. Until not so long ago bosses were considered above all nót to be busy with the primary process. But for instance the crisis at Polare is attributed by some to precisely that lack of interest, namely because “the owners of Polare systematically neglect the primary process of a bookstore in favor of investment strategies, synergy and all kinds of other considerations. Management takes too little notice of substantive knowledge”.

But it is one thing to know that the primary process is essential, it is something else to act accordingly. Because acting accordingly means more than just changing priorities.

Indeed, this area requires a different way of approaching. It can not be operated the way one manages strategy or human resources or change management. On these topics, the chefs are used to think in broad lines, and to develop plans in a top-down way, roll them out and let them be implemented.

In a situation of real attention to the primary process, that way of operating might very well be less useful. Because such attention implies a certain involvement in the workplace, in the manner of implementation. Less distance. In addition to management skills the content becomes more important indeed.

The objection to this is predictable: the boss does not have time for that, of course. No, that’s true, that’s exactly what makes the change so dramatic. Such an approach would in fact mean that personal enterpreneurship of others, besides the boss, is of greater importance. That initiatives may be coming from more sides at once.

More attention to the primary process could very well lead to fewer Chef and more Sache .

Also see Blowing Bubbles

Unlearning

A human being can learn, but can she also unlearn? I don’t mean that she can forget, for example in the sense of a skill you get unused to and lose. No, I mean that one has gained insights and then returns them. And not so by progressive clarification, but because these insights have become socially less desirable. In that case the question is: did you really get rid of them? Is the situation as it was before you gained the insights?

If that would be the case, unlearning would indeed exist. But if you still carry the learned things with you and simply don’t talk about them, then there is no question of unlearning. Then anyway the situation is very different from what it was before you started to learn.

These thoughts come to me because the last two years at my work were geared to collective learning. By focusing, with the help of external consultants, on our customer (the Amsterdam citizen) and our primary staff the permanent question was: where do our management concepts and controldrive hamper us more than they help us. When the management factory becomes dysfunctional?

In the process, we learned that the reality of the customer and the workplace may sometimes be very different from the manager’s reality. And that, in order to bridge the gap, and especially in order to somehow “have a control dashboard” often too quickly ICT is embraced, forgetting that a subtle network of connections between people and between people and machines determines the quality of information. We learned that there is no quick route, and that only constant attention to these connections eventually guarantees quality.

Those are insights indeed. Can one just shake them off once they are there? It seems so. At my work I already heard the simplicities pass again: just name some goals and implement them, and then the desired information rolls with the push of a button from the machine. As if not information is the result of a multitude of dependencies and delicate interactions. But maybe that kind of talk comes from people to whom the insights of the past two years have gone by, that is: who didn’t learn anything anyway. Of course, in that case you also cannot dislearn.

With people who díd learn something the past few years I suspect that the situation is different. There, I think, things have definitely changed in a way that is not easily reversed. Once you have seen how dysfunctional an organization can operate, your alertness to sham management will be aroused for ever. Dislearning and return to a naive embrace of command-and-control management have become impossible then. A broken egg cannot be repaired.

Of course, a stiffer regime and tight economic conditions can curtail the space to give effect to these insights quite severely. But people do not just lose their insights like that, so something under the surface will be different from what was the case before the insights came. Completely back to before will therefore not really be an option.

Also see Blowing bubbles and AAA

Everybody CEO

I want to expand a bit on the observation of a paradigm shift by which I concluded the previous message. Because that is quite a thing, a suchlike overturning of values, through which what was low-valued acquires more respectability: the real work, the trivial. If it were true, of course.

Confirmation of this trend may be found in the book Everybody CEO by Menno Lanting. In the book the author elaborates on the said paradigm shift, from contempt to appreciation for ordinary work, but now with the focus on organizations. He indicates the implications of this shift in the way we talk about work, leadership and management.

The impact of this shift may in fact be very large. Because the high esteem which traditionally exists with respect to thinking, overview and policymaking was always accompanied by a prestige for a certain - rather narrowly conceived - form of leadership and concomitant reward. That can not continue of course, once you call ‘everyone CEO’, because who is going to pay for that? Moreover, if you take seriously that slogan, then the monolithic image of The Real Leader pulverizes into many images of leadership, because then anyone can be one.

Then a leader is no longer necessarily dominant, or to be found at a distance from work, or heroically taking his the difficult decisions in utter solitude. Then leaders, as Lanting says, suddenly are to be found in the middle of organizations, close to the workfloor. Then it might be that the same people are leaders in one situation and followers in another.

Then it becomes conceivable that more leaders arise like Jos de Blok of a Dutch Neighbourhood Care organization who mentions as his main concern “that I don’t make my own role and position too big. I keep talking about ordinary things and professional content. I’m not really into management and management language and prefer to talk about client situations and the problems that professionals encounter. My assumption is that everything can be solved in the teams. This makes me to have the least (management) consulting as possible”.

This is truly revolutionary. Paradoxically, it means that we (temporarily) still need to rely on the heroic leadership which traditionally is in so high esteem. Indeed, there should be somebody to reduce the number of management meetings, to cut out overhead and to eliminate the woolly language in which we imprison each other. In short, to saw off the branch on which he sits. For a while there is still room for (very) heroic managers.

Aristotle and the bonuses

The Dutch legal philosopher Thierry Baudet recently wrote a nice article on Ronald Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum and the sustainability of our morality. However interesting the content of the article, on this place I am primarily interested in the end of Baudet’s article. After his discussion of the subtle polemics of Dworkin with his opponents and the activism of Nussbaum, Baudet concludes with the observation that both thinkers don’t show any shortcoming when it comes to high ideals, but fail to translate these into concrete practice.

Is that never ever going to change? I wonder in bewilderment at such a conclusion every time again. Do thinkers time and again accept that they are not relevant to everyday practice and keep critics being satisfied with just noticing that lack of relevance?

Indeed, these observations on the tiresome relationship of thinking to daily life are anything but new. Thus I recently came across a statement of Goethe in which he denounces the speculative, unsensuous and disputatious nature of the work of his philosophical contemporaries. He opposes to them the fellow German countrymen “who, being businessmen, standing in the middle of life, just pay attention to practical matters: they write the best”. And the English of course, “being born as orators and as practical, reality-oriented people”. And Marx formulated his opposition to the prevailing philosophy by saying that it comes to changing the world instead of interpreting it theoretically.

But from that perspective, I find it equally appalling that Baudet promotes Aristotle as a possible remedy for too much high-mindedness and philosophical isolation. Aristotle! The one who said that knowledge of eternal things is much loftier than practical knowledge. And for whom there was nothing more preferable than to dwell in contemplation.

True, among the ancient Greeks Aristotle was the one with his feet most firmly on the ground. Probably it is even for that reason that Baudet recommends him in his article, he can serve as an example against the theorizing of Dworkin and Nussbaum. Indeed, Aristotle has, more than they have, an eye for the paradoxical character of man as a being that is constantly torn between conflicting desires and needs. Moreover, Aristotle gave more close attention to the manifestations of biological and social life than any other ancient thinker.

But when it comes to the point, as far as his fundamental orientation is concerned, Aristotle is entirely in the Greek tradition. He does not really get out of the circle of his ancient Greek colleagues who maintain a hierarchical world view with contemplation at the top and labor at the base. And where the main concern is to stay away as far as possible from labor and as close as possible to the top.

It seems to me that this focus is for a large part responsible for the continuing irrelevance of our Western thinking. As long as Plato and Aristotle remain the ultimate benchmark of our thinking this is not going to change easily. Then the gap keeps reproducing itself.

The intriguing thing is that this reproduction has a parallel in the world of management and organization. The fascination for reflection at a distance to working life is reflected in the practice of our organizations. Up to the striving to make the distance between the thinker / manager and the work as large as possible. The degree of frustration that this causes may be derived from reports, for instance from the world of care and nursing homes. “The distance between the top and the workfloor becomes astronomical. In fact, the two don’t meet anymore”. And the rewards grow along with the distance. Here the Greek ideal of a sublime distance to labor has been realized alsmost perfectly, I would say.

Almost ... and maybe not forever everywhere. Because for instance the Dutch Council for Social Development (RMO) recently gave a revolutionary opinion. It was about excellent social workers in child welfare, which now too often make the transition to management because it pays better and gives more prestige. The RMO wants to keep them in the operational work by better rewarding them, precisely if they refrain from a management position.

This actually is a paradigm shift of the first order, a break with the ancient Greeks.

Megatrend

The transition from bondage to freedom, is it a jump, or even an absolute break? Or, to put the question differently: a bit more freedom, is that possible to exist once you've got a taste of freedom? Or is a bit more freedom something like being a bit pregnant? Something that does not stop until the freedom or the fruit matures?

That question may be posed in response to the rebellions in North Africa. Are the ghosts completely out of control, will the insurgents in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi still accept anything less than full democracy and participation? Or is there space left for a half-half situation, for a little more freedom within an autocratic framework?

So, for example, for a little more freedom in a state still run by the military, as now in Egypt. Or for greater involvement of the people while maintaining a powerful and popular king, as in Morocco. Or, as in China, for a bit of freedom in combination with rapid economic growth under an authoritarian party.

Or would half-half not last and should one radically march on? Have the Chinese leaders reached the borders of their ability to keep stupefying their population’s drive for freedom by offering prosperity and will they therefore have to allow more freedom? Will the Egyptian army have to give in to radical freedom-loving forces in the country? Or, if half-half is no option, are they going to choose, as in Iran, for completely stifling all freedom?

Closer to us in Western Europe the above question may be posed as well, be it that, fortunately, we know less physical and statedriven violence. And, another difference, I want to apply the question to the leadership in our companies. There we used to have directive and more or less top-down ways of leadership, but does that still work well? There is a growing number of voices that think it does not work any longer as a standard approach.

Carney and Getz for example state in their book Freedom, Inc. that the hierarchical model has run out. According to them the future belongs to companies that give their employees the freedom to do their job as they think it should be done. Because otherwise these freedom-loving people just walk away. Knowledge workers can not be managed in a controlling manner. The task of the leader is merely to create optimal acting space for his employees.

Another radical sound comes from Alan Murray. In his view managers are only a barrier to the full deployment of their employees and the prosperity of a company. "Their fundamental tendency is to maintain themselves. They are, almost by definition, averse to any change". Moreover, the younger generations don’t let themselves be commanded by parents or bosses. They listen to whát is being said. Not for nothing many people choose a position as worker without fixed tenure.

When you view the radicality of these statements, the opening question of this piece comes up again: once you have smelt freedom, will you not be at odds with any authority? Or is there space left for mixed forms of the authoritarian and the democratic, of hierarchy and freedom. Can these styles co-exist, or has the unfettered, free knowledge worker unmasked the manager as being a conservative potentate in such a way that the two are no longer compatible? That would mean the end of management. If so then we are living in historic times and experiencing a mega trend in both North Africa and in our own organizations.

But, to be honest, I think we must be prepared to manage with the hybrids. Complete freedom, both in North Africa and in our organizations, is something we will have to wait for a little longer. I feel strengthened in this thought – as far organizations are concerned – by a newspaper article that emphasized the indispensability of the organizational controlmodel. It was about the Belgian juridical system which had failed in an investigation into the murder of a student. The report on the police action can be read as a tribute to classical bureaucratic management because its absence is identified as the cause of failure: there was "no team manager, no file manager, no coordinator, (...) no structure, no information management, and leadership was absent. All this could be read as the chronicle of an announced failure".

Also see Must work be fun

Must work be fun

Should work really be fun? Wouldn’t it be enough for work not to be maddening, humiliating, mind-numbing, infantile, or enslaving any longer?

At times the gap may be very large, between the fancy rhetoric about work as selfrealization and the reality that we offer each other in organizations on a daily basis. Probably a more than two and a half thousand years old, classical dichotomy plays us tricks here. Namely the dichotomy between things that are respectable to do and things that are not respectable.

Actually, rather than a dichotomy this is a tripartition, as Hannah Arendt makes clear in her book The Human Condition. It lists 'labor', 'work' and 'action', in which sequence labor stands for activities that always comes back and are never finished, such as cleaning, caring, feeding. Work is the activity of making something, always new: writing a book, building a house, making a deal. Action is done in decision-making and politics.

I take this tripartition as a bipartition because, according to that venerable but overrated classical tradition, two of these activities are more or less respectable, and the third - labor - definitely not. Hence, in our Western culture since antiquity, we do our best to keep the right side of the division line. The white collar is held in higher esteem than the blue collar.

The echo of that hierarchy of values I come across in my own organization, the Amsterdam Municipality. A foremost, widely disseminated striving with us is that people practice their daily work with passion, joy and in full self-realization. Perhaps that striving is precisely the reason why in daily practice the atmosphere within the organization can get so sour. Because by focusing on ‘passion’ we feel justified to ignore labor. Indeed, labor offers little chance for self-realization.

But, of course, such a labor-less situation cannot exist. In Amsterdam streets should be cobbled, bins placed, digital address books cleaned up and invoices sent. Not the right things ‘to make flourish your personality’. But certainly things you really suffer from when they are disregarded.

Actually, in Amsterdam we are hampered a lot by, for instance, messed up digital address books. I am convinced that this situation is rooted in the hierarchy of action-work-labor that Arendt describes. By the way, Arendt in her descriptions can hardly disguise her own aversion to labor. So it is not surprising that people in organizations are trying to escape it. But the impact of that escape remains devastating, because this predilection for fun and self-realization bites in its own tail. If we all just want to have fun the adressbooks get messed up, and the working atmosphere as well.

Also see Nice Work

Plato at the workplace

In some of my previous messages I spoke about Plato and the impact of his dualism on Christianity and on education. But also in organizations his ideas are established quite firmly.

The Platonic privileging of the head over the body, of the spiritual realm over the physical realm that currently is playing tricks with the churches and Christianity, also exerts its negative influence in the workplace. This manifests itself in the preference of many organizers (managers, consultants) for a strict separation of policy and operations, think-work and do-work. And coupled to that separation it shows itself in a higher social status and higher financial rewards for the first and an underestimation of the second.

This situation in my view explains a lot of the discontent which may be observed in workplaces. Indeed, there the real added value of organizations is being created, but quite often managers think what is happening there is too trivial for serious attention. They prefer to confine their attention to the broad outlines, also because that’s more prestigious.

Yet in that respect a turnaround seems to be noticeable and that has much to do with the automation and computerization that take place anywhere. The many failed IT projects make it increasingly clear that the traditional management approach, invariably with a certain disdain as to the details of implementation, might be the cause of the failures. After all, if you're automating your processes and you limit yourself to the big picture without having precise knowledge of the operational requirements, you will easily create monsters of dysfunctionality.

So you need to know precisely what is happening at the workfloor. And of course the manager himself does not have to know all the details. But he must understand the importance of that knowledge and take care that it be gathered. This necessity in itself is a break already with thinking just broadly, in terms of strategic concepts and ideas. It is a (re-)valuation of the empirically concrete and hence of the workplace. Not really Plato’s cup of thea.

Within labor organizations therefore a self-correcting mechanism seems in place against the Platonic dualism. In politics this is less clear. Sometimes one reads optimistic stories about the possibilities of using the Internet and other social media for creating more and more direct forms of participation. There are times I believe so too, yet meanwhile I doubt whether that will work.

By definition, politics is about measures on a large scale for people at a distance. This requires thinking in broad outlines and it limits the possibilities for attention to the detailed outcomes of policy. I recently read about the ability of Americans to organize large scales in a small scale way. Perhaps that might offer opportunities to counter inappropriate Platonism in politics.

What makes Sammy run?

It’s in to listen to your workers. To try to reach their inner motivation, for then people will get really engaged. By doing so you create cultural controls and these are more effective and cheaper than other kinds of control.

Roy Jacques reproaches those who adhere to this vision that their intrest in their workers is instrumental and does not really stem from real concern for them. Perhaps it has to be that way because as a manager you operate within limiting conditions like the targetted return on investment, the quality of products, the need for managementcontrol and the income-dependency of the workers. All those conditions limit the space workers can get or dare to take.

But given those restrictions it’s good to know you cannot just in a non-committing way talk of inner motivation and engagement. Because this rhetoric has its own dynamics.

When you promise somebody that he will be listened to and that his voice will count, then at a certain moment he will not be content anymore with a small present, a bit of empowerment and so-called participation. He will unmask the windowdressing and if behind the surface he doesn’t find any real concern he will turn cynical. The nice management will be experienced as hypocritical.

When indeed the managerial intrest is conditional and instrumental it is also dubious whether you can ever get to know at all what motivates your workers. This in spite of the huge research efforts labor-psychologists and motivation-economists invest in the field. Could it possibly be that we not even know 10 percent of what people consider as ‘nice work’? Wouldn’t that be plain logic as long as managers and controllers, be it right or not, stick to a number of unnegotiable conditions such as return on investment and control?

If you really would let people speak for themselves, the outcome could very well be unwelcome to management. That’s to be learned from a newspaper article about a unique situation where one of the usual limiting conditions was not met. The subject was the – for the greater part voluntary – Dutch fire-brigades where the interesting combination exists of serious management and income-independency of many workers.

The paper reported that the Minister of the Interior wants the fire-brigades to regionalize. That means that local corpses are going to be encapsulated in regional corpses, because of the scale advantages and possibilities for more effective actions in case of calamities and crises. The idea is that volunteers from small communities after the regionalisation can be deployed in other communities within the region. Many volunteers reject this plan because they volunteered as firemen to combat fire in their own town or village. A big number of them now threatens to quit the fire-brigades. As 22.000 out of the 27.000 firefighters are volunteers this can have major impact on fire safety in Holland.

This story offers, for who wants to see it, a glimpse into the soul of organizational workers. Serious management apparently asks for scaling up, nice work for the opposite. Probably this will be the case not only with the fire-brigades but also in healthcare and educational organizations. Managers, controllers and labor-psychologists can take advantage from this insight, when they are really intrested in worker welfare. If not, sooner or later, fysically or mentally, Sammy just runs away.