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.

Ten bridges too far

I can not see it otherwise. Pleasant cooperation begins and ends with knowing of each other what you’re doing. Also in such a mega-organization like the municipality of Amsterdam.

Even if that means that policy makers sometimes have to know exactly some details of the logistics of a form or informationflow. And that a manager must be able to dive into the exact records of one of his products and must be able to follow the process of creation.

That’s ten bridges too far, I know that now too. Because they don’t wánt that at all, those managers and policy makers, for various reasons.

Therefore it is all the more remarkable that recently, just before my departure as ‘clarifyer of workprocesses’, I was allowed several times to experience the flow that occurs when six or seven people together harmonize their process – their daily bread – and feel taken seriously in it. That generates a specific relaxed kind of job satisfaction.

But now we are back again at the lonely, individual process-tinkerers. Or at the collective brown-paper products that are admittedly created with great flow, but of which after a year nobody knows where they are.

But one time it will be fixed well again – I can not see it otherwise.

Also see Live to see

Measurability

The time that students rode through town in carriages is over, fortunately. True, in those days there always were a few of them that used the very same pool of money and time for thorough study of their subjects, in breadth and depth. Then quality could just spontaneously emerge: Bildung we can only dream of.

Because of the affluence on which that Bildung mostly rested, the latter had a decidedly elitist and exclusive character. I’m not sorry to see it gone, and I welcome the fact that large groups of other people now share in academic education.

So I also understand that a lot of public money goes to the universities. And that one wants to have some control over it. And that directors and managers should monitor that. And that inevitably some form of counting and measuring is always involved.

In the debate about the return on investment at the universities, I therefore disagree with the proposition that there is nothing to measure. Because immeasurability would make large-scale universities unmanageable. Then intellectual and cultural formation would again be accessible only to those of whom also the means are immeasurable.

In addition, there is another, more fundamental reason why I do not agree with the inmeasurability thesis. I think that measurability dóes exist in this field. However: not in the form of the brute performance indicators that managers and financials invent and apply nowadays. As if it were thém who provide the added value of education and research.

As to measurability in a realistic form, I rather think of the kind Ben Tiggelaar recently referred to in his NRC-column. People with serious ambitions, he wrote, also on the field of arts and sciences, often put themselves all sorts of standards – as countable and even rigid as imaginable. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright for example got up every day at four o’clock to work three hours in quiet. “Like the bureaucratic habit of many writers to count the number of words they daily produce and to impose themselves quotas. Hemingway: 500 words per day, Stephen King: 2000”.

The difference: these professionals know exactly what is needed for fruitful results. Tiggelaar’s advice to managers and financials would therefore be: go talk to the professionals and do not decide for thém what standards they must meet, but let them decide themselves. Let a professor describe his personal ideals and benchmark her own performance.

Because professors (and students) are no less keen on return than managers. But they have more sense of it.

Also see Grief

Live to see

What you hope, if you’re intensively involved in a particular issue, is that you and your generation may live to see things improve regarding that case. But sometimes you have to be realistic, and then you conclude that it can take longer than your life time, before things will be okay.

With regard to the two issues that I have been intensively busy with for a long time, I have to draw that conclusion now. By the way, in both issues the same concerns are at stake: it’s always about cooperation and trust.

One subject is Israel, or rather, peace between Israel and its neighbors. It’s clear that lack of trust was the big issue there from the outset, and still is. A traumatized people resettled on land that in the course of time had become the possession of others. Wars and terror ensued, and it may be feared that the most recent war in Gaza will not have been the last one.

In realizing this situation, for me nothing more remains than, like Rabbi David Lilienthal once did, try to imagine what the situation will look like if you do not take your own life as a reference but a much longer period of time. Could the situation be much better for example after another three hundred years? Could the Middle East then be like nowadays Europe? For that to happen, by that time obviously not only in Israel but also on the side of Isis and Hamas and kindred spirits some things should have changed.

The other subject is the dysfunctioning of the Amsterdam municipality, ie of its civil service. With that I have in mind employees and departments who refuse to talk to each other, stressed bosses and top-down pushed solutions for problems that are not really known. What happens there is not a war such as in the Middle East, but it sometimes indeed reminds me of it: I see a lot of deeply unhappy people, more than I think is necessary.

That yet cooperation in Amsterdam cán run well and smoothly, I also was allowed to experience recently. Last year, for a whole year, time and energy were invested, within the framework of the Amsterdam City Servicecounter, to accommodate divergent views in a focused and professional manner. Which was only possible – I contend – thanks to generous attention to the primary process, in such a way that everyone involved, from clerks to managers, knew what they could expect from each other. The accommodating itself was a form of cooperation.

But I was wrong about the seriousness with which a sequel was allowed to this successful experiment. It’s nice, cooperation and trust, but it is apparently not the intention to make that into something more permanent. The fact that the Board of Mayor and Aldermen puts, because of imposed budgetcuts, the entire device systematically under pressure now, does not make things better. The bombardment of political and strategic imperatives is so fierce that attention to the core business is smothered in pushed through solutions. Employees are on their guard against being driven crazy.

So here too I have to face the fact that – except during the past year – I will not experience utopia. It will take a while before trust and cooperation again have a chance here. Okay,  maybe not in three hundred years, but easily in a hundred years: then it must have become self-evident that organizations, regardless of the strategic demands that are imposed, do not for even a moment lose sight of their primary processes and core business.

Defeats? Sure, but fortunately still other opportunities are left for me to experience cooperation and trust.

Also see Trust

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

The dominant Economy

I grew up in a family where the men (except me) were economist and the women were mostly philosophically or socially interested.

My connection with the economic field has never been spontaneous, but it was clear from the start that the economy represents a relevant aspect of human existence. I have learned to appreciate the conversations about the importance of margins and profitability and robust financial management. And when I myself could not find employment in line with my historical interest the distance to the economic area was small enough for me to take the plunge into a guaranteed job in accountancy. For no longer than was necessary, of course.

However, dominant it remains, that economic thinking. And the bad thing is, it’s so obviously true. The once-again-with-both-feet-on-the-ground pretends to be the last word. Any attempt to define the world more broadly will soon go to the wall.

I suffered from that previously at home, but last week I experienced it again at the Nexus conference with the theme “How much is enough?”. Or actually, I witnessed that others experienced that impotence.

At the conference in Amsterdam Lord Robert Skidelsky (economist) gave a lecture on occasion of the appearance of the Dutch translation of the book which he and his son Edward (philosopher) have written under the title How much is enough? Money and the desire for a good life. In the book they advocate a shorter workweek for all (15-20 hours) and more opportunity for people to do what they themselves find important. And they wonder why we work ourselves to death only to gather more and more wealth.

After Skidelsky's lecture there was a panel discussion led by Rick van der Ploeg with as participants Skidelsky and three Dutch economists. Van der Ploeg presented to the participants questions like “What does the crisis mean for you personally?” And “What should be done to solve the crisis?”

The answers sooned turned out to be of a techno-economical nature. There was talked for more than half an hour about recapitalization, strengthening balance sheets and cutting expenditures for another ten years. Could you expect otherwise with a debate panel composed of economists and bankers, but, it appeared, not every visitor had come for that. The audience wanted more views in the spirit of Skidelsky, I think.

Anyway, while I was still busy with realizing that all this could only moderately interest me, a collective irritation was suddenly felt in the room. As if the economic talk passed by the heart of the matter or should urgently be associated with a broader view on society.

Someone shouted her discontent from the balcony down. I could not hear what she said, even when the second time she used a kind of megaphone. But, unmistakenly, this did not please her, and, judging from the applause, it didn’t please a large part of the audience either.

The panel chairman could not negate this. So, the first waiting behind the interruption microphone got his turn. But after treating his question the next person waiting had to show ten minutes of patience because the panel chair now started to broach explicitly philosophical themes indeed, but in doing so followed mainly his own interest. Then suddenly time had run out. That was a bit sad of course, and therefore the man was allowed to put his question as yet, with barely time for a response.

In those tiny minutes nevertheless a couple of interesting themes lighted up, such as the question why economy and compulsory work and wage labor yield the kind of oppressive associations they produce. Perhaps, suggested Skidelsky, one must distinguish between work content that others decide about for you, and work content that you determine yourself. And perhaps in talking about less work not a division between work and idleness is at stake, but between work designed for you and work designed by you.

These themes were only briefly touched upon. But I had liked to hear a bit more about them from those economists.

Also see Blowing Bubbles and Begging for Feed-back

Begging for Feed-back

I recently read that in the short term we in the West must not expect revolutionary new technological inventions. Technological innovation will mainly need to build on existing technology and therefore productivity increase on this basis will be modest in size.

If that’s the case indeed, more profits and faster productivity growth are to be expected of social innovation. By which I mean the fixing of the energy leak which in many organizations exists because people do not or too little cooperate. And also I mean the stopping of the waste of money, time and talent which results from dysfunctional beliefs about management.

That energy leak and waste are usually not caused because employees or managers have bad intentions, but because the organization through budgets and powers is sometimes arranged in such way as to set people against each other instead of bringing them together. And that in its turn is caused because we are saddled with obsolete, dysfunctional beliefs about management and organization. These limit, consciously or unconsciously, our space for movement and improvement.

Take the views on management and leadership. In most organizations it are still mainly forms of hierarchical thinking and command structures that determine which concepts are associated with management. These include concepts such as power, competency, the ability to override others. And far fewer – apart from exceptions – a serving and facilitating attitude.

Then this is what you get: managers who get a kick out of their decision-making-power and who in intimate moments don’t keep secret that they are in that position because they cannot stand that others tell them what to do. But who at the same time do not but expect that others are able to do precisely that.

And you get relatively many frightened employees, who have effectively been silenced.

That pinches of course, and those managers may as well feel the pinching. They largely, despite their formal power, fail to achieve what they aim at. And they feel that more is needed, and – above all – something else: they should engage in genuine consultation with “their” people. But at this point also impotence enters the story: they have to listen but because of the way they have organized things and because of their character structure that does not work properly. They beg for feedback, but what follows is a deathly silence. Touching, almost.

This is not managable any longer by hurling in a top-down way some more behavioral science and communication tricks into the organization. Here another way of social interaction is required. Which justifiably may be called: social innovation.

Also see Trust

Trust

If there is lack of confidence, does it help to talk about it extensively?

At the Amsterdam Municipality they thought so. A few years ago, officials noted that there was much mutual distrust within the civil service. Some refused to talk to others and there was a lot of time and energy lost by legitimizing to others of what one was doing. To change this a meeting was organized for senior management to discuss the topic of trust.

After the participants had split up into groups and had begun their conversations, the chairing committee soon noted proudly that indeed people were talking about trust. The then newly appointed municipal secretary was still enough Rotterdamlike to note that if the issue is trust, you are entitled to expect that people will talk about trust. But apparently in Amsterdam this was quite a lot already.

But even then, does the premise hold true which says that talking about confidence yields confidence? If only it were that simple, I tend to think. In many cases talking about something is no more than enthousiastically –  see photo – going around the core of the issue. Unless you structure the conversation solidly, control the structure closely and collect the results and store them; then you may win something.

Meanwhile the budgetcuts make sure there is less talk in Amsterdam. The lean years have come and a lot of talk turns out afterwards to have been primarily a luxury phenomenon. That it has largely passed the core may appear from the fact that trustless talk now in some cases has been replaced by trustless management, simply top-down. Too bad the fat years have not been better utilized.

Also see Unlearning

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.

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

Nice work

For an explanation of the Holocaust and its streamlined industrial execution some philosophers point to the high flight of rational thinking in our Western culture. Zygmunt Bauman for example, argues that Western rationality may not have caused the Holocaust, but made it possible and in any event did not help prevent it from happening. The historian Philipp Blom follows him when he says that rationalization in our society is potentially problematic.

Other philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt, offer an entirely different, almost opposite explanation for the functioning of Hitler's extermination machine. They point to the thoughtlessness, the very refusal to use one’s own brainpower on the part of planners like Eichmann and other bureaucrats of the destruction. Such careless stupidity is in the eyes of Arendt the outcome of the banality of evil, or perhaps that banality itself.

I for myself arrive at a position right in the middle between the two mentioned explanations. This can best be formulated as follows: people just want to enjoy working. I mean to say that a person, especially if he also is diligent and wants to do his best, will enjoy having a job, coming up with a strategy, preparing plans and executing them orderly. Banal on the one hand, but with the satisfaction of a certain ordering thought on the other hand.

There is nothing wrong with that, you might say. We use to associate agreeable work quite naturally with working out undisturbed what we have in mind. Without children around, without too many insoluble dilemmas, preferably in an orderly environment, supported by clear goals and adequate resources. That has its own satisfaction.

However innocent that job satisfaction may seem, on closer inspection there are snags to it. Look for instance at what is being done by many executive boards of educational and health organizations and at their inclination to grow and merge, the consequences of which we in some cases very much regret. And by that I do not even refer to those executives who consider those mergers as opportunities for manipulation and personal enrichment, although there certainly are. No, I refer primarily to the bona fide executives among them.

These top executives just enjoy themselves. They come up with one plan after another, dropping them to the level below with the instruction to further roll it out to the underlying levels in order to implement them there. The designers at the top have their fling, but below, and certainly on the work floors, things get clogged up. Or a shadowy maze arises in which people keep each other imprisoned in a web of often conflicting directives and orders. The top prefers not to know too much about those effects because that only would disturb the flow of their zest for work. Viewed from this perspective the objective to ‘just enjoy work’ looks a lot more problematic.

Something similar, but much more horrible and catastrophic, may have played a role in the case of Eichmann and his associates. Besides blinding obedience as a motive for Schreibtischmörder (on which subject Stanley Milgram has written a lot), the simple satisfaction of an orderly performance of duties could have yielded an additional kind of blindness.

’Nice work’ as a blinding motive is perhaps even more banal than is the obedience to - whatever the consequences - just continue the proper performance of an assigned task. What plays a role both in nice work and in obedience, is the influence of the distance between the actor and the person(s) to whom he interacts: the greater the distance, the less you will be distracted from your task by the consequences of your actions. That’s what they have well understood, those executive boards on their upper floors.

The two situations - the one of blind modern management and the one of the blind Nazi extermination bureaucracy – cannot in earnest be compared. But in terms of an underlying pattern they might be comparable. It may be that they both go back to the same source: our desire to come up with plans and our pleasure in working them out straightly and unimpeded. Just being busy nicely and not looking too much at the consequences.

The question is whether the high-minded planners among us could perhaps restrain themselves a bit more and better realize what the actual impact is in reality of their cheerful zeal. And whether street sweepers, youth workers or homeless helpers might perhaps offer us a different model of nice work can offer. In any case, those seem to me to be jobs in which the euphoria of one’s own organizing activity is quickly called to order and in which reality remains soberingly close.

Grief

The words ‘grief’ or ‘violence’ or ‘pain’ do not belong to the vocabulary of organizations. Because there grown-ups work together based on mutual consent and rational alignment. That’s what I sometimes hear from participants in my workshop Thinking for someone else, in which I – in the footsteps of the philosopher Levinas – regularly use those words, even if we discuss work situations. My answer is that some words may indeed sound strange in the context of organization and management, but that they really can tell us something about that reality. And that time may be ripe for a variety of unusual word connections.

As to that latter thought I feel strengthened by the publication of the book The judge’s new clothes by the Dutch judge Rinus Otte. Because the book calls forth a number of unusual associations. Of judges with misery, of organizations with grief, of management with being pathetic. These unusual connections are there already for some time, so Otte suggests, but something in our minds keeps us from associating the said things with one another.

The association of judges with misery gets profile only relatively recently. Namely, Otte tells us, since judges are locked up in planning and control cycles in which targets are fixed and results are measured. Because much of their work processes are standardized, judges from a center point turned into a link in a chain. They have little grip anymore on the organization of their daily work. The juridical process is planned for them, not by them. The thinking is being done for them, and thus they started to show increasingly dependent behavior. They started to make one another’s lifes a misery and to complain a lot, especially about the workload, says Otte.

That’s pretty miserable indeed, but – according to Otte – no more pathetic than the fate of many other professionals, because the planning and control bureaucracy has raged almost everywhere and made people mellow. That of course makes it no less severe, as the malaise now almost gets the features of a genuine cultural crisis.

The words organization and grief seem to stem from two incompatible vocabularies. Organization stands for ultimate rationality and functionality. There may be some links with the realm of emotions, but these connections are subject to strict censorship. Emotions in that context should invariably radiate positivity and enthusiasm and be about connectedness. The association of organization as a reasonable concept with grief keeps feeling uneasy, but Otte makes clear to what extent that association within the administration of justice is identifiable. The Dutch paper NRC reports that Otte was baffled about the “unhappiness” and the “organizational violence” that he encountered at his court (and, appearing from his quotationmarks, the reporter found it strange words a well in this context).

Something similarly uneasy applies to the coupling of managers and being pathetic. According to the prevailing perception managers are still mainly associated with vigor, coolness and, again, reasonableness. Yet, however often the words energy and charisma and connection may be used in those circles, Otte’s book makes quite clear, according to the NRC, that management of the criminal process is mainly rather tiresome. “Tensions have grown over the last five to ten years” and “What you see is a lot of communication between deaf, people don’t reach each other”.

The interesting question, of course, which lays behind those uncomfortable associations is: what makes our brain to take one kind of associations for granted and to find other kinds of associations odd, even though reality offers us many reasons for such an unusual association to be made? To be continued.

Also see Bauman, Levinas and business ethics

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.

The kick of connection

The attraction of the word 'connection' is huge. And actually that applies to all words which come a bit near to it, such as communication, teamwork, directness.

Not for nothing these words are so often used to capture people. Not just in personal ads, but also in recruitment ads or reorganization plans. Apparently the need for being connected is high.

And for connecting. That appeared recently at a meeting for employees of the municipality of Amsterdam. At that occasion there were eight types of employees listed, each with its own qualities, which the city needs to function properly. These types included the 'networker' and the 'connector'. When subsequently the employees were asked to classify themselves into one of the types, the networker and the connector, together with the 'playmaker', scored by 75 percent of the points. The ‘finishers’ got no further than one and a half percent.

In Amsterdam nonetheless we know quite a few situations in which those connections are accidentally not in place, and not only with respect to the North-South metroline. Then we appoint coordinators or communication experts or social innovators. They, already by the sheer magic of their function names, respond to the need, even if this is just for a short time. In reality these solutions often lead only to more bubble blowing instead of connection.

The need for connection seems to have a physiological basis. I regularly read articles about the functioning of the brains in which the health of the brain is associated with the degree to which parts of the brain connect with one another. It appears that depression can be countered by removing hitches in the connections between braincells and that older people remain sharper when they continue to train their brains to create links.

I am inclined to believe that. The tying together - in a sensible way - of elements which in first instance are foreign to one another is stimulating. But in organizations you better don’t do that by primarily talking a lot about it, as in Amsterdam is the case a bit too much.

You better just do it. Literally. With a simple click I can connect one department of my work to other departments, through information which flows from the one to the other. And always based on a discussion between representatives of both departments. Each connecting click gives me a kick each time again.

Adrenalin

The idea, borrowed from Adam Smith, seemed to be so comfortable. Namely, that if only everybody takes good care of himself, society as a whole will also flourish. And that this is so thanks to the mysterious mechanism of the market – Smiths’ ‘Invisible Hand’ – which warrants the harmony between private and public interests. In other words, do not feel inhibited in your aspiration to self-enrichment because you are fully morally justified, it's almost social work! So let the adrenalin flow, that is being generated by the concern for your private interests.

But, says the French philosopher Jean-Claude Milner, there is no invisible hand and that awareness has been firmly drummed into our heads again by the financial crisis. It showed us clear enough how the hunt for personal gain is not necessarily running harmoniously parallel with the intrests of society. Rather, society was about to collapse for a moment and we still do not know what we will end up with. So, the idea of an easy harmony through the invisible hand is actually a piece of self-deception. If you are honest about it there is something fishy to that source of adrenalin.

But where to get your adrenalin from then?

The Dutch columnist Johan Schaberg recently wondered whether business does not know any other motives for action beyond greed. He notes, based on interviews with other Cor Herkströter (Shell) and Frits Goldschmeding (Randstad), somewhat reassured, that money, options and bonuses with these executives don’t play a significant role as motives. But, he wonders, why do they tell this only at the end of their career? And why did they in their working lives uncritically do what the entire stock market quotated business community does: rely heavily on bonuses?

Schaberg finds more convincing examples of engagement of business with public interests further back in the past. In the thirties a number of left-liberal Rotterdam businessmen united in the Woodbroker House. There they spoke about their own responsibility towards society and they studied leftist ideological models that could bring improvement.

But in the thirties, before the bankruptcy of communism and the problems of the welfare state became apparent, faith in such models was easier to bring up than it is today. Schaberg therefore somewhat sadly notes that this kind of social involvement is hardly around in the current generations. And that this is dangerous because a society does not remain healthy just like that.

So, is there nothing to believe in anymore?
I am afraid that the great ideological narratives lost much of their stimulating power indeed, and to them I reckon the Invisible Hand and the idealism of the thirties. If there is something I believe in, it is that sometimes, now and then, one person is really dedicated to another, and not just in romantic love. Something small indeed, but yet something which can make our ordinary life exciting for a while and which can give color to our work. That creates its own adrenalin. The condition for this to happen is of course that a normal life is possible. Thus, that there are good societal institutions: democracy, good governance and fair justice.

The problem is now, says Milner, that capitalism does not seem to care any longer about those societal institutions. Perhaps because the efforts to carefully maintain them are too prosaic and generate too little adrenalin. The feverish capitalism only wants big shots of adrenalin. It does not bother any longer about the question of where the rules come from. If only there are rules, then the most aggressive will manage to wrench money out of it. According to Milner that’s a really dangerous situaton indeed. He therefore believes that we cannot enough cherish our constitutional achievements. Let us spend our thinking power also on that and not just on earning money.

Heidegger, Wittgenstein and traffic

Organizational scientists who become philosophical should be cherished. They probably will allow a bit more space for manoeuvre and depth in their reasoning than those who are trained only in management. Nevertheless I want to make a warning remark concerning organizational scientists who orientate themselves towards Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein. What a number of followers of those two philosophers have in common – and that’s what I want to talk about – is the use of the metaphore of car-traffic for human communication in organizations. I find that irritating. For in my view that metaphore is not really adequate.

What can one say about traffic? Car-traffic consists in a unequivocal, uniform reality and this reality is based upon a set of (almost) generally accepted rules. Those among us who drive their car to the wrong side of the road or park it across the lane form a small minority. Of course the respective destinations of the road-users can diverge a lot but that’s not relevant for their quality of road-user. Their reality is being defined by the two white lines they have to respect, the arrows they have to follow and the trafficlights that come to their path. As far as their participation in traffic is concerned, all drivers have one and the same preprogrammed rationality in common, which allows only very limited space for interpretation.

The moment you start applying traffic as a metaphore for human behaviour in organizations a kind of alienating effect sets in. Take for example John Shotter, who is inspired by Wittgenstein. Shotter considers social action as ‘to know how to go on’ and for his explanation of this expression he takes recourse to the metaphore of car-traffic: “Just as in driving down a multi-lane interstate highway, we sense those cars here as near, and those there as far away, this one as requiring us to move away as it is moving too close, and we possess a synoptic grasp of how ‘to go on’ in a skilful way in many other spheres of our lives”.

Managementauthors Winograd and Flores, who orientate themselves towards Heidegger, also use car-driving as an image for communication and language in organizations. They speak about a kind of natural interhuman communication and compatibility by which things just go as they have to go and people, somehow, know what they have to do. Of course misunderstandings between people can arrise, in the same way in which collisions take place in traffic. And also in organizations one can find non-communicative people, as there are yokels in traffic. So, apparently, also traffic is not that unequivocal. But those situations are – according to the mentioned authors – exceptions, on the organization floor as in traffic, which are to be redressed or to be deplored. In the last resort they do not affect the clarity of the rules and the uniformity of reality. In principle human interaction functions, as does car-traffic, automatically.

I think this conception of human interaction is alienating because it does not match the experienced reality. The conception leans heavily on the presumption that people are permanently prepared to communicate. I find that a naïve, romantic thought. The day-to-day practice in organizations shows too many examples of the opposite. I have in mind people’s refuse to talk to others, the largescale use of language which in fact does not clarify but mystifies, and the energy it takes, not so much to redress misunderstandings, but to get people to talk with one another at all.

On a better look, it is possible to give some explanations for the discrepancy between the relatively unproblematic functioning of road-traffic and the laboriousness of human interaction. One can point to the fact that, opposite the unequivocal rationality and limited space for interpretation of trafficrules, in the domain of worldinterpretations and human acting many divergent rationalities can be found. And opposite the total freedom for each cardriver to choose his own destination, in organizations there is a hierarchy by which some workers (managers) tell other workers what to do. Conflicts on the road are usually restricted to teasing, while in organizations they often have to do with imposing, legitimately or not, one’s will on others.

These differences touch certain aspects of organizations which make communication in organizations so difficult but also interesting. Organizational scientists like Shotter, Winograd and Flores, who are orientated towards Heidegger and Wittgenstein, seem to miss exactly those points. They end up with a simplistic and technocratic caricature of interhuman communication. One may wonder whether something essential is lacking in the philosophical oeuvres of Heidegger and Wittgenstein because of which their organizational adepts arrive at that caricature?

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.