BETTER TOGETHER
Richard Little & Grahamae Broadbelt
The lists below give only the barest hint of the rich and thoughtful discussion that took place in our hot and noisy yurt. I have added a commentary, with references, which I hope capture some of the sense of what was said. It is interesting to see how the discussions anticipate many of the points made later in Learnfest by speakers. In the lists, I have paraphrased occasionally in order to show the sense intended by discussants. 1 Small Group Discussions 1.1 What does the word ‘agility’ bring to mind for you? (in an organisational context) Adaptability (x3) Autonomy – freedom to act (x2) Responsiveness (x2) Reactivity Emotional resilience ‘Riding the wave’ Change Moving quickly Culture of workforce A state of being (rather than something you do) Reducing fear (for a start) When things are ticking over, you don’t need agility -­‐ the need for agility is driven by volatility/rate of change How do you do agility on a production line? You can have agility of mind -­‐ and agility of response to market How do we help people stay open-­‐minded The word has energy Agility is about individuals first, then organisations -­‐ and it is easier to develop agility at that level The agile organisation is an unobtainable utopia The agile organisation is adult to adult Organisations are time-­‐bound 1.2 What is stopping your organisation being (more) agile? History (x2) Tradition -­‐ people stuck -­‐ ‘its always been done this way’ The founding values/culture live with a company and resist change Unwillingness to do things differently Mistrust in a system -­‐ leads to overall mistrust Fear (x2) www.impactinternational.com
© Impact International 2012
BETTER TOGETHER
Richard Little & Grahamae Broadbelt
Fear of saying the wrong thing Regulations – a focus on what you can’t say Fear of saying the wrong thing Job insecurity Culture Safety Un-­‐transferable expertise Management short-­‐termism -­‐ goals and targets non-­‐negotiable Unforgivingness -­‐ performance management The need for consensus Compliance Quality assurance (we have 13 audits a year) ISO, JSOX Customer focus Trying to do too much Not being trained in a new system (Failure to) unlock agile individuals, systems, structures -­‐ or to create the space and opportunity for agility to happen Its people we need to be more agile 2 Commentary The word ‘agility’, applied to an organisation, may be taken to imply adaptability and quickness to change; an organisation that encourages innovation and flexibility of mind, that it is ‘loose-­‐coupled’ (Weick, 1976, 1990), that is able to form a coherent view of the world in which it operates, that scans widely and that contains different, even conflicting perspectives with the methods and dialogical skill to process them. It may be the case that we do not so much create or induce agility in an organisation as stop preventing it. Bureaucratic managerialism tends toward command and control and the formalisation of goal-­‐setting and role allocation. These may be necessary disciplines in some contexts, but they may spill over into the social organisation and into activities in which they have no place – activities like innovation, dialogue. Their importance may also vary between different organisational contexts. In a seminal paper, Burns and Stalker (1961) suggested that organisations which operate in stable conditions are more likely to be ‘mechanistic’, while those whose operating conditions are labile and unstable are likely to benefit from being ‘organic’. Their description of the organic organisation seems radical even fifty years later. Many later writers elaborated and critiqued the idea, noting, for example, that most organisations are both mechanistic and organic at once, (Boje, 1999). Burns and Stalker made much of the relationship between the individual and the firm. In mechanistic organisations, ‘systems … define his (sic) functions, together with the methods, responsibilities, and powers appropriate to them; in other words … boundaries are set. That is to say, in being told what he has to attend to, and how, he is also told what he does not have to bother with, what is not his affair, what is not expected of him, what he can post elsewhere as the responsibility of other’ (Burns and Stalker, 1961). www.impactinternational.com
© Impact International 2012
BETTER TOGETHER
Richard Little & Grahamae Broadbelt
In organic organisations, on the other hand, ‘the boundaries of feasible demands on the individual disappear. The greatest stress is placed on his regarding himself as fully implicated in the discharge of any task appearing over his horizon’ (ibid). To put it another way, bureaucracy and managerialism get in the way of personal responsibility, engagement, ingenuity and action. In an agile organisation there may be rules, but these are applied to processes rather than people – they are rules that enable rather than constrain. Burns and Stalker is chosen here only as a representative sample from an avalanche of papers that have made these points over the last fifty years and more, and yet – most organisations are still top-­‐heavy hierarchies with crippling rules and procedures; most people are under the thumb of job-­‐descriptions, boundaries and performance targets that bury their initiative, enthusiasm and talent under a mountain of rules. For an discussion of how discipline and agility can be complementary see Boehm and Turner (2004); for an interesting current application to disaster management, see Harald (2012). Dyer and Shafer (1998) discuss the role of HR in developing agility and organisational effectiveness; their paper is a good way in to the subject. Croccito and Youssef (2003) give an overview of organisational agility in which they stress the importance of information technology in its achievement. Patricia Shaw (2002) shows how complexity studies illuminate our discussion of agility and her book can stand as an entry point to an exciting literature of which there are two more samples below (Stacey, 1996, 2001 and Mitleton Kelly, 2010). Finally, don’t forget Peter Senge’s classic ‘Fifth Discipline’ (1990) and Gareth Morgan’s thrilling ‘Images of Organisation’ (1985). On the second day of Learnfest, Steve Chapman gave us a brilliant take on these ideas. At Impact, we focus on the development of what we call ‘mindful agency’. We believe that the best and fastest way to bring about organisational agility is to develop in ourselves the capacity to be self-­‐aware and situationally alert so that we are ready for the open, enabling conditions that are the organisational correlate. I have thrown Hunter and McCormick (2008) and Little (2011) into the list of references, as approaches to the subject of mindfulness as applied to organisations. So. Lets not forget that the word ‘agility’, applied to an organisation, is a metaphor. Metaphors are fabulous ways to pack a lot into a word, but they can end up creating an illusion -­‐ that we have found the magic key to everything, or that we all understand one another, when really we mean different things. The idea of organisational agility is clearly attractive and, as one participant said, an energising idea. It is an idea that, when we unpack it a bit, can takes us to a place where people do great things together, guided by high purpose and faith in humanity. www.impactinternational.com
© Impact International 2012
BETTER TOGETHER
Richard Little & Grahamae Broadbelt
References and Recommended Texts Boehm, B., Turner, R. (2004) Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed. Boston, MA: Pearson. Boje, D. (1999) Five Centuries of Mechanistic-­‐Organic Debate. Burns, T. & Stalker, G. M. (1961), The Management of Innovation. London: Tavistock. Crocitto, M., Youssef, M. (2003) The human side of organizational agility, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 103 (6). Dyer, L., Shafer, R. A. (1998) From Human Resource Strategy to Organizational Effectiveness: Lessons from Research on Organizational Agility. Working Paper, Cornell Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies. Harald, J. R. (2012) Agility and Discipline: Critical Success Factors for Disaster Response. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 654 (1). Hunter, J., McCormick, D. W. (2008) Mindfulness in the Workplace: An Exploratory Study Paper presented to American Academy of Management Annual Meeting, 2008. Little, P. R. T. (2011) Leadership and Mindfulness. Internal Briefing Paper, Impact Inernational (available on request). Mitleton-­‐Kelly, E. (2010) Ten Principles of Complexity and Enabling Infrastructures. In Mallin, C. et al. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives of Organisations: The Application of Complexity Theory to Organisations. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Morgan, G. (1986) Images of Organisation London: Sage. Orton, J. D., Weick, K. E. (1990). Loosely Coupled Systems: A Reconceptualization. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 15 (2). Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday. Shaw, P. (2002) Changing Conversations in Organizations: A Complexity Approach to Change. London: Routledge. Stacey, R. D. (1996) Complexity and Creativity in Organizations. San Francisco: Berrett-­‐Koehler Stacey, R. D. (2001) Complex Responsive Processes in Organisations. London: Routledge Weick, K. E. (1976) Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 21 (1). www.impactinternational.com
© Impact International 2012