Challenges Implementing RO Concepts in Various Cultural Settings

Speaker A One of the things that does concern me about the work I've had a view, perhaps naively, that a lot of this work is cultural and it applies in lots of different situations. And one of the things that's encouraged me about that is that we've done quite a bit of work a across organization. So it's not just business. We've worked with schools, we've worked with hospitals, we've worked with NGOs, we've worked with public sector organizations and fine, we've worked with young people. We've worked with indigenous communities, particularly aboriginal communities in Australia. And all of this material, particularly the values, understanding system symbols and behavior resonates very, very well across those cultures. The one culture where I have or set of cultures perhaps now I should be clear in my own definitions the places where I have had difficulty with this material is Russia and Eastern European countries. And what I realized is maybe the overall theories still work, but some of the assumptions about what a good organization is is much more challenged, I found, by the Russian work. Let me give you an example what we found in the organization. One of the organizations that we work with, but it was echoed right across the different sites and parts of the organization is that when tasks were assigned to people, they're assigned as orders. And in fact the Russian translation is I order that you will do so and so. And there's no feedback at all from the team member, our team leadership and team membership and the notions of discretion, of use, of capability, et cetera, et cetera, suggest that it is rather good and productive if people engage in some dialogue and discussion and share their ideas and so on. And that there is a difference between consultation, discussions and so on which can be very positive and you don't have to confuse that with the nature of authority. So the fact that you ask for opinions and ideas does not necessarily undermine the authority of the leader who then decides what to do if that's the nature of the organization. And what we found was that's highly resisted in the Russian organizations. Now, there was a very good explanation for that in that one of the general managers gave us an answer when we were getting no encouragement whatsoever from implementing these models and ideas and discretion and discussion through teams. And he said, you must remember that in the past if someone questioned their boss, there's one of four results. One, they are exiled. Two, they lose their job. Three, they put in jail or four, shot. This does not encourage contribution, but there seems to be an acceptance of that. And maybe I need to look at my own mythologies that generally in working in that society at all sort of different levels, there is this notion that that is an appropriate way to behave. So if you're in a Russian business meeting, for example, there's very little discussion there is assertion and counter assertion and it seems to be much more as we would see on the basis of power and who can shout the loudest or bang the table the hardest. And in fact, if you go into that society not knowing that you think that they're rowing all the time but there doesn't seem to be in anything like the sort of discourse that we would expect and or encourage. And what results from that is I think maybe based on the culture, a history of targets and outputs, that's all that matters. And then you do everything you can to actually change the targets so that you can achieve them. But if you don't achieve them, it seems to me the main work of the organization is to avoid punishment. So the accountability systems are actually avoidance systems. But one of the things I've noticed is that across organizations in the west as well, the accountability, so called accountability systems are in my experience not very evident in that people talk a lot more about accountability than enact it. So people will talk about I am accountable for X-Y-Z and so on, but whether they are actually held to account, and I don't mean that in the Russian punishing way, actually asked to literally give an account of their work in that area that may be very patchy. And so while it's important when you do a systems and symbols audit in the organization, if you look at the systems and say well, what are people actually held to account for? Or what actually really matters, obviously drives the behavior and that often does not bear responsibility, doesn't correlate with what they would describe as their accountabilities. So for example, there would be a lot of people in the organization would be we talk about cross functional accountabilities but actually nobody holds them. If you look at the reward structure in the organization they're not rewarded for any of that. And then people then talk about oh, we will work in silos and how do we do that? And then they say oh, it's a hierarchical system, it's because it's requisite organization or whatever, which is all actually quite rubbish. It's actually looking at the mismatch between the systems and the apparent behavior that's required and what people are actually held to account for. And again, people will read in terms of social process and symbols it's not just what's obviously written down or obviously authorized, but what the leaders actually do, what you actually get called to account for. And again we go back into what's the symbolism and then how that symbolism then creates new mythologies, new stories in the workplace that people tell each other about what really matters and what really doesn't matter.