Changing the Organization Paradigm

Speaker A Ken actually said to me that he wants to change the paradigm, the dominant paradigm of organizations over the next 15 years. He was afraid after this conference there'd be nothing left for him to do, and he wanted some guidance in how to go about doing that. So I've looked at that question and I said, Change from watt to watt. And that's the first thing we'll look at and move on from there. And the word missing on every page of this is draft, first draft. This is just some initial thoughts about it. The description of both paradigms is not meant to be definitive. It's just a starting and a sketching of some notes. But for me, it starts with the engineering. What are the methods and templates that in the book requisite organization? These are what are suggested that you do actually do within the workplace. And what's the kind of stuff that you pick up when you're looking at the management column in your newspaper or even the Harvard Business Review. So in terms of engineering, the art grounded in a science, the application of the science to the workplace, how do you get people to do things? I think in the dominant paradigm, there's this notion of, well, if you hire people who just absolutely want to do everything, that you won't have to direct them or you build the right culture. I was in a one day workshop at the Schulich School of Business at York University about a month ago, and the whole day was focused on innovation. And the only topic anyone talked about was culture. You need to get an innovative culture. And sort of an hour into said, you know, two words I haven't heard here are strategy and innovation. Sorry. Strategy and accountability and blank looks. People didn't get it that if you hold people accountable and support them to do it, to aggressively pursue your strategy, don't you think people will have to do new things and maybe do things in a new way? And won't that end up with a whole workplace that's doing new things? And won't that end up in an innovative culture, but they start on the opposite direction? So issues of how do you treat conflicts between two people interpersonal? Or is it between roles and lack of clarity? Do you build teamwork by helping people understand and like each other? Or do you coordinate the work they do with each other? Diagnosis how do you get to the root cause of a problem? And the only method that I see over and over again in the dominant management literature is correlation. How do the people who do it well do it? How do the people who don't do it well do it? I think that's part of those of you who haven't seen it get a hold of Elliot's 2002 APA Division 13 paper where he says, this is a model. This is a prescriptive model of how things ought to operate. And like a dot, you know, you don't go to your doctor and say, hey, this is what's troubling me. And your doctor doesn't say, these pills work. For the last few people who had similar symptoms to you, why don't you try it? Your doctor has a theory. So major differences in that, in the engineering. What about the science underneath the engineering? The dominant paradigm, I think, is that people are greedy, and greed, fear, and to some extent, peer pressure is what will get them to do what you want them to do. As versus we all want to work, and we all are motivated, self motivated, to work. And the job of management then is simply to focus and enable. That the notion that if we don't all vote on a goal, that we won't be committed to it, versus, hey, my manager has set this target for me. I've been treated with respect for it. I've been listened to. I don't think it's the right place to go, but I will work with full commitment on it. These are major differences in understanding mean. And this goes back to Harold's comment about what's the science underlying the engineering. So what's the psychology? We have a different understanding of the psychology conceptual framework, going back to Kuhn's notion of a paradigm, the conceptual framework that frames science. And this is the stuff that's not decided by one particular experiment. But how do we go about organizing data? What are the things that we consider possible? When I first met Elliot, I said, do you really believe in these curves? Said, well, what's your problem with it? I said, well, it's not egalitarian. And he said, what's your definition of that term? Well, I get the notion that anyone can do anything that they apply themselves to if they have enough opportunity, said, do you really believe anyone can do what Einstein did or what Mozart did? And in an instant, it kind of reframed my notion. Talked with someone else who comes from a whole other paradigm, and when they respond to that question, they said, well, no, only Einstein could do what Einstein did. Only Mozart could do what Mozart did. And their point was, there is no way, no possible way, you could line one accomplishment as bigger or smaller than another. These things are inherently equal. So the conceptual framework is the stuff that a single fact, a single experience, a single experiment will not change. It takes a whole. And this is the stuff, really, that Ken is talking about changing. So our conceptual framework also says that capability is not distributed continuously. There are useful ways of stratifying it, even the notion, and this comes out in a couple of Elliot's more obscure papers, but you will see people talk about the profit that a product has or the profit that a department generates. And really, when you look at it, requisitely the word profit applies to a strategic business unit to nothing smaller than that. These are major ways of organizing how we think. And they're very resistant to change. Philosophy of science even what do we consider good science to be the dominant model is an empiricist model, by which I don't mean empirical. It's not just that there are data, but if you look at good to great, for example, Jim Collins in the beginning says, hey, folks, I want you to know I'm not here to prove a theory. I started without a theory. And I think our belief about science is sorry, everyone has it may not be a full blown theory, but we all have our ideas to begin with. Which is why, if you look in the index of his book, you don't find the word structure. You don't find the word accountability. You do find personality. Because he inherently had a theory. He had a way of organizing his thoughts. And our notion of science is that there is such a thing as a theory. And so again, the notion of science in the dominant paradigm is very much correlation based. Let's look at good versus great, but not the notion of let's build an integrated theory. And that is a system where all of the parts are interconnected. So we come from the tradition of general system theory rather than an atomistic thing, which is really what's dominant out there. Ken had asked me to ask Ken Kratic, so how is it that Deming changed the paradigm and called Ken up and asked him the question? And Ken said, what paradigm change when you look this diagram? I couldn't fit this neatly in a PowerPoint. But really what he said was, yeah, of what Deming said. What gets heard, if anything, is re engineer your processes and maybe train your people of what Elliott said. If anything gets through. There are different levels of work and different levels of capability. What doesn't come through in Deming is things like drive fear out of the workplace, substitute leadership for all of the other stuff that you're doing. The major thing I find missing in the application of requisite organization is managerial accountability, managerial authority. And what the things have in common that don't get through in either theory is, in Jerry Harvey's terms, they are the anacolitically threatening parts of the theory. These are the things anaclesis if you're not familiar with that term, read Jerry's the Elephant in the Parlor or who the Hell is Elliot Jacks? Anaclesis. That which we lean on, and in particular in this case, what we lean on for our sense that we will be judged acceptable by other people. These are the leadership. Managerial accountability, managerial authority are things that in and of themselves outside the system of management lead a manager to worry I'm holding this person accountable. Will I be sitting alone in the office Christmas party? Can I do this and get away with it? So these are the things that don't get through the harder things that require some sort of change in the way the person thinks about these things. Coon said that there is a particular path to the way a paradigm changes. An example I give is in terms of what do you pay people for? And I've seen this, I've worked with clients sort of along this path. And it starts with, well, what's your beginning paradigm? We pay people for what they produce and then you get an exception to the rule. And that's what happens in every paradigm. You apply it to a broad area, it works out, you bring it to another area and suddenly that way of organizing doesn't quite make sense. And someone now is achieving extraordinary results, but not because of what they did, but because the environment, they lucked out or they failed to accomplish what was set out at the beginning of the year. But it's not their fault. Circumstances changed. It made it more difficult. And the manager will say, then it's really not fair to give you a bonus or It's really not fair to penalize you. They know that because they see the effect of the environment on that output. That exception then becomes bothersome. I start worrying about, well, why is that an exception? What's going on over here? And at some point the exception becomes the rule. And I start realizing, you know, the reason I thought it was unfair before was this person was working really hard. They worked full out, they're really capable. So was this other person. They were working at the same level. The difference in their output had nothing to do with them. It had to do with the environment. Maybe what I really am paying for is how effectively did the person work? Not what did they accomplish, but how well did they work to get that accomplishment that then becomes the new paradigm. This is something to do, I think, with how we have to move things forward. And in terms of moving forward now we're really in a speculative space. This is well beyond me. But Ken Shepard had suggested I talk with a few people. Coon said the same thing that Elliot said and that Sorry, which was the Max Planck. Some people are going to have to just grow old and die and we can foster that or we can let nature take its course. Second, when Ken's talking about this change, somehow it comes to my mind as because my family is just firmly in Democrats in the States and I'm always getting into arguments with them when I go down to the States for American Thanksgiving about, all right, how big was Ronald Reagan? Because they all think he was an idiot, which most left leaning people do, in my experience, and which I did again until my first meeting with Elliot. And one of the things was when Barry Goldwater was crushed in defeat. Reagan said, in 20 years, I'm going to rebuild the Republican Party. And lo and behold, he did it. It has that kind of a feel. This is not a change within a managerial hierarchy. This is a social change. It's much more dispersed. Talking to people. I got all kinds of possible targets that we markets that we might target. George Weber suggested high school students. He says, you know, by the time someone's well into the workplace or even into university, it can be too late. We need to shape their values so that they understand what a good working relationship is, what fairness is, what trust is, obviously. CEOs and target the early adapters first directors of organizations if we can get to them, investors. Another thought is if we can target a geography or an industry or even better, an industry within a geography. So we get three or four competitors somehow taking this on. And this depends on the CEO's values and willingness to do it. But if this is seen as a competitive market sorry, as a competitive advantage, it could drive things. And the last comment is probably the most forceful thing we can do, the most effective thing we can do is to get published evidence, well documented, well researched, of yes. This is how this company increased its profits significantly. That, I think, is what's going to get us on the COVID of Business Week. That's what's going to get us into the COVID of Fortune. It's going to be some of the work that some people do with organizations that gets documented along the way. Enough people doing that that it can catch attention