The organisations we spend our life's time with
04-Feb-04
| Hi-trust organisations where people share the most vital news and value purposeful behaviours | Low-trust organisations where lots of politics is played between people. Crucially when an error is made or the environment changes, nobody has the courage to pass this knowledge up the organisation, nor would such messengers be rewarded. |
| Whole system is governed in way to make most productive win-wins between the 3 sub-systems of the exchanged based theory of firm namely: hierarchy, self-organising (interpresonal networking) and organsiational networking tranparency) | Whole system is governed in way that makes the least of (compounding the most conflicts between) the 3 sub-systems |
| Openly truthful organisations which choose the stakeholders and promises that they make so that all the value demands support (win-win) with each other | Organisations, which knowingly or unknowingly brand more promises than they can keep or have included a most powerful stakeholder whose demands become incompatible with others over time |
| Organisations which wish to contribute to the global impact of their industry recognising that the relationship connectivities of an increasing networked world make the dynamics of tranparency at the borders with partnering organsiations ever more vital over time because the world is too big and too fast changing for any organsiation to be a knowledge island | Organisations that believe that controlling "need to know" is more important than evolving transparency, and who are prepared to outsource the responsibility for the dirtiest or riskiest parts of their global industry. Tacitly, the leadership attitude often seems to be: we get to be the biggest by never being seen to be involved with where the greatest responsibilities lie. |
| An organisation where everyone is allocated some time and space and actively valuable contexts to discuss the practice of collaborative values. For example: what is love, faith, hope? what is trust? which values do we care most about at people to people levels which we don't see designed into organisational systems or in media? And is there any valuable reason why the values that you cherish most at a people to people level are not the ones we should most cherish transparently in organisational systems and mediated conversations, also CoPs etc? | An organisation where there is a corporate identity statement that commands the greatest human sounding values but most people have no idea how to practice these values in their working activities, and are either afraid to ask or have seen people be savaged who have inquired. |
| Proposed by Alan Rayner @ Maheo Faculty :Management is literally the facilitation of open space, allowing structure to emerge dynamically from the relational geometry of naturally transforming space and boundaries. Leadership is inductive, welcoming, openly serving and encouraging of diverse perspectives combined into complementary, holographic relationship. This permits action learning networks to connect and multiply deep human exchanges - of trust-flows and value-flows - sustained by support systems whose transparency resonates with emotionally intelligent characteristics. Organizations evolve in tune with natural processes, forming dynamic channels of communication capable of responding sensitively and creatively to local and global circumstances. | Proposed by Alan Rayner @ Maheo FacultyManagement leads everyone into fundamentally misunderstanding the origin of 'order' and 'coherence' by following an unrealistic, Cartesian 'box-logic' that imposes structure rigidly onto space. Whilst space is valued as 'room' in which to contain activities, attempts to divide up this space into discrete locations for particular people and practices, and only connect these, if at all, after-the-fact, literally produces an 'unholey mess'. Here, all feel acute discomfort, wastage of energy and resources is maximized and creativity is minimized. Leadership is assertive, authoritarian and partial-sighted. |
Details
- Author:
- Chris Macrae
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 04-Feb-04
- Categories:
- Emotional Intelligence, Knowledge Angels
- Sections:
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Some other left out authors
I don't see W. E. Deming or Joseph Juran on the list. Deming's "System of Profound Knowledge" is some of the core which underlies Senge's Vth Discipline and Juran's incessant teaching of project by project improvment for the quotidian basis for how many see the world of management today. Neither have flash or sex appeal, but the are important.
Left out?
Well, gee, let's see. I guess if you write The One Minute Knowledge Manager, The Unified Theory of Knowledge, and run kmtheory.com, and if Yogesh himself asks you (few years back) to 'please start contributing to brint again, because when you stop the traffic noticeably drops off the km forum'; if you explain why light is both a wave and a particle, something Einstein himself had trouble doing, and have it verified by someone with no less an academic pedigree than Reilly Atkinson; if you provide a western explanation for the Tao and define Quality as a function of the interdependence of opposites (something Pirsig himself couldn't arrive at after 20 years); define KM in 1997 as an oxymoron, then update the definition as a process that transforms intellect into intellectual capital; conclude that knowledge is 'the reality of the observer, whose fundamental purpose is to understand how the nature of the universe operates', and later to ascribe knowledge as our 'present moment awareness'; in this day and age, you'd think that would amount to something eh?
Guess not.
A tale of two organisations
I am not sure I would characterise organisations that can deal with their own issues as mature, I think it is an attitude and a set of core assumptions.
As an exampleof an organisation that really has its act together I nominate HSA in the UK. It is a health insurance company so in terms of the sector and the style of work entailed - call centre, sales team etc I would have expected an emphasis on task and style over substance. What you can see when you visit is a teremendously committed staff who feel that it is their company. All staff worked through an exercise to determine what their real work values were and they have built the company around them. As an example the call centre staff decided it really wasn't in the company's interest to move the call centre to India and are working to demonstrate exactly why. The boss thinks up schemes to deal with the issues that vulnerable employees have such as contributing to mortgage payments rather than pensions.
I am spoiled for chocie with the opposite but it could be a City law firm I know where the issues are all to do with whether partners are prepared to be managed by the current management team because the status of the partners is largely tied into earnings, which are directly affected by the effectiveness of management, and by the policies pursued. Law of course is a low trust domain before you even start.
The typology of trust here is that the positive spiral of trust is associated with a direct approach to common experience, rather than mediating it via authority, products or social assumptions. Knowledge and effectiveness always need to be found anew via real work. In poor organisations, real work is moved off the agenda in favour of control.
If anyone is interested I am setting up a course for execs interested in breaking out of the straightjacket.
does anyone have a favourite but forgotten author to profile?
- by which I mean how the author's work would differentiate between strong and weak organisations. I ask this now with Brint publishing an article suggesting KM is everyone's discipline. Their choice of top 58 authors who have so far defined KM looks peculiar to me- do tell us who you feel they have most left out
http://www.brint.com/new3.htm#011804
1 Alavi M
1 Hansen M
1 Oleary D
Stewart T
Argyris C
Hedlund G
Orlikowski W
Sveiby K
Barney J
Holsapple C
Polanyi M
Szulanski G
Blackler F
Huber G
Porter M
Teece D
Brown J
Kogut B
Prahalad C
Tsoukas H
Cohen W
Lave J
Prusak L
Vonhippel E
Daft R
Liebowitz J
Quinn J
Vonkrogh G
Davenport T
Leonard Barton D
Romer P
Walsh J
Drucker P
Machlup F
Ruggles R
Weick K
Duguid P
Malhotra Y
Sanchez R
Wenger E
Edvinsson L
March J
Schumpeter
Wiig K
Garvin D
Mintzberg H
Senge P
Winter S
Ghoshal S
Nelson R
Simon H
Zack M
Grant R
Nonaka I
Spender J
Hamel G
Odell C
Stein E
I have added a thread where you can nominate anyone missing from this list plus a favourite bookmark, and will keep it updated :http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=122764&d=1&h=417&f=56&dateformat=%o%20%B%20%Y
thanks Aidan
Where I am asked to develop trust from a mathematical view I also start with risk, before we can also map the opportunity of the big picture changes that networks or KM could facilitate. For big picture chnages look at sampling catalogues of those who have connected their life passions to KM language such as
http://131.103.209.102/webcast.html
or tell me where you get a one-click browse of the great human freedoms that KM could design into organisations systemically.
Aidan, what I would ask if you feel it is a fair exercise is for you to offer us one polar typology that most reflects the difference between a mature organisation in the sense of fully systemising your learning and leadership values in everyone's behaviours to one that is immature in those aspects of knowledge/behaviour. Is that an exercise you'd happily contribute to? This is the intent of this thread.
Authenticity?
Chris,
Your motivation as far as you have voiced it is to rate organisations as places to work and to use some external measure of trust to do so. By doing so you externalise the options presented to people: trust is about an organisation they might join not about them and their reasons for joining. I think this is unhelpful.
Of course there are major differences between how organisations behave. The instinct of many is to move towards standard meanings and definitions, towards inflated brand promises and the associated management of news, towards the application of external measures and motivations and/or sanctions as a way of dealing with uncertainty. A colleague of mine says "we would rather the organisation were dead and under control than alive and not under control".
To badge or league-table such organisations is to miss the point. We are not consumers of jobs and we do not need another brand promise from bad organisations that they are good employers. What we need to know is how to deal with such organisations when we have to, as we all do. And if at all possible, how to deal with them in such a way that opportunities for development are opened up rather than ending up colluding in oppression.
What organisations fail to understand is that some of their instincts send them in a spiral they don't want to go down. In particular they don't understand how to embrace risk. Advocates of transparency often unwittingly get in the way of people's ability to take steps in this direction.
My trust typology allows these effects to be unpacked. The three key types of debased trust (authority trust, commodity trust and network trust) all trap people in the sorts of effects you deplore, but are all common uses and meanings of the trust word. Authentic trust that is about me and my choices cannot thrive in publicness and only the greatest leaders are able to say what they mean in the full glare of publicity.
Just as you cannot have an island of knowledge you cannot have an island of open trust. There are plenty of people out gunning for those who suggest that we don't have to make oursleves miserable and cynical.
please help us develop typology of organisations
To start with our idea was to include profiles on:
1) hi-trust at interpersonal levels of sharing critical knowledge that puts the purpose of the whole firm above that of divisional interests
2) hi-responsibility, the bigger your impact on the world the more you should be involved in leading the deepest risk knowledges that your industry compounds (eg environment, cultural diversity etc)
3) transparency between organisational partners if we are to make the most of networks and digital flows of intelligence with all the emerging collaborative technologies
Do you have an extra profiling dimension to propose or a rewording of one of those drafted?
agreed but
I'd wholly agree with deming and juran as 2 of the 50 most knowledgeable people ever to have addressed organisational systems BUT then would I be right that KM has a kind of apartheid tenency against people that practised before the digital age began.
Seriously its not as if there are many in the Km world who bother bridging KM & learning Organisation ; in fact one of the first times I ever heard the phrase Km (circa 1995) it was at a talk given by the wonderful david Fahey; halfway through the talk he took out a handkerchief and asked the audience to join him with one sob at how this emerging subject called KM was studiously avoiding building on any of the LO that went before it. oh I know there are a few wonderful exceptions, but this bizarre top 50 list would probably disqualify any km person who dared link disciplines/practices
in case you think I am being prejudiced against KM; no worries i cant think of an organisational discipline in academic hands that tries to connect itself with other org disciplines; give me some bookmarks to prove me wrong, and I'll be overjoyed