Let's stop doing the wrong things better

 
The same old thing - but better. This is so often the approach we take in our own lives, communities and our organisations when we face . . . "tough problems". The same old thing doesn't work . . . we have to go beyond the approaches that got us here in the first place.
[Barry Boyce]

I'm setting up a new website for people to access more of our services online, because almost everyone I work with these days is too busy to get off the treadmill long enough to use them in their current form. Every week is wall-to-wall frenetic busyness and they spend four to 12 hours most weekends trying to catch up or mop-up (though not to organise, prioritise and plan properly - there's no time for that).

One client, a senior leader, recently worked 10 consecutive 15-hour days in order to deal with a crisis. Three senior managers assisted him, working 11-hours days over the same period. The event was handled under relentless stress; it upset many people and generated other serious problems. Now, a high-level inquiry into their collective performance is acting as a sink-hole for considerably more human energy. No wonder they're too swamped to respond to emails (150 - 250 a day) or stop for lunch. Even telephone discussions must be booked days in advance. What's going on?

We've constructed unnatural mega-systems that don't work. They are crumbling and collapsing around us, and we are the casualties - stressed-out, disconnected from each other, moving too fast without a moment for reflection or a really good conversation.
[Margaret Wheatley]

Even smaller organisations are not immune; they operate within larger systems that don't work. The organisational response to the sense of things being out of control is to create further systems designed to monitor and report, in an effort to regain control. This introduces further complexity and doubling-up of effort, which creates further stress.

The outcome I most hope for from the current meltdown of world-wide financial systems, is widespread acceptance of the need for fundamental and far-reaching change in the way we organise businesses, arrange organisations and social systems. What we are doing with and within them is just as unsustainable and inappropriate as the wider financial system within which they (sort-of and used to) work. Many workplace organisations are unnatural mega-systems (or smaller unnatural systems) which generate counter-productivity. They too are melting down and must change. If you're not aware of this phenomenon, you're not paying attention. That any of us believe we can somehow be exempt from its effects is a major part of the problem and one of its chief causes.

It's time to stop disguising the fundamental dysfunction by throwing vast resources at our problems in attempts to keep anachronistic contraptions together. Trying to keep them functioning without acknowledging this, take and waste increasing amounts of energy.

These are recent comments from people in mid-size to large organisations, some speaking privately, others in the news media, of their concerns about today's workplace:

• August 2008: We're trying to squeeze more and more out of the same old lemon; I'm now working harder than I ever have, with continually decreasing results. We keep trying to do the wrong thing better.
• February 2008: It [our organisation] is not the right tool for the job; it generates more problems than it solves. It's impossible to [achieve our purpose] with it but no-one's going to admit that. They think their jobs depend on not admitting it - and they may be correct.
• September 2008: We pussy-foot around, never really dealing with what we're here for or with what gets in the way. There's a whole herd of elephants in the room and in every closet. If this were a family, we'd all be in therapy or rehab.
• August 2008: [This recent crisis] exposed all the cracks in our services, relationships and the organisation; it's barely holding together.
• June 2008: I've disengaged from everything except what I get paid to do. I'm keeping out of and away from everything else because I can't cope with it; and almost everyone else is doing the same.
• July 2008: I enjoy my work and I'm good at it but my department is going under from overloading. I collapse on Friday night and finally relax around lunch-time on Sunday but start feeling physically sick that evening, at the thought of work on Monday.
• November 2007: The organisation is demoralised and dysfunctional. We work in a toxic environment, with no trust in management. Staff morale is appalling. People don't want to come to work. We are worn out. We are constantly compromising our standards beyond the point of comfort.

Any or all of those comments might have been made years or even decades ago. See Check Your Expectations of the Organisation

It's crazy, of course, to continue to work under these conditions pretending that somehow things will sometime soon change for the better. There is much self-denial about the reality. Some senior leaders try to control what is happening by taking decision-making increasingly to themselves, reversing former initiatives to empower people. Staff become frustrated, angry or rebellious about this of course, so leaders take increasing control to try to prevent that. They just don't get it.

Some take this approach: We're going to try another "solution". . . (to whatever is the current manifestation of "the problem", to stack on top of all the other previous solutions that temporarily buried symptoms or made problems more complex. Yes, I know other solutions haven't worked, but this one will. Trust me! We're going to re-structure . . .

Others latch on to someone's Grand Magic Answer - proprietary, sure-fire approaches to resolving everything - some sold as quick-fixes and others as comprehensive, long-term overhauls. Still others look for comprehensive training needs analyses, culture change initiatives or re-assignments of key people. All these things may be necessary under some circumstances but if they are seen as the Grand Solution, they're only temporary distractions.

Senior staff who report to these leaders may (and often do) secretly seek alternative employment in hope of avoiding similar circumstances or certain people, elsewhere. They don't get it, either; there are very few of our organisations that are really different (though there are some); structures influence behaviour.

When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.
[Peter Senge]

At this stage, our capacity to deal with what lies ahead is limited because its fundamentals - (i) the basic model we use to organise; and (ii) the global financial system, are self-reinforcing and limit creative thinking. They must change and they are; as I write this, many observers are reporting that the financial system is self-destructing. We have to think what is currently unthinkable, in ways we are not used to thinking. The trouble has been that we adapt easily to small-scale, incremental change and fail to see the massive shifts that eventually incremental shifts amount to.

[Adapting easily to small-scale, incremental change] . . . makes it possible to get up in the morning and not feel we're in a strange new world. It's part of our survival apparatus. And yet, this very capacity is a real handicap when it comes to dealing with slow-creep problems. We just don't see the change, and the thing about slow-creep problems is they may be slow-creep for a while, but then all of a sudden there's a non-linear shift and we find ourselves in a crisis.
[Thomas Homer-Dixon]

In answer to the creeping realisation that our organisations are unworkable and therefore unsustainable, we seem to find it more convenient to delude ourselves: No, wait! This must work! We've just got to try harder or try one more time. I'm not cynical about these efforts; I know how dedicated many leaders are about trying to balance organisational imperatives with respect for the needs of the people they serve. However, our organisations at best clearly waste between 40 - 60% of their potential and suffer from the same problems that existed 35, 45 and more years ago. Trying to solve these with the same thinking that created them has produced many small-scale improvements but only slight variations of what we've been tinkering with for years and only within systems which are fundamentally flawed. It just won't do.

People can put up with things if they hold out hope that they will get better, but not if they keep hoping to hold on to the present.

There is no genuine hope in those who intend to make the future repeat the present, nor in those who see the future on something predetermined. Hope . . . is engagement full of risk.
[Paulo Freire]

How can we engage with these matters?

I believe each of us has a duty to take responsibility for generating the causes of all the effects we wish to experience. We might begin by becoming very clear about the Bigger Picture of the mess we are in (think globally), by finding courage to point out the various elephants in the various rooms, by changing aspects of our own part in the problem, and by initiating change wherever we can (act locally). The key, I think, is first paying attention to the Big Picture.

• Because discussing these matters can be like asking a fish to describe water, learn to step outside of the system more often, to look at it objectively and thoughtfully. (Become an expert on the water quality.)
• Become acquainted with what thought-leaders like Peter Senge, Margaret Wheatley, Adam Kahane, Paul Hawken and Thomas Homer-Dixon are saying about these matters in their most recent books. Make the innovations you see in their global ideas which are within your power to introduce locally.
• Find out about the innovative approaches to organising taken by organisations such as Goretex, Easy Buy, Flight Centre, and the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation. There is very exciting experimentation underway in many places.
• Get outsight as well as insight: learn about the development of sustainable systems in fields other than your own. For example, small and medium-scale innovations are transforming systems for public use of cities in Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Portland (Oregon) and Curitiba (Brazil); these are systems designed for the future, not the Roman military.
• Make regular time to get off the treadmill, de-stress and think clearly - within every week and preferably within the working hours of each working day - even if for only a minute at a time. Pause and take three conscious breaths at frequent intervals during every day. Create time and energy by refusing to collude with wall-to-wall meetings; it's a grossly inefficient and counterproductive practice. Remember that the trick with stress-management is to get the benefits of the illness - quiet time, breathing space, conscious thought and enhanced meta-cognition for example, without experiencing the illness.
• Pay attention to your own feelings and the thinking processes that generate those feelings. Develop your habits of mind.

These practices won't in themselves change systems but they'll help you begin changing your own part in them. They may help you to pay attention, become more aware, more detached, and better able to notice what's happening at the Bigger Picture level, too.

You'd really, really like things to be well-ordered and predictable? Get over it.

Today a widespread hopelessness exists with regard to the possibility of changing the course we have taken. This hopelessness is mainly unconscious, while consciously people are 'optimistic' and hope for further 'progress'. They hope, but it is not given to them to act upon their heart's impulse, and as long as the bureaucrats do not give the green light, they wait and wait. Hope is neither passive waiting nor is it unrealistic forcing of circumstances that cannot occur. To hope is a state of being, that of intense but not-yet-spent activeness.
[Erich Fromm]

If you define serenity as blind acceptance of a bad situation, then I'm not serene. But if you define serenity as being willing to surrender to present circumstances while keeping a vision of a better future in mind, then I am that. I know things move slowly, and I know that massive injustice continues if nobody points out that the emperor has no clothes. . . . Serenity is being aware of both what is and what can be, and having the patience to get from the former to the latter.
[Joan Chittister]

© Copyright 2002 - 2008 Tom Watkins Group. All rights reserved.

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