The Self‐managing Organization

Citation

Jaffe, D.T. (1999), "The Self‐managing Organization", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 12 No. 6, pp. 562-578. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.1999.12.6.562.2

While writing this review, I had a visit from a diverse team of leaders from a Scandinavian telecommunications firm, who were visiting the USA to help them with the strategic planning and redesign of their company, which was growing through cross‐national mergers, reregulation, and facing increasing competition and warp‐speed redefinition of their market and technology. Their dilemmas were – how can we all begin to work as a team across so many boundaries, how can we change people’s expectations and mindsets about how to work, how do we all work together, and how can we change the ingrained culture fast enough to remain relevant in the new global business world. They wanted to know not why to change, or what direction to change – because that could not be clear as they were having to improvise as much as strategize – but how to get the whole organization to engage the problems and work together to learn and change.

We talked about how the imperatives of change in the system did not seem realistic given the realities of people. People did not change like systems, they could not be reprogrammed at will. There were limits to their capability, and to their ability to take in new information, and move in new ways in concert. I shared my sense that often companies had made changes in systems and strategies, but the people were still living in old structures, mindsets and ways of working that were probably a generation out of date.

Our talk focused on the ideas that are passionately, but also cogently and practically expressed in the new book by Ron Purser and Steve Cabana. The topic is not new – there are thousands of management books that present neat theories of how companies need to change, or what they should do, or lists of best practices that should be adopted. But as we read more of them, we find ourselves having an increasing sense of, well of course it would be good if we do all this, but somehow we don’t. We read the book about what to do, but we don’t find their advice workable, or able to be put into practice. If only our organization, or our leaders, would …we dream to ourselves. The pioneers and visionaries, even those at the top, are frustrated because they can’t get the rest of the organization to take up their obviously needed ideas.

Purser and Cabana have put together a rare management book, a book that is not made up of prescriptions and story‐bits from successful companies, but rather a roadmap of how a company can mobilize a large number of intelligent people to work across all sorts of organizational and team boundaries, to put fast, deep, sustainable change into action. They build solidly on theory – ideas from the systems group of the Tavistock Institute, developed over 50 years by Fred Emery, Eric Trist, Ken Rice and others. These theories defined the socio‐technical approach to organizational change, where technical and human considerations are integrated through processes of collaborative change. These ideas have found their ways into organizations through the practice of organizational development, and in such “neo” socio‐tech approaches as the reengineering and systems integration processes of the large consulting firms.

In moving into the mainstream, there has been a tendency to forget some of the key wisdom of these approaches – that they are founded as a response to experts defining for the organizational drones how the system should run, and then leaving the plan to be implemented by the workers. Open systems design ideas from Emery and colleagues began with collaboration and creating of design not by outside experts (who could nonetheless be drawn on as resources) but by the people who had to carry them out. The issues of getting employees to understand and commit to a change were radically reduced when the same employees were the designers of the changes. As the technical demands of new systems become increasingly complex, the tendency has been to give more and more control to outside experts, and for the organization to have less and less connection and commitment to the results.

Purser and Cabana have written about the critical need for collaborative change with widespread meaningful participation of a large multi‐leveled cross‐section of the organization, at times including literally everyone. They are on firm theoretical grounds as they make their case, but then they move ahead, and present the actual examples of nine real, large, often very traditional organizations, as they engage their knowledge workers in rapid strategic change. By reading about companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Syncrude Canada, American Express, as well as less traditional companies like Charles Schwab and Microsoft, you hear from real leaders, showing how they applied rapid strategic change to solve real businesses crises.

The book combines detailed cases with theory and practical commentary. It is one of the most balanced management books I have read – equally attuned to theory, case studies (validated and given by the actual participants, with names and data), and practical, how to do it accounts of how to apply these methods.

The key element of the rapid strategic change process is an innovation by Fred and Merrelyn Emery, using large cross‐sectional groups from a company to define the environment, the business needs, the possible directions, the vision and then map the actual steps to change. They call this the “search conference” – a name for one event that is the cornerstone of a whole approach to change. (Note that a variant of this approach has been popularized by Marvin Weisbord as the “future search”, a form with similar underpinnings, but somewhat more limited use.) Related methods have also been used powerfully by Kathie Dannamiller, Harrison Owen, in the Work Out process at General Electric, and others. These methods have been grouped as “large‐group” change methods because they have defined the technology of working with groups in excess of 50 people to define, together, pathways for change that are implemented immediately.

If there is a single theme and single tool that I think will define the first decade of organizational change in the new millennium, it is the theme of rapid strategic change and the tool of open systems methods – both of which are the subjects of this book. This readable book that should be read by every organizational leader who is faced with creating fast, somewhat improvisational change in a difficult and demanding organizational environment.