This begins a sequence of posts which describe Karl Weick’s picture of change. Weick has formulated a theory of social organization that is, I believe, highly informative to the processes, principles and values associated with organizational agility. Hence, I shall unfold Weick’s theory in a series of posts, all the while making every attempt to relate aspects of that theory to the notion of beauty and agility in organizations.

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We begin by distinguishing an evolutionary model of human behavior and change, based on Donald T. Campbell. Very roughly speaking, the evolutionary process requires (a)variations (e.g. mutation, trial, experiment, etc.); (b) a selection process by which certain variations are favored and incorporated, and; (c) a retention system that rigidly retains the selected variations.

It should be noted that every mutation (variation) constitutes a failure in the reproduction of a previously selected form. As Campbell notes, “too high a mutation rate jeopardizes the preservation of already achieved adaptations.” If mutation rate is too high, then the system disintegrates. So, it pays for systems, particular elaborate ones (like human organizations), to snuff out too much variation.

What this means, however, is that what gets preserved are the adaptive traits of an environment long since passed. That is, the organization has retained an adaptation from the past, not from the present. This can be a fatal problem (think of the duck-billed platypus, or of any number of Good-to-Great companies currently in trouble). Hence the phrase: Adaptation is the enemy of adapting.

This suggests that moderate rates of mutation (variation) are necessary for evolutionary advantage and, hence, survival. This can be very hard to do in human organizations, particularly those that have been, or are, successful. Success is a powerful force in the retention part of the process. It is important to see that Retention systems are not merely repositories for the various rules, heuristics, and practices that have been selected. Retention systems affect subsequent actions, both in terms of Variation and of Selection.

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Let’s explore this last point in a bit more depth, since it brings us closer to the core of what we want to see here.

Consider the following picture:

First notice the use of the term ‘Enactment‘ in the place of the previous term ‘Variation.’ The term ‘enactment’ is more appropriate for human social systems since it more accurately depicts what is actually happening: that human beings themselves bring about the ‘variations’, in evolutionary terms, which define the process of organizing.

Enactment occurs, always, with regard to an ecological stream or event. As human beings we almost never deal directly with raw ecological data. By taking this action, or giving that aspect of data our attention, we are effectively filtering it, and chunking it, by which means we discern discrete events and situations.

Now, you may ask, what is the point of all this filtering and chunking? The point is to reduce equivocality. In fact, this is the point of much of what is done in organizations: reducing equivocality. Now, equivocality is not necessarily the same as ‘chaos’ or ‘noise,’ though it might look like that sometimes. Equivocality has more of the feeling of an unresolved ‘pun’ (read more about organizational equivocality here)

Selection brings about further filtration of the enacted information, some subset of whose results are ‘retained‘ by the organization. What is retained comes to form, over time, the technological, operational, and cultural systems by which the organization comes to accomplish its goals and by which it comes to identify itself. Those systems form the foundation upon which further Enactment and Selection are carried out within the organization.

It is by virtue of this feedback that organizational memory (retention) exerts its powerful influence over the processes by which organizations and people learn (or don’t), and hence the capacity for adaptability (or lack of it).

The ‘+’ and ‘-’ signs have a special meaning. ‘+’ indicates a positive force–the more of one thing engenders more of the other. ‘-’ indicates a negative force–the less of the one thing engenders more of the other, and vice versa. So for example, the stronger the Enactment of raw ecological data (i.e. the more narrowly defining the attention given to it, and the chunking applied to it), the stronger and more narrowly defining will be the Selection made. By the same token, the stronger and more narrowly defining the Selection process, stronger and more narrowly constraining will be the Retention process.

Feedback introduces a special property of any system, including this one. Consider the following example:


Two elements are in a feedback relation. The first set defines a positive feedback loop, while the second defines a negative one. In the first case, an increase in A will cause an increase in B, which in turn will cause an increase in A, etc., until the whole thing blows up. In the second case, a decrease in A will reinforce a decrease in B, and so on, resulting eventually in the disappearance of both.

Both of these loops are referred to in Systems Theory as reinforcing loops. In social systems, however, they are referred to as deviance amplification loops, since they amplify any deviance that appears. You can quickly assess whether a given loop is a reinforcing loop, since they will always have an even number of ‘-’ signs (0, 2, 4, etc.). In the loops above, sure enough, there are even numbers of ‘-’s.

Now consider the following contrasting loop:



This loop has one ‘+’ and one ‘-’. Such loops are referred to as ‘Balancing loops’, since the number of ‘+’s and ‘-’s balance each other out. In the above loop, more of A will result in more of B, which in turn will result in less of A, and so on–a ‘balancing’ loop. Balancing loops can be easily discerned by noting that the number of ‘-’s will always be odd. Balancing loops define systems that tend to reach equilibrium and not blow up, as reinforcing loops will do.

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Returning to our depiction of Enactment….

The ‘+/-’ in the feedback from Retention to Enactment and Selection indicates that there can be either positive or negative feedback. In organizing systems, negative feedback between Retention and Enactment/Selection indicate the presence of organizational ‘doubt’ or of organizational ‘forgetting.’ By contrast, positive feedback indicate the presence of strong ‘confidence’ and of organizational ‘remembering.’

Most organizations have bountiful confidence and remembering, and a dirth of doubt. Most managers are ever-concerned about ‘forgetting’ things, and hence manage the design of systems to intensify remembering. These systems not only introduce tremendous waste–the enforced remembering they induce engender entrenchment and organizational inflexibility.

Karl Weick maintains that it is more likely that organizations fail, not because they forget, but precisely because they remember too much for too long, and hence persist in doing the things they have always done, how they have always done them, regardless of how long it has been since the environment actually called for doing things that way (remember the duck-billed platypus).

A balance of confidence and doubt, of remembering and forgetting, engenders a healthy balance of retention and genuine learning, and hence of organizational adaptability.

More on all of this in coming posts.

Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd Edition, 1979.

In this post, I want to discuss two different notions of organizational change–episodic and continuous. The following discussion is based on an important publication by Karl Weick and Robert Quinn* in which they assess many recent ideas and theories of organizational change.

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Episodic change is discontinuous and intermittent, something to be carefully planned. It is a sporadic occurrence that hopefully brings the organization to a new and improved equilibrium, where it might remain, unchanging, for some period of time until the next perceived need for change launches another change episode.

Continuous change, by contrast, is emergent, cumulative and pretty much constant. Change is a way of life, not a burden. The organization is viewed, not as a static entity occasionally punctuated by periodic change, but as an inherently dynamic entity, ever-changing, ever-evolving and ever-unfolding.

Here are some further points marking the difference between these two:

(Adapted from Weick & Quinn 1999, p. 366)

Episodic Change	Continuous Change
Organizations are viewed as stable and inertial, in which change is something that is infrequent and, when it is to occur, it is brought about with a great deal of planning and deliberation.	Organizations are viewed as emergent and self-organizing, in which change is a constant and normal characteristic of organizational life.
Change is seen as an occasional interruption from normalcy and equilibrium and tends to be dramatic and driven externally (i.e. by skip-level management and above or by management consultants). Change is most often triggered by some external event after some period of inertia. (Inertia itself often arises from the conservative tendencies of an organizational culture, particularly in the light of some definitive success.)	Change is a pattern of endless modifications in work processes and social practice. It is driven by organizational instability and alert reactions to daily contingencies. Numerous small accommodations accumulate and amplify
Metaphor of organization: an organizational entity that is characterized by dense and tightly coupled interdependencies among its parts. For such an organization, efficiency is the by-word and ‘imitation’ is a premier motivation for change (e.g. Company X is doing Agile, maybe we should be doing that too).	Metaphor of organization: the foundation of an organization is the recurrent interactions by which its activities are conducted, rather than the fixed edifices on which its built. Systems are self-organizing rather than static and response repertoires to events and breakdowns are developed continuously. Responses are mindfully constructed in the moment, rather than predicated upon the mindless application of routinized historical responses.
Image of organization: One image that episodic change evokes is of ‘punctuated equilibrium‘–the notion that systems remain in relative stasis and then suddenly burst out in revolutionary change. During that period of stasis, the parts and their interdependencies converge and tighten further and further, resulting in decreasing capacity for adaptation, and a general decrease in organizational effectiveness. When change does happen, its often big and it is usually revolutionary.	Image of organization: One image that continuous change evokes is improvisation . Change “is often realized through the ongoing variations which emerge frequently, even imperceptibly, in the slippages and improvisations of everyday life” (p. 376). Improvisation happens when the time gap between planning and implementation shrinks so that ‘composition’ and ‘execution’ converge. The more improvisational an act (or set of acts), the shorter this time gap between composition and execution, between planning and implementation.
Change intervention theory: Change is created through intention. Change is ‘Lewinian’ (referring to Kurt Lewin, founding father of the field of organizational development): inertial, linear, progressive, goal-seeking, motivated by disequilibrium, requiring outsider (e.g. consultant) intervention.	Change intervention theory: Change is a redirection of what is already under way; it is ‘Confucian’: cyclical, processional, without an end state, equilibrium seeking (rather than goal-seeking), eternal.
Perspective on change: macro, distant, global.	Perspective on change: micro, close, local.
Key concepts: inertia, deep structure or interrelated parts, triggering, replacement and substitution, discontinuity, revolution.	Key concepts: recurrent interactions, shifting task authority, response repertoires, emergent patterns, improvisation, translation, learning.
Emphasis: short-run adaptation.	Emphasis: long-run adaptability.

A Final Comment

We will continue to explore these distinctions in future posts. However, I want to make one final comment before closing this post.

It can’t escape our attention in relation to continuous change that one of the things we often say about Agility is that it constitutes the capacity of groups and organizations to embrace change. Hence, continuous change may seem a perfect change intervention paradigm for Agile change and adoption. However, we want to be careful about what this implies, particularly in larger, more established, more complex organizations. In future posts, I will attempt to bring together a variety of research in order to orient our thinking and design approach to the adoption of agility in organizations.

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*Weick, K. E. & Quinn, R. E. , “Organizational change and development”, Annual Review of Psychology, 50, pp. 361-86. — You can get a pdf copy (694Kb) of the article here.

[NOTE: I wrote the following piece in 2003, and it appeared then on humansandcomputing.org]

The command-and-control approach to managing people infects many of our teaching, coaching, and managing situations. It all begins when we want to change or motivate another. By externalizing the other as separate from ourselves, and then endowing ourselves with the unique privilege of poking and prodding the other to do what we want them to do–or what we think they want to do, or what they should want to do–we employ what James Flaherty calls the Amoeba Theory of teaching and coaching.

I, as teacher or manager (or coach), can either prod you into doing or being a different way, or I can seduce you with sugar.

Or…

I can employ a different metaphor. Suppose that rather than resonating the subject/object paradigm, and the various notions of separation that paradigm generates, I were to view the world, and relations within it, as an ecosystem whose principle medium would be language. Through language, members of a given organization-be it a family, team, company, group of friends, etc.-create what Humberto Maturana calls consensual domains. Consensual domains are domains of agreements, foundational understandings, presuppositions, and shared perspectives.

Of constitutional significance to our experience within an ecosystem are the interpretive frames through which we come to understand the world and the events that transpire within it. Though for the most part we don’t notice them, interpretive frames play a major part in how we view ourselves, how we view others, our sense of what’s possible, our sense of what we want, and so on.

Interpretive frames are enacted either individually or collectively, since they are embodied in language.

Within the context of this ecosystem metaphor, we might begin to understand the role of a manager a little differently than is customary. Rather than one who effects change by manipulating others, a manager might be one who effects change by collaborating with others in the management of the interpretive frames that govern the ecosystem of concern (individual, group, team, department, entire company, conglomeration).

Managing interpretive frames means constructing situations in language such that the normal way of interpreting the world is momentarily disrupted. In disrupting the normal way of interpreting the world, we bring about, at least momentarily, an insight-an experience, that is, in which the usual presuppositions, emotions, and social constraints are suspended, allowing for the appearance of a fresh perspective.

When all who are affected by the occurrences within a social/cultural ecosystem participate in its management and its ontology, and when it is understood that our language and positions shape not only the ecosystem itself, but the occurrences within it, then the ecosystem can be said to have integrity.

Returning to the amoeba model: Rather than using needles and sugar to try to change the state of the amoeba (which usually doesn’t work for people), we change the nature of its environment so that it perceives itself, and its range of possibilities differently. In light of its differently perceiving, it can make choices that serve its own needs, while engendering an unfolding integrity in its environment.

Resources
Flaherty, Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others
Maturana & Varela, The Tree of Knowledge

[The following is adopted from a piece that I wrote on HumansAndComputing.org some years ago. It relates to my ongoing advocacy for the ‘texture’ of work, and the relationship between the presence of such ‘texture’ and the creativity and productive effectiveness of individuals and teams]

Malcolm Gladwell writes in “The Social Life of Paper” that the consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper has risen nearly 15 percent between 1995 and 2000. You might think this is just a matter of our not yet having broken old media habits–of not yet having embraced the digital world. But, according to Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, in their book Myth of the Paperless Office, there is a cognitive reason why people still prefer paper over pixels: paper provides unique affordances that computers cannot provide.

Here’s a story that Gladwell tells about air traffic controllers, who he refers to as the “quintessential knowledge workers.” Each air traffic controller uses three media: a computer radar screen, with little blips representing the planes he is responsible for; audio contact with the pilots and other controllers; little strips of paper they call “flight strips.”

Using these media, the flight controller constructs for himself a 3-D picture of all the planes he is responsible for. The construction and manipulation of artifacts within these media help the controller maintain situation awareness. On the subject of situation awareness, Mica Endsley writes:

“Situation awareness operates on three levels. One is perceiving. Second is understanding what the information means-analogous to reading comprehension. The highest level, though, is projection-the ability to predict which aircraft are coming in and when. You’ve got to be able to look into the future, probably by as much as five minutes.”

Those paper air strips are critical in helping air traffic controllers achieve situation awareness. Air traffic controllers often work in pairs, where each manipulate the strips. Movement of the strips, writing on them, etc., all play a critical part in the real-time activity of the situation awareness needed to safely land planes. Their movement act as cues which helps the controller keep the situation of his planes clear in his head. Moreover, when discussing the situation with their pairs, controllers move the strips around in order to animate various scenarios. As Gladwell observes, “The controller’s flight strips are like the piles of paper on a desk: they are the physical manifestations of what goes on inside his head.”

This, I believe, is a critical point. As human beings, we rely on aspects of our environment that are as much felt as they are thought, in order to trigger embodied memory and effective action–the quality of ‘flow,’ which Mihály Csíkszentmihályi writes so much about, which is important to forms of work requiring creativity and ingenuity.

In fact, the air-traffic-control center probably looks a lot like my office looks when I’m in a particularly creative flurry of activity: papers and piles everywhere. And yet, it is this apparent chaos that allows controllers to keep thousands of people safe each and every day.

There is movement afoot to force controllers to clean up there act-to get everything onto those nightmares of affordances: desktop computers! Expect to see an uptick in accidents and near-accidents.

I wrote elsewhere in this blog about the ‘texture’ of self-organizing teams. There I referred somewhat obliquely to the notion of a project ‘taskboard.’ Here, I want to describe what a ‘taskboard’ is and why I think it is so important to an agile team, particularly a team that is new to each other, or new to the agile way of working.

Here’s a picture of a taskboard (taken from Mike Cohn’s website):

Here’s a snapshot of an actual taskboard from a team I worked with some years ago:

In short, the taskboard shows progress for a given iteration or ’sprint’. At the beginning of an iteration, the team plans the work for that iteration, writing down tasks on index cards or PostIt notes, and pins or tapes them in the ‘To Do’ column. During the course of the iteration, the team meets each day to plan that day’s work. With a taskboard, team members can move tasks from the ‘To Do’ column into the ‘In Process’ column, or from the ‘In Process’ column into the ‘Verify’ column and so on. As the iteration unfolds, the team can readily see their progress as those cards move (or don’t move) across the board.

See Mike Cohn’s discussion of taskboards for more information on taskboards.

Yes, But … Why Taskboards Rather Than Software Tools?

Some organizations love to use software tools for managing iterations and sprints. I prefer taskboards for the following reasons:

1. They make things more visible in ways that make the most immediate and best sense to the team. Teams almost always find ways to customize their taskboard, through color coding of cards, adding stick-ons, etc. This makes it easy for a team member to, at any moment, look up at the board and see where things stand.

2. Taskboards facilitate more active and interactive iteration and sprint planning meetings. I find that when team members can plan together, informally, around a wall–taping and pinning work items up as they discover them and while they discuss the work they intend to do–with lots of chaos and talking and scheming, there is more aliveness and hence more alertness. Planning meetings go more quickly; they become an occasion for subtle forms of ‘team-building’ and bonding; and team members come to be more invested in the work since they so actively participating in defining it.

3. Taskboards facilitate more active and effective daily stand-up meetings. When teams can have their daily meetings around the taskboard, moving task cards as they discus their progress and what they commit to do for the day, everybody can see everything and, thus, have a clearer sense of what is happening. This builds confidence for team members. Also, it is another one of those ‘texture’ things which come together and support greater team collaboration, cross-functionality, and self-organization.

4. Gives managers a good reason to visit the room. With software tools its very easy to simply send management a report of the team’s progress. However, if there is a taskboard (along with burndown charts), a manager can walk into the team workroom and see in a matter of seconds what the team’s progress is. Meanwhile, they can get a sense of how the team is doing in other ways since, presumably, they will be working right there in the room.

5. Taskboards give teams yet another opportunity to put their personal stamp on their physical environment. When teams and groups can make their physical space their own it helps them in the important process of self-organizing since it allows them to define, together, aspects of their ‘identity’ as a team.

While software tools certainly help a team ‘manage’ their project, the loss of these subtler qualities is extremely expensive.

Art appreciation is a course of activity by which we take time to observe and understand our own relation to aesthetic artifacts such as paintings and sculpture.

Organizations, like paintings, are human expressions, with aesthetic import. In order to appreciate (as in art appreciation’) the processes by which organizing occurs, it is necessary that we move beyond the ratiocinative frameworks and ‘styles’ by which we habitually think about, talk about, and attempt to influence those processes. Essentially, this means that we develop a taste for expression (over explication), image (over sense), the particular (over the abstract), the proximate (over the distal), the lyrical (over narrative)—that is, an appreciation for the non-linear, the ludic, the parenthetical, and ultimately the inessential.

Does this mean that we must necessarily abandon the cognitive, the ratiocinative? Not at all. It’s just that analysis, measurement, planning, and structuring are all enhanced when approached with an appreciation for the aesthetic, the lyrical, the particular, and the proximate, and not just the explicative, abstract, general, and narrative aspects of such work.

The design of experiments shapes how mechanists observe. E.g.:

a + b + c = X

where a,b, and c are independent variables and X is a dependent variable. But because it would be impossible to include all of the variables which determine any given behavior, we limit the number of variables to something manageable, and then tack on an Etc term to the equation:

a + b + c + Etc = X

But it may be that in this Etc term is where the good stuff lies. All the small peculiarities, frailties, failures, small insights, passing dreams, idiosyncrasies, and moments alone and with friends that constitute the edges of who we come to be at any given moment – a coming-to-be that shapes the behavior of an organization, whether a person, a company, a composition, or a piece of furniture.

The question “Who selects ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’” is a question of power. Because, the one who defines the dependent variables is the one whose description of the system will prevail.

Given the command-and-control facts on the ground in most places (i.e. who defines ‘a,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c’)–whether in our own heads or in the social structures in which we find ourselves–Etc is often the only refuge of democracy and native organization.

[Related article: “Texture”]

Karl Weick, luminous organization theorist writes:

If an organization is narrow in the images that it directs toward its own actions, then when it examines what it has said, it will see only bland displays. This means in turn that the organization won’t be able to make much interesting sense of what’s going on or of its place in it. That’s not a trivial outcome, because the kind of sense that an organization makes of its thoughts and of itself has an effect on its ability to deal with change. An organization that continually sees itself in novel images, images that are permeated with diverse skills and sensitivities, thereby is equipped to deal with altered surroundings when they appear.*

The images and metaphors we use to describe our organizations is one of the ways in which we enact them–it is, that is, one of the ways in which we bring that organization into Being. And yet, it is common to think of our descriptions as merely…well, descriptive, not enactive.

This may be why “process improvement” so often fails to engender the kinds of transformation hoped for: it does little more than improve the conditions that are given by the descriptions that brought us to where we’re at to begin with.

Lots of change. Little transformation.

* (from http://www.onepine.info/pweick.htm, retrieved on Aug 16, 2007)

Within the context of the inquiry to which BeautifulSystems.org is dedicated, texture is a special term (it has its own category). So, here I want to say a few general things about texture.

Here are some things you’ll find on Wikipedia:

“Texture refers to the properties held and sensations caused by the external surface of objects received through the sense of touch”

In painting, texture is described as the “feel of the canvas based on the paint used and its method of application”

In music, it’s defined as “a way to vaguely describe the overall sound of a piece of music”

In computer graphics, texture is “a bitmap image applied to a surface in computer graphics”

Here are some points that we may glean more generally from these definitions:

Texture is sensual, not conceptual–it requires a body.

Texture brings other more ‘noticeable’ elements together.

Texture is emergent–it comes about through the interaction of those other, more ‘noticeable’, elements.

Consider, for instance, the texture of a book. The book has a certain weight when you hold it. It has a particular smell to it. The pages have a certain feel as you run your fingers over their surfaces–a feel that comes about both from the texture of the paper itself and from the very minute protusions on the page that are formed by the ink. the cover has a certain texture.

In addition, the book has other kinds of textures. The font, the setting of the letters. The page layout. And, perhaps most generally, there are the things we do in order to facilitate our reading– the direction in which we turn pages, the scanning orientation (in English, for instance, we move our eyes from left-to-right, from top-to-bottom of the page). The location in the book of footnotes and citations.

All of these aspects of the book don’t just ‘frame’ our experience of reading–in fact, reading would not be reading without these things. (Amazon’s new Kindle attempts to recreate many aspects of book reading, acknowledging the loss of texture which current online reading experiences yield).

Organizations (companies, software source code, communication, etc.) have textures as well. Those textures describe the every-day-ness, the mundane qualities, of those organizations. They define what it’s like to dwell within those organizations (as an employee, as a programmer, as speaker or listener).

Subsequent writings on this topic will continue to flesh out this important aspect of organization, bringing attention to those aspects of organization that are often ignored, often relegated to the inessential. What if, as leaders and organizational change facilitators, we were to turn our attention to the transformation of texture? What would that look like? How might it be manifested, in practice?

Stay tuned.

A Schenkerian graph offers a reductionist view of a passage, or even an entire work, of music.

Here’s a picture of one:

This is a graph of J. S. Bach’s Prelude in C Major from Book I of the Well-tempered Clavier. The numbers along the top refer to measure numbers; those on the bottom refer to the deep level ‘harmonic movement’, in this case I-V-I, the canonic Tonic-Dominant-Tonic harmonic movement that defines the deep level harmonic structure of music from Bach to Chopin.

There is a story (perhaps apocryphal) that musicologist/pianist Charles Rosen, when shown a Schenkerian graph, exclaimed: “Yes, but where are my favorite passages.”

The point here is that reductionist views of any organization (whether a piece of music or a company) facilitate particular activity. The Schenkerian graph allows a musician (or any other musical observer) to view the larger musical movement as a whole. Such a view facilitates the accomplish of certain kinds of work that would not be possible otherwise.

And yet, when listening to the C Major Prelude, we are struck by the infinitesimal qualities of the performance, of the piece. The shadings in color, the precise tempi, the phrasing, the use of the pedals (if performed on a modern piano). These are the things that constitute our moment-by-moment engagement. Not that we don’t care about its deeper structure–and not that those deeper structures don’t ultimately frame our experience as well. Its just that, in our beguiled attraction to the abstract, the general (an attraction that seems to hold particularly within business and engineering worlds), our capacity to see distinctions and particularities–to see contexts–becomes dulled. We and those whom we see become dull. And the decisions and actions which emanate from such a viewpoint suffer the loss of those very distinctions.

Much can–and will–be said on this point regarding human organizations.

Often ignored in our reductionist quest for quicker access, organizational texture is the stuff of the everyday, the mundane, the material. And yet, it may be in those small, infinitesimal moments, where what’s most real occurs.

I once worked with a team that was struggling to come together as a team. Observing, for the first time, one of their project planning meetings, I saw that their work was stored in an Excel spreadsheet and that planning was conducted using a projection of that spreadsheet. Team members assumed the roles of spectators while the project manager and business analyst described the work items. The room was effectively a movie theatre of corpses.

For the next planning meeting (since this was an agile project, meetings were being held every two weeks), I invited the team to use index cards and for they themselves to assemble themselves during the meeting and write up their own work tasks. They agreed to try it. During that next planning meeting, chaos ensued: people were talking at the same time, scribbling indecipherable items down on notecards. By the end of the meeting, the team had covered the white board with hand-written tasks. They were fully engaged and ready to get started on their next iteration.

The low-tech index cards, with nearly indecipherable handwritten tasks, provided for those small, almost unnoticeable, infinitesimal, moments by which people most naturally come together.

The subsequent presence of those cards on the team’s taskboard–with idiosyncratic (and, again, often illegible) handwriting–reminded the team of who they are for themselves and each other. This was the beginning of that team self-organizing and coming together as a team.

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In denying or otherwise ignoring the qualitative dimension of human activity and interaction, modern management arrests the capacity for teams to emerge within their own coherence, to find their own humanity. Once this capacity is freed, however, it becomes an organization’s most vital strength.

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Commenting philosophically on matters related to this, Theodore Adorno writes:

“To yield to the object means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments. Scientific objectification, in line with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, tends to eliminate qualities and to transform them into measurable definitions. Increasingly, rationality itself is equated more mathematico with the faculty of quantification. While perfectly corresponding to the primacy of a triumphant natural science, this faculty is by no means inherent in the concept of the ratio itself, which is blinded mainly when it balks at the idea that qualitative moments on their part are susceptible of rational conception. (Adorno, 1995:43, emphasis added).

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Adorno, T. W. (1995). Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.

Areas of ignorance are never really resolved through research and science—they merely shift:

“From a suitable distance, we cannot soundly claim that the historic development of science has proved nature to be understand in a unique way…. What has happened is that the ground of the unknown has continually been shifted, the allegory has continually changed (Holton, 1965, xxiii)

Areas of ignorance remain constant in size. If this is so, then ambiguity and ambivalence of conceptual orientation will be more adaptive and accurate than clarity and certainty.

Nevertheless, sometimes clear and unambiguous concepts are needed in order to get certain kinds of things done. That is, we need to leave out, from time to time, the vagaries and exceptions that lend ambiguity to our observations and formulations. This constitutes a tool-oriented notion of conceptualization. This is fine, so long as we don’t reify the reductive methodology itself.

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Holton, G. 1965. Introduction to the issue ’science and culture’. Daedalus 94: v-xxix.

Most of the things we deal with in organizational occurring are of the nature of relationships and processes, or aspects thereof. E.g. capital, revenue, P&L, stock, throughput, turnover, cost, waste, capacity, etc. The problem is that processes are elusive and hard to describe. It is this very difficulty of processes that prompts managers, out of frustration, to metrics “and other static pastimes” (Weick, 1979:43). By mistaking these snapshots for the realities, they often end up tinkering with the wrong things. In the process, delicate and subtle balances that may be in place are upset which may in turn cause problems for which measures or metrics don’t yet exist. Consequently, things can appear to be going swimmingly well, when in fact they’re not.

Use of lots of nouns in our descriptions of organizations (see, there’s another noun) imputes a spurious character of stability to organizations. Weick writes: “In the interest of better organizational understanding we should urge people to stamp out nouns” (Weick, 1979:44).

Weick, K. E. (1979). The Social Psychology or Organizing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.