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.

Posted in: Texture, Team, Self-organization by admin on Thursday, December 20th, 2007

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