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A Chrysalis Moment For Transforming Management?

A Chrysalis Moment For Transforming Management?

Steve DenningSenior Contributor
Leadership Strategy
I write about Agile management, leadership, innovation & narrative.

Today In: Leadership

An interesting comment came from Bernie Maloney. He wrote:

After reading this post, these ideas on transforming management brought four thoughts to mind.

The first thought: “Life is a series of well controlled breakdowns.” … In the mechanics of walking, there’s a point in a stride where the body is off balance. We just pass through this point so quickly that our minds ignore the imbalance. Another way of looking at this, again, I attribute the origin to Matthew Ferry, is that “Breakdowns lead to Breakthroughs.” We see this graphically in Virginia Satir’s change model.

The second thought: Bill Harris, of Centerpointe Research Institute notes on page 13 of this PDF.

‘Dissipative structures (such as human beings) flourish in unstable, fluctuating environments. The more ordered and complex a system becomes, the more entropy it must dissipate to maintain its existence. Conversely, each system has an upper limit, due to its level of complexity, of how much entropy it can dissipate. This is a key point. If the fluctuations from the environment increase beyond that limit, the system, unable to disperse enough entropy into its environment, begins to become internally more entropic, more chaotic.

If the excessive input continues, the chaos eventually becomes so great that the system begins to break down. Finally, a point is reached where the slightest nudge can bring the whole system grinding to a halt. Either the system breaks down and ceases to exist as an organized system, or it spontaneously reorders itself in a new way. The change is a true quantum leap, a death and re-birth, and the main characteristic of the new system is that it can handle the fluctuations, the input from the environment, that overwhelmed the old system. In Prigogine’s words, the system “escapes into a higher order.”’

In short, when systems get overly complex, they reach a chrysalis moment. The pass through a what appears to be a disordered or chaotic state, on their way to a different organization more capable of handling the inputs.

The third thought: The Cynefin model puts disorder as a distinct state at the very center of a state diagram. It gives a graphic representation to the idea that, rather than being at a different end of a spectrum from a structured state, disorder is at the very center of things, with ordered and un-ordered states around it.

This depiction echoes the idea that there’s a point in each stride where the body is imbalanced.

Our mind is generally programmed to crave order. When something new pops up, the reptilian brain goes into fight-or-flight, friend-or-foe sensing. If it can’t make sense of the state quickly enough, it perceives it as a threat, and starts protective behavior. One path is avoidance. Another path leads to falling back into patterns of behavior that had previously worked well for us.

This return to prior behavior is what Virginia Satir cited as the “return to normalcy” in her change model. The disruptive influence still exists when this path is taken, and perhaps that influence becomes greater over time.

Now, let’s get back to that imbalance point in a gait. Our minds just ignore it. Accepting that, as the Cynefin framework depicts, disorder is truly central, what’s needed is simply the ability to ‘blip’ past disorder, much like minds ignore the imbalance point in a gait.

The fourth thought: At the Meetup where I first learned of the Cynefin framework, the speaker, Simon Bennett, asserted that Scrum, and by extension, ideas like Radical Management, is a means to help a team get out of prior patterns of behavior and through a phase of disorder in a relatively controlled fashion.

To sum it up: The resistance to change in management is coming from the sense that a disordered or chaotic state is imminent, and that state is perceived as a threat to the existence of the current management ‘organism.’

Instead of a threat to existence, we’re truly at a chrysalis moment.

If, instead of resisting a shift, re-ordering is embraced, the system that emerges will be capable of handling the greater fluctuations and inputs that are currently leading to, well, let’s call it, sub-optimal performance of the existing organism.

We just need to figure out how to ‘blink’ so our minds ignore the temporary imbalance.

--oo0oo--

Those are great comments from Bernie. I too believe that we are at a chrysalis moment. However we have been here before and, sad to say, on those earlier occasions, we actually regressed.

A chrysalis moment in the 1980s

In the early 1980s, many U.S. industry and government leaders saw that a renewed emphasis on quality was necessary for doing business in an ever-expanding and more competitive world market. This was particularly striking in the auto industry, where firms like Toyota [TM] were producing higher quality cars at lower cost.

One response was the move towards lean manufacturing which reflected an effort to emulate the accomplishments of Toyota. But many of the implementations of Lean manufuacturing were travesties of what Toyota had pioneered: they took the cost cutting aspects of Lean but eliminated the respect for people which Toyota saw as crucial. Jeffery Liker wrote in 2003: “What percent of companies outside of Toyota and their close knit group of suppliers get an A or even a B+ on Lean? I cannot say precisely but it is far less than 1%”: The Toyota Way p.10.

In terms of Bernie Maloney’s analysis, the firms opted to view the world as complicated, rather than complex. They pursued mechanical outputs and financial returns, rather than improved human outcomes--delighted customers. They adopted mechanistic solutions that were far less than optimal and in essence didn’t solve the problem.
A chrysalis moment in 1990s

In the early 1990s, the diagnosis from Michael Hammer and James Champy was grim: American companies had become “bloated, clumsy, rigid, sluggish, non-competitive, uncreative, inefficient, disdainful of customer need and losing money.” It was clear that the system needed to be replaced by something different.

But what? In 1993, traditional management jumped on the bandwagon known as business process reengineering. The initial idea was sensible: to reengineer processes, essentially a new fix to the system—particularly processes that took advantage of technology to minimize handoffs and enable smaller teams to work on tasks from start to finish. Such process improvements could lead to modest gains in productivity, although the change was hardly the kind of reform needed to deal with the profound structural problems of the traditional workplace. Nevertheless, Michael Hammer and James Champy hyped this modest proposal into something they called “radically new,” “a fresh start,” “something entirely different.”

Business process reengineering was something done to the workforce. For most workers, it made jobs worse. Because business process reengineering didn’t affect the goals of business, which continued to focus on improved efficiency through downsizing and outsourcing, often using fewer, less educated, and cheaper people, the social problems of the workplace were aggravated. Nor was thought given to the strategic implications of the wholesale shipping of expertise overseas to countries where workers could be more easily manipulated.

Once again, firms opted to view the world as complicated, rather than complex. They They pursued mechanical outputs and financial returns, rather than improved human outcomes--delighted customers. They discovered, once again, that mechanistic solutions didn't solve the problem.

A chrysalis moment in 2011?

Now once again in 2011, we find ourselves in a situation where there is widespread recognition that management as practiced in most of the Fortune 500 isn’t working. We have another potential “chrysalis moment”.

As Gary Hamel wrote in his classic article Moonshots for Management: (HBR, 2009)

To successfully address these problems, executives and experts must first admit that they've reached the limits of Management 1.0 -- the industrial age paradigm built atop the principles of standardization, specialization, hierarchy, control, and primacy of shareholder interests. They must face the fact that tomorrow's business imperatives lie outside the performance envelope of today's bureaucracy-infused management practices.

In the earlier “chrysalis moments” in the 1980s and 1990s, firms weren’t willing to admit that mechanistic solutions didn’t work. Instead, they implemented new versions of mechanistic management that were different in name but essentially the same in substance.