Uncertainty, Discretion and the Tricky Business of Organizing

"Uncertainty appears as the fundamental problem for complex organizations, and coping with uncertainty, as the essence of the administrative process."
James D. Thompson, "Organizations in Action"

“The greater the task uncertainty, the greater the amount of information that must be processed among the decision makers during task execution to achieve a given level of performance. The basic effect of uncertainty is to limit the ability of the organization to preplan or to make decisions about activities in advance of their execution.”
Jay Galbraith, “Organization Design”

"When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that person is crazy."

Dave Barry, Miami Herald

What was I thinking?! When I did the summer issue of Random Riffs, I told you that I planned to take a look at the relationship between jazz and complexity theory in September. Here it is halfway through October and I’m only just getting around to it. I must have had that crazy idea on one of the three days it didn’t rain this summer and the sunlight likely made me giddy! The problem isn’t that I don’t have enough material for the undertaking; it’s that I have too much. Enough, in fact, for an essay. The challenge is to keep it to newsletter size. Well, a promise is a promise so here goes.

The organizing challenge is twofold: 1) deciding what has to be accomplished and 2) figuring out how to go about doing it. Ends and means, if you like. Uncertainty can attach to either or both or neither of these task elements. The challenge, as Thompson points out, involves figuring out how to cope with it. And figuring that out has to begin with a way of thinking about it; conceptualizing it. Welcome to Complexity Theory 101. Consider this matrix.

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Southwest – Simple. Here’s where you know exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to go about doing it. This is Frederick Winslow Taylor country. Uncertainty wasn’t a problem for him ― he simply engineered it out if existence. Here’s what he had to say about bringing efficiency to his steel industry clients.
“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.”
F.W Taylor, “Principles of Scientific Management”, 1911

Fred gave us the assembly line and the command-and-control management style appropriate to it. Management did the thinking and workers did the doing. The legacy lingers on. And there’s nothing wrong with the legacy (I spent my formative organizational years working in a steel company) if what you’re doing is transforming iron ore into bolts, nuts and nails. Standardizing work methods is unquestionably the way to manage the interdependencies among subtasks here..

Northeast – Chaotic. This is where you don’t know what a good outcome might be ― or have agreement about it among the people involved. Coping with natural disasters belongs here as does getting an international agreement about climate change, sorting out Wall Street, or, as someone at a recent Getting in the Groove workshop said, figuring out what to do for an entire weekend with his eight year old niece!

Central – Complex. You simply have to keep Dave Barry’s crazy, take-charge people out of the blue zone because they have the dangerous habit of saying more than they know. In particular I have in mind the folks who learned everything they know about managing from Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Henry Mintzberg refers to organizations or project teams operating in complex environments as Adhocracies and the means for managing the interdependencies among those performing subtasks as mutual adjustment. (I know – it sounds like the sort of thing two chiropractors would do on a date.) Here we have moved beyond the realm of standardization and command-and-control; moved, I suggest, from the domain of management to the domain of leadership.

This is the realm where leaders don’t have all the answers but, as Jim Collins puts it in describing Level Five leaders, who, uncertain of the destination, know who to “get on the bus”. Whereas the need for discretionary behaviour is engineered out in Taylor’s world, it is absolutely essential in the world of complexity.

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This, of course, is the domain of the improvising jazz ensemble, where the musicians are accountable for their performance not only to the leader ― the person who got them on the bus ― but to each other. Mutual responsibility and interdependence is what it’s about. Without it there will be no performance.

The point of this newsletter ― you may well have been wondering ― has been to suggest that those responsible for organizational and team performance must understand the difference between these performance domains. They are vastly different. There are things that need to be done where managing interdependencies can only be done by standardizing work process ― you don’t improvise with accounts payable and receivable. But you have to improvise if you’re trying to figure out how to improve market share, innovate, or find ways to attract and retain talent in a competitive environment.

Recommended reading: Henry Mintzberg’s “Structure in Fives”. See especially his chapters on Machine Bureaucracies and Adhocracies.

October
22

Getting in the Groove