Matrix

About a week and a half ago, I was having a conversation with the WSM. We were discussing Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, and the WSM came up with something truly interesting. This is what he said:

I have this theory too: that organisations are pre-dominantly collectives of producers and police.

People get together to form organisations for the purpose of pooling, redistributing and re-purposing (production/manufacturing) resources efficiently... anything from governments, schools, corporations, to the religious, etc.

As organisations get larger, processes (laws/rules) are put into place to remove ambiguity and create fairer redistribution (or treatment of its members). But as exceptions to policies (naturally) occur, further alteration or amendment of processes is required to cater for those exceptions. However, processes and policy exceptions (e.g. amendments + codification of laws) require policing.

An organisation (organism) then reaches a kind of tipping point when there are more police than producers, and revolution ensues. (Because police/politicians/policiers(?) only improve processes but can't affect production once you go past some point of marginal utility/economy of scale.)

At this point the matrix resets itself.

The WSM is a very profound person at times. Here he has managed to encapsulate the behaviour of a lot of organisations all at once. I told him I would quote him as an unpublished source, and he very kindly assented.

A Civil Society Forever!

Over the last few days, the idea of civil society and civil institutions has taken a hammering, or at least been struck like a gong. The reverberations still continue, but I think it is a kind of healthy clangour.

Let me describe the situation. A local women's-rights organisation was taken over at its AGM by a group of women who turned out to have a general commonality: a bunch of them were from the same Christian church from down the road. As the details emerged through the cloud of fine spittle that tends to develop around the hissing of the faucets, it turned out that a number of emails had been exchanged among some members of this latter group describing the original institution as... well, perverse in terms of sexual mores, I suppose.

This was deemed reason enough for a takeover. Many days and mutual recriminations (some probably slanderous) later, an EOGM was held and vociferously attended. The newly elected executive committee was roundly defeated in a vote of no-confidence and the old organisation, newly overturned, was back to its old self again.

The vote of no-confidence succeeded by the large margin it did simply because it had a huge and even newer coalition supporting it. Apparently, the threat of a church-based takeover of a secular organisation had stirred the pot so much that secular forces had decided to get their own back. And so they did.

Personally, what I found alarming was the fact that persons X, Y, Z and so on could just blithely take over an established institution and decide to destroy its culture because they thought it was a good idea. It happens a lot, but never with such naked and unrepentant zealotry.

So, who was right and who was wrong? Or, who was right and who was left? It is tempting to cast everything in some sort of Foucaultian power/society/sexuality/institutionality sort of model. But I think that quite simply, it is generally a good sign for those who are hoping that Atlantean society develops balls the capacity for a healthy degree of internal disagreement, debate and discussion.

What I don't agree with is that churches should be tainting themselves by taking over secular organisations. There is no Biblical precedent for it; rather, Christians are exhorted to be in the world but not of it, and to free themselves from conformity to the world and its institutions. In this, I use the word 'taint' in the sense of 'tint, colour or dye', a perfectly legitimate usage from the 16th century. Christians aren't supposed to be part of secular sides, but separate from all to the same degree.

Actually, proto-Christians were also supposed to be proto-Marxists, if you read this passage (and this one) clearly. I've always thought that Marx had cribbed his famous 1875 slogan off somebody. Naughty man.

But I don't think I saw any of the church people rushing to sell their stuff for redistribution. The American religious right tends to talk about Godless communism. I wonder if they've ever considered Godly communism before. What a powerful social framework it would be! Heh.

The Perils of Goal-Setting

In every local organisation that has come to pay tribute to the new form of evaluation, the practice of goal-setting is considered laudatory, and in fact, the pinnacle of excellence in process management. This is especially prevalent in organisations going for so-called quality awards (which ought to be debunked forthwith).

Last night, I had the opportunity, thanks to a certain elf, to read an article by four academics concerning the perils of goal-setting. These four are from the Eller College of Management, the Wharton School of Business, the Kellogg School of Management, and Harvard Business School. It is an eye-opener, this paper entitled Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal-Setting.

Their conclusion is summarised in the form of a 'warning label' which they would like people to use more often. The text on that bright yellow warning label says:

WARNING!

Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations
due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking,
decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation.

Use care when applying goals in your organization.

It immediately put in me in checklist mode. I realised that the organisation I've been looking at is very much like that. And the details in the paper (especially those on page 11, thanks to the elf!) make it very clear where the blame should lie.

The Institutional Organization of Knowledge

To the acronyms TOK (Theory of Knowledge), WOK (Way of Knowing) and AOK (Area of Knowledge), I shall add IOK (Institutional Organization of Knowledge). It is not that new a concept; from about 2005, several books I came across spoke in detail of the tacit and detailed internal knowledge structures of large organizations.

However, my New York link sprouted an email in my direction pointing me to Amnon Karmon, an Israeli specialist (no, not that kind, you servicepeople!) in alternative methods of teaching. He's the director of the Kerem Institute of Jewish Humanistic Teacher Training in Jerusalem. This is how he begins his 2007 article:

For over a hundred years, there have been efforts to change the way that schools transmit knowledge. Most of these efforts have failed. The most common explanations found in educational research for this are either: 1) macro-social, according to which social interests and powers hinder these changes. 2) teacher-oriented, according to which the teachers themselves either resist those changes or/and lack the training and qualifications necessary to carry them out. Although these explanations have a lot of truth to them, they ignore a crucial point, a “missing link” between teaching and subject matter, and society. Every educational institution has a special structure for organizing knowledge. This structure is independent in many respects from macro-social factors, as well as from teacher behavior, and it has important effects on the ways educational institutions deal with knowledge. Educational research has not yet provided a detailed and focused examination of “the institutional organization of knowledge” in education.

Teachers College Record Volume 109 Number 3, 2007, p.603. http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 12826, Date Accessed: 3/14/2009

Wow, some abstract eh? Fear not. Abstract of abstract: "Don't just look too big, at national and international scale; don't just look too small, at the teacher level. Look instead at the educational institutions which occupy the space in between. Those are the things which need looking at."

This is exactly the kind of research I'm doing, and probably the reason why some people don't want me to do it. You see, the problem in some institutions is that they have no idea what kind of knowledge structures they're using. When the head is missing, there is no alternative to the complex snarl wrapped up in that unit. Well, actually, there is — but those in authority do not like being 'undermined' by things like tradition and thought.

When my long 'disqusition' comes to an end, it is my hope that we'll all know more about how an institution can either a) function at a high level without a proper IOK, or fake it so well that you can't tell the difference for all practical intents and purposes. Then again, there may be any number of other options. Amazing stuff!

Helicopter Vision

I've always been amused by the 'helicopter vision' which is the key personal quality demanded by some organisations when looking at human potential and ability. The metaphor is a terribly inexact one; in this day and age, the helicopter (whether a light passenger craft, a huge heavy military lifter, a gunship, or a surveillance/recon platform) is not likely to give you a significantly bigger picture of anything on a strategic scale.

In fact, a person with too much 'helicopter vision' will be confined to some sort of narrow-band tactical intelligence. In all likelihood, this 'helicopter' will fail to see the big picture unless at least other kinds of vision are used. To continue with this vaguely military metaphor, you need 'satellite vision' for a really big picture, 'infantry vision' for the man-on-the-spot picture, and 'infonet vision' for the data picture. Of all these four 'visionaries', the helicopter is most likely to be shot down, hardest to control, and most difficult to conceal in the battlefield. It is also easiest to deceive and most irritating to the people doing their job below.

Frankly, any organisation still touting 'helicopter vision' is obviously not good at assessing metaphors. I would think that such organisations need to be left behind somewhere in the 1980s. That kind of laziness will get you killed when you are up against superior conceptual and informational skills. It explains why an organisation filled with young helicopters will eventually find its mission going nowhere because of bad weather, low visibility and sparse knowledge of ground conditions (not to mention high fuel prices).