There’s an old joke about a banker whose plumber charged him £250 for a two-minute job to fix a leaking tap.  “I don’t earn that kind of money in the City!” the banker told the plumber.  “Yeah!” replied the plumber, “I didn’t either.  That’s why I switched to plumbing.”

The joke spoke to a pervading anxiety that the financial rewards of white collar work may be meagre compensation for the costs it exacts.  Now, along comes Matthew Crawford to rub salt in the wound with his thesis that the manual trades may also be more intrinsically rewarding.

The Case for Working with Your Hands (published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft) owes more to Marx than I had appreciated from reading reviews of the book. Crawford provides a critique of the alienation of work in corporate capitalism. He extrapolates the trends that Marx identified in 19th Century manual labour to show how so-called ‘knowledge workers’ in contemporary capitalism are subject to the same phenomenon. The argument is not new. What differentiates this book is that, while Crawford writes from the perspective of an academic philosopher, he builds his argument from his own direct experience in the manual trades (electrician, motorcycle engineer) and desk work (a writer abstracts of academic papers, a research fellow for a Washington think tank).

Crawford finds that his experience of manual work is more intellectually challenging and more intrinsically satisfying than his experience of knowledge work. As an electrician and running his own motorcycle repair shop, he finds engagement in problem solving, in creating something and working to demonstrable and tangible standards. There is holistic pleasure in working with both hands and brains, and daily experience of failure from which one learns, accumulates tacit knowledge and acquires mastery.

He contrasts this with our normal experience of alienation from work both as workers and as consumers. At work, jobs have been overwhelmed by bureaucracy and the stripping away of much of their intellectual content as the focus of corporations becomes the creation of maximum value for shareholders rather than for end-users. As consumers, we have no interaction with the products that we purchase which are designed to ‘free’ us from the need to fix or maintain them ourselves. He cites a model of Mercedes car which does not include so much as a dipstick to check the oil. The car still needs its oil levels to be topped up regularly but the owner is expected to leave this to the service engineer.

Crawford laments that in most organisational settings, work is not so much about mastery of craft but mastery of the dynamics of the team. He argues that the focus of management is to foster a certain sensibility in employees rather than require high standards in the application of skills. He gives a powerful account of his disappointment with his first job after completing his master’s degree. Employed to write abstracts of papers, he found that this was far from being the journey into knowledge that he had imagined. It turned out to be a mutilated form of intellectual work where the quality of his output — the integrity of his summarising of authors’work — mattered less than the number of abstracts that he could produce in a day. His colleagues were damaged people — including one who used heroin on the job and took pleasure in sabotaging his work by including in his abstracts outrageous material which his employers, none the wiser, would subsequently publish.  Crawford asks:

“How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a ‘knowledge worker’ at a salary of $23,000? I hadn’t gone to graduate school for the sake of a career (rather, I wanted guidance reading some difficult books), but once I had the master’s degree I felt like I belonged to a certain order of society, and was entitled to its forms. Despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as a manual worker.”

Crawford finds it perverse that Western democracies are alert to the dangers of a concentration of political power but not to the risks of concentrated corporate power. He advocates that, as consumers, we should show apply to our purchasing sensitivity to the impact of the production of goods and services on human dignity — in the same way that many routinely consider environmental issues. At work, he favours occupations which offer face-to-face interactions rather than control by remote forces, responsibility for one’s work, and solidarity between colleagues.  Such solidarity, he argues, is derived from the respect for each other which comes from working to clear standards and seeing colleagues do the job well.

Crawford offers nothing constructive for the masses of people who work in large organisations. The consolations of the trades cannot be readily established in the office.  Crawford himself acknowledges that to address the problems he identifies would require a revolution in the regulation of large corporations. Rather than hope for this, he suggests, individuals would do better adopting a ‘Stoic’ attitude — seeking out “the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.” For many people, those cracks are to be found mainly in their personal space away from work  — which is a measure of the very alienation that Crawford seeks to highlight.

The Case for Working with Your Hands provides a thought-provoking critique of how we work. It offers a glimpse of a more sustaining alternative.  But it strikes me as the beginning of a discussion rather than the last word.

The Case for Working with Your Hands, by Matthew Crawford.  Available from Amazon.

Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archive.

Empty gallery

I’m writing a series of pieces for ArtsProfessional on how arts organisations can focus on delivering their mission. Part 1, on the gap between the organisation’s purpose and its actions, appears today and is reproduced below.

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A theatre won funding to improve its engagement with disadvantaged groups. It approached the challenge as the chance to spread the word about its work. But it discovered that to get the target groups through the doors, the work would need to change. What the theatre was doing from day to day turned out to be irrelevant to a section of the community it was meant to serve. This is an example of the gap that can occur between the way an organisation behaves compared to its avowed mission, one that provides the sense of purpose from a shared understanding among everyone who works in a company.

The mission statement should inform everything people do in their jobs. Often, though, there’s a nagging doubt about whether a company is fulfilling the potential that marks its reason to exist. Arts organisations are particularly vulnerable. Being values-driven, they tend to be more vulnerable to falling short of a high ambition – and they are more likely to resist change. It’s not surprising that the purpose and actions can be misaligned. Things change rapidly; it’s easy to lose one’s bearings.

New technology transforms people’s expectations of the relationships they expect to have with companies. The global recession and the new government’s spending cuts are transforming the economic outlook for the arts. As austerity bites, it’s not just public funding but also consumer spending on the arts that will decline. The coalition’s broader policy changes for the arts are, as yet, unclear.

Change is the one given. The underlying purpose may stay the same, but the way to deliver it will always need to evolve. An organisation that fails to keep pace can quickly begin to lose relevance.

You might spot the gap around the artistic purpose: a gallery that measures success in terms of footfall, but whose traffic is consistently to its cafe not the exhibition space; a theatre that exists to promote new voices buts retreats in the face of intimidating protests. This kind of gap drives away audiences. Or the gap may open around a company’s business practices. Arts companies can be far from model employers. People may be expected to work for long hours in poor conditions. Occupants of senior roles might find their initiative stifled. There may be a culture of bullying which goes unchecked. These are behaviours that contradict the championing of creativity and respect for human potential that involvement in the arts might lead you to expect. This kind of gap damages retention and recruitment of talented staff. It leads to ossified processes and reduced ability to generate fresh ideas. Ultimately, the gap between performance and action drives away funding. When arts budgets are under pressure, companies can suffer capricious cuts. But those with clarity of purpose and a good narrative about delivery will better weather the storm.

Board members must understand the company’s role and their own part in holding the organisation to account. Management teams need to grasp how the organisation’s values should be manifested in practice. This begins with honest, reflective scrutiny of the artistic purpose. How well is it delivered? How well does it connect with an audience beyond the organisation? It extends to searching questions about running the company in a way that is congruent with the artistic purpose. How effective is the stewardship of public money? Is the cost of delivering the purpose appropriate? How motivated is the organisation to mobilise other sources of revenue? Managers also need to be clear about broader issues, such as how creativity is valued and fostered throughout the business. How are staff treated? What are the social and environmental responsibilities?

Purpose and action are aligned through an organisational culture that transmits respect for the purpose in everything it does. This is most easily evident in how recruits are inducted. If new recruits learn from their peers what people should do and why, the culture is probably in good shape. Where it’s not, managers must find ways to create new cultural imperatives. At the BBC, when Greg Dyke was in charge, he banned biscuits at meetings. A relatively trivial financial saving, but one with a powerful message: that every employee had a part to play in ensuring that the BBC’s use of licence fee money should be focused on delivering great services to the public.

An organisation that consistently asks how well it serves its purpose develops better clarity of purpose and better alignment of behaviour behind it. This kind of reflexivity creates a self-renewing culture, which promotes effective action and communicates its purpose in what it does. It makes staff more empowered, more motivated and more creative. And these are the conditions which foster experiences which delight audiences.

Image courtesy Mr. T in DC.

A fractal

Book review: Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley

Between the mysterious, almost inconceivable science of quantum physics and the mundane experience of working in a large organisation it would be hard to think of realms that are further apart. So Leadership and the New Science, by Margaret Wheatley, which seeks to apply insights derived from contemporary science to organisational life, is a book I approached with some scepticism. What possible relevance to the world of work could be found in the fundamental science of how matter functions below the level of the atom or how everything in the universe is inter-connected? These seem such big and incomprehensible questions that daily life is able to get along just fine without reference to them.

Reading the book, though, I soon realised that it was precisely because my thinking was shaped by the insights of traditional science that I couldn’t see the relevance of looking at quantum mechanics. If the world is more complex and mysterious than traditional science described, why is management still drawing on analogies informed by eighteenth and nineteenth century concepts. Might not organisations be more complex and mysterious than traditional management theory describes? By the time I’d finished the book, I had the impression that it had come about half a century too late.

It helped that I came to the book having not long before caught up with the absorbing TV series Atom in which Professor Jim Al-Khalili provided both a history and an explanation of atomic science that my layman’s brain could just about understand. Bringing the story right up to date, the series brought home to me how much science has moved on even in my lifetime, how different the world is from what scientists understood just a few decades ago.

And that is the nub of Margaret Wheatley’s book. Our organisational analogies need to catch up with how scientists now undertand the world.  She contrasts the new science with the Newtonian physics that preceded it. It’s not that Newton’s science has been rendered obsolete but that it doesn’t tell the whole story. Nor, therefore, does the broader thinking that science inspires. Mental constructs derived from traditional physics are all around us. We see the world as the sum of its parts which work together in an efficient machine: a largely linear process of cause and effect between one part and another.

As Wheatley observes how this kind of thinking pervades business life:

Responsibilities have been organised into functions. People have been organised into roles. Page after page of organisational charts depict the workings of the machine: the number of pieces, what fits where, who the most important pieces are. The 1990s revealed these deeply embedded beliefs about organisations as machines when “reengineering” became the dominant solution for organisational ills. Its costly failures were later acknowledged to have stemmed in large part from processes and beliefs that paid no attention to the human (or living) dimensions of organisational life.

She overstates, I think, the extent to which this kind of thinking has been superceded and its “costly failures” acknowledged. To appreciate the gap, we need only look at the alternative that she constructs.

Wheatley looks at developments not just in physics but across scientific disciplines. But it seems to me that quantum mechanics is the precursor to the rest, since it posits a radically different and challenging way of conceiving of things which provides the springboard for the other developments she explores such as chaos theory and self-organising systems.

In place of the large machine, with its processes and parts, comes a holistic way of viewing things. It’s not the rigid stucture itself that matters so much as the entity as a whole; not so much the parts in the structure as the relationships between them. Instead of a stable, material universe, we have a dynamic, fluid system in which order is constantly created out of chaos.

Apply this thinking to organisational life, and you soon arrive at a radically different view than prevails in most people’s experience of work. Instead of the command and control frameworks mapped out on organisation charts, we have complex networks where nodes of influence are distributed and found in unexpected places – not just among those formally invested with authority but also among those who hold informal influence. These may be people who are highly respected professionally, or who are sources of gossip or are subversive forces within the organisation.

Instead of the division of labour, deskilled production lines and micro-management of people’s working lives, the new science leads one to expect fluid, emergent ways of organising work to be more effective. Instead of crude financial incentives which produce perverse results, better to focus on creating a clear and shared sense of direction and purpose at work, and then leave people to use their initiative and potential to collaborate together in common cause.

We treat organisations as objective structures with a life of their own, but they exist only in so far as people come together and participate in them. It is more accurate to think of an organisation as a process rather than a structure.

If you do so, you find you need a different model of leadership – one that is both more challenging for and easier on leaders, because it recognises the limits of their ability to command and control. In the organisation-as-process, leaders can really only facilitate. They achieve by nurturing achievement in others. This necessitates an adult-to-adult relationship with those they aspire to lead – helping the organisation to understand its values and to become – in Wheatley’s phrase – the standard it has set itself. Instead of information being regarded as a source of power, to be controlled, it is seen as the lifeblood of the organisation and made to flow freely. And when times are tough, this calls for honesty about the future and engagement with the innate intelligence and expertise of the team about the way forward.

This brings me to a significant point about Leadership and the New Science. While it was written a good decade before the current recession, its passionate advocacy of a more human dimension in organisations does not feel appropriate only for the best of times. In fact, Wheatley intimates that it is in the most difficult of times that this kind of leadership must come to the fore:

As organisations continue to experience so many momentous challenges, we do a great disservice to one another if we try to get through these times by staying at a superficial level or believing we are motivated only by self-interest. We have a great need to understand from a larger perspective why we are confronted with dislocation and loss. We have to be willing to speak about events from this deeper level of meaning…  When leaders honour us with opportunities to know the truth of what is occurring and support us to explore the deeper meaning of events, we instinctively reach out to them.

I found Leadership and the New Science an invigorating read as I found myself coming home to ideas I had already known, but forgotten; finding them afresh through a new route. My degree at university was in sociology and this gave me a view of organisations as arenas in which relatio
nships are acted out. Yet somehow, in years of organisational life, I lost track of this insight and became mired in the organisation as a structure with a life of its own. Nor did anything I learned at business school challenge this mechanistic view of the workplace.

After I left organisational life to become self-employed, some my previous worldview began to re-emerge and I began to view my time in the organisation as a pathological experience. Deep down, while working inside the organisation, I had found many of its processes and structures dysfunctional but had somehow accepted them as the natural order of bureaucracies. But even at the time I could see that it was possible for the organisation to succeed despite itself. Little pools of creativity and innovation would cluster together and find ways around the system. People would ignore the established structures and find ways to make things happen.

The big insight for me from reading Leadership and the New Science was that the processes that subvert authority are part of the necessary and natural order of events. Chaos and order go hand in hand, in organisations every bit as much as in natural systems. They need change and instability to renew themselves and survive.

If an organisation is no more nor less than the people who participate in it, then simply to act within it is to change it. Since most of us are followers, even if we are also leaders, this is a very empowering message. It means we have it within ourselves to lead, to take ownership of the organisation and move it. We are all, in fact, leaders, even if we are also followers. We don’t need to wait for the bosses – whoever they may be – to get the message.

Leadership and the New Science by Margaret Wheatley.

Available from Amazon.

Image courtesy Santa Rosa OLD SKOOL.

A difficult meeting

As a practitioner in medialand, I learned the value of creative behaviours – ways to open up thinking and new ideas in order to develop better products.  I particularly admired a book called Sticky Wisdom by ?What If!, a group of consultants who – while challenged with punctuation – cut through the fog regarding innovation.  Sticky Wisdom demonstrates that creativity needn’t be the preserve of a particularly talented cadre of employees.  It can be cultivated through techniques and exercises to encourage freshness of thinking, open mindedness, and a determination to incubate abstract proposals to tangible reality.

The book seems to point to a more attractive way of being in organisations.  It provides ways to challenge the bureaucratic reflex which closes down ideas with criticism before they have even had a chance to develop, and it shows how to facilitate behaviours which display respect to one another.  So it is perhaps not surprising that organisations have drawn on creative behaviours and tried to apply them more widely.  As a freelance consultant, I have been struck to find the ?What If! model and others like it being adopted as templates for meeting behaviours in general.

There was a certain sense in this during times of growth.  When opportunities were plentiful and the environment fast-changing, leaders needed to foster innovation and nimbleness to stay competitive.  But I’m beginning to find that emulating creativity behaviours doesn’t work quite so well in the downturn when hard choices and prioritisation replace the land-grab as the modus operandi.  If people are feeling uncertain about their future, and contemplating cuts in their operations, the playfulness and sense of possibility in creative behaviours sit uneasily with the rigour and decisiveness that the situation demands.  The environment is still fast-changing and uncertain.  It still calls for innovation and flexibility.  But the cost of making the wrong call is now demonstrably high.  The challenge is how to retain the courage to take creative risks while being guided by a robust assessment of the context.

There’s still a place for thinking imaginatively but this is as likely to be focussed on brainstorming ways to strip out cost as to develop new things. For management teams who have to think through the implications of a financial shock, it is important to identify which of the creativity behaviours can still be helpful and what other kinds of meeting behaviours need to be encouraged.

Three creativity behaviours advocated by ?What If! are still worth drawing upon for this kind of meeting: freshness, signalling and courage.

Freshness is all about thinking about your issue from different perspectives. When people are experiencing changes which threaten their own or their organisation’s security, they are inclined to hold to what they know. So it can be useful to find ways to re-imagine what you do and how you do it as this can open up productive thoughts about how to meet the challenge of the recession.

Signalling is about conveying how you want people to engage with your ideas – whether you want them to suspend judgment to build the ideas creatively or to provide critical evaluation to test the ideas in the business context. It seems likely that there will be more of the latter going on in the present climate.  But sometimes you will want people to suspend judgment.  So they need to know which mode they are expected to be in at any given time

Courage in relation to creativity is about stepping up with your ideas and taking risks to realise them. Hard choices and cutbacks demand a different kind of courage of management teams – to face up to reality with honesty and to be candid about the potential consequences of different options. Only with this kind of honesty can they make good decisions about how to proceed.

These behaviours are particularly helpful at the start of the thinking process, when there’s a premium on generating new ideas and fresh perspectives.  When it gets to the point where difficult decisions have to be made, it’s no longer about opening up ideas but filtering down.  Here are some behaviours which would be helpful in that context.

Help to solve problems – This is about driving towards clarity and direction. Teams which have cultivated ways to open up thinking may find it difficult to recognise when this needs to stop. Possibilities need to be nudged towards decisions by filtering against pertinent criteria: the strategic context, the organisation’s purpose and its priorities.

Keep to the point – When people are feeling insecure, they can be tempted to bring into the discussion issues which are not strictly relevant to the matter in hand. It is important to give people space to surface how they are feeling and to report wider concerns, but these shouldn’t be allowed to overwhelm the main agenda.

Negotiate your dual role – Management meetings bring together people who simultaneously form a team of their own and represent the teams that they lead. They need to help each other to work together well – overcoming baronial thinking in order to collaborate and share responsibility while also representing their people effectively.

Everybody speaks, one at a time – It is vital to find ways to ensure that everyone contributes and that they are heard without interruption. It is partly the responsibility of each individual to speak up but it is also important to find ways to channel the discussion in varied ways. Typically in whole group discussions there will be one or two individuals who usually occupy the airtime, so breaking up into smaller groups can elicit contributions from those who are normally more reserved.

Acknowledge viewpoints – This is the counterpart to freshness and signalling. It concerns keeping an open mind to what you hear and showing receptiveness to ideas and, when judgment is required, exercising it constructively so that people’s contributions are respected. This is particularly important in a time of crisis when emotions may be running high.

Set groundrules – Establish expectations about meeting behaviour at the start of each meeting. Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne at Manager Tools offer a wealth of resources on running effective meetings and setting groundrules is one of their top maxims.  Their suggestions include: keep to time and switch mobiles to silent.  How people use technology in meetings is a vexed issue.  I was at a meeting recently of a well-regarded national institution where about a third of the people round the table were sitting behind laptops.  This might be an aid to personal productivity, but it is really bad for group dynamics.  Laptops create barriers around the table and when people use them to multitask they say that the subject of the meeting is not important to them.  A culture of respect is the prerequisite for effective meetings.  Groundrules help bring this about.

Image courtesy sbblackley.

Cyclist, Theobald's Road

My trusted advisor tells me my blog posts are “very eclectic”.  I don’t thinks she intends this as positive feedback.  She’ll be unimpressed, then, by this tangent into the world of cycling.  Bear with me.  It’s a tale of incivility, self-delusion and reluctance to accept responsibility.  An exploration, if you will, of the banes of modern life.

James Daley, a columnist on cycling in The Independent, offers an account of how he mowed down a middle-aged lady who crossed the road in his path on the Thames Embankment:

My arm was all cut up and bleeding, and as I gathered my bag and bike out of the road, I said nothing – trying to compose myself, while waiting for the pain to subside. The lady I’d hit was in her fifties, but surprisingly, she bounced back on to her feet almost immediately, and didn’t seem to have come out of the collision too badly. While her husband threw a few menacing glances at me, she apologised profusely.

As I rode off, I turned back and told her she should be more careful when she was crossing the road. And she agreed.

When I told this story to my friends, they were horrified – not out of sympathy for me, however, but out of shock that I’d mown down a middle-aged woman rather than slowing down.

As a cyclist myself, I tend towards the sedate, continental style of riding rather than the lycra-clad speediness that I suspect Mr Daley favours.  But I’d be disinclined to judge him for being involved in an accident with a more vulnerable road user.  I understand all too well how you can make an assessment that the pedestrian in front of you will vacate the space to which your heading, only to find in the intervening seconds that she stands stock still in order to let you pass.  I’ve only narrowly avoided collisions in precisely such circumstances.

I did have misgivings though about his unapologetic (and somewhat cowardly) hectoring of the pedestrian as he rode away.

His frank acknowledgement of the horrified reaction of his friends to his behaviour seems to prefigure a redemptive journey whereby he rediscovers his empathy for other human beings.  But, alas, he seems to learn nothing:

Incidents such as this are becoming more and more common, because pedestrians underestimate a) how fast bikes are travelling and b) how much it will hurt if they end up being run over by one. And more and more are learning the lesson the hard way… Given pedestrians’ignorance and complacency when it comes to road safety, it’s no wonder many cyclists on our roads are so angry and aggressive.

What interests me here is that this seems symptomatic of a pervasive incivility in the urban environment to which I have become increasingly sensitised since leaving organisational life.   It’s particularly evident during the morning commute, a time when the tensions between work and personal life are most telling.  I think it’s bound up in some way with how the stresses of working life dehumanise us.

I began to think seriously about it during my own daily cycle ride to school with my five-year-old son.  We travel through narrow side roads, congested by over-sized off-roaders.  I began to notice how drivers would take off at speed to advance a small number of yards, and battle with and swear at each other to stake their claim to space on the road.  Mostly I was struck by their extraordinary lack of consideration for a cyclist going slowly uphill with a small child on the back of his bike.

As I watched them scowling and losing their composure, I wondered what kind of lives they were leading which would cause them to behave in such boorish ways.  I suspected that a different part of themselves would be horrified to see the people they became behind the wheel.

But then I remembered that I used to be like them, anxious to close down a few inches of road between me and the office or jostling to get onto the escalator at the tube station as quickly as possible.  Since leaving my job, I was doing the daily commute on the school run without turning into a stressed ogre.  So I wondered if it might not be the conditions of the journey so much as the prospect of its destination that was causing people to behave inconsiderately.

The plague of incivility in modern society and the dehumanising character of organisational life have become pre-occupations for me, ones to which I will no doubt return here.  The capacity of organisations to destroy human relationships is well-documented.  The management thinker Peter Drucker famously said “The only things that evolve by themselves in an organisation are disorder, friction and malperformance.”  This is why an intervention such as coaching can be valuable in the workplace; it helps people step back from the imperatives towards disorder friction and malperformance and reconnect with their own sense of purpose and decency.

But what about pervasive incivility.  Is it a purely UK phenomenon? Or even just a London one?  It’s not one I’ve previously associated with cycling.  For me, cycling represents an escape from the tensions to which people subject themselves in their cars or on public transport.  Yet James Daley seems to see anger and aggression as a given of the cyclist’s experience in London.

There’s no logic or consistency to this righteous rage.  Just self-justification at all turns.  Had Mr Daley been involved in a collision with a car rather than a pedestrian, would he be blaming himself for underestimating how much it was going to hurt?  To ask the question is to answer it.

We seem to be experiencing a breakdown in our capacity to see others as we would see ourselves.  Recovering a sense of our selves at work is part of the answer.