Systemic diseases of organizations

In what kind of organizational situations the usual approaches remain ineffective? Below, I present eleven pictures of such situations. We could call them systemic diseases. In my next blogs I will consider them one by one from the perspective of system dynamics and of constellations. I start with an artist's impression of each type of situation. That may touch you also at an intuitive level.
Remember, any similarity with your own organizational situation is by accident!

1. A crotchety manager with a square face and heavy jaws sits crouched in a meeting behind his stack of reports and position papers. Everybody sits uncomfortably in their own invisible partitions. (Displeasure, tension, mutual distrust.)
2. People argue in a jeep on a rock plateau, blaming each other. They are stranded. How to proceed? In which direction to go? Or better wait and see? (problem-makers quarrel)
3. In a moonlit night the tomb of the founder. His statue looks with dead eyes conceited into nothingness. But one feels somewhere, somehow a spying, suspicious stare. Next to the tomb is an open grave. It might be yours. (shadows of the past)
4. In a Chinese palace garden a school of fish jumps out of the water in gracious arcs, their scales glistening in the sun. The fountains behind them produce a rainbow. In a gilded boat, rowed by servants, the prince looks about in great satisfaction. Even the fish jump for him. A big carper lies gasping and dying on the bottom of the boat before his feet. He studiously avoids to look at it. (The top sponges on the workers. The next echelon is breaking under the strain. A financial black hole is approaching.)
5. A chess player in a simultaneous display. His real competitor is not among his opponents. His attention drops. What is doing here? (Incessant action without any strategy.)
6. A cylinder is pulled through a half-open gutter, again and again and again and again. To minimize friction, they say. It is never good enough. (useless perfectionism)
7. A lot of buzz in an auction room. Small groups watch each other surreptitiously. Bidding is about to start. Who will go home with what? (everything is politics)
8. Somebody is repairing a complicated machine. Others hand over tools or spare parts. Every time it seems to work, but then it doesn’t - as if the devil has a hand in it. Gremlins have a field day. (solvable problems remain unsolvable)
9. A Japanese house with many complicated paper walls and especially complicated paper ceilings with many layers. It seems designed by a crazy architect. (managing by abstract numbers instead of real facts.)
10. Nails are hammered in a huge wooden plate. Threads are stretched and wound between them. It doesn’t result in a recognizable picture. Grown-ups play children’s games without pleasure. (unthinking application of management techniques)
11. An audience listens enchanted to a wise and brilliant speaker. They leave in a daze, no idea what to do next. (management by fads)

STRATEGY: THEORY AND PRACTICE

I just read, for the first time in some years, a new book about strategy. I read it from cover to cover, more than 650 pages. So this is not a bad book. It is a new book, an excellent book. It is Strategy: A History, from Lawrence Freedman (Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-932515-3). I like to read about strategy, and I like to read about history.
The great thing about this book that is very well-informed, and it is written by a truly intelligent author. And well-written as well. What can one ask more?
Only one thing: that the writer knows about strategy. I don’t think Freedman knows. It is like a brilliant book about horses and horse riding by one who read more about the subject than possibly anybody else. But apparently he has never seen a life horse and certainly never rode one.
When Freedman writes about strategists, he writes with a superior view on his subject. It is a joy to read his observations and comments on writers like Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Von Clausewitz and Liddell Hart and find that he both understands them and sees their weak points or, I should say, their limits. The same is true when he writes about recent authors that are more in the management field. I have read those too, met a few, and closely worked some years with one of them. So what do I miss?
Apparently, he never experienced what a good strategy does to an organization. How it brings minds into focus, increases understanding of the external and internal conditions of an organization, how it electrifies managers and operational people and brings the performance of that organization on a whole new level. And he certainly didn’t help to formulate such a strategy.
Like most authors, he doesn’t distinguish clearly between strategy and tactics, considering strategy more as a kind of large-scale and long-term tactics. Let me suggest a different approach:

• Standard operating procedures are the antidote to plodding on without learning from experience and without analysis of costs and benefits.
• Tactics are the antidote to mindless execution of standard operating procedures.
• Strategy is the antidote to mindless tactics. Strategy prunes and corrects tactics and keeps it focused on the essentials of the situation and the essential goals. Which means, of course, reassessing the situation and reassessing the goals whenever desirable or necessary.

Strategy is not about plans, though plans are useful and necessary, as long as they are not taken too seriously.
In my experience, an organization only needs to make once or twice a comprehensive plan. Why? because that transforms the minds of people. They learn to consider things in a strategic way. Once they have that, strategy becomes a mind-set instead of a plan.

Take one of the few successful strategies of the United States after the Second World War: making the Soviet Union lose in Afghanistan and withdraw. It was the result of ‘a few good man.’ Charlie Wilson, its hero, was a far cry from a strategist, but he kept focused on essentials, like shooting down the Russian helicopters. The master mind in the war was, probably more than anybody else, Mike Vickers. Immense logistical, financial and political operations, but welded together by a strategic analysis that fortified a strategic instinct. As usual, the main enemy was not the other side, but incompetence, fear and bureaucracy at one's own side.

I have witnessed how a simple strategy resolved so-called unsolvable crime problems in three months till a few years. Strategy is not a plan. It’s a practical mind-set that brings together situational knowledge, business competence and practical and really worthwhile goals. Whatever the paperwork involved, a strategy description shouldn’t take more than a few pages. It both ignites and clarifies the mind.
As a historian, I liked Freedman’s book from the first pages. As a strategist, I became interested on page 571. Still 60 useful pages.

Good Government

In a workshop on creative thinking participants were asked to assume that magic was really possible. What kind of magic would be the most desirable? In the end we concluded: good government.
Good government is managing a community, a province,  a state or a federation well. How to find out what good government is? By identifying what bad government is. Really bad government is unjust, cruel, arbitrary, corrupt. Unfortunately, even reasonably decent and reasonably intelligent people without ill-will can make a mess out of things. How?
Within the frame of a blog, we have to keep things simple. Looking around me, I see four things:

1. Policy not aligned to practical execution.
2. Execution not aligned to results.
3. Results not aligned to clients.
4. Results not evaluated or evaluations ignored or rejected.

Always the same measures are proposed: new laws and regulations, new budgets and either reorganizations or new institutions. Critical evaluation of proposals are routinely ignored. The results of measures are hardly evaluated, if ever. Managers are appointed that have no knowledge of, experienxe with or interest in the processes they are supposed to manage. If knowledgeable chiefs have mysteriously survived so far, they are eradicated and supplanted by 'professional' managers. Management is on numbers and PR-effects. Fortunately, both numbers and PR can be managed themselves.
If by any chance bad results can't be polished away, no one takes responsibility. Bringers of bad news are branded as suspicious, ill-informed outsiders. And if all else fails, the 'victims' are entitled to ample compensation for their stroke of bad luck and undeserved bad publicity. There is no correction, no learning, but excuses and accusations galore.
Policy-making is the preferred activity. Policy is vague and full of good intentions and positively looking for the future. It has more prestige, is better paid and much safer than practical execution. If 90% of policy-makers in the public domain would perish by a miraculous disease, and any policy function is only an episode in a career that is mainly in execution, the world would become an unrecognizably better place.
Strategy should be made by special meetings of practical managers and specialists, with one or two consultants (at most) and a few staffers who prepare those meetings - and know they may end up implementing their own recommendations.
Mancur Olson would know the recipe to get there: first a destructive totalitarian regime and than losing a great war bigtime. Are there other recipes? Not many. Almost all really successful periods of government were of societies just having been on the brink of disaster: Rome after Hannibal, the Netherlands after almost losing to the Spaniards, France right after the revolution. Wise, enlightened, forceful times without that are scarce. Maybe Prussia under Fredrick the Great qualifies and Britain, right after the Napoleonic wars. By the way, what is the first sign of good government? Fiscal prudence. No loans. No loans at all.