Self-defeating processes and sentimentality

About ten years ago I was in Porto, an old, historic city at the Douro, in the North of Portugal. It was evening and I was enjoying an excellent port at the riverside, with excellent bread and excellent cheese. Everything was calm and I enjoyed the evening.
A month ago I was back for a congress. Again I was at the riverside, now at lunchtime, before an open window on the first floor.
I hardly recognized the place. Between huge masts tourist passed in funiculars, about twice a minute. Each five or ten minutes a helicopter passed over the river, first East and a few minutes later West. This is going on from earling morning to evening. At the quay an endless stream of visitors strolled between restaurants offering Indian food, American food, Italian food. And yes, also Portuguese food. Street vendors everywhere and small shops selling the same souvenirs in gaudy colors.
Tourism had come to Porto.

So we take a plane to an other country to walk between other tourists in a place that has become a backdrop to tourists. At a beautiful coast so many hotels are built that the coast becomes a backdrop to high-rise hotels and the silence is ripped by motor yachts and other tourist pleasures.

in Porto, a local doctor told me that all European funds for regional development in Portugal were to stimulate tourism. Portugal has been earmarked a tourist destination for North-Europeans.
I had seen the results also almost ten years ago already at the Algarve, where the beach was parceled out to huge restaurants with large terraces, so you could enjoy the beach without touching the sand. Local people were waiters and waitresses and everybody spoke English and German.

Is that bad? There is certainly a good side to it. Porto is certainly more wealthy than ten years ago. Many Mercedeses, many good restaurants, more people living the good life, enjoying the new dynamism. Life has become so good than they can make tourist trips themselves.

Amsterdam is groaning under the ever-increasing loads of tourists. The almost proverbial Japanese tourists of thirty years ago are today swamped by the Chinese. And a reputation for freely available soft drugs has attracted hordes of youngsters. It is going the way of Venice where locals are leaving, children can play on the streets only after night fall and the Italian restaurants are run by Chinese owners. One Venetian lady told that a tourist asked her at what hour the city closed. Venice as Disneyland. Paris as Disneyland. Amsterdam as Disneyland. And now Porto as Disneyland.

I can’t see this is going to stop. Unless for awful reasons like a pandemic or slightly less awful: a serious and persistent global economic crisis.
In all of history, almost all people have subsisted,  pretty much tied to the place where they lived. No wonder that such an experience in the collective unconsciousness of mankind leads to over-eating and over-traveling today.
The only solution on the short term may be to make attractive destinations less attractive by making them more expensive: fewer cheap hotels, fewer cheap eateries. The owners of such establishments, and the owners of mass tourism services will cry wolf. And mass tourism will simply change its destinations. There are places enough in the world that will welcome them.

Today, plans are underway to deregulate the Dutch coast so that hotels and apartment flats can be built at nice spots - making them much less nice.

All these process have been described and analyzed at a global level. The article that started it all, The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin is already 50 years old. Limits to Growth has become a household word. Still, system dynamics is a largely underrated and underfunded discipline.

By the way, the food and the drink and the company in that restaurant in Porto last month were excellent. For the locals all the buzz was a sign of social and economic progress. But I miss that simple food and drink of a decade ago. Lost worlds live only on in sentiment.

The root of the matter

What would you do in the next situations?

1. You have solved this problem already two times, but it comes back a third time.
2. Doing one thing doesn't help, doing the opposite doesn't help. Doing something in-between doesn't help either,
3. You have done something and it didn't work. The next time it doesn't. What now?
4. You don't know what to do. Everybody has different suggestions.
5. You are tired and disappointed with your success.
6. You have read it two times. You read it a third time. And you still don't get it.
7. You can't choose between two attractive options.
8. You can't choose between two unattractive options.
9. You are about to solve a problem, but somehow the last step escapes you.
10. You seem to run around in circles.

In all these cases minus one, you have to take one step behind and find the essence of the situation, the core, the key, the marrow, the basis, the center. Don't you find it? Take one step more behind. To find the core you have to raise your point of view. Didn't you know you are your own drone?

How do you know you found the essence? Because everything becomes suddenly clear. Because you see the whole field from a different perspective. Gestalt psychologists call this field restructuring. In system dynamics the golden rule when you are stuck is: Widen the system.
The essence of every situation opens the story of the situation. Discovering the essence is understanding the system, understanding the story, the story of the system, the system of the story.
System dynamics is the discipline to understand the story of a system. And what is the understanding of the system of a story: getting the plot right.
The central art of communication is communicating the plot. What leads to what? And why and how? And we don't find linear cause-and-effect relationships. Several causes usually lead to several effects. And effects may feed back in the causes. There is no simple cause-and-effect, there is something called causal texture.

This brings me to the one exception: situation 6. In this case, don't find the core, don't go for understanding; find a better text. And if the text is a manual? The only manual? Find a knowledgeable person.
Many texts are difficult or impossible to understand. Why?

• Some people write about things they themselves don't understand properly.
• Or they don't care about their writing, because they don't care about their readers.
• Or they want to hide that they don't want you to understand.

During the Second World War, Churchill had a discussion with Roosevelt and his aide, Harry Hopkins. Suddenly, Churchill turned to Hopkins and told him they were going to offer him a fine British title and they knew already which title he would get. Hopkins was embarrassed. The title Churchill had in mind, he told Hopkins, was Lord Root-of-the Matter. Now that is a compliment for you.
Anyway, go for it. The Root of the Matter. Everything else is a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of brain space.

The Latest Management Technique

An audience listens enchanted to a wise and brilliant speaker. They leave in a daze, no idea what to do next. (Management by fads)
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)

These two belong together, though the first one is the province of empty-headed top people and the second one is the province of lightweights one or two levels lower.

Of course, most of these techniques are useful, few are useless. But usually they have a much more limited application than their champions advertise, especially those about leadership and motivation. There are as few recipes for keeping employees happy and productive as there are recipes for marital felicity. Even sensible approaches can be misapplied and become nonsensical. I have seen overhead ratios brought back and the percentage of productive functions increased to the detriment of over-all productivity. The once famous 7-S model of McKinsey was nothing more than a checklist with a gimmick. Again, even simple checklist can be useful if they draw attention to underestimated aspects of organizational health, but applying techniques without real knowledge of the work processes involved leads astray. With knowledge, interest and judgment in place, most new techniques perform. Without knowledge, interest and judgment even proven techniques lead to sham success.

Management literature is replete with reinventing the wheel, but now with a fashionable twist. Even one of the most worthwhile endeavors - applied system dynamics - can lead nowhere when the analysis is too broad or too limited. I saw a system dynamics analysis of the American intervention in Afghanistan that convinced me that the intervention was bound to fail. And what about strategic planning that doesn't show even an inkling of what a stable desirable situation could look like? I have heard brilliant negotiation experts rattling away their precious (at least expensive) teachings without any notion of the factual conditions of the negotiations the audience was involved in.

Enthusiastic proponents of new management techniques are most successful when they interface with critical and seasoned practitioners. That interaction is key to success. But often the prophets are into a conversion game, not a practical improvement game. When a company trading in building materials took over supermarkets for do-it-yourself stuff, they applied rigidly their proven success formula: to go for margin. They eliminated all articles that to them had ridiculous low margins. Within a year they had to sell their acquisition with great loss. They didn't understand that in such shops turn-over speed is a much more important indicator than margin. And they didn't understand that buyers leave when they have to visit several shops to get what they want. One-stop shopping is important for people involved in maintenance and repair and in home improvement.

See new management techniques for what they usually are: a new methodical viewpoint that gives a new and possibly useful view. But without knowledge and judgment of the products, services and activities involved it is just icing without a cake.

And why do I consider this a systemic problem? Because underlying is the decoupling of management from effort and responsibility, from the real world. There is no methodical solution to that problem, only a gross cleansing of all management layers, especially the higher ones. That only happens in Neverland. What happens in reality is bankruptcy in the private sector and what is euphemistically called restructuring in the public sector.

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)