Most Organizations Are Mediocre
The status quo persists, but why?
Look around your organization. Are you amazed at just how resigned everyone is to the status quo? Does the seeming acceptance of mediocrity bother you?
Despite severe environmental pressures, are the people around you behaving in obviously ineffective ways that could be threatening the very survival of the organization?
For me, the answers to the above questions is a resounding yes. I work in higher education — enough said, right.
Well, as I look around, I see processes, routines, and objectives that continue to persist despite their perceived inadequacies. Our enrollments have been declining steadily for the past five years. Yet, cumbersome governance processes and infighting continue to slow efforts to innovate and keep pace amid increased competition.
We are part of a world-class education system here in Illinois, and we have a campus that could accommodate 10,000 students. Yet, we have a little over 4,000 students. That is the epitome of mediocrity, my friend.
Perhaps, as communicated by Dr. Michael Barzelay in Breaking Through Bureaucracy, my colleagues are unaware of the problems, or they have just accepted them as unalterable conditions. Many seem to have learned that the delays and the substandard quality that results are just the cost of doing business — the nature of the beast that is higher education.
My colleagues have also become too comfortable with infighting. Why is it that things get so personal, and we spend more time fighting against each other than alongside each other?
The easy out is to blame my colleagues, and you may be tempted to do the same. This, however, is not a people problem.
This issue, as intimated by Ken Miller, will not be solved by “getting better people, motivating the ones you have, and hold[ing] everyone accountable.”
So, what is the problem, and what is the solution?
Most Organization are Incapable of Learning
The problem is that most organizations are incapable of learning or changing themselves in response to experience (i.e., the discrepancy between expectations and results).
Learning happens when an organization and its people can detect and correct an error based on joint reflection and inquiry, as defined in an article on learning in organizations by Visser and Van der Togt.
Consider the example of higher education given above. What if cumbersome governance processes were seen as a problem to be solved, rather than as an unalterable condition?
Give some thought to how your organization comes to identify some situations as problems and how it attempts to correct them.
Are the consequences of action and inaction ignored? Is there any blame-shifting in the face of failures? Are policies established to subvert the detection of errors? Are there efforts to redefine what counts for success underway?
Are people closed in their attitudes? Are they defensive? Is the general atmosphere one of distrust and a lack of respect between managers and employees? Are communications blocked?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then your organization is likely in a pattern of defensiveness. This pattern is the same pattern that Dr. Julianne Mahler found studying the Challenger and Columbia accidents at NASA. It is a pattern that actively works against the detection and correction of error. Let’s hope it doesn’t result in something so catastrophic for your organization.
What does the alternative look like?
Well, as communicated by Dr. Mahler in a different work, organizations that do learn detect and embrace error and try to understand its sources. They are marked by an open attitude, open communications, and a general atmosphere of trust and respect between managers and employees (Argyris and Schon, 1978).
Most organizations are incapable of learning, but why? What is the origin of this pattern of defensiveness?
Blame the Bureaucracy
Organizations, as argued by sociologist Richard Scott, are the basic building block of society. They allow us to get things done and achieve goals beyond the capabilities of individuals acting alone.
Organizations, then, are collections of people pursuing a goal. Yet, as those goals grow in their number and complexity, organizations tend to grow in size. To create regularity and make behavior more predictable (i.e., establish some control/standardization), most organizations institute formalized structures and rules outlining roles, role relations, and related responsibilities (i.e., division of responsibility and distribution of decision-making power).
This is what many refer to as bureaucratization. It is an effort, as intimated by Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization, to fragment, routinize, and bound the decision-making process to make it more manageable and predictable.
So, how bureaucratized is your organization? How fragmented, routinized, process-driven, and rule-driven is it?
Well, here is the problem. Bureaucracy is primarily oriented toward controlling rather than learning. It makes joint reflection and inquiry into the causes of error (i.e., learning from experience) extremely difficult. Let me give you three of the top reasons why:
1. It makes it hard for people to see the big picture.
Yes, breaking problems apart makes them more manageable. But, the corresponding structures, reward systems, information systems, and rules affect what people pay attention to — and what they will overlook.
In the absence of some form of intervention, when we fragment, as stated by management guru Dr. Peter Senge in the Fifth Discipline:
We pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.
So, people tend to see their responsibilities as limited or defined by the boundaries of their position. They struggle to feel or realize the interdependencies that cross those boundaries, and how what they do might affect others and the whole organization.
So, what are the implications for learning?
Well, the jobs/positions, departments, and other divisions within an organization do not just define a structure of work activity. They create boundaries that structure and limit the attention of individuals and groups.
In higher education, for example, this inability to see the larger whole is most evident in the recruitment and admissions process. The journey from prospect to student includes interactions with marketing, admissions, financial aid, registration, student life, housing, advising, and faculty. Each interaction point is marked by different purposes, experiences, and indicators of performance.
Who, then, feels a sense of responsibility for the pooled results? Seemingly, no one.
In my experiences, the boundaries between jobs, departments, and other divisions can become too hard or difficult to cross (i.e., impermeable) such that information about results, especially failures, and knowledge rarely flow freely.
People, then, will struggle to see or give the proper attention to the downstream consequences of their actions because they are often distant in time and space (i.e., felt elsewhere in the organization).
Feedback (i.e., information about actions taken) is needed — it is paramount to learning.
When feedback is lacking or worse yet not welcomed due to reason number 2 below, many errors will remain outside the awareness of the individuals and groups that can act on them. Problems, then, will go unnoticed and unaddressed.
2. Defensiveness and blame-shifting become the norm.
Errors are rarely noticed, and when they are, the level of reflection and inquiry necessary to correct the error (i.e., learn) can be hard to achieve.
When hierarchical and horizontal divisions are strong, as stated by Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization:
The different parts of the organization operate based on different pictures of the total situation, pursuing subunit goals almost as ends in themselves.
The existence of such divisions tends to emphasize the distinctions between different elements of the organization and fosters the development of political systems that place yet further barriers in the way of learning.
In other words, there can be a bit of goal displacement (i.e., neglect or distortion of the organization’s goals) among individuals and groups who are attempting to adapt and survive in their particular circumstances.
Individuals and groups, Gareth Morgan in Images of Organizations states:
… compete for scarce resources … Empire building, careerism, the defense of departmental interests, pet projects, and the padding of budgets to create slack resources may subvert the working of the whole.
This attempt to adapt and survive often lead to forms of “wheeling and dealing.” It also breeds defensiveness and conflict. So, the people involved begin to act in ways that will prevent them from the threat of embarrassment or looking weak.
Let’s continue with the higher education example. In the face of declining enrollments, faculty might blame marketing for not communicating the value and distinctiveness of degree programs. Marketing might blame admissions for faulty processes for following up with the prospects they get into the admissions funnel.
In this blame game, I have seen the intentional distortion of information and negative feedback discredited, blocked, or ignored. I have seen low levels of trust and a fear of retribution lead to a reluctance to communicate openly and explore alternative interpretations of events and information about results.
I am using examples from higher education. But, does this resonate with you?
In most organizations, complex and subtle issues are not explored through dialogue because people feel they must defend their turf and their position against an enemy. The problem is that this enemy, more often than not, just happens to be a member of the same organization.
Guess what happens when things go wrong in this situation. Senge states:
When the results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that “someone screwed up.
There is in each of us a propensity to find someone or something outside of ourselves to blame when things go wrong.
Psychologically, it is easier for people to blame someone else than to confront the reality that they may be partly the cause of their own problems.
It is often easier for people to write off someone or some group as an enemy than to collaboratively confront errors, suspend their views, and try to understand why others might see a situation differently.
In higher education, faculty members blame the administrators, and the administrators blame the faculty. So, this results in an excessive amount of time and energy spent defending one’s turf and discrediting information from the other camp.
Similar battle lines are drawn in many organizations between those on the front lines and middle management.
What are the implications for learning?
Well, if someone or some group is seen as the enemy, this leaves little room for dialogue, which is paramount to understanding cause and effect. It is in dialogue that people will begin to see that different views, opinions, and perspectives are often not a matter of ignorance or malice. Instead, they are simply the result of occupying a different position in the organization — positions that may face other pressures and incentives than they do, and that have access to different information.
It is in the free and creative exploration of those differences (i.e., collaborative reflection and inquiry and reasoning about cause and effect) that makes learning at the organizational level possible.
3. It is dehumanizing.
Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people — W. Edwards Deming
Bureaucracy is meant to be impersonal and, thus, has a dehumanizing effect. The goal of bureaucratization is to build a plug and play structure that is not dependent on the personal attributes and relationships among the individuals occupying the positions in the structure.
Hierarchical control systems, as argued by Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization, are built on the idea that control must be exercised over the different parts of the organization, rather than being built into the elements themselves. Typical forms of control do not just monitor the performance of workers — they also remove the responsibility from the workers.
Management thinker Dr. Gary Hamel describes the implications of this bureaucratization well and says that most organizations are inertial. He states:
This isn’t the fault of supposedly change-phobic employees, but of top-down decision structures that create long lags between sense and respond.
They are incremental. That’s hardly surprising since bureaucracy has little room for curiosity, intuition, playfulness, and daring that animates human creativity.
Bureaucracies are emotional dead zones … As a result, our organizations are less adaptable, creative, and inspiring than we are.
Bureaucracy rewards compliance and, in the process, can crush the natural curiosity and desire humans hold to create and make things better. Most will resign themselves to focusing on the tasks they are to perform and prioritize rules and processes over outcomes, impact, and the purposes of the enterprise.
I have seen this unfold too much higher education. I see members of the faculty and staff who get involved in higher education because they want to make a difference in the lives of students and their community. Over time, as the higher education bureaucracy sucks the life out of them, they slowly lower their sights (i.e., deal with the cognitive dissonance) and turn their attention elsewhere.
In heavily bureaucratized organizations like higher education, many people adopt an external locus of control. In effect, they see themselves as participants in a system over which they have little-to-no influence.
What, then, are the implications for learning?
People will absolve themselves of any responsibility for the current circumstances or problems and, guess what, they will choose inaction or, worse yet, engage in a misguided fight against their supposed internal enemies (see reason one above), and the status quo persists — mediocrity reigns.
The Starting Point for a Solution
Often, people have the analytic ability to detect and correct problems through collaborative reflection and inquiry. However, they are constrained by bureaucratization and its effect on the overarching culture of organizations. Together, these things shape, albeit at the subconscious level, how people show up in organizations and engage others.
In the Power of Noticing, Dr. Max Bazerman states:
Leaders have a unique responsibility to create systems that will increase the likelihood that their staff will notice important information and respond in a productive manner. Leaders should audit their organizations for features that get in the way of noticing.
I will leave it to you to pick up a Bazerman’s book and accept his challenge to become a “noticing architect.”
For now, the starting point in this effort to create organizations that can learn (i.e., detect and correct an error or change themselves in response to experience) is the fostering of systemic ways of thinking and a climate where crossing boundaries is the norm. Leaders must approach this effort with intentionality. They must create opportunities for people and groups to safely challenge the status quo and explore, feel, and begin to embrace their interdependencies.
And, where information is bottlenecked or not flowing, and the consequences of an action are distant, or out of sight, feedback loops must be developed and instituted.
While there is much more to this puzzle, for now, Dr. Gary Hamel states:
We have to face the fact that any change program that doesn’t address the architectural rigidities and ideological prejudices of bureaucracy won’t, in fact, change much at all.
We can overcome the staying power of the status quo and build organizations that learn — but “only with a bold and concerted effort to pull bureaucracy up by its roots.”
