Politico-technical systems

The language of socio-technical systems and socio-technical design has proved over the years to be one of the most fruitful approaches to analyzing and implementing effective organizational change. Essentially, it’s based on the idea that organizations have both a technical system consisting of the tools and hardware and equipment they use and a social system of relationships and reciprocal behavior. These two systems can be some degree analyzed separately, but they are integrally related to one another, to the point that it’s virtually impossible to make a change in one of the systems that doesn’t have direct implications for changes in the other. Any effective organizational change must tried to jointly optimize performance of both systems; optimizing one at the expense of the other is always less efficient and effective. As the pioneering organizational analyst Kurt Lewin once said, “it’s impossible to change just one thing.”

Back in 1976, Albert Cherns defined nine basic principles that underlie a socio-technical approach: Compatibility; Minimal critical specification; Variance control at the source; Multifunctionality; Boundary location; Information; Support congruence; Design and human values; and Incompletion. Each of these is worthy of discussion in its own right, and there’s a lot of information about them out there (for example, http://is.theorizeit.org/wiki/Socio-technical_theory). But while the theory is helpful, what really matters is how effectively it can be implemented.

In practice, effective socio-technical analysis and design is often more of an art form than an exercise in organizational science. Even relatively small scale change projects can become extremely complicated when they extend deeply into interactions between the systems which are often largely unknown or invisible to the participants. Organizational change in general and socio-technical designs in particular can easily become bogged down and unsuccessful through overly narrow definitions of the systems. In particular, we often forget or occasionally choose to repress that a key part of the socio-element in a socio-technical system is in fact the set of political relationships — adjustments of relative interests and returns — among the participants.

I’m using politics here in the most basic sense originally defined by Robert Dahl — who gets what where when and how. Some of these interests are economic, involving money and physical resources; many of them are intangible, involving exchanges of favors and support in multiple contexts both short and long-term. Some of them may even be purely symbolic — compliments of the larger context narrative surrounding any organizational activity. Some of them may be clear and obvious and thoroughly acceptable; some of them are probably illegal, immoral, or fattening. But any interest however defined by a participant is likely to be real in its consequences.

The political subsystem is the set of arrangements for balancing and trading off interests among multiple participants in any system. We often feel quite uncomfortable talking about organizational politics. It’s acquired a shady connotation, somehow suggesting that we are more concerned about what happens to us than what happens to the organization as a whole. The fact that it may be true makes it even more uncomfortable. It is entirely human to value more things that are close to us and to those we are closely connected to than things that are of more indirect or casual benefit to us. Ignoring politics in this extended sense doesn’t make it go away — it just makes it harder to understand many aspects of decision-making.

Any large-scale or even medium scale socio-technical system involves conflicting interests. That is, no one individual or group is going to get as much out of the system as they would like to get. Thus, there will be various kinds of exchanges, side payments, deals of all sorts, and other mechanisms for balancing and adjusting the exchange relationships among the participants. Some of these may be formally negotiated; some may be implicit in decisions that are nominally about technical or social issues; and some may be mostly or entirely covert. Some of them may advance the decision-making regarding socio-technical systems and change; some of them may address entirely separate issues; and some of them may in fact retard certain parts of the process. In short, there is a whole realm of political processes adjusting the interests of the different participants at all levels going on as part of the whole socio-technical design effort.

I’ve thought at various times that it might be more useful to speak of politico-technical systems. Socio-technical language speaks specifically to the connection of goal-directed activities and relationships to the engineering and technological components of the organization, but it sometimes masks this whole set of related adjustments of interests and returns that inevitably accompanies any change process. Political exchanges usually extend far beyond the bounds of what an analyst would really see as the socio-technical system itself; they often extend beyond the bounds of the organization itself. The more skilled the participants are in managing their politics, the longer the focus of the relationships tends to be and the more pervasive they are.

Unless we’re prepared to honestly assess how political relationships and interests are involved in the decision-making surrounding sociotechnical systems, we’re going to be more confused than enlightened. Decisions that may seem irrational or stupid in engineering or sociological terms are often quite rational and logical within the political context. Admitting that decisions have this political component doesn’t mean that we have to approve of the influence of interests and/or mechanisms for adjusting conflicts of influence. But unless we acknowledge and allow for political influences in the development of the socio-technical narrative, we’re always going to be two steps behind. Ignoring and illegitimizing organizational politics only serves to empower the bad guys.

This piece originally appeared in LinkedIn Pulse, April 6, 2015