A Strategic Pause

Yesterday I was asked to "escalate" an issue. Someone out in the business hadn't completed some forms that had been requested a few weeks ago, and this was going to delay implementing some project changes. I was supposed to contact this person's line manager, highlight the lack of activity and generally bang the table ("escalate") until the recalcitrant miscreant did what was requested.

I thought I'd do a little checking before I started the escalation, and checked the forms. I found a mess - people listed in the wrong buildings, incorrect data, mostly people not associated with our contact ... etc. Hardly surprising that the forms hadn't been completed. Instead of escalating, I searched around for someone I vaguely knew in the relevant department and gave him a call to ask for assistance. He'd already gone home, so I took a risk and delayed doing anything until today.

Today I found that the person who had escalated this to me had got his information wrong, and the form is not due for completion until next week - it's been a long project, and mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. But I felt greatly relieved that I hadn't taken the escalation action that had been requested. That would have been counter-productive, made me look stupid (or at least uninformed) and high-handed. It was lucky I had taken a "strategic pause".

This seemed very relevant today when I was reading about the strategic benefits of doing nothing in business. While this might seem to encourage the idle, it does highlight the pragmatic approach to management that accepts over-reaction to data or events is just as counter-productive as ignoring information. Studying systems thinking (as I currently am), this links to the management of feedback to control systems. Make the control too reactive and the system rapidly oscillates between different states, while an unresponsive control introduces long lags between event and response. The secret is finding the appropriate balance.

So I'm not moving into the do nothing domain, but taking a "strategic pause" seems an appropriate response to many requests for action. One suggested response is in the art of being brave: listen, wait, do something different and keep it simple, to which I would add: ask lots of questions.

Russell Ackoff (RIP)

The great management thinker and philosopher Russell ackoff died in October, a great loss to alternatives in management thinking. As a systems thinker, he regarded the detail of current management planning as a crisis, and wrote extensively about the flaws in this. Highlighting the risk aversion that is trained into most managers, he regularly proposed a new direction of management measurement - checking up on what people failed tro do as well as what people failed in doing. As he put it: "Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong".

See more Ackoff at the Ackoff collaboratory (blog), on Mission statements, on systems thinking and an obituary.

A Systems Perspective of Targets

Came across an interesting perspective on targets in "The Systems Thinking Review" (web archive link). While most management thinking stresses the importance of setting goals and targets to motivate performance, in "a tool too far: a systems perspective of targets" (web archive link), the authors highlight some of the problems of target-driven cultures. There are numerous example:

• NHS targets 'may have led to 1,200 deaths' in Mid-Staffordshire
• Hospital chairman quits over dangerous targets

These life and death situations present some real callenges to mainstream thinking about performance management. The authors highlight that many of these problems are caused by centrally set targets, which have little connection with the business action at the front line. The further the centre from the operation, the worse the problem seems to be, particularly when data is aggregated and averaged to produce management reports that drive new targets. This statistical process smooths out all the variations in performance and operational difficulties that make targets difficult or impossible to achieve.

The authors highlight the challenge that then arises for managers under this measurement regime - the options are (a) cheat, (b) tell the truth or (c) chase the target but do the wrong thing. Option (a) may deliver what the customer wants, but only works for as long as the manager doesn't get caught. Money and reputation are linked to target attainment, so option (b) is eventually career-limiting. Which leaves (c), so organisations are driven to do the wrong thing in order to meet an irrelevent target set externally.

So, can this be changed? It can be quite difficult to move an organisation away from a target-driven culture, as targets give the illusion of control. If a specific target is set out as a performance improvement, and subsequently achieved, this appears to be strong management, leading the organisational improvement. However, the deleterious impact on other services is skipped over in focusing on this single target.

So the change may be difficult, but it is possible. Locally set targets appear to motivate performance improvements, particularly when there is a connection between a target, an individual's behaviour in attaining the taget and the connection with some organisational or personal value. This simply needs a re-establishment of trust between local managers and the organisational centre - the centre sets direction and local managers set targets to motivate local performance.

This suggests loss of control from the centre, but local empowerment may achieve the required performance where central targets often fail. This requires a brave decision for the executive at the centre, but ultimately leads to greater achievement.

Update (Dec-2014): The Systems Thinking Review website seems to have disappeared - links moved to point to a snapshot archived by the web archive project.