The idea of purposive transformation – instrumentalising paradox

In previous posts I have been exploring the ways in which conventional management theory tries to overcome organisational paradoxes by introducing logic models, idealisations, producing double-binds or separating the paradox out into temporal or spatial phases. In this post I will treat those scholars who recognise paradox, but nonetheless suggest that somehow it can be mastered for organisational improvement and ‘excellence’. In doing so their writing can tend towards the esoteric , sometimes suggesting that leaders and managers can develop a special skill or insight that allows them to ‘master ‘ paradox and ‘unleash’ its creativity in the organisation. Sensitive to the complexifying potential of the coincidence of one thing and its opposite, they are tempted nonetheless to suggest that it is possible to instrumentalise contradictions for the good of the company.  This is a familiar trope with many people writing about the complexity sciences, who on the one hand express an interest in uncertainty and unpredictability and on the other hand suggest that they can both be harnessed for the good.

Covering over paradox II

In the previous post I wrote about how paradoxes and contradictions produce unresolvable tensions for people working in organisations and often provoke strong feelings. For example, it is impossible to have reorganisation without including some people in the changes and excluding others, without having winners and losers, those who are satisfied and those who are not. All reorganizations are disruptions to power relationships which can sometimes be experienced as threats to identity or lack of recognition.

Last time I rehearsed some of the ways in which orthodox theories of management reduce the paradoxes of organisational life by turning them into dualisms, double binds, or separating them into sequential phases between stable states. In this post I will consider two other ways of re-presenting paradoxes in the form of idealisations and logic models.

Managing with paradoxes in everyday organisational life

In previous posts I have drawn attention to some of the enduring paradoxes of organisational life. Organisations are sites of both stability and change, innovation and habit, creativity and destruction. Even in every day activity employees are confronted with paradoxes of the individual and the group, of the ‘I’ in the ‘we’, and the need to both compete and co-operate with others to get things done. And when reorganisations happen there are likely to be both winners and losers from the changes, employees will feel both recognised and misrecognised, included and excluded from the new arrangements.  The ordinary paradoxes of every day life in organisations often call out strong feelings in employees, which in turn may provoke anxiety in managers as they grapple with what they might do to alleviate the discomfort, both their own and that of the people they manage.

Complexity and sustainability

Elinor Ostrom, who in 2009 was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics, is due to give one of the Oxford Amnesty lectures this year.  You can watch her Nobel lecture accepting her award here. Ostrom’s work over five decades has been to conduct a huge variety of studies of what she terms ‘common pool’ joint  economic undertakings, such as forests, farmland held in common, irrigation systems and even the provision of services in cities in the United States to better understand human behaviour. She has been concerned to develop better understanding of how common pool economic ‘systems’ might be managed more sustainably. Her conclusions are that complex economic interaction can more helpfully understood with painstaking empirical study, but that there are no simplistic answers. To echo the title of her Nobel lecture, complex economic interactions demand what she terms ‘polycentric governance’, which is beyond both state and markets.

For example, her response to earlier studies criticising the messiness of provision of government and other agencies in a city area led her to conclude that what mattered was not the consolidation of agencies to rationalise away the mess, but  overall performance. There is no one best way of organising ‘messy’ provision, which might be providing a good level of services for local citizens. For example, her in-depth studies of police departments in six metropolitan areas did not find a single instance where a large centralized police department outperformed smaller departments serving similar neighbourhoods in regard to multiple indicators. A mixed population of departments, both large and small, was what worked best, she concluded.

Her studies of common pool resources led her to develop a range of inter-disciplinary methods better to understand her objects of study, including agent-based models, which we have discussed in earlier posts.

Doubt as a form of enquiry

In the last post I discussed what the pragmatic philosopher John Dewey referred to as the quest for certainty. I have been arguing that the discomfort that people feel if something isn’t completely nailed down in advance often prevents them from dwelling long enough with experience to work experimentally. There is rush to define, to plan out in advance, to idealise and to make certain and this is likely to prevent innovative ways of working to which organisations aspire. I have been making an alternative argument that without improvisation, spontaneity and risk there can be no innovation.

Dewey was interested in experimentation and argued that traditions of thought, such as mainstream philosophy, have conventionally been suspicious of the bodily, the temporal and the experiential, instead preferring Plato’s fixed and pure forms. We are generally encouraged to discover pre-existing ‘truth’, rather than dwell in the messy reality of experience. However, he himself was much less interested in knowledge as a pure and static expression of truth, and more committed to knowing as a form of active enquiry, the idea of constantly opening up experience to further experience. I think this idea of constant doubt and enquiry is especially relevant to managers who are thinking about how to deal with the ever changing patterning of experience in organisations that they have to deal with on a daily basis.

Attempts to make the uncertain certain

I was rung up the other week by someone who worked in a management team in a development organisation, which wanted to try some new initiatives in three ‘fragile states’. It had become clear to them that traditional ways of working, adopting and following logical planning instruments, were inadequate in these particular dynamic and fast-moving contexts, and they were keen to try a different approach. I began to discuss the possibility of working experimentally: with the teams already working in-country, why not start with what they would like to do. Take the first steps, reflect on it, see how it had gone, and then take the next steps. Repeat the process over again. The programme would evolve as new possibilities emerged, although it would take a good deal of discussion and judgement. Programme coherence would build up with retrospective sense-making over time. ‘Yes, but can you prove that this way of working is effective?’, my co-respondent asked.

In a recent journal article I described the way in which staff in an organisation I had a great deal of experience with had tried over time to reflect systematically on the way they were working. This involved acting with intention, but regularly being open to puncturing and questioning these intentions through discussion, reflection and involving the subjects of their intentions by asking them what they thought of the work. It often involved taking two steps forward and one step back, and seeing the process of reflection and discussion not as an adjunct to the work, but as the work itself. The staff often had to work to tight deadlines, to cut short their deliberations to meet them, so were not in any way paralysed by talking rather than doing. Talking was a form of doing. One of the reviewers of the article commented that this was all very well, but what had I actually said about working differently? What would an ideal model of working actually look like?

I was supporting an organisation think about how they might assess work they were doing in East and West Africa where they had made an explicit commitment to their donor that they would focus on what they thought would be sustainable ways of working. That is to say, instead of providing services or materials as such, they would support local stakeholders, central and local government officers, local organisations, politicians and local councillors to work out what their problems were and what they wanted to do about them. The staff in the organisation I was supporting were clear that they had expertise to offer, but the problems were not theirs to ‘solve’. They would support, cajole, facilitate, discuss, offer training if necessary or seed initiatives. But since the inception of the programme the relations with the donor had changed, partly owing to a change in personnel in the donor. Now the donor required ‘objective evidence’ that this way of working produced results, and that these results would be transferable elsewhere. Exactly which kinds of ‘instruments’ were they using to encourage local discussion, and how could they be validated?

In each of these three examples I would argue that there is an illusory quest for certainty.

Linear and non-linear models and the financial collapse

In this article the mathematician Ian Stewart considers the responsibility of the linear mathematical models widely used by ‘quants’ in investment banking for the credit crunch. He points to the unrealistic and ideal assumptions of the Black-Scholes equation, used to justify more and more derived financial products, in comparison with the volatility of financial markets. As an alternative Stewart recommends the development of more ecological agent-based models of complexity which more closely represent the fluctuations of trading owing to traders’ sometimes herd-like behaviour.

Five types of uncertainty

In his most recent novel The Fear Index the novelist Robert Harris tells the story of a mathematical genius Alex Hoffman, who, frustrated by his job at the Cern laboratories, leaves to set up his own business, a hedge fund. Hoffman’s innovation in complex computer modelling of financial trading is not just that he can model many variables in the constant fluctuations in international markets, but that he can model human emotions which contribute to these fluctuations. The novel speaks to the critique offered by ex-quants like the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan, that the mathematical models developed in the financial sector are highly idealised abstractions and do not do justice to the complexity and unpredictability of human life. The conceit of the novel is that there is an algorithm for human emotion, although in this case the only emotion which seems to count is fear, hence the title of the novel.

Although it is unclear from the book at what level of aggregation Hoffman’s computer simulation is operating, wittingly or unwittingly, it addresses a number of concerns of social theory. That is to say Harris sets out a theory of social action, ie financial traders are as much driven by fear as they are rational calculation, as a well as a theory of stability and change:  global social phenomena arise from the complex interweaving of the daily activities of multiple numbers of traders with amalgams of calculation and fear. As with agent-based models of complex social processes, agents are forming and being formed by the population of which they are part, both at the same time.  Fearful micro-decisions can stampede markets, which drive fearful micro-decisions. In this way Harris undercuts some of the principle assumptions of classical economics, that actors in an economy are rational atoms acting to maximise their own utility according to clearly articulated preferences. Nonetheless the novel still sustains the fantasy that the non-rational, even the irrational, can be modelled with efficient causality.

Of course there are currently many researchers working with agent-based non-linear models of complex social phenomena, but I know of none who would claim that their models are particularly helpful at predictions, rather than offering retrospective insights into the ways in which particular global social patterns have arisen. They have much stronger explanatory rather than predictive power. They may show trends and describe probabilities, but there will always be a margin of error.  Small changes in the model can amplify into dramatic and large, population-wide changes in patterns, just as seemingly large interventions may result in not much change at all. Everything will depend on the history of interactions, the context and the way the agents self-organise.

In much organisational theory, however, and with the proliferation of tools and technique, the emphasis is still on developing methods which are assumed to be able to predict and control human behaviour. They aspire to Robert Harris’ dream.

Trends in the management of development

In this post I will continue with the discussion about the particular assumptions which now seem to underpin theories of social development as currently practised by staff in many INGOs. I will also offer some thoughts on the specific configurations that have evolved in the domain of international development between a handful of very large INGOs and others, as well as between INGOs and the state and the public which supports them. In doing so I will be exploring what I consider to be three historical trends which have interwoven to bring about significant changes in the way that staff in INGOs have come to think about their work and how they undertake it.

On the means and ends of management

One topic of discussion in the international aid domain is the extent to which current management practice, the management of development, works against the expressed aims of international development organisations. Put simply, if the aim of international aid organisations, INGOs, is to help others to help themselves in ways that, according to the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, ‘they have reason to value’, then what place do ways of working have which are predicated on control, and some would argue, coercion? In the thicket of visions, strategies, grids, frameworks, and targets which INGOs set themselves, to what degree are the voices of the disenfranchised audible? Or are they rather, drowned out by the aspirations of INGOs which in appearance and actions seem more closely to resemble private sector corporations? Have means become disconnected from ends?

In this and a series of subsequent posts I will be arguing that means and ends are inseparable: they are constitutive of each other. If the means of INGOs appear to be contradicting the ends they espouse publicly, then this is because other ends have come to dominate. Although this discussion is specifically about INGOs it may have relevance by analogy to other discussions about the means and ends of management in, say, the public sector, for example the management of schools and hospitals, or the management of companies which aspire to being innovative or creative. To what degree is the way they are managed consistent with what they want to achieve?