A critical glossary of contemporary management terms XIX – Vision

Vision, the faculty or state of being able to see, the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom, is one of those grand words of contemporary leadership discourse which is nonetheless used on a daily basis. Vision is cheap, it is everywhere, and yet somehow it is still lacking.

As we find ourselves facing more periods of semi-lockdown, so we look to our leaders to find some reassurance and to guide us to a better future. There are well known psychological reasons for our amplified preoccupation with our leaders: the more uncertain we feel, the more we look for certainty from authority figures. Certainty can soothe our feelings of anxiety, even if it is misplaced or overblown. Remember President Trump’s mantra during the 2016 election: ‘there’s nobody who knows more about tax (or race, or poverty, or the economy, or whatever you want) than me’. This isn’t just narcissism, but a significant gesture of containment to the highly anxious or distressed, which in his case clearly worked well enough to get him elected. Whatever we think of Trump, he took a big enough proportion of his audience and their fears seriously. He acknowledged fears in order to promise hope.

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More than 30 years of scholarship about leadership has left us with many contradictory views about what makes a good leader. It has also stimulated critical appraisal: how the leadership discourse tries to make the mundane extraordinary[1], how every grand claim for transformation carries its dark side[2], how leadership and transformation has been captured by neoliberalism as a way of masking the goals of corporate power[3]. But in the end we know a good leader when we experience one. Experiencing is different from thinking passively that vision is something a leader ‘has’, like some kind of X factor that they are born with. Optimism and charisma only take you so far. Instead we can understand leadership as a social and group activity, a relationship that involves the leader and those they lead in an evolving performance of  mutual recognition.

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A critical glossary of contemporary management terms XVI – Leadership Part I

In many ways leadership has emerged in all kinds of encouraging and unexpected ways in this current crisis to break our sense of dependency on idealized individuals. Young medics have gone to work in hospitals just as they are graduating, supermarket workers have continued to turn up to help feed us every day, underpaid carers have continued to care for the vulnerable despite lacking the support and PPE they need; com

munity groups have rallied in their communities to support and aid their neighbours. Leadership doesn’t always emerge from leaders.

Rather than obsessing about leaders and leadership, the pandemic and resulting crisis has given us ample opportunity to notice how leadership is a co-created

pattern of relationships which arises in a group. It tells us as much about our own expectations of and projections onto authority figures, as it does about the authority figures themselves. We all play into some dominating emotional patterns which catch us up again and again.

It’s important to pay attention to this social and emotional perspective on leadership because it is underrepresented. The mine of leadership scholarship which has focused on individuals and how they behave, what they should be doing, has been dug very deep and every time one anticipates that there is no more digging to do, along comes another variation on a theme: transformational leadership, servant leadership, relational leadership, leadership and followership, clear leadership, dialogic leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership. It becomes hard to think about power and authority without having the word leadership somewhere in the sentence as though every societal problem can be reduced to one thing.

A critical glossary of contemporary management terms XIV – VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous).

If management is understood as a discipline which tries to control things, to place things under one’s hand (manus), then the concept of complexity poses something of a dilemma. The phenomenon one is trying to control is, by very definition, uncontrollable. This doesn’t prevent thinking about it, describing it, noticing its effects, positing what might or might not be helpful in dealing with it. But the question is when these attempts to identify, clarify and name tip over into hubris and begin to suggest that a complex world isn’t really so complex, or can be managed, or with particular tips and tricks, subdued to the will of the rational manager. Complexity is assimilated as another novel and/or fashionable real world phenomenon which will succumb to management science and clear thinking. Complexity is something a manager acts on rather than acts in.

The idea of acting on is the other route to taming complexity, to suggest that sometimes the world is complex and sometimes it isn’t, and it is up to the manager to decide. I will come back to this way if thinking later when I discuss some of the intellectual assumptions which are revealed in VUCA discussions about complexity.

The coining of the concept of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) as a way of introducing complexity helps us investigate how radically the idea of a complex world challenges that notion that we can predict and control. And noticing how the concept is mobilised and described by particular traditions of thought gives us insight into how management discourses sustain and renew themselves, sometimes consuming everything in their wake.

A critical glossary of contemporary management terms IX – passionate.

Passionate, meaning capable of being roused to intense feeling, ardent, easily aroused to anger, is a word which is taken for granted now in organisations to convey commitment to the job, or being able to go the extra mile. Despite the ubiquity of the term over many years, it seems that we have not yet reached peak passion. Previously the word also had connotations of suffering or enduring. Hence the passion of Christ refers to Jesus’ suffering on the cross. To be passionate about one’s job, then, denotes hard work, endurance, and a willingness to suffer in order complete work which pushes the employee to their limit. In a way, then, to claim to be passionate is also an indication of submission and obedience to a call of duty.

The prevalence of the term is at odds with the experience of many workers in organisations where metrics and performance management are used as a disciplinary apparatus to keep people’s noses to the grindstone. Ticking boxes, conforming to increased standardisation and targets often squeezes out worker autonomy and a sense that it is possible to exercise professional judgement. And yet while this narrowing of professional enjoyment is happening, employees are expected at the same time to be able to assert that they feel passionate about their jobs. Perhaps the greater the presence of the former the more the latter is required as public display.

A glossary of contemporary management terms II – transformation(al)

Transformation, a marked change in form or appearance, is one of the most widely used words in contemporary management vocabulary after leadership and delivery (future posts). Quite often it is used in conjunction with leadership: everybody knows since Burns and Bass that leaders are transformational and managers are transactional. It goes without saying. Linking transformation to leadership is another blast of air into the already over-inflated concept of leadership given that most leadership activity involves humdrum, every day tasks and conversations. It creates anxiety for leaders and unrealistic expectations from those they lead.

The idea of transformation is part of the charismatic tendency in management thinking and talking and fits well with other alluring, quasi-religious ideas such as vision and passion. It is no longer enough just to change something, or even to try and keep things the same, forgetting that there are many social traditions and practices which persist because they serve us well, there must be a commitment to transform them. The promise of transformation feeds into what one might think of as the anxiety narrative about change, which we can’t achieve completely enough or quickly enough, as other competitors catch us up and pass us by, particularly the Indians and the Chinese.

Implied in the rush to transform things are a number of assumptions about the role and capabilities of leaders and managers, time, and valuations of the good.

Talking about organisations and complexity

Teach us to sit still.

An interview with Richard Atherton from the Being Human podcast.

From quantity to quality

I had been invited to work with a group identified as ‘talented potential leaders’ in a large public sector organisation in a European country. Workers in the organisation were highly likely to be users of the organisation’s services, a bit like workers in the NHS in the UK because of the size and scope of the organisation. To an extent, then, there is no inside and no outside, no clear-cut distinction between the employees and the ‘customer experience’: employees had very direct access to what it meant to use the organisation’s services, which were widely available.

My role was to encourage the ‘talent’ group to think about how they are thinking, to identify some of the organisational patterns they found themselves caught up in, and to think about how the organisation did strategy. To what extent were accepted ways of undertaking strategy in the organisation helpful? How did they square with their own experience of making plans and trying to implement them?

Leadership development in a fragile state

My colleague Nick Sarra and I were asked to work with some practicing managers and leaders in what is usually described as a ‘fragile state’ in Africa. The country has been plunged into conflict for decades, and this has had a profound effect on social relations and the ability to get things done. Conflict still breaks out sporadically, making parts of the country off-limits,  potentially reactivating the tensions which still exist between groups living elsewhere in the country, especially in the capital. The government struggles to provide basic services, so the country is dominated by international aid agencies, development organisations and the representatives of international governments who each have their own sets of policies, procedures and priorities. This becomes visible the moment one steps off the plane: the airport car park is full of 4x4s, each sporting its own logo, and often there to meet, or disgorge development workers with their wrap-around shades and desert fatigues. Without the agencies this country would not be able to survive, but at the same time it feels a bit like an occupation.

Researching ‘transformational change’

Recently I have been involved with a team of researchers in researching so called ‘transformational change’ in a not-for-profit sector. I suspect the research has been commissioned on the understanding that transformational change is something which senior managers choose, and can, to a degree control. We are at the beginning of the research but the process itself has thrown up interesting insights into research methods , but also how the idea of transformation is framed and understood by our commissioners, and by the respondents. This helps us researchers understand the term anew too, but makes it no easier to think and write about.

Complex responsive processes in Sydney Australia – December 13/14 2016

Chris Mowles is visiting Australia the week beginning 12th December and will be running a two day intense workshop and a breakfast meeting with 10000hours .

The two day workshop is entitled:

LEADING IN UNCERTAINTY – 13/14th December

The workshop is suitable for experienced leaders, managers and consultants from all kinds of organizations. It includes a mixture of seminars, break-out discussions, and real time exploration of examples from participants’ own organizations.

Chris will draw on insights from the complexity sciences developed by Ralph Stacey in the perspective known as complex responsive processes, which informs this blog.

Participants can expect to gain basic insights into the complexity sciences understood in social terms, and to experience the importance of reflection and reflexivity in relation to their particular organizational contexts.

To find out more follow this link: http://10000hours.com/chrismowles/

Breakfast meeting Thursday 15th December

10,000 Hours will host a breakfast meeting for experienced leaders, managers and consultants wishing to hear about the what difference understanding organisational life as complex responsive processes of relating can make to the task of leading of managing.

Evening seminar UTS Thursday 15th December

Chris will give a seminar hosted by UTS to interested academic colleagues about some of the difficulties of sustaining critical management education in the UK. He will talk in particular about the  contribution of the Doctor of Management programme at the university of Hertfordshire.

Lunchtime seminar RMIT Melbourne 16th December

Chris will give a similar seminar to interested academic colleagues in Melbourne at lunchtime in RMIT.