14 Comments on Towards a 21st century enlightenment organisation

Jonathan Rowson on Mon, 29th Nov 2010 2:08 pm


“But what does freedom, justice and progress mean in an organisational context?”

I’ll leave freedom and justice for others, but on progress, Robert Kegan (him again) is right on the nub of this challenge.

Co-written with Lisa Laskow Lahey: Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization (Leadership for the Common Good)

The problem with big organisations, including the RSA, is that we very often put our foot on the accelerator and, without realising exactly how, we put our foot on the brake at the same time. Kegan shows exactly how and why we do this- and the reason this book is so good is that he also shows what to do about it.

The way I would frame the organisational challenge of the 21st century is this: How do we make our immunity to change an integral part of our conversations about the changes we profess to be working for?

Michael Lewkowitz on Mon, 29th Nov 2010 4:11 pm


I’m a big fan of this direction… and still, for me, the deepest work I’ve seen on ‘organization’ is in the book ‘Heart of Enterprise’ by Stafford Beer. It’s old, but by far the most honest look at what organization is and the foundation systems required for viability. While there is much writing on the effect of digital technologies and return of humanity (passion and purpose) Beer’s work, if you can get through it, understands it best.

Josh on Mon, 29th Nov 2010 4:56 pm


Hi Matthew

Both your ideas for the annual lecture sound great – partly because they are so ambitious. But how about combining the two? Perhaps counterintuitively, this could make for a more focussed argument.

Organisations whose work is consonant with ‘Big Society’ goals must surely have one common characteristic: they should make room for employees to participate in the political discourse centred on “developing a common account of progress” that you mentioned in your earlier post.

Structures that allow for greater employee engagement in the governance of organisations – and in deliberation over goals and their relationship to the enablers and constraints provided by particular policy contexts (how they fit in to discourse about broader ‘social progress’) – could provide more space for the kind of reflexivity that your “Connected Communities” report identified as leading to more pro-social behaviour, better awareness of the conditions in which actions are taken and a greater ability to shape them. In other words, they could unlock the kind of potential you’re talking about here.

Focussing on the level of democracy within organisations would help address one of the major criticisms of the Big Society project: that it disproportionately excludes those who do not have the resources to contribute in their free time, or those “creative people” with little incentive to continue contributing when their voice is drowned out by the “difficult people” you have mentioned in the past. If employees could help re-align the goals of the organisations that employ them, they would have a chance to contribute to society during the course of their paid work, increasing the incentive to participate.

This is just a sketch of some of the links you could make. Might it be worth exploring them further?

Chris Cook on Mon, 29th Nov 2010 5:50 pm


Perhaps in the 21st Century it will no longer be a question of ‘an’ organisation as an object, but rather of organisation as a relationship.

So, perhaps we will no longer use Organisations as artificial legal persons based on genetically modified hoary statutes – which take on a life (management and agenda) of their own – but will instead see Self Organisation to a common purpose within interactive and consensually negotiated partnership-based agreements .

There is an international trend to the use of entities which facilitate such collaborative working – such as the US LLC and the UK (and elsewhere) LLP – to the extent that the ‘Economist’ even ran a feature on the subject.

Once it is realised that the use of such framework agreements opens up simple but radical new financing options which are complementary to existing finance capital, then things get really interesting.

Meredith Doig on Mon, 29th Nov 2010 11:18 pm


The best organisational framework I have come across (and I’ve experienced and read about lots) is the Requisite Organisation framework of Elliott Jaques. It draws on human psychology (ie, human nature) to recommend a structure of roles that allows for enough freedom to keep work interesting, combined with sufficient accountability to ensure ‘other people’s money’ isn’t wasted.

Some will say the Jaques model is ‘bureaucratic’ – but that’s how large organisations have to be. The question is, what sort of bureaucracy? A compressing or a liberating one? Requisite Organisation, properly understood, is the latter.

It does, however, have to be updated to take account of how communications have been changed so radically by the Net. This would make an interesting project!

David Guillebaud on Tue, 30th Nov 2010 10:17 am


Matthew
You must read Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to its own Unspoken Knowledge by Theodore Taptiklis. Surely a critical insight of 21st Century Enlightenment is that the power of an organisation lies not in the smartness of managerial elites trying to make people do what they think should happen – no, it resides in the hidden knowledge possessed by frontline practitioners and that reflective conversations between practitioners encouraged by an enlightened 21st Century leader will encourage small practical changes which together drive transformation from the bottom up. Theodore’s book is a fascinating mix of his personal journey from McKinsey consultant toenlightened 21st Century Unmanager and profound analysis of various influential voices – Patricia Benner, Hubert Dreyfus, John Shotter, David Boje and Ralph Stacey not to mention Wittgenstein, Bakhtin and Elias.

Gerard Darby on Tue, 30th Nov 2010 2:56 pm


I think this is a ripe area for a lecture. Organisations are fundamental to how our society is currently structured (though I like Chris Cook’s suggestion that there is ultimately a shift from organisations as objects to organisations as relationships). Demos in a paper in this area estimated there were some 1,280,000 organisations in the UK covering everything from SMEs to government departments and I believe they can have a significant impact on our effectiveness, our culture, and our aspirations. Change in any organisation is complex as it involves affecting people’s attitudes, outlooks and behaviours – things that are intangible, difficult to influence and problematic to measure.

Yes, there is some discourse about this area already but, as you suggest, the debate if often focussed on the latest management fad rather than a holistic appraisal on how to make our organisations and the cultures they imbue to be more in tune with the requirements of our society.

I look forward to the lecture!
Gerard Darby

Dave Gorman on Tue, 30th Nov 2010 8:03 pm


Matthew,

You’re right, a vast area opens up if one starts to review even just the management literature around new forms of organisation and how to encourage innovation and so on.

My own contribution is to think how various forms of new media tools can assist with this, by making collaboration easier, and allowing tie-strengths to improve, and contributions to be made from anywhere. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everyone, or Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 are good guides I think…

Charlie Dannreuther on Tue, 30th Nov 2010 8:36 pm


Thought Matthews 21ce talk in Leeds was interesting this evening, but cannot help thinking that the interest in the importance of ideas, of seeking ways to organise society to confront pressing problems and to promote clear political communication between diffrent perspectives is something that could usefully discuss the function (if not the content) of ideologies.

It’s not very 3rd way or very 21ce but all the above were effectively mediated through clear ideoligical positions in the past. Furthermore the references to early and late C20th social capital in the talk also does not explain why the need for more coordinated ideas made the C20th “the age of ideology”.

So when in MT’s view do ideas (which are “good”) become ideologies (which are “bad”)? And if the distinction is rather arbitrary is a more fulsome investigation of the past a useful prerquisute for the future?

Will on Wed, 1st Dec 2010 11:37 am


If you speak to managers and executives about ‘talent management’ they all seem to want two things: a workforce within which the best people are given room to act autonomously and develop their ideas, and a firm which swims as a whole, towards a common goal.

But there is a fundamental tension between ‘goal directed’ enterprises – those that are steered as a single mass, and emergent ones – those that are propelled by currents swelling from the bottom up. Achieving defined objectives in a large organisation seems to necessitate bureaucracy and organisation (for all complex, goal directed systems I know about are both hierarchical and highly structured); conversely, if employees are granted the right to roam (e.g. Google’s ‘twenty percent time’) then their labours will take unexpected directions and management must be reactive in order to capitalise on them.

It seems to me that what you’re seeking to do in applying 21CE thinking to the RSA is the magic combination of those two elements: a participative yet purpose driven organisation. In my opinion you have the shoots of an answer already (and it’s an old one): shared, ‘living’ values.

The 21CE updates the notions of autonomy, empathy and ethics in the light of modern understanding, forming a potential set of shared values from which a broad social agenda flows. My belief is that if such a value set could be truly woven into the heart of an organisation, and woven in a such way that they are frequently discussed, debated and advanced, such that they live and evolve, then unity of purpose is much more likely to emerge from the ground up. Although every organisation has a vision and a mission statement, very few actually seem to really live them in this way, and are seemingly unwilling or unable to inculcate them within the cogs and gears of operation.

Will

MatthewKalman on Wed, 1st Dec 2010 5:07 pm


Hi Matthew,

Dave Gorman mentions Andrew McAfee’s book ‘Enterprise 2.0′.

What I found most interesting about that book is that it in fact seemed to conclude that the new technologies are a side-issue really.

It’s the shift away from a ‘Model I’ type of organisation typified by command-and-control to a Model II type of organisation, focused on mutual learning, that is what’s truly important here. This draws on the ideas of the great organisational development guru Chris Argyris.

But such a shift requires “sustained interventions”, not just new tech. (I’m fairly sure the Kegan’s ‘immunity to change’ exercise that Jonathan mentions would help in this – we can all try it ourselves, or with our organisations).

I talk about McAfree, Argyris and all this organisational stuff in this blog post:
http://communities.cilip.org.uk/blogs/update/archive/2010/05/10/open-leadership-enterprise-2-0-the-practices-that-can-make-them-real.aspx

I’d certainly recommend you listen to Argyris, Torbert, Jaques, Kegan and similar voices, if you want to get a handle on how to turn dysfunctional organisations into effective, liberatory ones!

Bertelsmann Stiftung have a report ‘The Leadership Implications of the Evolving Web’ just out today – see http://bit.ly/hy15W5 – by Grady McGonagill.

It looks really promising!

By the way, as you know, I’m talking with Jonathan Rowson about a possible idea for an RSA project which might well include elements around the Big Society, human potential, active citizenship and suchlike.

For instance, I think a real-time ‘Living Community Map’ of people’s experiences/emotions in their communities could act like a radar for the ‘Big Society’ – surfacing real-time actionable insights (ie visualising hotspots) pointing to where Big Society action is needed, so that active citizens can step forward to own these problems. (Perhaps enabled to locate others to partner with via social media).

Cheers,

Matthew Kalman

Charlie Dannreuther on Wed, 1st Dec 2010 10:55 pm


Have enjoyed reading these views. I do not think that the relationship of ideas to actions you describe are necessarily without ideological content nor could they not be applied to another ideological model. For example “the notions of autonomy, empathy and ethics in the light of modern understanding, forming a potential set of shared values from which a broad social agenda flows” could surely be applied to liberalism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism (in fact any -ism) etc etc. Of course many of these became horrors as they became organisations. But isn’t that where we are now? Trying to work out hwo to organise ourselves better without falling into modern traps?
The benefit in my view of linking the emergent properies of organisational behaviour under discussion above and by MT (which are fasccinating) to ideological frameworks is that we can a) tease out how they are different to old patters, b) draw on things that happened in the past both for inspiration and consolation and lessons of what not to do and c) communicate beyond a literature exchange between intellectuals to a broader society that can engage in broad frameworks of behaviour and understanding on their own terms.
best wishes
Charlie

Christopher McCracken on Thu, 2nd Dec 2010 1:25 am


Organisations are about relationships but are more commonly assessed by product rather than people. Emotional intelligence strikes me as a good place to start – there is an excellent article by Daniel Goleman (2000, Leadership that Gets Results) that can be downloaded for free. He identifies four capabilities, each with a number of competencies. A 21C org should measure these more explicitly in its managers.
Every worker has an implicit psychological contract with their employer, but how often is this talked about? Probably never. A 21C org would promote it because it would be a conversation that revolves around trust, commitment and engagement. The article to read is Rousseau (2004, Psychological Contracts in the Workplace: Understanding the Ties that Motivate).
20C orgs looked at great policies or great managers. This perhaps underplayed their social complexity and the causally ambiguous nature of success. 21C org will look at social architecture, connections, skill formation and how to socialise the tacit knowledge within its members and make it explicit.
21C leadership should be based around socialised power – building capacity, coaching and mentoring, promoting the success of team rather than self.
I couldn’t agree more about the importance of new media. 20C org managers kept a “professional distance” from staff. In the 21C managers and staff should be friends on facebook and idea generation should come through Twitter.
And coming from the public sector, Francis Maude’s idea of mutualisation is definately along the right lines!

Michael Shaw on Thu, 2nd Dec 2010 11:31 am


Having attended, and enjoyed, the Leeds lecture, I am broadly in agreement with the points raised as being highly appropriate to the twenty-first century. However, I have serious concerns with reference to the Enlightenment in the title of this initiative. I totally accept that reviewing the relevancy of the Enlightenment to the present day is completely worthwhile. From the lecture (and accompanying booklet) I gained the impression that the Society (and society) needs to undertake more than just a review, and, again, I am in agreement. My problem arises from the fact that the Enlightenment, in my understanding, was not a ‘project’ but a name given at a considerably later date to a collection of ideas and actions which, and this to my mind is the key to the term, had overarching features in common and these feature were, indeed could only be, identified by later generations. Hume and the rest did not set out to create an ‘enlightenment’ and I would argue that Hume (and other epoch-defining spirits such as Dante, Leonardo, Galileo, Newton and Luther) had very little, if any, idea of the overall effects of the movements of which they were (later identified as) key members. If society does come up with ‘answers’ to the issues faced at this point in time, they may or may not have a substantial commonality. But if they do, that commonality will be markedly different from the defining features of the Enlightenment. The Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment (to give three examples) have similarities but differ in key, fundamental ways (which is why, I suppose, the Enlightenment was not named the eighteenth century renaissance).
This leads to a subsidiary concern that reference to the Enlightenment in the title will be restricting in that people will seek parallels between their initiatives and those of the eighteenth century, so placing a possible restriction on thought. Whilst examining the relevancy of the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century is valid, it is almost certain that the ‘answers’ to the issues covered in the lecture do not lie in the Enlightenment: if they did, we would have already realised that to be the case and applied them. Should a name ultimately evolve for the overarching approach of the twenty-first century, it is folly for us to attempt to name a methodology that, by definition, does not exist.

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