This post is part of the “Better organizations by design” series
- What’s wrong with today’s organizations?
Why do some of them seem incapable of learning?
Wisdom isn’t always easy to apply. But a spectacular example, surely, of the gap between guidance — wisdom if you like — which is easily available, and actual everyday practice, must be the way that most modern organizations are run.
A generation ago, maybe, managers could possibly claim that they didn’t know that treating staff well is the best way to get results; or that pursuing short-term cost savings is the worst. But not these days. There are now shelves of books based on detailed research that demonstrate these things. Sites like this one put even the laziest manger only a few clicks away from acquiring wisdom on these and similar issues.
With more business books being sold than ever before, and more sites about how to be a good manager appearing every day, there has to be the interest in the subject. Besides, it’s not as if there were much dispute about what good management practice is, or what works best.
Is the answer just that we need better leaders and managers? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the way organizations work today?
It’s very clear that treating people as humans leads to much better results; and that obsessing about short-term financial management is a very bad idea. The evidence is quite unequivocal. To cap it all, it emerges that treating people like human beings is even good for profits in anything except the shortest of terms. What more incentives to good behavior could managers possibly want? And yet, reports from the organizational front line suggest that the war for more humane organizations is being won very slowly, if indeed it’s being won at all.
The obvious question is why? And the responses to that question fall very clearly into two main categories, depending on how it is you think that organizations work.
The “royal” answer
The first answer, and the more optimistic, sees organizations as essentially the same as the people that make them up. It sees change and improvement as a moral and emotional education process. It looks for a change of heart, or at least an intelligent appreciation of self-interest. It isn’t the system, it’s the people who run it.
This is the fundamental conservative approach — in the traditional British sense — to criticisms of organizations; and it’s comforting because it implies that the problems are moral, rather than structural, or, horror of horrors, political.
In this answer, you can hear the great defensive cry of history: that if the King’s ministers had been better chosen — if only the Emperor (or the President) knew what was being done in his (or her) name — none of this would have happened. There is, in other words, nothing fundamentally wrong with organizations that can’t be cured, if people could be made to behave better. It’s why people talk ending African poverty by abolishing corruption, or cleaning up police forces by making them issue more reports.
In many ways, of course, this is too obvious to be worth arguing about. If people stopped being wicked, there would be no crime. But the real question is why people — from alleged rogue traders to muggers and pickpockets — actually behave as they do.
This approach to solving organizational issues is less an answer than another way of stating the problem. Why don’t managers in modern organizations actually follow what makes sense and would benefit them in the end?
In reality, as people who have worked in large organizations know, bad organizations can defeat even the excellent, whilst good organizations can make bad people behave better.
So maybe there’s another possibility about today’s organizations. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the system of which they are part? That will be the topic of the second part of this article.
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