Organisations - How much do we really know?

Managing our daily lives is a challenge most of us find difficult at times - if not all the time. As we grow we learn from our mistakes and successes, we have regrets, (a few) but we get on with it doing our best for ourselves and our own, wishing all the time we had more control, could exert more influence, and could predict the future a little better.

We as humans deal in perceptions. We perceive the world around us and act upon our perceptions as if they are reality. This in itself is not a problem and in many ways it produces the uniqueness of each individual. Our background, education and life experiences fuel our perceptions of the world around us. Our perceptions drive our actions and our actions deliver experiences which further drive our perceptions etc, etc. My view of the world is different than yours because of my experiences. How I react to a situation maybe the same as you but why I reacted that way may come from entirely different belief systems or simply from a different perception as to what the outcome might be.

It is commonly accepted that the human mind cannot make sense of its surroundings without some form of reference base. As we grow we develop cognitive maps of concepts and categories and we use these to understand the world around us. If something new occurs and we have no reference framework we have to invent one or we cannot respond to that event in any meaningful way. We all have developed different references to help us understand our world as we see it.

That's just life. We follow different paths, and our motivations are distinctly unique. This provides for the differences between people and produces the wonderful tapestry and richness of life.

This individuality, driven by a myriad of perceptions becomes an issue when we move into the work organisation. Why so, you may ask? Well, let us consider what a work organisation is. Organisations exists for a reason - a very specific reason, all organisations were established in the first place by some one who had a goal. Therefore, organisations exist initially to achieve someone's goal. This brings us to a second definition of organisation: any group of people working towards a common goal. At this stage, things are getting very complex. The 3 P's of organisational life are starting to take over - purpose, people, and power. Before we even consider the complexities of structure, relationships, climate, leadership and process, already individual purposes are colliding with the organisational purpose, and power and politics is now being exercised. The bigger an organisation is and the longer it is in existence the more the distortion is apparent.

The organisation is by definition groups of people organised to achieve the organisational goal. All organisations have six common factors between them - Goals, Structure, Relationships, Climate, Leadership, and Process i.e.:

1. They exist for a reason - the goal
2. They organise or structure themselves to achieve the goal
3. They create relationships between people, between units of the organisation and between people and the tools people use to achieve the Goal
4. A climate evolves which, hopefully encourages people to stay in the organisation and motivates them to work towards the organisational goal
5. Someone or “some bodies” are required to define priorities and establish programmes to achieve the goal, i.e. leaders
6. There has to be a logical means by which the work gets done to achieve the goal, i.e. processes

While these seem straight forward enough each of the six factors above could be considered a science subject in their own right. Thousands of books and academic papers have been written over the years to help us understand the so called right way.

Now add to this complexity group dynamics, i.e. people, behave differently in a group scenario than when on their own, (an individual may be fine to deal with in a one to one situation, but makes Genghis Kahn look like a boy scout when in a group session) plus all individual motivation, perceptions and individual goals and you begin to wonder how does any organisation work at all. What can be amusing, depending on how you look at it, is that we ask managers (individuals) to manage the organisation.

These are people who are challenged by managing their own life and now we ask them to manage the lives of their subordinates, in a work context, as well. Their own perceptions collide with the perceptions of those they are expected to manage. Their motivations are different; their needs are different as are all individual needs and motivations. Power plays, politics, one up man-ship, jealousy, perceptions, personal goals, all collide like big bang, (Steven Hawkins was right - chaos seems to be the natural order). Self-esteem, security/safety, social, and growth needs of individuals all have to be dealt with - and they're all different. And finally as a manager, there are my perceptions of your perceptions and as all of us charge ahead as if these perceptions are object reality, which they are from an individual's perceptions, but not of course from anyone else's perception, which of course for them has their perception as the object reality and not yours.

If there is a gap in the way we manage organisations, it is, I believe in our managers' lack of knowledge in the behavioural sciences. The failure to appreciate the perceptual differences, and to understand the basic dynamics of organisational life, leads to poor decision making, stress, lack of competitiveness, and as a bottom line, energies being wasted by being totally misdirected.

There is general consensus that in the new millennium competitive advantage is seen in the smart engagement of our human resources. Intellectual capital and its total deployment within our business will provide the edge for the future. If we are to unleash the benefits of our intellectual capital we must fully engage with our human resources in a meaningful way. We must improve our managers understanding of the behavioural sciences. Our managers must become comfortable in a world governed by perception and they must understand the complexity of organisational life in all its guises if they are to effectively tap into intellectual capital.

Our brains are pre-disposed to structure things to help us make sense of the world around us. To help us understand organisational life, we need some form of model that can help us think about the complexities of the work place. We need a common model that facilitates all members of the organisation to at least begin in the same place when faced with the challenge of managing an organisation. We need some solid basis on which to begin our thinking in order to mitigate the vagrancies of the perception driven work world that we inhabit.

Graphite has spent much of the last 10 years working on the development of not just a model but a tool that can be used to help us understand our businesses better and to take action to remove the barriers to corporate performance.

In order to use any model or cognitive map we must start with some assumptions. The model we have developed assumes the following:

1. The essential issue for all organisations is the achievement of the Goal (their reason for existing). Therefore as managers and leaders of the organisation we must be particularly concerned with any issue that inhibits or prevents the Goal being achieved.
2. Individual goals and motivations must be aligned with organisational Goals so that the achievement of both sets of Goals is possible and not one at the expense of the other. It is assumed that this alignment exists when a person is recruited to an organisation and they accept the job and the conditions of employment attached to it. If this alignment breaks down then it is either the recruitment process that's wrong or something else is not working within the organisation. When alignment breaks down people will either leave or become de-motivated and the Goal will be affected.
3. Organisations are defined as “any group of individuals working together with at least one common goal”. Therefore organisations at the macro level can be viewed as a series of interlocking smaller organisations e.g. Microsoft is an organisation but equally the Human Resource function or the Finance function within Microsoft can be viewed as organisations in their own right. This infers that we must concern ourselves with both macro and micro issues in our organisation. It also infers that the issues, which exist at one level or in one area, can be vastly different to another area which in turn suggests that macro intervention to any organisation is not always or indeed desirable.
4. To understand an organisation in behavioural terms we must consider it in the context of the Goals it wishes to achieve and the environment in which it must operate. We must define it by boundary or isolate it from its environment so we can examine it in the context of its environment e.g.
   • If a boundary is drawn around a total business its environment becomes the market in general
   • If a boundary is drawn around a department (e.g. Human Resources) then its environment becomes the rest of the business and the specific market forces which impact Human Resources
   • If a boundary is drawn around a cross-functional team its environment becomes the rest of the business.
   • The environment of an organisation is all things over which it cannot exert control. It may be able to influence the environment but it cannot control it. Once a boundary is drawn all else outside the boundary is, by definition the environment.

As we have said we live in a world governed by perception and this is no truer than in the world of work. Therefore, to understand the work world, we must understand the perceptions which abound in our organisations. We cannot assume that everyone sees things the same way. Remember how one perceives the situation determines how they will behave. In order to retain our employees we must ensure that alignment exists between the individual goals and the organisational goals. We must be aware of the levels of morale and motivation that exist in our organisations if we are to retain our staff and achieve our goals.

To understand our employees' perceptions we must ask them to regularly let us know how they see things. This means surveying. There are many types of surveys many of which are familiar to most of us. We have all heard of the “Employee Attitude or Satisfaction Survey”. Whilst I believe these are very useful I have found over the years that their effectiveness is greatly undermined by a number of factors - namely:

1. They are timely and costly to implement
2. They take too long to analyse and feed back which impacts the relevance perceived by employees
3. The results are open to interpretation and subject to perception which is the very thing we need to tie down

We still need the information and it is in this area we began to research for a better way to understand the perceptions in the work place over ten years ago. We sought something that would be quick to implement, quick to analyse, cost effective, and would be based on a standard model, which would facilitate agreed interpretation quickly. We also sought a method, which would allow one to look at both the macro and micro issues in the organisation.

The result of this research is the ODP (the Organisational Diagnostic Profiler). ODP is a fully automated survey process based on common irrefutable model of organisational life and contains 90 standard questions. The ODP model (see Fig. 1) is a cognitive map of an organisation. It is one particular view or a world view which is useful to help us think about and understand our organisations. It is not the only view but it certainly helps us to understand perception in our business and it definitely allows us to clearly understand the threats to corporate performance in a behavioural context. This in turn ensures we make decisions about our business based on facts and not on assumptions.

The initial work for this model was done by Marvin Weisbord in the seventies. He began to experiment with cognitive maps of organisations to help him carry out organisational diagnosis. His thesis at the time was that existing models were either too broad to be useful or too narrow in that they excluded too much. He developed the six box model in which he claimed the categories were broad enough to focus his gaze on important issues and precise enough for him to decide whether he should do anything about what he saw. In effect he provided a starting point, given infinite possibilities, where you could begin to carry out an organisational analysis.

To take this further and develop an automated system more conceptual work was required to not only have a starting point but also an end point or Ideal of organisational life. By establishing the ideal in respect of each factor it is then possible to measure deviation from the ideal through a series of questions linked to criteria which in turn are linked to the factors (see Fig. 2). This is how we are able to understand the organisational issues which impact Goal achievement and indeed understand the perceptions of our employees at all levels within the organisation.

ODP FACTOR MODEL
Factor	Criteria	Ideal
Goals Organizations exist for a reason i.e., GOAL	Clarity Are goals clearly stated so all can understand them in the same way? Agreement Do employees exhibit in their formal and informal behaviour, agreement for the stated goals? Fit Are the goals appropriate to the environment in which they are set and do employees believe they can be achieved?	Clear goals fully supported by employees who believe in their achievability
Structure To achieve the goal they must organize i.e. Derive a STRUCTURE	Functional Specialists work together Product By product, program or process. Multi-skilled teams work together Matrix Mixture of both - two homes for everyone	To know the dominant structure that exists, understand the advantages and drawbacks and evaluate its suitability for achievement of goals
Relationships A structure must be populated with people and hence RELATIONSHIPS are created	Between People Relationships up, down and across the organization should be good for those who need to work together. Between Units There is interaction in all organizations. The more units have to work together to achieve results the more important the quality of those relationships Between People & Units People should not be stressed in their relationships with technology	A relationship is good in organizational terms if it carries forward the goals of the organization and enhances the self esteem, or at least does not undermine the self esteem of the people involved
Climate The CLIMATE must motivate people to stay in the relationship/structure	Morale Does the reward system sustain morale? Motivation Are morale and the environment sufficient to generate motivation? Punishment Does the reward system actually punish people for good work?	A reward system that encourages people to belong, creates the conditions for motivation and distinguishes between good, average and poor performance
Leadership LEADERS are required to define goals, ensure participation and provide order	Define Goals Do leaders define goals and embody them in programs? Risk Sharing Do leaders encourage and succeed in getting employees to share the risk? Ordering Conflict Do leaders order internal sufficiently to defend organizational integrity and unblock barriers?	Assertive leadership characterized by example, supporting the organization unblocking barriers
Process There must be means by which work gets done, i.e. PROCESS	Co-ordination & Integration Processes should not hinder the performance of work. They should aid it. Monitoring Processes should provide sufficient management information to monitor work progress. Creation/Innovation Processes that are obsolete should be discontinued and replaced. New processes should be created.	The organic organization, constantly reviewing and recreating itself

With a standard model of organisational life it is possible to conduct faster surveying and more importantly a standard model supported by standard questions allows one to develop an automated system which can produce instant results as soon as employees have inputted their responses. This is not possible with non standard or non model based questionnaires. Automation brings reduced costs and increases the efficiencies making it possible to conduct regular employee surveys and thereby stay in touch with the perceptions of our employees and the be constantly aware of the threats to our corporate performance. Without this information we will end up with poorer decision making, more stress, wasted energies and ultimately maybe even the failure of the business.

To quote Lingle & Schiemann (well known commentators on organisational issues)

"The availability of information on critical people dimensions coupled with meaningful education on how this information will be deployed strategically, will constitute a major breakthrough for many firms in the next 3-5 years. Those that have already made this breakthrough are significantly ahead of the pack."