Author: naomiorgdesign

March 8 was International Women's Day and I'm writing this 5 days later now I've had a bit of a chance to think about it. Organisers asked that we 'Celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievement of women. Yet … also be aware progress has slowed in many places across the world.' They say that 'urgent action is needed to accelerate gender parity' and that 'Leaders across the world are pledging to take action as champions of gender parity.'

Gender parity in the workplace means addressing the fact that 'Women are overrepresented in informal, temporary, and low-productivity jobs with low pay and limited opportunities for advancement' and that they 'continue to lag behind men in economic participation and opportunity by 15 to 25 percent in even the most gender-equal societies.' (McKinsey)

The McKinsey video The Power of Parity is powerful in quantifying the economic opportunities that lack of gender parity means. But as other commentators point out economic value is only part of the gender parity puzzle. Gender parity is lacking on many fronts where it could add value – politics, child and elder care, everyday sexism, tax regulations, employment policies (e.g. around family leave), land and inheritance laws and so on.

This leaves me wondering how much organisation designers can wield their skills to become 'champions of gender parity'. What is it that we could/should do that will help with this? (Assuming that we think that gender parity in its many forms is 'a good thing'). There are many ways but I will look specifically at flexible working as one of them.

The UKs Modern Families Index 2016 makes five recommendations related to increasing flexible working. I've taken the headline of each and suggested how organisation designers could help realise the recommendation.

1: Flexibility by default: In each redesign or design piece of work organisation designers should consciously think about the way that existing jobs are done and how they are designed to find ways of incorporating flexible working into them.
2: Getting workplace culture right: There's still a prevailing attitude that flexible working is not 'real' working and many men are hesitant to use even existing flexible working policies. For example: 'A study of 1,030 Australian workers has found that … men were twice as likely to have their flexible work requests rejected and even when they were permitted to work flexibly, felt judged, less confident and committed, and that their careers had been jeopardised'. Download the full report here. Designers can help on this by designing work processes, uses of technology, work patterns and incentives that will support a culture of gender parity for flexible working.
3: Joined up thinking about family and work: The Modern Family report notes that seniority allows for flexible working. Paradoxically those on higher incomes are also more likely to be able to afford family care support and more senior people tend to have more discretion over their workloads and how they manage them than more junior people. Designers can redress this in several ways: for example, designing for: outcomes not input, role autonomy, team accountability and trust building. Additionally we could be redesigning benefits packages in a way that will help support balancing family and work commitments.
4: Bridge the childcare/eldercare gap. Although much of the research on flexible working is concentrated on childcare arrangements as the population ages there is an increasing need to consider elder care (and other dependants' care). Again we could be generating innovative approaches to this for example, designing collaborative arrangements with providers of care, or building care support networks within the organisation.
5: Work with the next generation. More long established organisations with traditional ways of working are increasingly losing out on attracting a younger generation who have different views on careers, work/life balance and attitudes to management. See some research here and here. Typically organisation designers are hired by senior executives. Consider contracting with your client to do all design work in collaboration with the next generation.

Do you think we can and should design for gender parity? Is flexible working one aspect where we could support this? Let me know.

Years ago I read The Territorial Imperative in which author Robert Ardrey explores his 'central notion that territory – not food and not sex – is our strongest biological drive'. Rather than spend time looking for the book on my bookshelves, I know it's there somewhere, I downloaded a sample chapter to my Kindle to remind myself of more of the detail.

Having done a quick revision of it I'm beginning to think it should be a 'must read' for anyone trying to introduce, or work with, the newer ways of thinking about office workplaces and working patterns. Often these newer ways fall under the heading of 'Smart Working' which as the new BSI Code of Practice on the topic states 'incorporates the benefits of increased flexibility and organizational agility by introducing … changes to working practices, working environments, processes and organisational culture'.

In the category of 'working environments', for the most part, Smart Working involves forms of 'hotdesking', desk sharing, unassigned desks, and collaborative spaces, leading to what the Smart Working Handbook describes in its maturity model as 'non-territorial working'. It's fascinating to see that 'non-territorial working' is the first step of maturity towards the fourth and final level of maturity described as 'smart flexibility'. So if we don't get past non-territorial working are we ever going to continue down the path of Smart Working?

Ardrey defines territory as 'an area of space, whether water, earth or air which an animal defends as an exclusive preserve'. He then goes on to wonder whether 'humans' are 'animals' in this definition and in a subsequent paragraph confirms that 'Man (I think these days he would include women) is as much a territorial animal as is a mockingbird singing in the clear California night'.

So you can see that my delve into 'The Territorial Imperative' was prompted by some work we're doing on (trying to) introduce Smart Working. In doing this I've observed, and not for the first time in this type of work, that getting to non-territoriality is a giant step and perhaps even an insurmountable.

This is because territoriality involves 'protection, a safety device, and a status marker'. In Smart Working settings I notice that it is the 'status marker' that is the biggest barrier to getting anywhere with Smart Working particularly in organisations where there are strong hierarchies with associated 'entitlements'.

We've all seen car parking spaces with the names of senior individuals attached to each one. There are similar things about 'my meeting room', 'my office, 'my desk' (if you are not senior enough to have an office), 'my chair' – complete with admonishments taped to the back of it not to alter any of the settings. I was once in an astonishing exchange (or was it perfectly ok?) where a senior person demanded us to go and fetch a tape measure so we could check that the lockers we were ordering would enable her to hang her full length coat in 'her' locker so that the bottom of it didn't get wrinkles.

In a previous organisation I worked in (in the US) I asked some researchers to come and investigate with us the issues we'd noticed around 'status markers'. I wanted to know if we could substitute 'territory' i.e. office, desk, or chair, etc. for alternate 'status markers'. You can read the findings in this article When the Bases of Social Hierarchy Collide: Power Without Status Drives Interpersonal Conflict .

In a nutshell the research team '[found that] employees who have power are especially reactive to changes in status. … establishing that power without status is a unique state that produces more interpersonal conflict and demeaning behaviour than any other combination of status and power.'

So what does this mean for introducing Smart Working in organisations where status is implied by amount of territory 'owned' (and where leaders are reluctant to give up 'their' territory)? Are there substitutions and/or organisation design possibilities for enabling people to feel they are keeping their 'status' when they lose their 'territory'?

Let me know.

Out running on Sunday morning I saw two magpies. Remember 'one for sorrow, two for joy …' the magpie rhyme? It came to mind then and also reminded me of the point that someone made at the Culturevist meeting earlier in the week. She'd said 'We don't talk much about happiness at work'. (The meeting was on Redesigning Performance Management – in most current designs a source of much unhappiness).

I think she's right. We don't talk much about happiness at work. We seem to act on the assumption that it's a good thing. So instead of trying to talk about what it is and consider whether it is a helpful workplace construct, we try and 'do' happiness, and bunches of consultants are ready to leap in and help us with just that.

One, for example 'believes that happiness is a serious business. Research shows that happiness and wellbeing at work is the foundation of a productive and optimised organization and makes a real difference to a company's bottom line'. I wonder where the research comes from? Could it be the 2014 research report from Warwick University which suggests that fostering happiness at work is a 'must do' because 'In the laboratory, they found happiness made people around 12% more productive'.

What's wrong with that? Well, maybe not a lot but it does bear some reflective thought. I looked at the research and found that: 'All the laboratory subjects are young men and women who attend an elite English university with required entry grades amongst the highest in the country.' That's not an exactly representative example of the UK workforce in my view. Also I'm not sure that a 'laboratory' is remotely like a call centre, supermarket, hospital ward, etc. where workers are engaged in work and not in carefully designed tests. So question one – how reliable is the happiness 'research' when it starts to be applied to workplaces?

Second, there's a lack of distinction between 'happiness' and 'well-being'. In a Futurelearn course that I'm doing – Strategies for Successful Aging – two questions were posed to participants in an article 'Introducing happiness and wellbeing'. These were: What do you think are the differences between happiness and wellbeing? Are there areas which overlap between both? This resulted in 1502 comments with people generally saying that 'well-being' is about physical and mental health, and 'happiness' is a much more subjective and intermittently experienced emotion. The tutor noted that wellbeing and happiness are not necessarily correlated i.e. happiness is experienced by people in poor physical and/or emotional health. And people who describe themselves in a state of well-being do not always think themselves 'happy'.

Third, the whole issue of 'happiness' gets tied up not just with well-being but also with 'engagement' which is more about people being emotionally committed to their company and their work goals. People who are engaged care about their work and often give discretionary effort. Again engaged employees may or may not also be happy employees – there isn't necessarily a correlation. A similar distinction could be made for employee 'satisfaction' which is not the same as either happiness or well-being, or engagement.

Thus, there's a patchwork of related and interrelated concepts which could all fall under the umbrella of 'positive psychology' which when they are approached separately seem to fragment the notion that organisations should be aiming to be overall good places to work. Happy employees may or may not be the outcome of being a good place to work but they are more likely to be. (If you like models the EFQM is helpful on a holistic framework for creating a good place to work).

So is it better to concentrate on becoming overall a good place to work rather than focusing effort on employing happiness consultants, trying to up engagement scores or engaging a Chief Happiness Officer?

Let me know.

We spent almost a whole meal laughing as we read our 1963 Collins Italian Phrase Book that we took to Turin this past weekend. It was so old fashioned. When was smoking cigarettes banned on flights we wondered reading 'Steward, have you any cigarettes?' (Camerierie, ha delle sigarette) Did anyone actually say: 'This is a rum go' and 'That's the giddy limit'. Or 'I have two pairs of socks to mend'. There are so many phrases that are no use now.

Time warp continued in the magnificent Automobile Museum. Remember the Dave Clark Five's 'Catch us if you can' album? No? Well perhaps the car that features on the sleeve is more memorable. It's a 1964 Jaguar E Type Series I OTS. We loved the psychedelic paint job on an actual 2CV . One of us travelled overland to Afghanistan in one and has the photos – hard copy in an album – to prove it. The 2CV stopped being produced in 1990.

We went on the history of cinema museum and more remembering. This time it was 'reel to reel' film, turning knobs manually on cameras, seeing a poster for a film we'd seen years ago.

The fun of a short get-a-way break is that step back from the day to day and see what happens. We didn't deliberately go to Turin to look back to the past but that turned out to be a bit of a theme, in some ways not surprising as Turin has a long history, and we enjoyed our time exploring aspects of it.

There's a lot of research suggesting that 'we all need to unplug now and then! In fact, we come back better able to perform when we allow adequate breaks'. So did I actually 'unplug'? Of course it depends on what you mean. With my smartphone in hand I was able to ditch the 1963 phrase book in favour of an automatic translation of Italian/English and hear the correct pronunciation. I had my steps automatically counted. (Why?) I could take photos/videos to send instantly to family (they like to keep tabs on me), have a route to destination planned for us with recommended stuff on the way and stay in touch with 'breaking news'. So I was definitely plugged in to the present – but differently from during a work day.

The structured workday and the load of stuff to deal with that it brings is what characterizes 'work' for me. I wasn't doing less in Turin, I was doing differently. I hadn't taken my work computer or phone. I could stop and watch street performers, sit and eat lunch without a keyboard in front of me, wander along the river bank admiring rowers' skills (ok I know nothing about rowing technique but they looked good to me), amble through food markets and feel a whole different pace and time. I could argue that I still had 'meetings' scheduled (Matisse in the 10:00 a.m. slot), still commented on stuff – though not with an imposed time limit of 'by noon today', still complied with bureaucratic processes for example buying the correct ticket and standing in line to go to the top of the Mole Antonelliana tower, still searched for relevant information (what is bicerin)? But all of this was different from my work day content.

And right now I feel a whole lot better for the refreshing differences. I'm hoping I'll feel this good when I see how many email I have to respond to tomorrow and how much I have to comment on before 'close of play'. ('Play'!!??)

Do you think a breaks from the usual work routine are beneficial? Let me know.

Ron Ashkenas points out in an HBR article 'One of the most sacred tenets of management is the need for clear accountability. As such, organizations spend enormous amounts of time and energy defining jobs, roles, and goals -— and then figure out who to reward or punish when things go well or poorly'.

I'm sensitized the topic partly because of the number of times I've heard the words 'accountable' and 'accountability' this past week. They cropped up, for various reasons, in just about every meeting I was in. Reasons included: some to do with two or more people trying to do the same thing, some to do with no-one doing whatever was supposed to be done, some to do with lack of control over third party activity, and so on.

I am not alone in hearing 'accountable' and accountability' at every turn. Jerry Muller in The Costs of Accountability writes 'that "accountability" has become a ubiquitous meme-—a pattern that repeats itself endlessly, albeit with thousands of localized variations'. His is a critique of our cultural obsession both with the concept and with enacting the concept.

Seeing how 'accountability' works and doesn't work in practice I too wonder about this 'sacred tenet' because I am struck by four things:
1. Individuals often resist being assigned accountability or being accountable
2. Individuals who are accountable often feel driven to compromise their values, ethics or better judgement
3. Single point accountability sits well enough in a command/control organisation but is not always right in a matrix or networked organisation where good relationships are key to effective performance.
4. Accountability is culturally defined

Ashkenas discusses three points to explain why 'accountability is muddled': a) point 1 on my list (people trying to avoid it), b) the complexity of most organisational structures c) processes are constantly evolving. So taken collectively that's six points that make the 'sacred tenet' problematic. I'll discuss my four here
Resistance
I suggest that the resistance to taking accountability is due in part to individuals being required to meet externally applied performance measures. For example 'A maximum wait of four hours in A&E remains a key NHS commitment and is a standard contractual requirement for all NHS hospitals'. The issue with this is that often individuals have very little or no control over what it is they are being measured against. Look at the A & E waiting times again. One report tells us that 'Pressure on emergency departments is symptomatic of wider pressures across the NHS, which is struggling to cope with rising demand in the face of increasing numbers of elderly people with multiple health conditions, alongside constrained resources.' (Ashekenas's point on resistance relates to fear of failure)
Compromise
My second point on compromise relates again to the accountability metrics. They drive performance. Sadly they are often ill-conceived and thus frequently lead to short term or myopic decisions being made that sacrifice the longer term benefit. They also pressure individuals to 'improve the numbers' which may compromise their values, better judgement, and high quality work in the process. Jerry Muller's article has some illustrative examples of this.
Single point accountability
My third point that single point accountability can work well in a command/control organisation but is more problematic in a matrix or networked one is similar to Ashkenas's point on organisational complexity. A recent McKinsey article Revisiting the Matrix Organisation offers more on this and suggests that 'consultative (as opposed to authoritarian) leadership practices can contribute meaningfully to accountability [in a matrix organisation]'.
Cultural definition
The fourth point that accountability is culturally defined is I think worth more consideration, particularly in organisations that are trying to change their culture. In a report 'Culture and accountability in organizations: Variations in forms of social control across cultures' researchers say '[Although] all cultures have accountability systems to create predictability, order, and control, the nature of accountability systems can vary considerably across cultures.'
Summary
So my various investigations on accountability are leading me towards the conclusion that the sacred tenet of accountability is one that needs de-sanctifying to allow close examination and a re-think. Is this possible?

What's your view on accountability? Let me know.

Stefan Czerniawski sent me the links to two blogs he's written on what he calls 'information management'. His first discussion centres on the point that 'all too often, we organise information as if it were on paper, even when it never has been and there is no expectation that it ever will be.' His second on the 'continuing struggle' people have 'coping with – and contributing to – organisational information'. By 'information' he appears to mean explicit data rather than the more difficult concept of 'knowledge'.

There's an important distinction between 'information' and 'knowledge'. There's something about a focus on information management (ways of filing) that misses the human element that to me is the 'knowledge' bit and includes: emotions, societal values, ethics, serendipitous connections and 'ah ha moments' that are impossible to manage. I always take issue with the phrase 'knowledge management' when what people seemed to be referring to is types of data filing and retrieval.

But information and knowledge are closely connected. In the way of things I was thinking about Stefan's blogs when a piece on Fast World Values dropped into my in-box. In this the author says: 'Take something we rarely think about, searching the web. The speed of Google's search engine is so enthralling that few reflect on the fact that it favours some content over others. For example, in 2007 Google had to change their search engine, so that when you type in 'she invented', the autocomplete no longer comes up with the query: 'Do you mean "he invented"?' Google was not deliberately gender-biased, but its algorithms reflected the values and culture of our world. Most people tend to regard algorithms as neutral brokers of relevant knowledge, but they are inevitably influenced by those who design and write them.

Note the last sentence using the word 'knowledge'. Here the author means 'information' but capturing, structuring and organising 'relevant information' is not value free. What's intriguing here is that Google's information management 'rules' are designed within a knowledge/experience/societal context. The context changed but the rules stayed frozen in a past context. (Remember Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful).

Therefore, there is a bigger question implied in Stefan's first blog discussion in which he presents 5 points for organising information not as if it were on paper but as if it were … well, something different. One of the 5 points is that 'People are search engines'. It's people who work with, accept or discount information presented. They are analysing, interpreting, challenging, connecting and sense making from information using and/or creating knowledge as they work with it. Thus the organisational challenge is both around designing careful information management protocols – that recognise they will not be context free – and around being able to find the people who can work with the information and who can also act knowledgeably with and on it.

The distinction was brought home to me when I was looking at artist Rob Ryan's paper cuts. They are described as 'whimsical, melancholy and heartfelt, the intricate works … depict scenes rooted in real life but also the otherworldly, woven with leaves, flowers, skylines and kissing couples.' You can get a ton of information on how to do papercutting but you'll never be able to capture, file, store, and retrieve the knowledge/experience that makes Rob Ryan's work what it is. (Or is there artificial intelligence coming for that)?

So from these blogs from Stefan, a bunch of questions for me to work on: Is information capture/storage/retrieval distinctively different from knowledge? Does the way information is captured/stored/retrieved/contributed to reflect particular contexts and values? How does the way an organisation treats information shape (or is informed by) its design? Is 'knowledge' unmanageable or it is shaped by the way information is handled?

What questions does the information/knowledge debate raise for you? Let me know.

What do you experience as 'data' in your organisational life? In mine it manifests through multi-channels: email, webinars, podcasts, SMS, What's App, Huddle, Chatter, Collaborate, Lync, intranet and internet searches, hyperlinks to shared files, linked-in, twitter, dropbox, Trello, Microsoft Office (Windows 7 Enterprise), print, info graphics, data visualisations. I'm not sure if I've named them all, and I use others in my non-work life. So, all told I have a lot of technology enabled data interaction. In both my work and non-work lives I'm constantly interpreting and making sense (or trying to) of this data 'tsunami'.

'Tsunami' – related to 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create globally every day is one of the words explored in Big Bang Data a London exhibition in which 'Artists and designers help us understand our brave new world'. What I understood pretty much as soon as I'd seen the first installation was that I know nothing that goes on behind the scenes to bring this data to my fingertips.

You walk in and see a vast triptych video – no people in it at all. It 'documents one of the largest, most secure and 'fault-tolerant' data-centres in the world, run by Telefonica in Alcalá, Spain' and aims to 'look beyond the childish myth of 'the cloud', to investigate what the infrastructures of the internet actually look like'.

Immediately, I asked myself 'What am I not seeing as I interact with the data on my screens? What 'childish myths' do I hold about data?' These questions grew by dimension and complexity as I met each of the five parts of this compact but intense exhibition: data and democracy, data and design, data and privacy, data and you. (Look at the exhibition's explore tab here and you'll find associated materials and articles). I took away many thoughts to explore further, here are just two:

On infrastructure: I don't think I'll be able to walk around London now without seeing pieces of the infrastructure network all around me: access covers, antennae, utility cabinets, green spray paint markings on street excavations–indicating comms cables. It's the same in the office building I work (ok 'street excavations' usually means ceiling panels) but we have cctv, server rooms, swipe key hardware and so on. How aware are you of the infrastructure of your oganisation's data flow? Is it an organisation design consideration? Why/why not?

On data and privacy: The whole surveillance thing is taken up in a lot of the exhibits. Again it's a big cultural, ethical, moral debate in organisations and usually not very well addressed in my experience – we are not seeing it as an issue maybe because many of us hold 'childish myths' about surveillance. But, what is your organisation's thinking on the questions: 'My social media profile should have no impact on my professional life'? How transparent should we be about what we are tracking/can track about our employees? How do you make decisions about whether your employees' names, photos/emails appear on your company website?

Companies can already legally: watch employees via closed-circuit TV, log keystrokes, take screenshots of employees using their company computers, read employee e-mails. What are the ramifications of further technologies – for example, will companies be able to access legally our fitbits to monitor our health and stress levels?

These types of question are powerfully raised in the final exhibit – Jonathan Harris's 'Data will help us'. About it, he says "Big Data" has become a kind of ubiquitous modern salve that now gets applied to almost any kind of ailment. In fields ranging from education, to government, to healthcare, to advertising, to dating, to science, to war, we're abandoning timeless decision-making tools like wisdom, morality, and personal experience for a new kind of logic which simply says: "show me the data." How many times have you heard that last statement in your organisation?

As I said the exhibition raised 2 questions about data. What am I not seeing as I interact with the data on my screens? What 'childish myths' do I hold about data? How would you answer these questions? Let me know.

The retrospective show at London's Barbican is a go-to if you're in the neighbourhood. It showcases Charles and Ray Eames who 'are among the most influential designers of the 20th century. Enthusiastic and tireless experimenters, this husband and wife duo moved fluidly between the fields of photography, film, architecture, exhibition-making, and furniture and product design.'

It's a reminder that organisation design practice is similarly about moving fluidly between fields of organisation structures, cultures, people, work, processes, technologies, data and so on, and meeting some kind of need in doing so.

In one room Design Q & A Charles answers succinctly a series of 29 questions in a 5-minute video. Both the questions and his answers are applicable to organisation design. (You can read the text here) Four of them stood out for me as I reflected on my work last week:

Q1: "What is your definition of 'Design,' Monsieur Eames?
A: "One could describe Design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose."

Q2: "Does the creation of Design admit constraint?"
A: "Design depends largely on constraints."

Q3: "What constraints?"
A: "The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list."

Q4: "To whom does Design address itself: to the greatest number? to the specialists or the enlightened amateur? to a privileged social class?"
A: "Design addresses itself to the need."

It's the fourth question that is the most challenging for organisation designers: agreeing that the organisation design is about addressing 'the need' (Q4) that accomplishes the 'particular purpose' (Q1) within certain constraints (Q.2,3).

Here are three organisation design examples that illustrate the challenge of 'the need'.

1. Leadership (not stated out loud) need: 'I think x is a good guy who deserves promotion. Let's restructure to give him/her a new division carved out from these three others.'

   For those in 'a privileged social class' (organisational 'leaders'?) 'the need' is often opaque, political and not always stated directly, as in this case to put someone into a specific job role created for that person and thus 'the purpose' becomes restructuring the organisation around that person. Is that a legitimate organisation design piece of work? How would you handle it?

2. Current need v known future need: 'We need to solve the customer complaints problem really quickly. Let's open a new function and recruit 300 people to do that. We'll worry about what to do with them when we've got technology that their complaining about working properly.' Is that a legitimate organisation design piece of work? In what circumstances?
3. Many stakeholders' needs: There are many stakeholders in the system each viewing issues and opportunities from their unique perspective e.g. 'We need an omni-channel strategy'
   1. to give a better customer experience/choice (Customer Satisfaction Director)
   2. to outperform our competition (Financial Director)
   3. to break down our internal silos that makes the different channels competitive which misses opportunities (Operations Director)
   4. to attract more customers (Marketing Director)

Each of the four needs could result in a different organisation design. How do you reconcile or prioritise them? Is one more legitimate than the other?

How do you identify 'the need' that will accomplish a particular purpose in your organisation design work given the constraints? Let me know.

I'm guessing that most people in the organisation theory world are somewhat familiar with Geert Hofstede's work on national culture. I've just facilitated a course on cultural change with a group of twenty people of various nationalities and a range of organisations. The two days was threaded throughout with questions about the role of leaders in changing an organisation's culture. The whole power/distance thing came up. (One of the dimensions that Hofstede talks about).

In Hofstede's thinking (if we apply his national typology to an organisation) thinking of culture as part of the power/distance dynamic looks attractive. He says: 'This dimension expresses the degree to which the less powerful members of a society accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. The fundamental issue here is how a society handles inequalities among people. People in societies exhibiting a large degree of Power Distance accept a hierarchical order in which everybody has a place and which needs no further justification. In societies with low Power Distance, people strive to equalise the distribution of power and demand justification for inequalities of power.'

The general opinion in the room was that leaders i.e. those at the top of the hierarchy are responsible for an organisation's culture and it could only be shaped 'top down'. These people felt that those with hierarchical power 'owned' the culture. We discussed various organisations: Ford under Alan Mulally, IBM under Lou Gerstner, Zappos under Tony Hsieh, all lauded for leading the charge on their organisation's culture.

The people in the room were working in hierarchical organisations with relatively high 'Power/Distance' in the Hofstede terminology. Their roles involved 'changing the organisation's culture', but this is difficult to do if you believe that the top of the hierarchy leaders are responsible for it. Where is the 'power' of the agents trying to effect the change if they are in the middle or bottom of the hierarchy? (See my blog on Tops, Middles, and Bottoms).

Take a different view that power is not only held by hierarchical leaders. It is held by all sorts of players in an organisation and takes many forms: the admin assistant who is gatekeeper, the despatcher of an airline who has the power to say yes or no to departure. There are many powerful players at low hierarchical levels in the organisation – they are not usually trying, in Hofstede's terms, to equalise the distribution of power. (In hierarchical organisations this could be career-limiting). They are often distant from those at the top. Nevertheless, they too, have often profound influence on the culture. Power and distance works both ways.

You can see this visually when you look at the work of Rob Cross on organisational network analysis or Alex Pentland on social physics – both of whom use technology to map organisational and societal interactions. Their work clearly shows power/distance relationships working in multiple ways and well outside the view of power/distance as shown on a traditional organisation chart. Pentland, in an interview, remarks that: Social physics helps us understand how ideas flow from person to person through the mechanism of social learning and ends up shaping the norms, productivity, and creative output of our companies, cities, and societies. This sounds like culture change to me.

So, I'm in my usual sceptics' camp this time alongside those who critique Hofstede's work. Look at one example here. Better in my view to think of power and distance more as part of the wicked problem of addressing culture change not as part of a tame problem that puts hierarchical leaders 'in charge' of organisational culture. Yes, they have a part to play but so do multiple others.

Continuing our discussions in the training it seemed as if participants warmed to the idea that 'culture change' is not wholly or even necessarily leader dependent. I'm looking forward to hearing how they're doing as they start applying the new thinking into their organisations.

What's your view on power/distance in organisational culture change? Let me know.

Did you know that the BBC has a website called Intelligent Time Wasting? Someone told me about it. So in the middle of writing a paper (see below) I learned what the first office computer was like. The 4 minutes I spent on this topic, that might be useful at some point – rather like a tangled piece of string might be useful at some point – was a distraction from the task in hand and we all know how much distractions cost. Fortunately I managed to stop myself learning about keeping prize sheep in winter (although that could seem an attractive alternative to commuting to London).

Then I realized that the work environment has a similar form of intelligent time wasting stuff that stand in the way of getting work done. They sound a sensible thing to focus on but they're not. Sadly most of the intelligent time wasters in organisations take far longer than the 4 minutes of each BBC nugget. During the week at work I collected a list of seven. See if you recognize any of them.

1. Who gave you the permission/authority to go ahead? This is one that flies in the face of autonomy, empowerment and encouraging employees to take initiative. In hierarchical organisations it also implies that you are too junior to make choices and that you need to find someone more senior to endorse whatever it is.
2. What problem are we trying to solve? Well maybe there's no problem. Maybe we'll be missing an opportunity if we don't do something. Why are we always looking for a problem to solve? It smacks of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' so I wonder how we are going to get innovative breakthroughs?
3. Can you address my concern? This takes ages in trying to reassure someone that their concern, worry, agitation, fretfulness or general anxiety has been previously thought through and addressed. It often suggests a lack of trust and a low level of risk tolerance. It goes hand in hand with:
4. We need [more ]data on this Ho hum. In this one data means rows of numbers in excel spreadsheets or in figures, charts, and quantitative information. It leads to people poring over one number completely losing sight of the actual topic in hand.
5. Can you put that in a paper? In spite of our exhortations towards paperless, social interactions, collaboration, working in the moment with others, there seems to be a false assumption that a paper will explain something better than you can do in a 5-minute conversation.
6. What's the scope of this? This can be a legitimate request but is a time waster if asked too early in a project. Preceding 'scope' decisions should be discussion, teasing out of information, looking at what's do-able given the resources, and so on. But people often seem reluctant to engage in this 'discovery' type of activity. Warning: be sure 'discovery' doesn't become an intelligent time waster.
7. Have you consulted with …? Yes, consultation is good and is also time consuming. Knowing when to stop and get on with the job is key here. 'Saturation point' is worth bearing in mind: it's when consultation with individuals stops revealing any new/relevant information.

All seven are stalling tactics that get in the way of action. They have an air of legitimacy but are, in fact, time wasting. They mask many of the attributes described in a useful discussion Working With Barriers To Organisational Learning which could equally read Barriers to Organisational Action.

Another good read is Authentic Management: Gestalt Orientation to Organizations and Their Development which has a chapter on Eight Running Games for Executives. It discusses further types of intelligent time wasters which, almost 40 years after that book came out, are still seen and heard in organisations.

What intelligent time wasters does your organisation favour? Let me know.