Organisational hurdles
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Understanding Organisational hurdles
Thinking expertise alone will solve it all
Take a look at the clip where Russel Ackoff explains what happens if you take the best (read expert) parts of ten cars trying to assemble the best vehicle. (1)
| Exernal link | |
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| (1) | Russ Ackoff TED Talk... - YouTube |
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Thinking commercial pseudo-scientific thinking will solve it all
MBTI, Enneagram, ...,. Please browse the book: "A Skeptic's HR Dictionary - Patrick Vermeren."
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The minority rule
The situation where a minority in the organisation blocks new steps to be taken by the whole organisation, a situation we all know, is a particular form of a much more subtle phenomenon that is always present.
For example, in the US, soft drinks are allmost all kosher because it is less expensive and much easier to make them all in a kosher way than to divide the market between kosher and non-kosher.
A problem arises when the minority is more strict than the majority. When this (minority)power is exercised top-down, we speak of coercion. Bottom-up, we talk about blocking the situation. We can only progress in an organisation when the minority (the leading coalition of the willing to change) will change the situation for the good of the totality. However, selecting a guiding coalition from employees' functions is risky business because we cannot know (only from their positions) whether they are stricter than the whole organisation. (1)
| Source | |
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| (1) | N. Taleb - Skin in the game - Allen Lane 2018 |
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Command and control
Control and command would be a better description.
| Hierarchical
level |
Action | Mental result | Compensation for mutual relation | Command | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N | Control of the behaviour of level N-1 | → | Feeling of control | Frustration | → | Command the action expected at the control moment | |
| ↓ | ↓ | ↑ | ↓ | ||||
| N-1 | Behaviour | → | Feeling of lack of freedom | → | Avoiding accountability | Behaviour without accountability |
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Fear of loosing control
It make no sense to recruit the best and micromanage their work.
Revelations by Russel Ackoff
- Improving the performance of the parts of a system separately will not improve the performance of the whole. In fact, it may harm the whole.
- The best thing that can be done to a problem is not to solve it but to dissolve it.
- The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize stakeholders value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation.(1)
| Source | |
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| (1) | R. Ackoff - A lifetime of systems thinking - The Systems Thinker - Vol 10 No 5 - 1999 |