THE REAL PROBLEM WITH MANAGEMENT  

<— Imagine that this diagram is of an organization. The shaded circles represent components of the organization that do something as part of their role in the organization. They may be people doing jobs: like designers, skilled operatives, salespeople or accountants. They may be equipment: like machines that make things, electronic technology that processes information or vehicles that transport goods. Whatever the components are, they carry out processes that are essential for the organization to work.

The lines commecting these components represent the flow of information and communication between them. (And note that the picture tells us nothing about the timing, speed or accuracy of this communication).

Now suppose A is a manager who wants the organization to achieve a specific goal and B is that manager's boss who wants to check the success of manager A in doing this. According to this diagram they have a near impossible task. The complexities of intercommunication, time of action, delayed response and multiple interaction; are just too great to know what is going on, let alone achieve any goal.

Yet in real life, organizations much bigger and more complex than the one in this diagram, do actually work. How? The answer is by reducing variety. The CEO doesn't know every detail of what goes on in the organization. Instead he learns about the financial situation from the financial director, the production situation from the diector of operations, and so on. But it doesn't stop there. The finance director doesn't know every detail of day-to-day financial transactions any more than the director of operations knows all the data in the stock record. What they do know is summaries and overall reports submitted to them by those who work in their departments. So real organizations work by having structures, relationships and procedures that reduce the variety that managers have to deal with. But it is important to note that these reductions in variety are also simplifications, and therefore reductions in reality of the managers' views.

One of the key forms of variety reduction found in all working organizations is the operation of a protocol, which represents a shared set of rules based on a shared set of values. So human beings in the organization are informed and trained in what their job is. Machines are programmed or set up to perform in a certain way. When working, this means that control in the organization does exist in the organization, but it emerges as a result of the operation of the protocol rather than from some boss, like A in the diagram, trying to manage every detail of the organization's procedures. Note also that any protocol restricts and selects what managers can do.

Given that it is not managers, but a protocol of a shared set of rules and values that results in an organization being controlled, then we once again have something that has the form of a religion. But not let's get distracted for the moment. The real problem with management is that all of these ways of enabling the organization work are based on variety reduction. Yet the wider world in which the organization exists is very complex: it has very high variety (see Stafford Beer quote). And we know from Ashby's Law that an organization would have to match the variety of its environment to be completely in control of its destiny. In reality this can never be the case. No organization can exactly predict the future, guarentee the integrity of every employee, ensure the existence of a market, control its political context, etc. etc. So the only 'law' of management is that management is limited in what it may achieve.

Yet our society is widely infected by the beliefs and values of management. They tell us that if only we had more intelligence, more data and more technology; we could create paradise on Earth.

 But the symptoms tell us something different - - >

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