When I asked earlier about whether Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization could really work over a weekend, I was asking a specifically micro-question: Does changing the structure of the organization produce “instant” results in individuals?
I got an answer about the macro question I wasn’t asking: Jaques just doesn’t talk about the process by which the change occurs, from old structure to requisite organization.
I also, later, got an answer from Glenn about the micro question: Yep, sure does. In his experience, which is similar to mine, when you get the reporting relationships lined up and the accountability/responsibility clear (no small thing either way), individuals can have over the weekend transformations. It’s almost frightening how it happens. On Friday, the team is a bunch of backstabbing, defensive SOBs and on Monday they’re the twelve Apostles in a church window.
Which raises the question, again: does this mean that the psychotherapuetic model (including Argyris’s work and executive coaching) is treating the symptom and not the root problem, spending inordinate amounts of energy to teach the lame to walk with a walker rather than simply curing their lameness?
Image Credit: Off shore oil rig. By images by photoeverywhere.co.uk (CC BY 2.5)