I’m still uncertain about the connection between Flyvbjerg’s “think slow, then act fast” and Warren Kinston’s Pragmatic phase of management culture, but that shouldn’t stop us from moving forward!
Kinston points out that Simple Pragmatism, the base of organizational life, always degrades. You think it won’t, that all you need to do is keep doing what’s in front of you. But it does. Sooner or later, something will not get done. “Why didn’t you do this [expletive deleted] task?” But it was never assigned! They thought that other person was doing it!
Kinston described the degeneration [emphasis is mine throughout these quotations]:
Pressures for quick results and immediate action rather easily inhibit people thinking, consulting, communicating or looking to the future. So one manager’s success is often another manager’s problem. Fire-fighting and management by crisis increase until work can hardly proceed due to constant intermptions. Opportunism becomes reflex expedience without any clear or agreed rationale. [p17]
You can compare with what Repenning and Sterman say something similar about the firefighting hero culture:
As organizations grow more dependent on firefighting and working harder to solve problems caused by low process capability, they reward and promote those who, through heroic efforts, manage to save troubled projects or keep the line running. Consequently, most organizations reward last-minute problem solving over the learning, training, and improvement activities that prevent such crises in the first place. [p. 81]
The reason why the Firefighting Culture is so prevalent is that it is, at its root, the expression of the first step to success: Just do something! Action is Action! This ability — to respond to the moment, to rearrange work, to keep the business alive — is not just good for business: it is necessary for the concern to survive. It’s when it becomes the only thing you can do that this first step, the simple Pragmatism that’s the core of success, degenerates and destroys value.
Once installed, this culture is damnably difficult to dislodge because the simplistic executive only sees crises all around. They don’t see their “best employees” as the ones who should have prevented these crises. The ones who prevent crises get passed over for promotion because they “arent working hard” in comparison. If you want to get ahead, you have to let things fall apart so that you can work excessively long hours to fix it, and show “real dedication to the company”.
Repenning and Sterman quote “an engineer at an auto company [who] told us, ‘Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened.'” It’s often worse: leadership’s inaction creates crises that they then blame on subordinates, as Kinston points out:
Political manoeuvring degenerates into doing things only for show, back-stabbing and playing power games. Intrusive control through directives produces quick responses at the cost of over-centralization and dependence on the boss. The top dog really feels powerful. Although this is largely illusory, staff vary in their ability and inclination to support the illusion.
In degenerate situations, the people who rise to the top are not those who produce more long-term value. Instead, leadership promotes those who fully support this illusion, especially if they have skills in the “back-stabbing”, “playing power games”, and “doing things only for show”.
Elliott Jaques, the inventor of the idea of a “culture’ at a company, called this paranoiagenic: a situation that generates paranoia in its members. As he was also a psychiatrist, he did not mean this in our usual dismissive way of “stop being paranoid” but that these organizations, denying the natural needs for clarity and structure, create mental illnesses. In these cultures, everyone really is out to get you.
Kinston continues, describing further increases in risk to the organization’s success:
So favouritism develops and in-groups and out-groups emerge. Focusing down and keeping things simple result in ever more missed opportunities and failure to avert burgeoning threats. Handling people and driving them hard, when combined with taking care of yourself, soon cross over into machiavellian manipulation and exploitation. Impossible deadlines and unrealistic objectives or targets, backed by covert and sometimes overt bribes and threats, cannot then be challenged. The end result is spreading cynicism and demoralization, combined with a conviction that senior management is incompetent and out of touch. Finally, when self-reliance leads to achievement and outward success, a cocky form of arrogance may emerge: cocky because achievement is based on a mixture of ignorance and luck.
What led to your initial success (“just do something!”) leads to your doom.
There’s only one way out of this: you must do the hard slog of defining what needs to be done, then assigning it to someone.
In the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model, this is moving from Level 1 to Level 2.
This is remarkably hard. It’s why no one wants to do it. But it’s what it takes to get out of unbridled chaos.