Partially as a result of the different settings in which these activities take place, the VCR has remained an underused piece of electronics, while the automobile continues to play a central role in our culture. This example is just one of many that the authors cite in weaving a cautionary tale about relying exclusively on technology — especially information technology — to drive the future of our organizations, institutions, and societies. Instead, we must recognize how social needs — especially around learning — influence our acceptance and successful application of new technologies. If we fail to do so, we’ll continue to build products that people can’t use, design strategies that people won’t implement, and recommend changes that people fail to embrace — regardless of how elegant or sophisticated those solutions may be.

Broken Promises of the Information Age

To bolster their argument, Seely Brown, director of the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and Duguid, research specialist in social and cultural studies in education at the University of California at Berkeley, explore some of the broken promises of the Information Age. What ever happened to visions of the “paperless office”? Or predictions that the organizations of the 21st century would be flatter and less centralized than their 20th-century counterparts? Or the idea that most of us will soon be working for “virtual corporations,” dialing into the office every day from our homes? Despite now having the technical means to make such divinations realities, we have yet to do so. Are we merely creatures of habit, stubbornly standing in the way of progress? Or are there deeper reasons why the digital revolution hasn’t changed our world as quickly and as completely as some soothsayers had prophesized?

Seely Brown and Duguid believe that many of the predictions about the transforming impact of bits and bytes fail to take human needs and desires into account. They state, “The tight focus on information, with the implicit assumption that if we look after information everything else will fall into place, is ultimately a sort of social and moral blindness.” The authors argue that “rather than condemning humanity as foolish, primitive, or stubborn for sticking with the old and rejecting the new, it seems better to stop and ask why.”

Their probing questions produce interesting — and sometimes counterintuitive — results. For instance, why has the rise of digital communication corresponded with an unfortunate jump in paper consumption, when many predicted that computers would replace the need for printed documents? In exploring this query, Seely Brown and Duguid found that paper is more than just a carrier of information; it offers certain qualities that are challenging to duplicate in electronic form. Documents bear smells, textures, and smudges that convey meaning. For instance, think of the reactions that a letter on high-quality bond, a perfumed notecard, or a tearstained letter can provoke in the recipient — characteristics that are difficult to emulate by computer.

The authors sense that we have found cutting-edge technologies and old-fashioned pen and paper to be complementary rather than competitive. They cite the case of the fax machine, which has grown in popularity even as seemingly more efficient modes of communication have evolved. People still find it useful to be able to scrawl comments on a document and drop it in the fax for instant — and accurate — transmission.

Likewise, for years, pundits have predicted that the rise of e-mail, the Internet, and the World Wide Web would lead to flatter organizations, with information systems replacing middle managers. What these futurists failed to recognize is that managers add value to the flow of information; they aren’t simply conduits that can easily be replaced by machines. And technology can actually lead to greater centralization. With the compression of space and time made possible by digital communication, the main office can now maintain tighter control over branch offices than it could when information flowed more slowly. Thus, technology won’t automatically cause more egalitarian organizational structures; managers still must choose to share power and authority with others.

Knowledge and the Knower

Seely Brown and Duguid also address the topic of knowledge management. In an effort to leverage employees’ learnings and insights, numerous companies have invested fistfuls of money in knowledge databases. But many have found that, despite their best intentions, they have created only static repositories of information. True knowledge is notoriously difficult to “detach” from the knower. As a case in point, the authors cite several companies that have successfully identified best practices in one plant but have been unable to implement those practices in another factory just across town.

Why is transferring knowledge from one plant to another, or from one person to another, so difficult? This question brings us back to the example of the video-cassette recorder — and the social nature of learning. Seely Brown and Duguid refer to anthropologist Julian Orr’s study of the spread of knowledge among Xerox technical representatives — which occurred in spite of the company’s information systems. Orr found that the company-supplied documentation was inadequate for all but the most routine tasks that the reps faced. So the reps found ways to engage in collaborative problem-solving, knowledge sharing, and knowledge creation outside the organization’s formal processes — through telling stories over breakfast or while troubleshooting breakdowns together.

“Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. Remain an outsider, and these will remain indigestible.”

The reps formed a community that was linked by their common practice of servicing copiers. “The members of this community spent a lot of time both working and talking over work together. . . .The talk made the work intelligible, and the work made the talk intelligible. . . . Become a member of a community, engage in its practices, and you can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information. Remain an outsider, and these will remain indigestible.” The reps ultimately adopted a knowledge database that succeeded in becoming a valuable resource because they themselves determined what tips and insights to include. In this case, the technology supported — rather than sought to replace — the workers’ social network and processes.

Learning as a Social Process

Based on their findings, the authors have several recommendations for moving from an information-based to a knowledge-based model of learning. They highlight the power of collaboration, storytelling, and improvisation. They cite the example of a problem-solving session at Xerox that resembled “a series of alternating, improvisational jazz solos, as each [rep] took over the lead, ran with it for a little while, then handed it off to his partner, all against the bass-line continuo of the rumbling machine until finally all came together.” This kind of learning would be difficult to glean from a user’s manual or information database.

Seely Brown and Duguid also advocate balancing formal and informal processes, as well as structure and spontaneity. Too many constraints can limit creativity; too few can hinder productivity. They comment that “The use of deliberate structure to preserve the spontaneity of self-organization may be one of humanity’s most productive assets.”

The authors are careful to point out that knowledge creation and sharing mustn’t remain the purview of the folks in product development. “Businesses have to create new business models, new financial strategies, new organizational structures, and even new institutional frameworks to deal in these new markets.” Companies must look beyond their own walls to view their formal and informal connections with other businesses — especially those located close by. Seely Brown and Duguid point out the synergies present in “clusters” of companies in similar industries, such as the high-tech cluster in Silicon Valley, the Formula 1 cluster of race-car designers outside of London, and the golf-club cluster outside of Los Angeles. Such hotbeds of knowledge on a particular subject can offer economies of scale and broad-reaching networks of practice for all players.

Far from being a pessimistic diatribe about the limits of technology, The Social Life of Information highlights the potential that exists in the human mind and spirit. Time and again, though, the authors remind us that machines, software, and datalines must serve human needs — and that humans don’t exist merely to fulfill a destiny predetermined by our tools. In order to make the most of the incredible technical resources that we’ve created, we need to tailor them to help bring us together rather than allow them to push us farther apart. By remembering that learning and knowledge creation are social processes, we can ultimately leverage the promise of technology to build a better future for all.

Janice Molloy is content director at Pegasus Communications and serves as managing editor of THE SYSTEMS THINKER.

The post When Technology Alone Isn’t Enough: Rediscovering the Social Nature of Learning appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

For three decades, Lester Brown has been dedicated to researching and communicating the major trends in the world’s use of resources, the health of our ecosystems, and the state of our society. His hope has been that by understanding the patterns of behavior of our economic system and its impact on the environment, all of us—individuals, businesses, nations would commit ourselves to halting destructive activities. But despite the many efforts that Brown’s work has inspired, he says they’re not enough.

Linking Economics with Environment

In the long run, if we do not create an economy aligned with the Earth, then we will erode the natural systems on which life depends.

In his latest book, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (Earth Policy Institute, 2001), Brown urges us to recognize that our economy does not function separately from the natural world. While we may be able to ignore the effects of our economic activity on the environment in the short run, in the long run, if we do not create an economy aligned with the Earth, then we will erode the natural systems on which life depends. Brown argues that “the economic policies that have yielded the extraordinary growth in the world economy are the same ones that are destroying its support systems.” He cites statistics that show how worldwide mismanagement has been eroding forests, range lands, fisheries, and croplands ecosystems that provide both raw materials and food.

Brown offers us three challenges: We need to understand how our current economic system and population growth are incompatible with the way that natural systems function; we need to create a positive, hopeful vision of an economy that works in harmony with ecology; and we need to change the structure of our current economic system to fulfill that vision. This last challenge in particular caught our interest as systems thinkers. The central premise of systems thinking is that a system’s underlying structure drives its behavior. As such, before we make changes, we should first understand that structure—that is, look at things such as information flows, rewards, and incentives to understand why people and physical systems act the way they do. Then we need to change the structure in ways that harness the energy of the system to push itself in a needed direction and don’t require constant effort and energy to sustain progress (see “Non-Structural vs. Structural Interventions”).

For our economy to support the natural systems on which all life depends, Brown says we need to create incentives that guide behavior naturally in positive directions. In the first section of Eco-Economy, he concisely summarizes the ecological trends that are motivating the need for change, from global climate instability to regional water-supply issues to species loss. In the next section, he moves quickly from the bad news into an ambitious, inspiring vision for a more sustainable economy. This vision includes a hydrogen-based energy system, a closed material product economy, and a redesign of cities. In the final section, Brown explores ways in which we could rewrite some of the rules of our economy to support the necessary changes.

Harnessing the Power of the Market

Brown’s approach in these last chapters feels refreshingly practical; he describes how various existing public policy tools could harness the power of the market to improve our economy by including both better information and truer costs. The theory is that the market provides a powerful system of product self-selection through supply and demand—in other words, how people spend money is what determines whether products and services are successful or not. So if ecological goals were better incorporated into the market signals (through costs and information), then the market could help nudge the world into alignment with natural systems. Some of his ideas include:

Eco-labeling. Consumers ultimately drive the success of products and businesses. Currently, many commodity products compete primarily on cost, and companies are forced to continually reduce their costs. This emphasis generally takes away from efforts to reduce the impact of products on the environment. Brown believes that when product labels provide information about superior environmental practices, such as farming organically, recycling fibers in paper, and designing for energy efficiency, consumers will reward the companies that are committed to developing more sustainable solutions.

NON-STRUCTURAL VS. STRUCTURALINTERVENTIONS

One of the most interesting contributions of Brown’s book is his focus on changing the structure of the market economy to make it more consistent with the ecological world. As shown in these examples, well-designed structural changes are changes in physical structure, information flows, or rewards and incentives that align the implicit goals of local decision-makers (such as individual consumers or investors) with the desired change in the overall system’s behavior.

Tax shifting. What we tax sends a powerful signal throughout the economy. For example, high taxes on wages limit the number of people we hire and the pay increases we offer. Conversely, low taxes on pollution and resource usage encourage us, as Brown writes, “to exploit our natural resources as rapidly and competitively as possible.” To align taxation with a more robust environment, Brown proposes “tax shifting”—changing not the level but the composition of taxes. To do so, we could decrease taxes on salaries and raise taxes on undesirable things, such as toxic waste and emission. He outlines actions that people in the U. S. can take similar to what many European countries have already done.

Subsidy shifting. Government subsidies also produce economic incentives that damage our ecosystems. Brown quotes a recent report that identified over $700 billion of environmentally destructive subsidies that encourage the overuse of water, fossil fuels, pesticides, and fishery resources. Many of these subsidies initially helped sectors such as farmers and fishing companies that were struggling with high costs, but, eventually, the subsidies led those same sectors to ignore signals of resource scarcity. Brown asks us to see this problem in the positive: What if we subsidized environmentally constructive activities? What would the impact of $700 billion be?

Eco-Economy’s focus on moving from understanding the trends to integrating our economic systems with the ecological world is appealing to systems thinkers—it helps us understand both the physical system at work and the rewards and incentives that encourage our decision making. While no single book can answer the question of what the sustainable economy is, Eco-Economy reminds us that we have practical policy tools that can guide the economy in a better direction and inspires us to try again to do so.

The post An Economy Designed to Sustain the Environment appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Three Planes

Mintzberg sees managing as “influencing action”; that is, helping organizations and units get things done. His model describes three planes that represent where managing takes place: the information plane, the people plane, and the action plane (see “Rules of Managing” on p. 10).

The Information Plane. According to Mintzberg, managers manage information to drive people to take action; they create budgets, set objectives, and so on. He thinks that most managers spent too much time on this plane, at

the expense of the people and action planes. Mintzberg is critical of what he calls “deeming,” where leaders impose targets in the absence of strategy. He states, “Some deeming is fine; management by deeming is not.” I agree with his premise that many leaders get caught in the trap of seeing their jobs as merely declaring or deeming “stretch goals” and then holding the organization accountable for achieving them.

The People Plane. When describing the people plane, Mintzberg states that “People are not driven so much as encouraged, often to ends they favor naturally.” This simple statement has many ramifications. For instance, encouragement may be praising, coaching, or simply truly understanding the circumstances of those you are leading. When Mintzberg states “to the ends they favor naturally,” he implies that managers need to ensure that the goals of the task are in alignment with the goals of the person being lead.

Many leaders get caught in the trap of seeing their jobs as merely declaring or deeming “stretch goals” and then holding the organization accountable for achieving them.

The Action Plane. On the action plane, managers “do on the inside” and “deal on the outside.” Mintzberg describes the “doing on the inside” role as “managing projects proactively and handling disturbances reactively.” For the “dealing on the outside” role, managers must mobilize support and conduct negotiations. According to the author, “Managers who don’t do and deal, and so don’t know what is going on, can become incapable of coming up with sensible decisions and robust strategies.” When leaders make decisions that leave you wondering, “What were they thinking?” it’s often because they are disconnected from the action plane.

10 Useful Points

A lot of management or leadership books focus on one competency or aspect. Managing provides a balance/ blending of many aspects. The book has key points in bold text, which makes it easy for time-constrained readers to quickly scan to items of importance and dive in where they find an interest. Here are 10 points I found particularly useful:

1. Much of a manager’s information is not verbal so much as visceral—seen and felt more than heard.
2. Managers help to bring out people’s natural energy.
3. Managers are gatekeepers and buffers in the flow of influence.

   Mintzberg characterizes five ways in which managers can get this role wrong:

4. Sieves allow external influences to create an environment in which individuals have to respond to a variety of pressures.
6. Dams are the opposite; they block external influences and disconnect the organization from the outside world.
7. Sponges absorb all the pressure and are at risk for burnout.
8. Hoses create a lot of pressure for those who support the organization from the outside.
9. Drips are the opposite; they don’t put enough pressure on outside supporters.
10. The pressures of managing are not temporary but perpetual.
11. Managing is no job to approach with hesitation; it requires too much of the total person.
12. Successful managers are flawed, as we all are. Fortunately, certain flaws are not fatal.
13. Managing contains many inescapable conundrums. (Chapter 5 documents these challenges and is worth the price of the book by itself). The conundrums of managing reminded me of the statement “describe in detail briefly.” Here are two I found particularly appealing:
    • The Action Conundrum. The Ambiguity of Acting describes the difficulty of making decisions in a world where there are a multitude of factors, all of which may be known with varying degrees of certainty. This reality often paralyzes leaders into not acting, while others seem to wait forever for information or data of limited value.
    • The Information Conundrum. The Dilemma of Delegating highlights the difficulty of delegating when information is “personal, oral and often privileged.” It is challenging to delegate when the context required for the task may not be available to the task recipient.
14. Readers of The Systems Thinker will appreciate the question:, “Do I have sufficiently powerful mental models of those things I must understand?” I like the question about mental models, because my experience has been that many leaders have an insufficient picture of the things they need to understand.
15. Effective managers are reflective: They know how to learn from their own experience; they explore numerous options; and they back off when one approach doesn’t work to try another.
16. Measure what you can, but then be sure to judge the rest, too: Don’t be mesmerized by measurement.

Effective managers are reflective: They know how to learn from their own experience; they explore numerous options; and they back off when one approach doesn’t work to try another.

True Managerial Effectiveness

If you are looking for the “three steps to … or the “five essential factors …” or the “eight ways to … ,” this book is not for you. But if you believe that you can always improve your management skills, then you’ll get a lot out of Managing. In particular, the self-study questions for managers in Chapter 6 are a powerful tool to improve your performance as a manager.

If you are a high-level leader, consider giving this book to your managers and then scheduling a monthly meeting where the group reviews a single chapter and discusses the important points and take-aways. Doing so might just help create true managerial effectiveness in your organization.

Dr. James T. Brown is president of a project management training company, SEBA Solutions Inc, and of a web-based provider of Professional Development Units (PDUs), OnePdu.com. He is author of The Handbook of Program Management, published by McGraw-Hill. For more information, contact Dr. Brown at jtbrown@sebasolutions.com.

The post The Practice of Managing appeared first on The Systems Thinker.

Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. …Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. … Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs.

Consider the contrast between great advances during the last century in understanding technology and the relative lack of progress in understanding economic and managerial systems. Why such a difference? Why has technology advanced so rapidly while social systems continue to exhibit the same kinds of misbehavior decade after decade? I believe the answer lies in failing to recognize that countries and corporations are indeed systems. There is an unwillingness to accept the idea that families, corporations, and governments belong to the same general class of dynamic structures as do chemical refineries and autopilots for aircraft. To admit the existence of a social system is to admit that the relationships between its parts have a strong influence over individual human behavior.

The idea of a social system implies sources of behavior beyond that of the individual people within the system. Something about the structure of a system determines what happens beyond the sum of individual objectives and actions. In other words, the concept of a system implies that people are not entirely free agents but are substantially responsive to their surroundings.

We change laws, organizational forms, policies, and personnel practices on the basis of impressions and committee meetings, usually without any dynamic analysis.

To put the matter even more bluntly, if human systems are indeed systems, it implies that people are at least partly cogs in a social and economic machine. People play their roles within the totality of the whole system, and they respond in a significantly predictable way to forces brought to bear on them by other parts of the system. This is contrary to our cherished illusion that people freely make their individual decisions. I suggest that the constraints implied by the existence of systems are true in real life. As an example, we see the dominance of the political system over the individual in the evolution of the Federal budget deficit. Every presidential candidate since 1970 has campaigned with the promise to reduce the federal deficit. But the deficit has on the average doubled every four years. The social forces, rather than the president, have been controlling the outcome. How to harness those social forces has not been effectively addressed.

Designing Managerial and Social Systems

In designing an engineering system such as a chemical plant, engineers realize that the dynamic behavior is complicated and that the design cannot be successfully based only on rules of thumb and experience. There would be extensive studies of the stability and dynamic behavior of the chemical processes and their control. Computer models would be built to simulate behavior before construction of even a pilot plant. Then, if the plant were of a new type, a small pilot plant would be built to test the processes and their control.

But observe how differently social systems are designed. Although political, economic, and managerial systems are far more complex than engineering systems, only intuition and debate have ordinarily been used in building social systems. We change laws, organizational forms, policies, and personnel practices on the basis of impressions and committee meetings, usually without any dynamic analysis adequate to prevent unexpected consequences.

“Designing” social systems or corporations may seem mechanistic or authoritarian. But all governmental laws and regulations, all corporate policies that are established, all computer systems that are installed, and all organization charts that are drawn up constitute partial designs of social systems. Such redesigns are then tested experimentally on the organization as a whole without dynamic modeling of the long-term effects and without first running small-scale pilot experiments. For example, bank deregulation and the wave of corporate mergers in the 1980s constituted major redesigns of our economy with inadequate prior consideration for the results. All systems within which we live have been designed. The shortcomings of those systems result from defective design, just as the shortcomings of a power plant result from inappropriate design.

Effects of Feedback Structure

The feedback structure of an organization can dominate decision making far beyond the realization of people in that system. By a feedback structure, I mean a setting where existing conditions lead to decisions that cause changes in the surrounding conditions, that influence later decisions. That is the setting in which all our actions take place.

OPEN-LOOP IMPRESSION OF THE WORLD

The prevailing view is that the world is unidirectional—a problem leads to an action that leads to a solution.

We do not live in a unidirectional world in which a problem leads to an action that leads to a solution. Most discussions, whether in board meetings or cocktail parties, imply a structure which suggests that the world is unidirectional, that the problem is static and we need only act to achieve a desired result (see “Open-Loop Impression of the World”).

CLOSED-LOOP STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD

In reality, we live in an ongoing circular environment in which each action is based on current conditions, such actions affect conditions, and the changed conditions become the basis for future action.

Instead, we live in an ongoing circular environment in which each action is based on current conditions, such actions affect conditions, and the changed conditions become the basis for future action (see “Closed-Loop Structure of the World”). There is no beginning or end to the process. People are interconnected. Through long, cascaded chains of action, each person is continually reacting to the echo of that person’s past actions as well as to the past actions of others.

In general, social systems carry a set of common characteristics:

• Most difficulties are internally caused, even though there is an overwhelming and misleading tendency to blame troubles on outside forces.
• The actions that people know they are taking, usually in the belief that the actions are a solution to difficulties, are often the cause of the problems being experienced.
• The very nature of the dynamic feedback structure of a social system tends to mislead people into taking ineffective and even counter-productive action.
• People are sufficiently clear and correct about the reasons for local decision making—they know what information is available and how that information is used in deciding on action. But people often do not understand correctly what overall behavior will result from the complex interconnections of known local actions.

Jay W. Forrester is Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT System Dynamics Group, and is the founder of the field of system dynamics. Since his retirement in 1989, he has worked toward bringing system dynamics into schools as the basis for a new kind of education.

Part two of this article is available by clicking here.

The post The Next Great Frontier: Designing Managerial and Social Systems (Part 1) appeared first on The Systems Thinker.