Why you need to sack the dead bloke who’s running your organisation

You need to fire the bloke who’s running your organisation.

Despite the name on your MD’s parking space, it’s probably still being run by Frederick Winslow Taylor. He was the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and the man who gave us the modern office with its managers, targets, metrics and job descriptions.

He treated the organisation as a huge, complicated machine. The way to manage the machine and the people in it was with rules, regulations and controls. But he’s been dead since 1915, so it’s probably time you showed him (and some of his ideas) the door.

Of course, treating an organisation like a complicated machine is pretty easy. Since Taylor it’s almost been hard-wired into the way we think; desks in straight rows, all the same, a careful hierarchy of managers and workers, fixed hours, fixed wages, fixed job descriptions, everything apparently measurable. Create a series of fixed processes and systems, police them and monitor their stats.

Complication and complexity aren’t the same thing

The problem comes because, thanks to our friend Frederick, we’ve assumed complexity and complication are the same thing. But they’re not. Complex systems are completely different from complicated systems — and both need different tools to develop, work and fix them. Things go wrong in organisations when you use the wrong tool on the wrong system. The secret is knowing how to spot each type of system and which tools to use.

There’s a rich irony in that we’re now trying to get machines to be more complex; like humans. It’s unlikely Taylor would approve. And, looking at modern organisations with their complex ‘why’ statements, ‘missions’ and ‘values’ clashing with the complicated reality of everyday work, it’s not hard to see why.

What do complicated and complex systems look like?

Complicated systems

• Tightly defined roles — “Here’s your job. Stick to it.”
• Tightly defined rules — “You need to do things this way or it won’t work.”
• A right way and a wrong way — “and this is the best way to do it”
• Logical decision making — there’s a ‘best’ choice and you can find it logically.
• Tight structures — there’s a tight chain of command that prioritises or limits simple actions.
• Knowing — the people at the top know most and best and decide and tell others what to do.
• There’s an instruction book. Follow it and you’ll be fine.
• Keep doing what we’re doing — success comes from doing the same thing better and better.
• Marginal improvements — the only improvements you can make are small and have small impacts.

Complex systems

• Flexible roles — “Here’s your objective. It’s up to you to work out how to reach it.”
• Principles — “These are our principles. Live and work by them.”
• The person closest to the problem is usually the one who knows best how to fix it; good ideas aren’t based on seniority or rank.
• There are many right ways to do things — because circumstances and situations change, people need to adapt.
• Principles-based decision making — situations are too complex for hard rules.
• Loose ties — more ambiguity means people aren’t in such tight lines. More need for freedom of thought and action.
• Relationship building — people interacting to get a result. Instruction books date fast.
• Learning — things in the system keep changing so we need to keep learning.
• Significant improvements — huge changes possible

Neither system is better than the other — they’re just different

Neither system is better than the other and both have their place. It’s when you use the wrong tools on the wrong system that the wheels come off. Try using the principles for managing complexity on a complicated system and see how spectacularly it goes wrong. The difference is that it goes wrong faster — almost immediately — and in a predictable way. Think about fitting the wrong-sized part to a few hundred car engines at Toyota. Using complicated tools on complexity takes longer to cause damage — and it does it more insidiously — but look at the stats on employee disengagement and you’ll see it’s just as corrosive.

Organisations are hybrids of the two systems, but because we like stuff we can measure (as Rory Sutherland puts it, we have ‘physics envy’), we tend to treat them as though they’re complicated — like huge machines. Then we wonder why our people (who are complex) are massively disengaged and don’t use their initiative. It’s because we’re using the wrong tool on the wrong system.

Let’s take a real world example…

Sarah’s customer Nadeem was about to get her gas supply cut off because of a technical problem, leaving her with no heating and no hot water; not ideal with two children under two in the house. Because Sarah was in the call centre, she had no power to make anything happen, she could only pass on information using the processes she was allowed to. So she did. And it got ignored because there was a debate about which department had responsibility for fixing the problem. Was it gas safety? Was it buildings maintenance? It wasn’t clear, so the problem ping-ponged around between various managers and teams.

Sarah kept trying to get someone to take responsibility for the problem, but because it wasn’t precisely in their department’s service level agreements, no-one would. Worse, because the cost of fixing the problem was a few pounds over an internal authorisation limit, no-one could get the costs signed off either. And because she wasn’t senior enough (at one point she was told precisely that) she couldn’t get a result for her customer.

Meanwhile, Nadeem was having to take her children to her parents’ house for baths and rack up her electricity bill running oil-filled radiators.

In the end, it was only a chance conversation that saw one of the organisation’s directors get involved. She rolled her eyes, called the gas supply company with her business credit card and got the problem fixed in one ten minute phone call and Nadeem’s heat and hot water back on again. The cost? £154.

If Sarah had been in a system that allowed for the flexibility that a complex problem needs, she’d have been able to work with the principle that leaving a customer with no hot water or heating was a problem that needed to be fixed quickly. Instead, because it didn’t quite fit the precise set of definitions, budget limits and responsibilities of any of the teams, it fell between the cogs in the complicated machine.

Complexity is messy — but that’s OK

But, let’s face it, complexity is messy and, organisationally, we tend not to like mess. But by using the wrong tool we end up with far more mess — we just kid ourselves it’s OK that we can’t keep staff, that people don’t use initiative, that engagement is sub-30%, that the frontline don’t come to us with ideas…

The power of understanding the difference

If they could get a handle on the difference between complication and complexity, organisations would completely change the way they work. If they could understand how to use the right tools for managing the two things they could eliminate most of the chaos they cause, engage and enthuse their people and get the kind of loyalty most Managing Directors can only dream of.