The Hindu Business Line : Counter-intuitive ideas for the new manager

Biology is a much more appropriate source than engineering for understanding life in organisations. As the famous butterfly effect has shown, small changes in the initial conditions can bring about big effects in the outputs of a system.

The garden or forest, with its cycle of growth and evolution, is a more appropriate source for understanding life in organisations.

S. Ramachander

As we near the end of the Manager’s Handbook series, we will try to pull the major strands together — not to summarise so much as highlight what, to me, is special about managing in today’s world. It is now quite trite to say that we live in times of great and accelerating change. Clearly, we need to re-visit at least some of the older ideas and frameworks of thinking for the manager. Whether there is much new in management elsewhere in the world or not, surely in India there is. Let us look at the facts: For five decades, from Independence till the late 1990s, we escaped facing the full fury of competitive managing. We early management graduates were taught about competition and strategic responses to it as if it were really so much theory. It was frustrating in those days to see the new learning mocked and derided because it all seemed so alien to India in the 1970s. Now, the tasks facing us are different as the worldwide game has changed. The mega-trends such as the world environment crisis, need to save on fossil fuels, fundamentalism, terrorism and AIDS or SARS touch all of us. In this chapter, I propose some counter-intuitive thoughts for you to take away.

The world of the physical sciences, which provided the model of precision and control and a quantitative bias to textbook management, now acknowledges complexity, non-linearity and randomness. This cuts at the root of certainty and pre dictability hitherto assumed. Management science must be seen thus as more of a metaphor than the literal truth.

What is the manager expected to manage? Shorn of all the jargon, what remains to distinguish the effective manager from the ordinary one is how well he manages relationships. All the rest, which are inanimate, knowledge, money, technol ogy and equipment, can be traded or borrowed. Therefore, only the animate can truly make a difference in a competitive world!

Anything that moves by its own volition cannot be predicted. It always contains within it an element of surprise, free will and therefore uncertainty. This makes managing an uncertain act, a craft or a set of skills and not another bra nch of science. There are severe limits to how much you can programme it. The activities are non-linear, that is to say not always proceeding from fact to conclusion to action. Action takes place on hunch and trial and error and the cause-effect connections aren’t always obvious. You almost never know enough to decide and therefore you must guess — there is nothing shameful about it. It is always easier to build a logical case after the event and with hindsight! Even more difficult to accept is the fact that it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

Relationships are really all that we can manage — with varying levels of skill. On the inside, the task is clearly to attract, motivate, retain talented people and make them produce results in collaboration, not in competition. O n the outside, relationships imply how to understand all the associates, attract them, delight them, persuade them to stay with us and create value for all. This applies to suppliers, dealers, associates and service providers. And if one considers deeply, clearly these two sets of relationships are not mirror images; they are the same. However, we are used to thinking of one as the responsibility of the top management and the HR department and the other as that of the sales and supply chain managers. Perhaps if one manages the inside well (i.e. have productive, motivated and well-adjusted employees), one can do better at customer and other associate relationships too! Certainly this is true of customer-facing, service businesses.

Biology is a much more appropriate source than engineering for understanding life in organisations. Things grow and evolve as they do in a garden or forest and the end result is not always obvious. As the famous butterfly effect has sh own, small changes in the initial conditions can bring about big effects in the outputs of a system. In a mass-production factory, you would expect all units of a product to be identical and utterly replaceable. One can do the job of another. However, in natural systems (more close to human organisations), systems are self-similar, not identical. One leaf is similar to another but not exactly the same. The whole not made up of parts, but comprising branches and limbs. The hologram is the name given in science to a system in which the whole and the individual element carry similar capabilities — a good example used often as a way of explaining this is the way the human brain functions. This implies a big challenge to the minds of the current crop of professional managers.

Recognise the two kinds of learning: single-loop and double-loop. Single loop applies where the learning is of the “If this happens, then you must do such-and-such” variety. Rules are formulated typically in administration and bureaucracies, which function rather like a trip switch or a thermostat. When something goes wrong the system either corrects itself or shuts down. Soon, this kind of decision making is programmed and delegated to a junior, non-managerial level or even to software. On the other hand, double-loop learning diagnoses and eliminates root causes if possible and thereby avoids recurrence of the problem. Questions are posed such as: Is the problem a constraint? Is it necessary? And the ‘why’ of why it happens in the first place are some of the queries that double-loop learning demands of us.

If you are in love with your hammer, everything will look like a nail. A common managerial failing is taking the solution or the tool to the issue. Instead, first we must look more carefully, in an unbiased way, at the problem itself. One has to immerse oneself in it. In the process, one could find that the issue might redefine itself or even disappear or reappear as something else!

Adopt a sensible approach to success. Everything won’t and can’t succeed. Successes are stepping stones to “failures”. There are always far more steps than the one summit! In a class of 40, there are three rank holders or medallists and 37 so-called failures. This is so, arithmetically so, by definition. Yet, do we teach this to our children? This realism plays no part in our development. As managers, do we appreciate the consequences of this? If we did, you cannot but wonder if we would continue the same way in the world of work.

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that what counts is only what you can count. This engenders the usual mental model: measure, predict, control — therefore manage. On the other hand, we must learn to think in metaphors and be ware of mechanistic thinking.

Life isn’t a binary variable. Success vs failure, good vs bad, the ideal vs useless, theory vs practice and so on. Managers deal with continuous variables, a range of possibilities. This also implies being ever alert to learn new lessons outside our comfort zones; being a learning manager, not a learned manager! In managing relationships and systems, an attitude of learning and doing simultaneously is essential. A reflective practitioner is one who thinks as he acts.

Paradoxes are the stuff of life. See life not as an exercise in continuous problem solving, but rather one of dealing with opposites and paradoxes. Strive to strike the elusive balance between competition and collaboration, certainty a nd ambiguity, effectiveness and efficiency, organisation and structure as well as flexibility and change, centralised control and creative freedom, local autonomy, deliberate development and organic growth, experimentation and reducing risk of failure, innovation and conformity.

(For a fuller treatment of these ideas please refer to the author’s recent book Manager at Work published by Penguin Portfolio.)

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