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March 16, 2005

The Nature of Management

Management likes control. In most business organizations, operational control is a packaged deal - a bundle consisting of a core uncertainty, wrapped in tolerances, wrapped in procedure. Because control is established that way, whether the wrappings are looser or tighter, it is often only the procedure that is detectable evidence of control.

What's more, procedure is often the only evidence of operational consistency -- that is, something that managers want to be accused of when things do work, and want to not be hostage to when things don't. But managers should not -- must not -- mistake procedure (nor superficial consistency) for management.

A business likes to take it for granted that certain things are possible because managers have other things under control. This is similar to assuming that you can get to work in the car even on a pretty stormy day. To dramatize this assumption, imagine an angry person driving a powerful car on a bumpy road in the rain -- altogether an operating environment of at least four pretty major forces interacting: temper, motor, surface variation, and weather. We might even think of each force as a "system".

But first facing facts, the commute is all predicated on the notion that these four forces will interact within a usable range of uncertainty, otherwise the deal is off. The combination of forces may at any time become fundamentally unsound for the purpose of completing the travel. Each system is capable of independently excelling at what it does but likewise interactively throwing the overall driving "environment" out of whack for the intended purpose.

All environments have a deep structure that is simply:
- whatever forces are in the environment;
- whatever types of dynamics are generated by those forces;
- whatever types of regularity there are to the dynamics; and
- whatever interactions between those dynamics is likely to be generated by their regularities.

And then there's management. Basically, management brings interventions to the "natural" scenario that develops from the existing forces. The most useful way to account for these interventions is to simply call them tasks.

Broadly speaking, tasks either help to navigate the environment or help to reengineer it, usually by acting on the dynamics. Introducing counterforces that redirect extant dynamics is always popular; changing the systems that generate the forces that create the dynamics is also a well-worn path. On the other hand, anticipating their patterns and threading through them or leveraging them is the minimum requirement.

To more fully imagine those options, think of any operating environment as a pool of magnetic syrup, in which the manager can introduce fences and gates; steps, pits or inclines; heat or cold; and of course, more magnets. Performing tasks that distribute these interventions in one way or another, managers get the environment to more or less take a desired shape with a desired level (or degree)of stability. The logic of the tasks and distributions is the design. The purpose and duration of the shape is what lets the business do what it is trying to do -- or stops it. The manager's responsibility is to keep conforming the shape and duration to the real-time needs of the business, in effect, to exercise continuous deployment of productive interventions. Because of the frequency of business change, uncertainty is always a given whereas procedure is not. And this is why, in management, design is both more powerful and more essential than procedure.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 16, 2005 4:37 PM

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