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Humans are the collaborating animal.

Sure, bees dance, termites build mounds, and wolves and orcas hunt in packs. But no other animal gets together to build anything on the level of skyscrapers or Mars rovers, to fight in anything resembling a human armed force, or compose and then sing barbershop quartets, let alone symphonies.

But for every successful collaboration there are probably ten that fail, whether they’re ERP implementations, failed designs for a 9/11 memorial, most legislation, or every Pirates of the Caribbean sequel and every other Disney-theme-park-ride-turned-into-a-movie.

What goes wrong? With Disney, it’s probably the need to manufacture another movie even if nobody has had even a tiny spark of inspiration to justify one. For the rest …

Often, the problem comes down to different people from different organizations coming to the party with different hidden assumptions. When these go undetected and unresolved, the usual outcome is something less than success.

Two weeks ago we looked at one aspect of the situation: How each party values the three bottom-line goods of business — revenue, cost, and risk.

Last week we looked at a second aspect of it: How organizational styles compare, and in particular their levels of empowerment, formality, and communication.

This week we look at one more aspect: Each organization’s operating mode.

At the risk of oversimplifying, organizations have three ways to do their work.

The first is to work through processes and procedures, which is to say recipes. Everything is specified, and if everyone just follows the steps as they’re described, the result will be what it’s supposed to be.

The second is to work in accordance with “practices.” Like processes, practices are organized into an accepted series of steps to follow. Unlike processes, in a practice the specifics are left to the practitioners, who are expected to apply their knowledge, experience, and judgment to each situation they face.

The third is to innovate and improvise — to figure things out based on the logic and context of each situation.

The way it ought to be is that for each type of work that has to get done, the organization responsible for it makes a conscious choice from among these three ways of working, recognizing that really, they aren’t categories so much as they’re three poles in a continuum of possibilities.

The way it usually does work is that for each type of work, whoever does it chooses whichever approach they like the best — the decisions come from hidden assumptions, not explicit analysis.

Likewise IT. So when the two organizations try to collaborate, their two sets of preferences don’t line up, because why would they?

Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that IT’s overall operating mode strikes an even balance between process and practice, with very little improvisation going on.

Now imagine the other organization IT has to collaborate with is Marketing. As the figure illustrates, our mythical Marketing organization is heavy on practice and improvisation. Following recipes just isn’t in its DNA.

Now what?

The starting point is to be conscious: of your own organization’s preferences, and those of the organization you’ll be collaborating with. How can you find out?

Ask. Not using this vocabulary, which might seem strange to anyone who doesn’t read Keep the Joint Running. But just asking, as in, “Tell me about the kinds of work you do here.”

As you listen, keep an ear out for key phrases like, “We just do what makes sense,” a tip-off that improvisation is important there. Or, “This is how we do things around here,” which sounds a lot like process.

“We know our business and get the job done”? That’s a practice orientation.

It will take some conversation, some reading between the lines, and eventually, perhaps, after you’ve built some rapport, some time spent familiarizing your colleagues in Marketing (or wherever) with these concepts. At some point in the conversation you’ll familiarize your colleagues with your IT self-assessment, and you can ask for their self-assessment.

Better yet, you’ll be able to discuss why IT is what it is and why Marketing is what it is.

That’s when both organizations will stop choosing their operating mode based on personal preference and start deciding based on the logic of their (and your) circumstances.

Once you’ve achieved that, you’ll be in a very good position to help your colleagues solve the problems they have in ways that will fit their operating mode, rather than trying to force-fit them into yours.

That’s preferable for a very simple reason: If your solutions fit their operating mode, they might actually adopt them.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

“Why can’t we all just get along?” is the battle cry of the hopelessly naïve. There are plenty of reasons, ranging from:

  • Different values (not better or worse values, just different ones).
  • Disagreements about subjects we think are vital.
  • We just have different styles, which aren’t entirely compatible with each other.

People who have to work together work together better if they get along with each other. The same is true of the departments within a business. To the extent they have different styles, getting along is harder. This, in fact, is an important reason companies put diversity programs into place … to help everyone understand that different styles aren’t better or worse styles.

They’re just different. The starting point for working together is to understand what those differences are.

Start with this: In a business of any size, there probably isn’t a “corporate style” that accurately describes every part of the organization. Like it or not, HR will have a different style than Accounting, which will have a different style than Sales and Marketing (we hope!), which will have a different style from manufacturing.

If the business is organized geographically, the Asian subsidiary will have a different style from the European subsidiary, which will have a different style from …

So from the perspective of IT’s need to manage relationships effectively, understanding the style of each group IT works with … and IT’s style, characterized in the same terms … matters a lot.

There’s no shortage of ways to characterize “style,” the most popular being to start with a blank sheet of paper and then to write whatever occurs to you. If you’d like something more structured try this:

Three important dimensions of organizational style are empowerment, formality, and communication.

Empowerment means how much freedom of action employees have in accomplishing what they’re supposed to accomplish. A key diagnostic is whether managers typically delegate goals or tasks … whether all that matters is the result, or managers involve themselves in how employees are to achieve their results.

Formality is what you think it means: Is everyone relaxed, calling everyone else at all levels by their first name? Or is there a lot of “mister”-ing and “Ms.”-ing going on? Does communication have to follow the chain of command, or does everyone talk with whoever they need to talk with, whenever they need to talk with them?

Is the dress code “Dress for your day,” or is it a twenty-seven-page document that tries to detail exactly what’s allowed in every possible circumstance, but mostly it means wear a business suit?

Communication is about listening, informing, persuading, and facilitating communication among others. In organizations with high levels of communication the key question is, who would benefit by knowing about this? In organizations with low levels the key question is, on a need-to-know basis, who absolutely needs to know about this?

In organizations with high levels of communication, the expectation is that the more people know the better … not just about such matters as the specifications of a piece of work they’re supposed to produce, but also about contextual matters such as what the work is for, what it’s going to directly connect to, and the larger context into which the work is going to fit.

The more everyone knows, that is, the more likely the work they produce will deliver maximum value. Very likely, “everyone” will include more than just employees, too, because very often employees find themselves working with contractors, consultants, suppliers, business partners, and customers.

That contrasts with low-communication organizations. In these, the expectation is that unnecessary communication is a distraction, and worse, it expands the likelihood that sensitive information might leak out of the business and fall into the wrong hands.

Again: While each of us has preferences in these three dimensions, none are better or worse in absolute terms. What matters is understanding that if you work on, say, an Agile-oriented IT applications team, with low levels of formality and high levels of empowerment and communication, and the time comes to bring in Information Security … a team that by its nature tends to be more formal, less empowered, and more limited in its levels of communication (see the figure) … you’d better expend some effort getting your team and the InfoSec team to understand how each other think about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What matters isn’t whether you use this particular framework, although I hope you find it helpful. It doesn’t matter whether you graph the result or use some other method to visualize it.

What matters is taking the time to understand how “they” view the world.

And not just how, but why.

 

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