Industry Commentary – Page 27 – IS Survivor Publishing

By: Bob Lewis|In: Digital|Last Updated: September 30, 2019

When IT professionals … heck, let’s not limit this to the land of IT; when professionals of any and all stripes hear someone say “All you gotta do,” we cringe.

My co-author Dave Kaiser and I decided to do more than cringe. We wrote There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project as a counterbalance to a particularly unfortunate branch of the all-you-gotta-do tree.

That’s the branch that focuses on making organizational change happen. Listing offenders would be ungraceful, tedious, and would generate a compendium of titles that would become stale within weeks.

The problem with all-you-gotta-doism is that it doesn’t work but is pernicious: “All you gotta do” books aren’t entirely wrong. They describe something you gotta do. The problem is that they pretend something that’s complex isn’t.

When someone ignores complexity, they compromise their ability to make the complex entity they’re oversimplifying different tomorrow than it was yesterday. And no matter how you look at an organization it’s complicated. You might, for example, look at it from the perspective of:

Business architecture, which consists of five internal dimensions (people, process, technology, structure, and culture) and five external dimensions (customers, products, pricing, marketplace, and messaging). Or …

Business functions, of which there are more than 300, even if you limit your drill-down to three levels, and that count ignores their interconnections: Each business function receives inputs from other business functions and delivers its outputs to yet another group of business functions. One more:

Business model, a description of the levers management can pull and buttons it can push to make profitable sales happen. Even simplistic business models track at least 20 factors and their interconnections.

In Leading IT I made the case that leading isn’t hard the way neurosurgery is hard. It’s hard the way digging a ditch is hard.

In No IT Projects, Dave and I make the case that achieving intentional business change is both — it’s hard because it’s intrinsically complicated and it’s hard because there’s a lot of actual work involved in making it happen.

Much of the hard work is complicated work, too. Dave and I break it down to:

Culture change
Changing the conversation between IT and the rest of the business
Fixing Agile
Building an operations-level business/IT partnership
Business change governance
Establishing IT-led strategy
A quick look at the seven disciplines needed to make change happen: leadership, business design, technical architecture management, applications support, organizational change management, implementation logistics, and project management.

It’s enough to make your head explode.

Which doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It means business leaders need to approach intentional business change the same way they approach running the company as it is: If they try to stuff into their heads everything that has to happen so the company can sell and deliver products to its customers they’ll fail, and fail with a near-terminal migraine in the process.

That’s why organizations have org charts — or, rather, why organizations organize. The org chart shows how they’re organized; it’s that they’re organized that makes a bunch of people an organization and not an aimless mob.

CEOs put organizations together the way they do specifically because nobody can keep track of everything that has to happen to sell and deliver products, not to mention getting paid for them.

In an effective organization, while nobody can know everything that has to happen, someone knows each thing that has to happen and enough about the rest to, if you’ll forgive the turn of phrase, keep the joint running.

That’s also true for intentional business change: nobody can understand what has to happen in enough detail to make it all happen. But with the right team, organized well and effectively led, someone will know each thing that has to happen, and can recognize when collaboration with another team member is called for. If Dave and I did our job, No IT Projects will help you and your change team put it all together.

Organizational change is both complicated and hard work. Changing an industry is, if not harder, at least more unlikely, and beyond helping business change leaders, that’s what we’re trying to do with this book: Change how an industry … management consulting … approaches everything about the interconnections between IT and the rest of the business.

We recognize we lack access to and influence over most of the buttons and levers needed for success. What we’re hoping is that those leading organizational change … you … and anyone who finds this book useful … also you? … will start the broader conversation.

Spock, Inc.

I always liked Mr. Spock.

This was in spite of his profoundly stupid ongoing arguments with Dr. McCoy about the value of emotions in daily life.

[If you’re lost, you never watched Star Trek. I can’t help you. You’ll just have to pick it up from context.]

It’s our emotions that cause us to want. Decisions are about people getting what they want. If Mr. Spock has no emotions he doesn’t want. No wants, no decisions.

And not only people: A flatworm in a T-maze has to decide whether to turn left or right. It does so based on whether, in past trials, it encountered food or electric shocks in one or the other direction. It “wants” food and also wants to not experience another electric shock, and it makes its decision based on those wants, although, as we haven’t yet achieved telepathic rapport with planaria, of necessity we’re using “want” fairly loosely.

One could, were one an argumentative sort, counter that we haven’t yet achieved telepathic rapport with each other, either. We each might know what we want, and, for that matter, that we want, but we can only infer the same about each other.

When Scott Lee and I wrote The Cogniti ve Enterprise we wrestled with the challenge of building organizations that act with purpose — that make similar or complementary sorts of decisions no matter where in the organization each decision is made.

Or, avoiding the passive voice, no matter who in the organization makes each decision.

One of the challenges: Comparing humans to planarians, while we’re undoubtedly more sophisticated than flatworms in understanding what we want, we’re alike in the fundamentals, like wanting food when we’re hungry and wanting to avoid pain when something might hurt.

Organizations? Not so much, and in fact the more we stare at an organization the more our heads hurt trying to infer what “want” might mean.

The naïve among us might imagine that, narrowing our focus to for-profit businesses, what they want is more profits.

That view lasts only as long as it takes to recognize that business decisions are made by individuals and committees.

Imagine you’re one of those individuals. Now imagine you’re in the organizational equivalent of a T-maze. Turn left and the business makes more profits, but, it does so in part by defenestrating you. Turn right and profits diminish but you survive the experience and get a bonus.

Multiply by the number of decision-makers and you realize, there’s no reason to think the aggregate of all business decisions will be to increase profits. It will be to maximize the personal survival rates and compensation of those in a position to influence them.

But we’re straying from our focus, which isn’t the nature of the decisions made by an organization. Our focus is on whether an organization can and does “want” the way humans (and flatworms) want.

The answer, I think, is a resounding no. Humans and all other biological decision-makers want in the sense of an emotional need. Emotions are what set the targets for our decisions, which is why Mr. Spock’s emphasis on logic was misplaced: Without emotion, we can’t want anything and neither could he.

Logic is how some people (and most Vulcans) sometimes go about making decisions that get us what we want.

So ignore phrases like “corporate greed” and similarly meaningless formulations. There’s nothing about how an organization is constructed that would let us imagine it experiences anything that corresponds to greed or any other emotion.

The closest counterparts are its governance and its culture.

Its governance is the set of rules, guidelines, and organizational sub-structures … committees and councils … that its board of directors and management establish to encourage consistency in an organization’s decision-making.

Governance starts by assigning the authority to make decisions, typically includes prescriptions for how those authorities are supposed to make them, and somewhere along the way also defines what want means: The organization might want more profits, mission achievement, or the recently demoted increase in s hare holder value.

In a cognitive enterprise, as you know if you read the book, culture is the new governance. Culture is how we do things around here. It’s the sum, substance, and consequence of the assumptions — conscious and unconscious — and other mental habits shared throughout the organization.

A cognitive enterprise — one where culture is the primary form of governance — might not want in the human sense.

But it has at least a chance of acting as if it did.