In the second of this three-part series, John Wenger discusses the merits of John Seddon's 'successful systems thinking' from a management perspective.
Management
My understanding is that when people like Deming and Seddon advocate for the elimination of targets and performance appraisals, they are not suggesting that we eliminate management. It can be confusing sometimes because so much is written about management and leadership and, as John Kotter and others have already observed, the two terms are often used interchangeably when they mean different things. For example, when Deming says in his 14 points, 'substitute leadership', one could easily misinterpret that to mean he is pooh-poohing management. He is not; he is pooh-poohing management by numbers. Organisations still require management. Deming himself said, ”A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.” In our current paradigm, however, we misconstrue management to mean managing people: getting people to work to targets, inspecting them and chastising them when they miss a target.
Old-style management focuses mostly on the people, Deming’s 5%. The 95% is the system; I’ve seen managers who manage the system and it’s far more effective at making the work work for everyone. I see management as the set of tools and processes that people apply in their work that allow them to provide the services or make the products that the market is asking for. Every organisation will have these tools and processes, but I think the point that Seddon and other systems thinkers try to impress upon people is that, by and large, those tools and approaches to managing are oriented to managing the wrong things. I see this in my work, too. So trying to integrate Seddon’s talk and Deming’s work and my own experiences, I would say that we do away with old-style management practice and replace it with the kind of management that works on the system...and also institute leadership. Management and leadership - different things. Both necessary. Complementary. Both/and, not either/or.
So what would a manager’s work look like if they were doing system-y management things, rather than control-y, target-y management things? How would someone in a senior management role occupy themselves, then, if they didn’t have all those 'HR issues' to deal with? I feel privileged to say I used to work in a place many years ago, where the senior managers did this system-y stuff, rather than the controlling stuff.
"The role of someone in a management position is to provide the kind of support that people need in order to do their jobs well, not to keep tabs on them while they do it."
Interestingly, when the two senior managers of my old workplace moved on, they were replaced with people who didn’t get systems thinking. Even more interestingly, the reputation of this organisation has gone downhill, they are struggling to survive, they are struggling to attract contracts, they are seriously struggling to retain good staff. The place has turned into a paper-shuffling nightmare with little room for autonomy, innovation or real learning. People feel stifled and it’s not a nice place to be anymore. Still, as far as the new managers are concerned, it’s working much better than before; after all, they have everything under control, they have the people under control (if they only knew) and everything that can be counted is being counted.
So, it’s not about getting rid of management in favour of leadership; organisations need both. The role of someone in a management position, however, is to provide the kind of support that people need in order to do their jobs well, not to keep tabs on them while they do it. Taking away targets does not mean living in lovely, fluffy cloud-land. It doesn’t mean, for example, that people stop having fierce conversations with one another. It’s just that they stop being fierce about which numerical targets people haven’t reached yet and which behaviours they need to stop and, instead, are fierce about quality. Quality freakery, not control freakery.
If we get managers to take up that system-y support role (making sure everyone has what they need blah blah blah), we can get rid of the target-y stuff. I like the roundabout/traffic light analogy. If the traffic people build a roundabout, they are implying, 'We trust that drivers have all the information, experience and training they need to make the right decisions about who goes next.' The role of the traffic managers, then, is to ensure that the system is built and maintained that promotes good flow and that people have learnt what they need to about responsible driving etiquette. Their job is not to keep tabs on individual drivers. Traffic lights, however, infer that drivers don’t need to do anything but what they’re told. Red means stop, green means go and amber means speed up or else you’ll have to wait for the next green. They then set up cameras to inspect whether or not people are breaking the rules and if they do, they get a fine in the post.
So management is about making sure people have all the knowledge, information, learning, resources and relationships necessary to get the job done and that the system is designed to make the stuff or provide the services that the market actually wants. If you haven’t yet, watch that Seddon video to hear some good examples of what shouldn’t be happening and what is starting to happen differently, illustrating how costs come down as the work gets done better for the benefit of the market.
Read part one of the series here
John Wenger is a director at Quantum Shift. This article first appeared on John's blog, which you can access here.
