It is not very accurate to call self-organising a "bottom up" approach or process. To me, a bottom up process is where there is activity amongst those lower in the hierarchy or closer to the front line who feed ideas or a new process up through the hierarchy. A bottom up process can happen because it’s been designed by the top managers e.g. a series of facilitated focus groups, or it can happen more informally e.g. where a problem is solved or a new process is established at one site and then the results are seen by those higher in the hierarchy and the new process is implemented at other sites.

Either way, central to the idea of a bottom up process is that it is starting at the lower end of the hierarchy and bubbling up through the layers. Things happen low in the organisation first and then are fed upwards.

When we say that human interaction is self-organising, what is meant is that ALL human interaction occurs through local interaction in the absence of a central blueprint or plan. The term "local" is used here in a particular sense, which is that all humans interact with a relatively small number of others, not with the whole population.

The top managers are engaged in local interaction and so are those lower in the hierarchy. It is all "local" in this specific technical sense. The main difference between interaction amongst top managers and that of those lower is that the top managers have more power, although the power balance is never static, it is always shifting and changing.

So, self-organisation is not about the top managers letting something happen at lower levels and then feeding the good ideas or lessons learnt up through the ranks. Top managers and lower ranks alike are engaged in self-organising interaction and there is no overall plan or blueprint for the patterns that emerge from that interaction.

Managers cannot "allow" something to emerge from the lower parts of the organisation by relaxing constraints. They can relax constraints, but still do not know what will emerge from the myriad interactions taking place in the organisation. This is because senior managers cannot control how people will respond to that they say and do.

This does not mean that what occurs is random. What occurs is the result of myriad interactions amongst people with their own intentions, goals, psychodynamics, backgrounds and aspirations amidst shifting power relationships. That is why the results are emergent or self-organising – these different intentions, goals, psychodynamics are not controlled by even the most powerful manager.

As the intentions, goals, power relationships change, the sense people are making of what is happening changes, and so new or different results become possible.

So, instead of trying to manage what emerges from this, managers can only participate in interaction (or conversation) with others, and notice what responses they are getting and then adjust and respond accordingly.

This is why I say that self-organisation is not a "bottom up" phenomenon.

Bas Reus is exploring what it means to say that humans are self-organising, over at http://basreus.nl/2009/07/27/self-organization-defined/#comment-51. His post outlines the development of his thinking in attempting to define self-orgnisation.

Arising from the study of complexity, the important thing about self-organisation is that the ordering of society (or people in organisations) occurs through local interaction in the absence of an overall blueprint or plan. As any top manager will tell you, you can’t just make a plan, tell others and then confidently expect that the plan will be followed. Instead, all sorts of unexpected things happen – people interpret things differently, they react to things in surprising ways and there are unintended consequences. This is what is meant by saying there is no overall blueprint or plan.

Many people, including me, when they first learn of this idea of self-organisation, immediately think of questions like "How can we empower employees to be self-organising?" or "How can we manage our people so that the emergence can take place?"

In attempting to answer these questions during my doctoral thesis, thanks to my supervisor Ralph Stacey’s empathetic guidance, I came to realise that it doesn’t make much sense to talk in this way because humans already always are self organising, even when they work in organisations with top down management approaches. If they are working in an organisation with restrictive management approaches, then they are still self-organising, with a given mix of constraints, power relations and so on that is determined in part by the management approach. This is because top down or highly directive management approaches give a certain combination of constraints and power relations.

A more useful question might be something like "How can we change the constraints and power relating so that different patterns will emerge from the self-organisation?"

The challenge with thinking about self-organisation for people in organisations is to avoid falling into the trap of thinking that self-organisation means random – or that just anything can happen. Obviously, in an organisation, people cannot just do what they like. And it doesn’t make much sense to me for a manager to allow people just to do anything to respond to the environment – the chances of achieving management goals would be very low.

So self-organisation means something much more subtle than "anything goes." The challenge for managers that is presented by the concept of self-organisation is not "How can I empower my people to be self organising?" They are already self organising (in spite of management directives). The challenge is "How can I influence the constraints and power relationships so that different (hopefully more desirable) patterns of social interaction emerge." If different patterns of social interaction emerge, then along will come innovation and different results – the actions of the manager will play a big part in whether those results are more desirable or less desirable – so we cannot just say "anything goes."

The big insights of self-organisation are 1) the recognition that managers have a lot less control than the dominant managerial literature would have you believe, and 2) that managers themselves are also part of this self-organising dynamic of local interaction.

This means that as a manager you can only influence your organisation from within your own local interaction with others. So you must pay attention to your own interaction, observe what results and adjust as you go along.

"Approaches to leadership and management are still dominated by prescriptions – usually claimed as scientific – for top executives to choose the future direction of their organization. The global financial recession and the collapse of investment capitalism (surely not planned by anyone) make it quite clear that top executives are simply not able to choose future directions. Despite this, current management literature mostly continues to avoid the obvious – management’s inability to predict or control what will happen in the future. The key question now must be how we are to think about management if we take the uncertainty of organizational life seriously" – Ralph Stacey

The above lines from Ralph highlight a major disconnect between management literature’s formulaic attempts to provide prescriptions and recipes for controlling the future, and the reality that this is actually an impossible and fruitless pursuit. This blog is an attempt to help us to understand how to act when the future is uncertain and unpredictable. Acknowledging the unpredictability of the future is not a signal to be depressed. Rather it is a provocation to become aware of how you are thinking about the tasks of management and leadership in organisations so that your approaches and ways of thinking are more congruent with this reality.

Recipe attempts to control the future prevent you from seeing clearly what is going on around you, and mean that your responses to the uncertain world in which you work and live will be less effective.

Footnote: The quote above is taken from the "blurb" for the paperback version of Ralph Stacey’s latest book which has just been released. The book is called Complexity and Organizational Reality: Uncertainty and the Need to Rethink Management after the Collapse of Investment Capitalism. It’s not available on Amazon yet but you can get more info or the book itself here (thanks to Chris Rodgers for alerting me to this).

What is OD? The roots of OD stretch back to Lewin’s unfreeze / change / refreeze model of the 50s, the T groups of the 70s, downsizing of the 80s and TQM, BPR and culture change of the 90s. More recently, social movements, social media and social networking are influencing the frontiers of OD practice. Throughout these changing fashions, leadership has remained a constant fascination with OD practitioners, CEOs and General Managers alike.

Chaos theory and its progeny complexity science were also fads of the 90s. And yet there is no doubt that organisations are complex. What can the insights of complexity teach us about OD now that the first flush of enthusiasm and rose-tinted spectacles are both dimmed?

There are only two key properties of complexity that are useful to OD practitioners and CEOs:

• Emergence – global patterns emerge from local interaction without the overall control of a central designer. Any CEO will attest to the lack of control they have over those who work in their organisation

• Novelty emerges only when those interacting are diverse. Without diversity of people interacting, the patterns of interaction remain the same and innovation and creativity are stifled

If our OD initiatives are to be effective, then our thinking about organisations and their development must be relatively congruent with our experience of working in organisations. Unfortunately, for most of us it is not. For all our awareness of informal networks our initiatives concentrate too much on formal lines of communications that take place in staged events, (i.e. the much-maligned ‘cascades’) and not enough on the multitudes of ’shadow’ interactions that take place each and every day, at which the CEO and OD practitioner are not present.

Join us on 17 February to explore an alternative view of OD that takes into account these two key insights of complexity, a radical perspective on human interaction, and recognition of the power relations that are at the heart of all human relating.

Expand your thinking, expand your OD effectiveness!

Level aimed at: All OD practitioners.

Venue:

HRINZ National Office
Level One
11 Chews Lane
Wellington

Change is constant. We know that – it’s no more than a bromide.

If you are thinking in terms of gap analysis – your desired state compared to your current state, then you are thinking of organisational change as the rather problematic transitory stage between the two states – desired vs actual.

If you think of change as being truly constant, then change is not a comparison between two states. It is a process that is going on all the time. This leads you to concentrate on the experience of the change. The experience of the change is the result of a complex set of interweavings of intentions of many players, ambiguity, power, politics, ambivalence, gossip, and many things over which you as a leader actually have no control – you don’t know the future.

In some ways, change is like my experience of speed, driving at Manfeild race track (that’s me in the picture). You don’t know the future and have to react immediately to what you sense around you. Will I make it around the hairpin?  Racing drivers are much better at sensing what’s going on around them in a speeding vehicle than I am. But what a buzz, and how my driving improved!

In the same way that I can improve my driving by sensing more of what is going on and making in-the-moment adjustments, change leaders can improve their ability to implement change by sensing better what is going on in the organisation and responding skilfully to their people.

Speed is measured in kilometers per hour or miles per hour, depending on where you live. Explaining change as the transition between a desired and a current state is like explaining speed as the movement between point A and point Z. It is like describing the static points (points B, C, D etc) that you reach as you move from point A to point Z. While this tells you about these static points it gives you no conception of the experience of speed. It doesn’t tell you about wondering if you have entered the corner too fast, nor about the joy of ‘drifting’ across the track as you come out of a corner at speed.

While a scientist or teacher might describe speed in terms of miles (or kilometres) per hour and the points that one passes through at a certain interval in time, this would not convey the experience of speed. In the same way, our thinking about change in terms of static points or states does not convey the experience of change. Like driving on the track, there is the anxiety of wondering how people will respond to the proposal, and the exuberance of an interaction in which an unexpected idea emerges.

So often we think of change as a journey and it is natural to think about the speed at which we move. However, unlike most of the real journeys we take in a car or on a plane, many times we do not really know the destination and our maps do not bear much resemblance to the real world.

As a leader of change, you have to think of the experience of change, and concentrate on what is going on around you, who is interacting with whom, what is going on your organisation, and how are you going to respond to these events, given your intention of implementing change.

Then, like the racing driver, with a richer understanding of the situation in your organisation, you will be better able to accelerate from the curves.

To say that "Change is constant" is pretty much a meaningless bromide, a platitude. It is such a common saying that it has lost its meaning. Most people would agree with it and think nothing of it.

We say that change is constant without giving it another thought. But most of us think about our organisations as normally being in a state of equilibrium. And if your organisation is not in equilibrium, no doubt that is because it is in the process of moving from a current (equilibrium) state to a desired (new equilibrium) state.

If your change projects are based on a gap analysis, then you are thinking of your organisation as moving to a new equilibrium. Of course, we don’t think too much about this equilibrium way of thinking, because we take it so much for granted. So much so that it almost seems to be a default way of thinking.

But consider this for a moment. A state of equilibrium is a state where change is not happening, where stability is constant. By definition, in a state of equilibrium, change is not constant.

So if your people are talking about change in terms of a desired state and a current state, and how to move from one to another, they are inherently talking about moving from one equilibrium state to another. If they are also saying ‘change is constant,’ they are contradicting themselves.

Consider your own thoughts about this. Is your organisation currently in your desired state? No doubt it is not, because I am sure there are changes you want to make, things you want to improve. Are you thinking of how you can move from your current state to your desired state? Is the desired state some kind of resting place before working out what the next desired state is? I think most of us would say yes, this seems very natural.

This is a very seductive way of thinking that most of us take for granted. However, we also know from our own experience that change is constant. This just does not go with the idea of moving your organisation to a new state.

Organisations being in equilibrium is an analogy taken from chemistry, where a chemical reaction can be contained in a state of equilibrium, and in physics where opposing forces can cancel each other out, leading to equilibrium. These analogies have been imported directly into our thinking about organisations. Kurt Lewin is the acknowledged father of this way of thinking back in the 1950s, and his contribution to the field is undoubtedly significant.

But our organisations are not chemicals reacting in a test tube. And they are certainly not predictable mechanical forces of the kind that Newton described so well. Our organisations are made up of people who have consciousness, the ability to relate to each other and highly developed ability to learn and change as a result of those interactions.

This equilibrium thinking simply does not serve us well. Nor do the associated tools (I want to call it illusory baggage) – gap analysis, well documented steps and predictable change stages.

Related post – here.

The poor regard in which politics is held, and the view that it is bad to engage in politics are both indicative of a way of thinking in which it is implicit that people can either choose to engage in politics and therefore be labelled “bad” or they can choose not to engage in politics and be “good”.

Politics are also commonly seen as part of conflict, uncertainty and situations where the formal channels break down or are not effective.

However, I think that politics are an inevitable aspect of the social nature of being human and working in organisations.

I often hear people say "I don’t get involved in the politics." While this seems like an admirable aspiration, all humans are involved in politics because we all have intentions that we are trying to manifest in our organisational lives. The results of what happens in your organisation is a result of the interweaving of all the different intentions of the many people who are involved in the organisation. 

Hidden in the view of politics as the result of conflict, uncertainty and lack of effective formal communication channels, is the implication that people would not need to engage in political behaviour if there were no conflict, if the environment were predictable or if formal means of resolution were working effectively.

Like it or not, conflict, uncertainty and formal channels that break down are a part of human existence in organisations. It ain’t going to go away. Everything is political (or interpreted in a political way), including the actions of people who are not interested in organisational politics, or who think they are not being political.

Drawing on complexity theory, the reality is that leaders and managers have a lot less control over what happens in their organisations than is commonly assumed in most managerial discourse. But organisational results and outcomes are not random. So do not despair. Leaders and managers do have an impact on their organisations. However, their impact is often not for the reasons they think!

Strategy

Myth 1

Results occur through strategic planning and execution of the plan

Reality 1

Results in organisations occur through the interplay of the numerous intentions of those in the organisation and are therefore unpredictable

Myth 2

Actions are either strategic or operational / tactical depending on whether they have a broad or contained focus

Reality 2

There will always be unintended, unpredictable consequences as a result of the interplay of local interactions therefore only hindsight can tell if an action was strategic or tactical

Leadership

Myth 3

A leader is a masterful individual with a vision for the organisation

Reality 3

Leadership emerges from interaction as a social process of mutual recognition

Myth 4

The organisation is a whole that can be designed and managed by a coalition of the most powerful

Reality 4

The organisation consists of many interactions amongst combinations of individuals, over time. From these myriad interactions emerge patterns of stability and novelty as propositional and narrative themes. The most powerful people (i.e. the leaders) can interact with many others, but they cannot control the responses they receive, and so they cannot design and manage the whole organisation

Myth 5

To provide good leadership, look at the big picture

Reality 5

To provide good leadership, take your experience seriously – look at the detail of what is going on and what we actually do to achieve results. No one else is! They are too busy being future oriented, thinking of solutions and what we ‘ought’ to do to notice what is really going on around us

Myth 6

Power is something an individual holds over another person

Reality 6

Power is an intrinsic part of all human relating and changes according to the relative need one individual has for the other. Power balances can shift. Power enables you to do what you would not be able to do otherwise, but you cannot just do anything if you want to maintain relationships with others. Power paradoxically enables and constrains us in our relationships with others

Myth 7

Patterns across the organisation are identified and managed by senior managers or organisational experts. Leaders set the vision and direction for the overall patterns of the organisation.

Reality 7

Patterns emerge from local interactions in the absence of any blue print or master plan – they are not managed or controlled by anyone, no matter how powerful. Leaders engage in local interaction and they cannot predict the outcomes of their actions for the organisation. If it were so, no leader would ever fail!

Myth 8

Personality is an attribute an individual has and with sufficiently sophisticated instruments, it can be measured

Reality 8

Identity and personality are formed in interaction with others. They are not intrinsic to the individual – they are not properties held inside the individual and so they cannot be measured

Control

Myth 9

Breaking elements of the organisation into parts, setting targets and measuring results will enable leaders to have more control of the organisation

Reality 9

Leaders are paradoxically in control (of their own actions, speeches and so on), but not in control of how people will respond. Leaders act with intention and so do employees. No one person is in control of the outcome, which is the result of the interplay of all the various intentions of those involved.

Myth 10

Increasingly stronger targets, rules, laws or procedures give increased levels of managerial control in organisations

Reality 10

The strongest controls come from the constraints we put on each other

More about complexity in organisations is available on this website or refer to:

Stacey R. 2007 Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, fifth edition, UK: Prentice Hall

Stacey R., Griffin D., and Shaw P. 2000 Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking, UK: Routledge