HOW THE WORK GETS DONE

“We just wanted to understand how the work gets done,” says Hewlett-Packard’s Anne Murray Allen, former head of IT and strategy for the Ink Supply Organization (ISO), HP’s largest and most profitable division for more than a decade. “I can’t remember when I first got started looking at things from a systems point of view, but it goes way back—something about the way I am wired. When The Fifth Discipline first came out, I devoured it. I was already a practitioner of dialogue, coaching clients on the power of listening and what it took to come together and do extraordinary things, even before I came to HP. At HP, I got involved in strategy, and especially the strategic role of IT, which naturally led into knowledge management when that started to become a big focus. But all the ‘lessons learned’ databases and the like never seemed to me to be very high-leverage, nor the whole idea that knowledge is somehow floating all around us and all we have to do is capture and codify it. That notion has become a lot less popular now because companies have spent a lot of money on ‘knowledge management systems’ and don’t have a lot to show for it.

“The problem starts with not understanding knowledge, how it is created and how it operates in practical settings—because knowledge is social. Knowledge is what we know how to do, and we do things with one another. That is how the work gets done. Collaboration is the flip side of knowledge management. You can’t talk about one without the other. So, to manage knowledge you need to address collaboration and tools that help people collaborate. Today, much of our work is on knowledge networks, which we also call networks of collaboration: how people work together to create value and to create new sources of value. This is a very organic process, but there are ways to understand it and ways to help rather than hinder it.”

Several years ago, Allen began working with a social network researcher at the University of Oregon, Dennis Sandow, on a series of studies. “We soon learned two things: it was possible to identify different social networks associated with different key technical capabilities, and people enjoyed being part of the studies. The beauty of Dennis’s approach, unlike [that of] most academics, was that he did not do the analysis for people, he taught the engineers how to become their own network analysts.”

“My real aim,” says Sandow, “was to help people reflect on how they did their work. People are naturally interested in understanding how their own work occurs and explaining it to others—especially to managers who are fond of reorganizing and reassigning people without any real understanding of the repercussions. Today, those engineers have a whole new language for communicating with managers.”9

Allen and Sandow’s work has developed a novel bridge connecting the practice of reflection, the importance of relationships, and an understanding of organizations as living systems. “Over time we’ve learned that networks of knowledge expand and become stronger through reflection,” says Allen. “When we think about who we collaborate with, and together reflect on our process of collaboration, we legitimize one another.” For example, the ISO was facing important problems that required a new understanding in material chemistry. ISO worked together with two highly competitive vendors to develop a social-network map of the HP-vendor system. The map not only clarified who knew what, it contributed to trust and a sense of mutuality: “People felt seen, and their concerns and contributions were equally clear to all. By building trust and openness early on, this network reduced new ink-jet cartridge development time by sixteen weeks after just a few weeks of collaboration. Today we have many examples like this, and gradually the pragmatic value of fostering reflection on our knowledge networks is being recognized.”

Looking back on their work, Allen and Sandow concluded, “As the philosophy of the physical sciences dominated the Industrial Age, the philosophy of the biological sciences is beginning to dominate the Knowledge Age. This philosophy views knowledge, people, and organizations as living systems … [which represents a shift from] (1) focusing on parts to focusing on the whole, (2) focusing on categorization to focusing on integration, (3) focusing on individuals to focusing on interactions, and (4) focusing on systems outside the observer to focusing on systems that include the observer.”10

Allen and Sandow’s view of social systems was influenced by the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, who is famous for his pioneering studies of cognition in living systems. Maturana says that intelligent action is created in social systems where all the members of a network accept the others as legitimate participants in the network. In 2000, the management of ISO hosted the first of two two-day seminars given by Maturana. It was a memorable experience, as more than one hundred engineers listened to him talk about love as the recognition of the other as a legitimate other—and the “emotion that expands intelligence.” His comments made me recall something I had learned in writing the foreword for de Geus’s book. The English word “company” comes from the French compaigne—the sharing of bread, the same root as “companion.” Interestingly, the oldest Swedish term for business, narings liv, means “nourishment for life,” and the oldest Chinese symbol for business translates as “life meaning.” Perhaps when we rediscover organizations as living systems, we will also rediscover what it actually means to us as human beings to work together for a purpose that really matters.

IMPETUS

B uilding learning-oriented cultures is hard work in any setting. It takes months and years—indeed, it is a never-ending journey. It is fraught with risks, either of failing to realize true cultural change, or of succeeding in doing so and thus becoming a threat to those who want to keep things as they are. Building learning-oriented cultures is demanding because learning stretches us personally, and it is always easier to stay in our comfort zone. Nothing in the past fifteen years has lessened my appreciation of these challenges. Given all that, what would compel people to embark on such an undertaking?

There seem to be three overlapping but distinct motivations that compel people to take on the difficult work of building learning organizations. Some seek a better model for how to manage and lead change. Some are trying to build an organization’s overall capacity for continual adaptation to change. All seem to believe that there is a way of managing and organizing work that is superior in both pragmatic and human terms, that significantly improves performance and creates the types of workplaces in which most of us would truly like to work.