Overcoming the Basic Diseases of the Hierarchy

OVERCOMING “THE BASIC DISEASES OF THE HIERARCHY”

Not surprisingly, CEOs tend to emphasize developing the organizational culture. “In the traditional authoritarian organization, the dogma was managing, organizing, and controlling,” says Hanover’s CEO Bill O’Brien. “In the learning organization, the new ‘dogma’ will be vision, values, and mental models. The healthy corporations will be ones which can systematize ways to bring people together to develop the best possible mental models for facing any situation at hand.” O’Brien thought about cultural change in terms of basic “diseases of traditional hierarchies” and the required antidotes. “We set out,” he said, “to find what would give the necessary organization and discipline to have work be more congruent with human nature. We gradually identified a set of core values that are actually principles that overcome the basic diseases of the hierarchy.”

Two of these values in particular, “openness” and “merit,” led Hanover to develop its approach to “managing mental models.” Openness was seen as an antidote to “the disease of gamesplaying that dominated people’s behavior in face-to-face meetings. Nobody described an issue at 10:00 in the morning at a business meeting the way they described the issue at 7:00 that evening, at home or over drinks with friends.” Merit—making decisions based on the best interests of the organization—was Hanover’s antidote to “decisionmaking based on bureaucratic politics, where the name of the game is getting ahead by making an impression, or, if you’re already at the top, staying there.” Together openness and merit embodied a deep belief that decision-making processes could be transformed if people become more able to surface and discuss productively their different ways of looking at the world.

But articulating these values was but a first step. While some confuse value statements with cultural change, O’Brien and his colleagues could see that impressive words were not enough. “If openness and merit were so useful,” they asked, “why did they seem so difficult?”

This question eventually led O’Brien to Chris Argyris, whose writings resonated with Hanover’s managers’ experience. Through “action science,” Argyris offered theory and method for examining “the reasoning that underlies our actions.” Teams and organizations trap themselves, he says, in “defensive routines” that insulate our mental models from examination. Consequently we develop “skilled incompetence,” a marvelous oxymoron to describe being “highly skillful at protecting ourselves from pain and threat posed by learning situations,” but because we fail to learn we remain incompetent at producing the results we really want. Most importantly, Argyris had developed tools designed to be effective in organizations and was a masterful facilitator in their use.

About this same time, I found this out for myself when we invited Argyris to do a workshop with a half-dozen members of our research team at MIT. Ostensibly an academic presentation of Argyris’s methods, it quickly evolved into a powerful demonstration of what action science practitioners call “reflection in action.” He asked each of us to recount a conflict with a client, colleague, or family member. We had to recall not only what was said, but what we were thinking and did not say. As he began to work with these “cases” it became almost immediately apparent how each of us contributed to the conflict through our own thinking. For example, we all made sweeping generalizations about the others that determined what we said and how we behaved. Yet, we never communicated the generalizations. I might think, “Joe believes I’m incompetent,” but I would never ask Joe directly about it. I would simply go out of my way to try continually to make myself look respectable to Joe. Or, “Bill [my boss] is impatient and believes in quick and dirty solutions,” so I go out of my way to give him simple solutions even though I don’t think they will really get to the heart of difficult issues.

Within a matter of minutes, literally, I watched the level of alertness and “presentness” of the entire group rise ten notches—thanks not so much to Argyris’s personal charisma, but to his skillful way of getting each of us to see for ourselves how we got in trouble and then blamed it on others. As the afternoon moved on, all of us were led to see (sometimes for the first time in our lives) subtle patterns of reasoning which underlay our behavior; and how those patterns continually got us stuck. I had never had such a dramatic demonstration of my own mental models in action. But even more interesting, it became clear that, with proper training, I could become much more aware of my mental models and how they operated. This was exciting.

From their work with Argyris and his colleague Lee Bolman, O’Brien realized that, “Despite our philosophy, we had a very long way to go to being able to have the types of open, productive discussion about critical issues that we all desired. In some cases, Argyris’ work revealed painfully obvious gamesplaying that we had come to accept. Chris held an incredibly high standard of real openness, of seeing our own thinking and cutting the crap. Yet, he was also not simply advocating “tell everyone everything”—he was illustrating the skills of engaging difficult issues so that everyone learned. Clearly, this was important new territory if we were really going to live our core values of openness and merit.”

In the ensuing years, Hanover integrated training in Argyris’ tools with a workshop on the “limitations of mechanistic thinking” developed by philosopher, John Beckett. “Beckett showed,” says O’Brien, “that if you look closely at how Eastern cultures approach basic moral, ethical, and managerial issues, they do make sense. Then he shows that Western ways of approaching these issues also make sense. But the two can lead to opposite conclusions. This leads to discovering that there is more than one way to look at complex issues. It helped enormously in breaking down the walls between the disciplines in our company, and between different ways of thinking.” The two combined to have a profound impact on many managers’ understanding of mental models. “Many saw for the first time in their life that all we ever have are assumptions, never “truths,” that we always see the world through our mental models and that the mental models are always incomplete, and, especially in Western culture, chronically nonsystemic.”

BP has followed a somewhat similar path of broad training, reaching over 5000 “First Level Leaders” in three years with a four-day program that includes the basics of personal mastery and working with mental models. “We have tried to make the tools and ideas of organizational learning part of our basic ways of managing,” says Leggate. The “pacesetter program,” aimed at developing networks of refinery managers who could share best practices, help one another, and learn collectively “was our first major cross-border network capacity-building effort, and it showed us that people appreciated and could use these tools. Since then, similar introductions have occurred throughout the organization.”