orgcomania

I'm a little late getting to this blog entry but we'll think about chapter four nevertheless. Systems theory is obviously another in our line of theories for thinking about organizations and organizational communication. In the language of theory some people are realists and some people are instrumentalists. A realist thinks that a theory actually explains what is going on. There is a direct correspondance between the theory and reality. An instrumentalist thinks of theory as a tool. Theory doesn't necessarily explain exactly what is really going on but it provides a way of thinking about what is going on that is useful for predicting, explaining, and controlling. (Guess which I am, realist or instrumetalist?)

Systems theory is interesting looked at this way. Is systems theory trying to say how things are actually organized or is presenting a model that lets us understand the relationships between things and parts of things? At first I think systems theorists were realists, trying to explain the way things really are. Now I think systems theorists are mostly instrumentalists, using the ideas of systems theory to be able to talk about complex interactions about all kinds of stuff. Certainly we (humans) have built organizational structures with so much complexity that we need all the help we can get to understand them. If I think about there is somebody down in Madison (in the UW-System office) who I don't know and will never meet, who has a job that I have never heard of and probably never will hear of, who will make a decision today that will have a direct and almost immediate influence on me. The UW-System is one of those big, human creations that is hard for humans to understand. Systems theory at least gives us a peak.

But I like Weick. Weick is one of those people who comes up with ideas that you look at once and say "this guy must be nuts." Then you go back and look again and you say "of course, it's so obvious, why didn't I always understand that it works like he says." Weick doesn't even try to explain organizations. He explains organizing. His genius is that he focuses on how WE make sense of the world (and organizations) rather than on the sense of the organization. Weick says that the world isn't out there for us to make sense of. He says that as we look at the world we are constantly breaking off little pieces and giving them a meaning and using our sense of those little pieces to help us make meaning of the next pieces we break off. His idea of "enactment," the idea that we actively parse and make sense of the world is a radical way of looking at the order of the world. I love it. His theory explains how people can have experiences that on the surface look similar but can end up with radically different meanings for them. His theory explains how a person or a group of people can engage the world in ways that other pepole look as completely nonsensical. Why do cult members, for example, not take the information that the rest of us use to see the fallacies in the cults beliefs. Many things factor into this of course, but Weicks explanation of enactment, selection, and retention provides a perfectly normal way of engaging the world that can create sense that anyone else cannot hope to understand.

The focus shifts from organization to organizing and that's the key. How are we making this organized behavior not how do we understand this entity, the organization, that stands before us. Different, confusing, but very cool.

It would be very comforting to believe that "business people" or at least "corporate people" had their act together and knew what they were doing. In my experience it is common for undergraduate students to expect that when they get to their "real job" there will be leaders who lead, managers who manage, and a clear overall sense of what the organization is doing and how it is going to get where it needs to go. Sadly, the bulk of my email messages and communication from alums makes it clear to me that the "real world" is no more, and no less, organized and smoothly functioning than this unreal world of the University.

People are people and their attempts to organize are always complicated by the fact that we are not robots or automatons. People do the right thing, but they also do the wrong thing. People work hard, but they also get lazy. People act rationally, but they also act nonrationally. It is always hard to get all the necessary people on "the right page." To my thinking, this is one reason that there are so many theories of organization. Certainly our understanding of what work should be like change and theories must change accordingly. But business theory, the stuff in chapter three, has also been notoriously ineffective in predicting and controlling life in the organization (theory is supposed to allow for prediction and control). So managers and other people do their best. They invent TPS forms to try to manage a chaotic situation but somehow the form just adds to the chaos and they have to try something else. A consultant arrives with the latest theory and makes suggestions for change. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't but eventually the "people-ness" of the organization wins out and a level of chaos returns.

Think about Enron. The situation at Enron was an ethical nightmare, of course. But think about that fact that an organization of that magnitude, with facilities around the country and the world, with thousands of employees, could collapse so absolutely and so fast. It reminds us how tenuous the threads that hold organized activity together really are. I remember reading an article in the Minneapolis paper a year or two ago. I wish I remembered the name of the organization but it was a pretty good sized national organization. The organization was in trouble and the CEO was getting pressured to resign or get fired. At the heart of the problem was that he had hired his girlfriend to be the CFO (chief financial officer). She was in over her head and had caused a number of problems. I remember thinking that it was incredible to me that a big Fortune 500-ish company could be seriously brought down because the CEO hired his girlfriend. It sounded like the thing that might happen in a little two or three person organization or even in a club in high school. But in a major organization with hundreds of employees. I was amazed! But as I said, people are people and putting them in high powered organizational contexts does not change that.

All this is not say that we shouldn't learn theory of course. There are many valuable tools in chapter three. It is only to serve a reminder that whatever theory you may use those are people out there and as Depeche Mode says "people are people..."

--Rick

Communication? 

How often do you look at the world through the eyes of another person? There are many cliches that suggest we should. We all know we can "walk a mile in the others shoes" and we should "do unto others as we would have them do unto us." Cliches aside, however, actually taking the perspective of another person is a very difficult thing to do. It's kind of hard to believe that the I- centered way we view the world is a cultural thing.

Likewise, the way we think about communicaton is very much a cultural thing. There are many models and theories of communication that make very different assumptions about communication. For most of us, the default model of communication focuses on transmission. A sender transmits a message to a receiver. The telephone becomes the perfect metaphor for any communication with its electronic encoding of message, its transmission of the message over copper or fiber optic cables, and the decoding of message by the phone on the receiving end.

Try this experiment. Think of communication as a waterfall. Communication begins at the top of the waterfall; there certainly is movement as the water rushes off the cliff. As the water cascades it is shaped, changed, and dispersed. Some of the water evaporates. If you're standing near the waterfall you will be cooled or chilled by the mist. Some of the water impacts the land behind the waterfall, over time this land erodes and changes shape. Most of the water lands in the pool at the bottom. Sometimes the stream into the pool is steady and predictable. Other times it seems to land in a random fashion. If the stream stops the pool at the bottom dries up.

What does this metaphor say about the communication between a student and a teacher? What does it say about the communication between you and your significant other. Who's the pool at the bottom? Where does the water at the top come from? Can we learn anything new about communication from radically changing the metaphor we use. Some people believe that our transmissional metaphor causes as many problems in understanding communication as it solves. What things about communication should a good metaphor highlight? What is your default model for thinking about communication? Does it ever prevent you from understanding communication?

--Rick

In the musical 1776, which is based roughly on the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the John Dickinson character (Dickinson was a delegate from one of the Carolinas) says to the assembly "most people would rather cling to the hope of being rich than admit to the reality of being poor" (maybe not an exact quote, but close). I think about that quote as one of the few explanations for why people let corporations get away with what they do.

There clearly is a new social contract between employees and corporations. Nobody who is even a little aware would take a job with a corporation assuming they will be taken care of for life. That guarantee has dissappeared in the last 20 years. Now the only guarantee is that the top executives will be taken care of for life. Between the completely exorbitant salaries, bonuses, and options and the excessive "golden parachute" severance packages CEOs win if they succeed or fail. In 1980 CEO pay was about 40 times that of the average worker. Now the average CEO makes over 200 times the average workers pay.

Why would the many (workers) tolerate such excess to the few (the executives)? Money is power, of course, but can't the vast majority who make workers pay (even millionaires are have nots in this day and age) bind together and get legislation passed to limit extreme differences in pay? They could, but for some reason it is not an issue that voters seem to care much about. I think the John Dickinson quote gets at one reason. To raise your voice against unreasonable pay is to admit that you yourself are a have not. That's a fact, but it's not a comfortable fact.

Have you noticed how many organizations don't seem to even be aware of the way they communicate? One thing that gets me is how many times an organization could DO less and communicate better and actually be more successful. My wife went to a specialty store in the twin cities to buy a piece of equipment that she needed for an upcoming event (she's a caterer, among other things). The store did not have the item in stock but their salesperson assured her that there would be NO problem if they ordered it and had it delivered to her. She was very clear in telling them that if they could not guarantee that the item would arrive prior to the date of the event she was not interested. If there was any uncertainty about the delivery of the item the salesperson could have said they would try to have it there but couldn't "guarantee" it. Since the salesperson repeatedly assured my wife the item would arrive well before the date needed, she ordered it. Well guess what? The item didn't arrive leaving my wife in a fix. Now something went wrong. Maybe this is the only time in the history of the store that a promised item didn't show up but I doubt it. Now the store has at least one customer for whom they have created a significant credibility problem. Who knows how many other customers she'll talk to? If they had been more complete in their communication with her they could actually have gained credibility by NOT delivering the product. Of course the best case scenario is to communicate completely and deliver the product but in this case good communication and no product actually would have served them very well. I'm sure the salesperson isn't supposed to tell customers "we can't get that by then" (or even, in this case, "we may not be able to get that by then") but in many cases honest and complete communication is more important that the product you provide!