Here’s a highly political group that decided to seek help:
A Denver marital therapist has been hired to work with school board members after a tumultuous Monday meeting exposed deep rifts among the new board about the future of school reform in the city.
A day after approving controversial reforms at the city’s most troubled middle school and following the swearing in of three new members, the district was wary of a possible legal challenge and that the reform package could be overturned.
…
Colorado’s open-meetings law specifies when public agencies may close meetings. It does not make allowances for private therapy sessions, only for discussion of personnel actions, contracts or other legal matters.
Board members say healing, public or private, must begin.
I’m torn on whether I think this is a good idea. There is a lot of potential for this to be done poorly, as has happened in many teambuilding and leadership group therapy sessions. If it isn’t part of an ongoing effort–that is, a one-off activity designed to heal all rifts–it is certain to fail. There are also environmental concerns that must be addressed, and those will be tough. The various constituencies of the board members will tend to have strong ideas about their own priorities and varying regard for those of others. Although I think it’s generally a good idea for teams to develop awareness of their processes, I’m not sure the board could be called a team, and I’m not optimistic about their chances for success.
Who knows, though? It worked for Metallica.
UPDATE: The DPS Board was forced to open its therapy session after a legal challenge by The Denver Post under the Colorado Open Meetings Law. The initial push for a closed meeting appears to me to be the lesser scandal here–the greater scandal in my view is that the meeting is being held at the Broadmoor Hotel (very expensive) in Colorado Springs (nowhere near Denver). Ignore everything above–it’s going to be a bust.
Categories: Current Events · Decision-making · leadership
Tagged: Denver Public Schools, group therapy, school board, teambuilding
After a month of cranking out a 50K-word novel for NaNoWriMo, I’m back to that stolid mistress, the PublicOrgTheory blog, but it’s not with good news.
I was an early fan of the crowdsourced tablet computer project at TechCrunch. It seemed to me to reflect the best of what enthusiastic amateurs could do. The crowd was committed, knowledgeable, and ambitious. This is what I wrote at the time:
It’s hard to dismiss the success of the successful crowdsourced projects, and hard to ignore the many more that have failed. Taken as a whole, though, this would seem a legitimate area of interest for org studies, especially among those who focus on theories of groups. Despite the restrictive definition some use of groups as necessarily requiring physical proximity, these collaborations are exhibiting behavior and output. It’s time to rule them in.
In the year since that post, crowdsourcing has really taken hold as a legitimate business model with some interesting variations. There’s also satire, which indicates to me that an idea has real traction.
Alas, the tablet project died yesterday:
It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
…
Mostly though I’m just sad. I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money. It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible.
That’s truly sad. The problem, detailed at length in the post, appears to be that one of the vendors took a look at the intellectual property and said “hey, we could just sell that ourselves without involving these people.” If that’s how it happened–and the e-mails seem pretty clear to me–that vendor has reminded us of why ethics matters in business. They would also have tanked one of the best exemplars of high-quality crowdsourcing.
I don’t know, but I will assume for a moment that Arrington and TechCrunch had strong legal with all the parties (and, if so, a legitimate claim against the vendor), especially given the size and acumen of some of them. Ultimately, that doesn’t matter, though–a potentially great product with a transformative business model will never see the light of day. That sucks.
Categories: Current Events
Tagged: collaboration, crowdsourcing, Michael Arrington, tablet, techcrunch
Sorry it’s been so quiet here of late. NaNoWriMo and a “revise and resubmit” have had me clacking the keys on other stuff. Enough excuses, though–I need your vote. I want to present at Ignite Boulder, and I need to get the votes to do it. Here’s the presentation idea:
Spy vs. Blog: Crowdsourcing and Real Espionage
The most counterintuitive development in the recent history of foreign intelligence is the paradox of open-source intelligence. As hard intel is increasingly cloaked in secretive regimes, impenetrable cultures, and information overload, much intel collection and analysis is being conducted by amateurs in plain sight. Embracing this free source of surprisingly high-quality analysis is quietly becoming a useful complement to the craft of intelligence as connecting the dots exceeds the capabilities of traditional institutions.
In the span of a very few minutes, you will learn how to become a spy.
All you need to do is click here, then click on the box with the number of votes. Don’t be afraid to give three votes if you feel like it.
Categories: Current Events
Tagged: crowdsourcing, espionage, Ignite Boulder, intelligence, NaNoWriMo
Brayden King of orgtheory.net recaps a conference he attended this weekend on organizational dynamics in the financial crisis:
The papers were very diverse, but one idea came up in several papers. The idea was that the crisis was a kind of normal accident that was made possible by the organizational structure of the financial system. As Charles Perrow theorized, accidents can be thought of as the product of organizational systems that are highly complex and tightly coupled. Decision-makers have a hard time figuring out how the system works as a whole due to its complexity, but when one part of the system breaks down, for whatever reason, the entire system is vulnerable to collapse due to the interdependence of the different parts.
Normal accidents is a favorite theoretical foundation for explaining such debacles as space shuttle disasters and nuclear accidents. Scott Sagan’s Limits of Safety is a particularly useful application of the theory, holding normal accidents against the idea of high reliability organizations to examine why there have been no catastrophic nuclear accidents (clearest indication that normal accidents might make sense: there have been a hell of a lot of near misses).
I wish I had attended the conference. Drawing on Sagan a little more, I suspect that normal accidents in a financial system might very well provoke even greater efforts toward high reliability organizations, which would in turn eventually suffer normal accidents. I would also have enjoyed hearing King’s take on the topic–his work never fails to challenge and stimulate.
Categories: Current Events · Decision-making · bureaucracy
Tagged: Brayden King, Charles Perrow, financial crisis, normal accidents, nuclear accident, orgtheory.net, Scott Sagan, space shuttle
The Washington Post asks some important questions about electronic medical records:
…bipartisan enthusiasm has obscured questions about the effectiveness of health IT products, critics say. Interviews with more than two dozen doctors, academics, patients and computer programmers suggest that computer systems can increase errors, add hours to doctors’ workloads and compromise patient care.
“Health IT can be beneficial, but many current systems are clunky, counterintuitive and in some cases dangerous,” said Ross Koppel, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who published a key study on electronic medical records in 2005.
Under the stimulus program, hospitals and physicians can claim millions of dollars for IT purchases, and will be penalized if they do not go digital by 2015. Obama has said the changes will save billions in health-care costs and will minimize medication errors.
But health IT’s effectiveness is unclear. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found in March that electronic records prevented only two infections a year. A 2005 report in the journal Pediatrics found that deaths at the children’s hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center more than doubled in the five months after a computerized order-entry system went online. UPMC said the study had not found that technology caused the rise in mortality and maintained that medication errors were down 60 percent since computers were introduced in 2002.
I’ve written a great deal about success and failure rates in IT in addition to teaching courses specifically tailored to improving the likelihood that technology might deliver on its intended outcomes. What such discussions often miss is the notion of the stealth failure: systems implemented on time, on budget, and according to requirements that nevertheless complicate the processes they automate, costing user time and errors and spawning workarounds that may or may not address the reasons for developing the systems. In the aggregate, these stealth failures can bear a heavy cost, but they are almost never considered in the aggregate. Electronic medical records have a strong potential for becoming stealth failures, exacting a heavy toll not only in financial costs, but in quality and length of life.
Of course, these outcomes are not inevitable. Careful attention to use cases, outcome-based requirements, and relationships between interdependent purposes go a long way toward catching and addressing the elements of stealth failures. Unfortunately, political processes tend to undermine the communications and clarity necessary to realize better outcomes.
Categories: Current Events · Decision-making · bureaucracy
Tagged: bipartisan, electronic medical records, health care, stealth failure
Leslie Hinkson delves into the patterns of putative bureaucratic failures:
After the public outrage comes the creation of a task force to investigate these agencies, the public firings of a few officials, and the report that points to a lack of coordination among the various governmental agencies and employees responsible for tracking these families. I haven’t conducted the analysis as yet but I’ll bet my mint condition X-Men #1 that in every one of these public cases that lack of coordination and communication across job titles and across agencies are given as primary factors for the “failure” of these systems to protect these children until it is too late.
That sounds like the pattern to me. Hinkson concludes with two of the questions that have driven this blog for five years:
The first is why do some bureaucracies more closely resemble this organizational type than others? That is, is there a specific historical trajectory an organization follows to take it down this path? Second, if we can assume that I am correct in my observations regarding the lack of coordination and communication in these cases, what can be done about it? If we can assume away any ‘friction” such as costs, is there a way to institute organizational change such that these problems might actually be resolved?
Change usually fails to gain traction until there is a crisis, at which point the change is arriving too late. Perhaps there is something to managing crisis such that the event that catalyzes change is less severe than some of the more prominent bureaucratic disasters. There is also an element of competition among bureaucracies–how does one create profound change at one but not another? All important and timely questions.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy
Tagged: change, crisis, Hinkson, orgthe, orgtheory.net
Tyler Cowen addresses the useful and timely question, “what are some examples of successful government bureaucracies?”:
Wars aside, here is a short and very incomplete list: the NIH, the Manhattan Project, U.C. Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Fairfax County, the World Trade Organization, the urban planners of postwar Germany, some of the Victorian public works and public health commissions, most of what goes on in Singapore, anywhere that J.S. Bach worked.
The European Union has been very good for eastern Europe. I’ll leave aside the health care issue because we’ve debated that plenty already. The real question is what all these examples have in common.
I would add–as one commenter did–the Tennessee Valley Authority. For commonality, I would throw out that most of these (if not all) have some sort of urgency about their objectives. That point’s debatable, but what isn’t all that debatable is that bureaucracies without urgency and big missions tend to be cumbersome.
Categories: Current Events · bureaucracy · leadership
Tagged: bureaucracy, Fairfax County, leadership, Manhattan Project, the World Trade Organization, U.C. Berkeley, University of Michigan
Forbes has an interesting story about the mix of high tech and old school at Gist:
The relationship management service scours some 60,000 news sources, 20 million blogs and 600,000 Twitter handles and matches up the information they find to a contact list generated from a user’s e-mail correspondence. The result is that Gist is an advanced Web communication tool that helps you keep tabs on the people and companies that matter most. Some of the company’s success, however, comes from one the Web’s most primitive of communication tools: online forms.
Soliciting customer feedback has been a driving ethos behind Gist. What started out as PowerPoint product pitches evolved into weekly “friends of Gist” meetings, which eventually grew into conference calls for those who couldn’t make it to Seattle. Those meetings became standardized, and from them came the survey.
I have been using Gist for a few weeks now and am mightily impressed. The tool, though simple to use, is powerful and growing. Check it out.
Categories: Current Events
Tagged: Forbes, Gist, old school
A quick look at privatization news from France:
PARIS, Oct 7 (Reuters) – France Telecom (FTE.PA) on Wednesday began a second day of negotiations with unions on ways to reduce workplace stress blamed by labour leaders for a spate of suicides at Europe’s third biggest telecoms company.
The talks, which are expected to continue for several weeks, are part of France Telecom’s effort to calm the political firestorm surrounding the deaths of 24 workers in the past 18 months.
As sporadic strikes continued at sites across France, Labour unions said management was more conciliatory on the first day of talks, although points of contention remained, such as performance reviews and controls on call centre workers.
…The government, which is France Telecom’s biggest shareholder with 27 percent of shares, has also been closely involved in trying to manage the fallout from the suicides.
To better understand workers’ concerns, “all employees will receive a questionnaire on stress in the workplace” on October 19, said Lombard.
Christian Mathorel, a CGT union representative, was not convinced that management would deliver on its pledges. CGT wants the company to stop monitoring employees’ calls, measuring individual performance and giving managers headcount reduction targets.
“We think the employees are still in danger,” he said. “If we don’t address the fundamental causes behind these dramatic incidents, we will be negotiating in fear of new suicides.”
As one with experience in both managing European employees and working in various roles in call centers, this is an interesting development. 24 suicides in a year and a half at one company’s call center is alarming. Yet, monitoring calls, measuring performance, and reducing headcount are accepted practices in call centers from Memphis to Mumbai; what caused such a reaction at France Telecom?
My guess: a change program executed with insufficient employee engagement and up-front data gathering, analysis, and diagnosis. That’s only a guess, and I’m certain no one could have predicted suicides–it would take a real tyrant to go ahead with that knowledge–but this situation smacks of front-end ignorance of points of resistance. Did this have to happen? Probably not.
By the way, good luck with that questionnaire.
Categories: Current Events · Studying organizations · Unintended Consequences · leadership
Tagged: France Telecom, suicide, workplace stress
There’s a lot going on off-line right now, including building a business. That’s going very well. I’ll be back to it soon enough. In the meantime, check out www.josephlogan.com. Getting good traction among those who are developing ideas into businesses.
Ciao.
Categories: Current Events
