PublicOrgTheory

I find no flaw with this plan:

LONDON, England (AP) — British bureaucrats have been warned: no more synergies, stakeholders or sustainable communities.

The body that represents the country’s local authorities has told its members to stop using management buzzwords, saying they confuse people and prevent residents from understanding what local governments do.

The Local Government Association, whose members include hundreds of district, town and county councils in England and Wales, on Friday sent out a list of 100 “non-words” that it said officials should avoid if they want to be understood.

The list includes the popular but vague term “empowerment;” “coterminosity,” a situation in which two organizations oversee the same geographical area; and “synergies,” combinations in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Officials were told to ditch the term “revenue stream” for income, as well as the imprecise “sustainable communities.” The association also said councils should stop referring to local residents as “customers” or “stakeholders.”

The association’s chairman, Simon Milton, said officials should not “hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases.”

My personal views is that organizations–primarily corporate–employ these neologisms to mask a lack of substance and coherence.  While the article doesn’t mention consequences of using these terms, any move to clarify meaning and encourage critical thinking is okay in my book.  More of this would be just ticketyboo.

UPDATE:  The article also mentioned that “brainstorming” might be offensive to those with epilepsy.

Students occasionally protest that the case studies I use are skewed heavily toward organizational failure (my chapter in e-Human Resources Management: Managing Knowledge People explains why).  I usually reply that we rarely see success in public because it doesn’t sell newspapers .  That’s why this is remarkable:

GROTON, Connecticut (AP) — The Navy’s newest attack submarine, the New Hampshire, was christened Saturday, delivered eight months ahead of schedule and $54 million under budget.

If these numbers are real, this is very good news and will join those other case studies.

Today’s Washington Post reveals how powerful the Bush administration’s presumed groupthink was (is?) regarding indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay:

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such advice, issued periodically over the past six years, was ignored or discounted, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the debates.

In August 2006, for example, the top lawyer at the State Department told senior officials at the White House that unless they won a congressional mandate that broadly supported their system of detaining terrorism suspects, their goal of keeping the detainees locked up was in jeopardy. “I can virtually guarantee you, without a legislative basis, federal courts are not going to be willing to uphold the indefinite detention of unlawful combatants,” John B. Bellinger III warned in an e-mail.

You might remember this post listing Janis’s eight symptoms of groupthink:

1. Illusion of invulnerability
2. Unquestioned belief in the inherent morality of the group
3. Collective rationalization
4. Shared stereotypes of outgroup, particularly opponents
5. Self-censorship; members withhold criticisms
6. Illusion of unanimity
7. Direct pressure on dissenters to conform
8. Self-appointed “mindguards” protect the group from negative information

Sometimes diagnosing groupthink is like shooting fish in a barrel.  So how about unintended consequences?  the Post goes on:

“Through misjudgment and overreaching, the White House ended up with the very result it sought to avoid — heavy judicial involvement and erosion of deference to the president’s view of wartime necessities,” said Matthew Waxman, who worked on detainee affairs at the State Department and the Pentagon before leaving last fall to teach law at Columbia University.

I occasionally wonder whether groupthink and unintended consequences aren’t a little too ubiquitous and obvious.  However, evidence suggests there’s still more to learn.

It appears I owe Ron Rosenbaum his propers not only for the title of a recent post, but also for blazing the trail that led me to coin the term “orgporn”:

I don’t know, maybe you had to be there, to be a baby boomer growing up with the threat of the Bomb blighting your vision of the future. (Still, I’d argue that part of the power of James Cameron’s brilliant, underrated Terminator films was due to the way they recapitulated and rewound nuclear-war terror for a new generation.) But experiencing the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis at the cusp of puberty and adolescence, all of it inflected by a genre of book and film I’ve called “nukeporn,” was different.

I have a curious relationship with the word “nukeporn,” a word I coined in a 1978 Harper’s piece called “The Subterranean World of the Bomb,” a piece that explored, among other things, the psychic internalization of the external threat of nuclear extinction. Recently I got a call from my friend Jesse Sheidlower, who is the American editor of the encyclopedic and definitive Oxford English Dictionary. He’d recently discovered, in the dictionary’s database of citations for new coinages, that my word “nukeporn” was cited as the very first use they could find in print of the now familiar practice of adding “porn” as a suffix to words, as in “kiddieporn” and “foodporn.”

Though the usage is slightly different, it’s close enough.  I have a lot of respect for Rosenbaum, who writes weighty books and thoughtful posts on Slate.  It’s with a little chagrin, though, that I am reminded that there really is nothing new under the sun.

I won’t even pretend to understand this issue well enough to have sage advice on it, but the case for the creation of unintended consequences appears clear:

In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration tried a bold new approach to the challenge, and it wasn’t welfare reform. The idea was to tear down some of the nation’s worst public housing projects and instead give rental vouchers to the residents to enable them to live where they wanted. The major hope: that middle class values and stability would somehow rub off on the former residents of the projects. And remember: this was one of the classic centrist ideas – using free-market (i.e. conservative) principles to achieve humanitarian (i.e. liberal) ends – over the skeptical resistance of both partisan extremes.

Well, guess what: it doesn’t seem to have turned out that way. As Hanna Rosin documents in a compelling, if depressing, piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, this “Section 8 rental voucher” program instead appears to have exported crime from city centers where public housing has been demolished and into the lower-middle class suburbs. Indeed, Section 8 may be the most important reason why crime – and murder in particular – seems to be rising at an alarming rate in many mid-size cities (like Memphis and Kansas City).

Growthology is becoming one of my favorite blogs.  I’m looking forward to seeing more of Kauffman’s ideas on this.

Following on my recent post about the Tupac-like posthumous output of the A.Q. Khan network, this Explainer piece in Slate caught my eye:

The notorious A.Q. Khan smuggling ring had its hands on the design for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon, according to a new report from a former U.N. arms inspector. In 2006, electronic blueprints for the device were discovered on hard drives in several countries. What does a nuclear weapon blueprint look like?

Lots of diagrams, instructions, and lists of materials. While the word blueprint may conjure images of white schematics on blue paper, the designs found on the computers of two Swiss businessmen associated with Khan contain gigabytes of digital information. The bomb in question is considerably more advanced than the first generation of atomic weapons, like those the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and schematics for such a weapon require extremely precise specifications for parts and materials. For example, the documents may prescribe which metal alloys to use and the precise milling—or cutting—of component pieces. Assuming the electronic blueprints described this week are fairly complete and authentic, they contain far more than just a set of pictures.

Rather than belabor what could easily become a tired buzzword, I’ll offer humbly the view that these blueprints will likely contribute as much to the organizational forensics of their creators as they will to our knowledge of who’s building what.  Artifacts speak volumes.

I’m cautiously optimistic about this:

Eager to embrace eggheads and ideas, the Pentagon has started an ambitious and unusual program to recruit social scientists and direct the nation’s brainpower to combating security threats like the Chinese military, Iraq, terrorism and religious fundamentalism.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has compared the initiative — named Minerva, after the Roman goddess of wisdom (and warriors) — to the government’s effort to pump up its intellectual capital during the cold war after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957.

Although the Pentagon regularly finances science and engineering research, systematic support for the social sciences and humanities has been rare. Minerva is the first systematic effort in this area since the Vietnam War, said Thomas G. Mahnken, deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning, whose office will be overseeing the project.

It is the very premise of this blog that social science has a contribution to make to these very issues.  The caution in my optimism is related to embedding journalists in Iraq, a program that by many accounts compromised journalists by influencing what they saw and reported.  A good-faith effort between both the military and the academy to maintain some independence and mutual challenge would likely be a very good thing.

This is shaping up to be the week to feature other people’s blogs, and when they’re as good as this one, how could I not? Peter Klein has found some vintage org charts that might be some of the earliest modern orgporn:

Just as interesting as the charts themselves is Klein’s commentary about them, as are the papers linked from the site.

Mark de Rond, Cambridge professor and Fulbright Scholar, is guest-blogging this summer at one of my favorite blogs.  Here’s an excerpt from an insightful, efficient post on learning from one-time organizational events:

One of the curiosities of the organization sciences is the prevalence of formal modelling in a world dominated by singular events. After all, aren’t many (most) significant events in organizational life of the ‘one of a kind’ variety? If so, these events are, by definition, resistant to statistical or econometric analysis. Yet we wish to learn from them. Learning about unique events, in turn, often begins with a why-question. Why was Google prepared to pay so much to acquire YouTube? Why did Pfizer fail to secure continued protection of the patent for its blockbuster drug Viagra when challenged in court? Why did Honda succeed so spectacularly in the US motorcycle market?

Explaining why an event occurred typically involves constructing an account of the causes that led to it. These accounts, very roughly, are instances of what we refer to as causal explanations. As the examples suggest, why-questions about unique events and the causal explanations they elicit may reflect important practical concerns – be it for managers or those who study organisations. Where so, there will be premium on getting these explanations right.

It’s a treat to live in a time when this kind of scholarship is freely available to anyone with wi-fi and curiosity.

Though over a week old, this story nests somewhat well with yesterday’s thoughts on the A.Q. Khan network’s sustainability and legacy:

LONDON, England (CNN) — A second set of confidential papers on British terrorism policies were found on a train, The Independent reported on Sunday.

A member of the public found a set of papers on British terrorism policies at the Waterloo station in London.

A member of the public found the documents at the Waterloo station in central London and turned them over to the London-based newspaper, Simon Evans, a journalist at The Independent, told CNN.

The paper gave them to the Treasury Cabinet on Friday evening, Evans said.

The documents outline how trade and banking systems “can be manipulated to finance illicit weapons of mass destruction in Iran,” The Independent reported.

The article goes on to note that each page of the documents bears the legend “Australian/Canadian/UK/US Eyes Only”, a nugget that would seem likely to arouse interest if found on, say, a train. After all the complex procedures put in place to keep these documents under wraps, it would seem this internal control has the unintended consequence of being far more intriguing to the uninitiated than an innocuous-seeming interoffice memo.

However, about those procedures: these incidents are somewhat reminiscent of Scott Sagan’s eloquent discussion of normal accidents and high reliability organizations, The Limits of Safety. The quick summary for the uninitiated (and this really is a book worth picking up) is that Sagan was intrigued by the question of why we haven’t had a serious nuclear accident. Is it because the organizations running these programs have massive reliability built in, or is it that the accident one might expect just hasn’t happened yet? Recent incidents involving accidental transfers of nuclear weapons within the US and export of weapons parts outside it certainly make a case for the latter.

Unfortunately, there is no lack of accidents in the intelligence field, and there never has been. The salient question, then, is what form of system can help compensate for human fallibility? The high reliability organization tends to offer some degree of false comfort through tight coupling and redundancy, but undermines itself by fomenting complexity beyond the capacity of organizational actors to comprehend. Workarounds follow, and mayhem ensues.

I don’t imagine complex systems and the craft of intelligence are all that compatible. Sure, there have to be some safeguards in place to ensure that hard-won information is both secret and useful. Still, doesn’t it make sense that

1. Rigid, cumbersome systems would spawn workarounds;
2. Detailed regimes of rules will be impossible for all people to remember at all times;
3. The importance of intelligence will diminish with volume; and
4. Those who aren’t supposed to see this stuff might find it more intriguing if labeled, “Look! Spy Papers”?

More to the point, how likely do we think it is that the system undermines itself? I would say pretty likely. Again, there must be safeguards in place, and classified information must be handled differently. Still, it’s much easier to say that some wanker left some documents on a train than to try to understand why that would happen–twice. It is the rules themselves, not the actors, that provide the most levers for change. An investigation to assign blame might feel good, but the cure is almost certainly in the hard work of looking at the organizational system.

Study question:  what advantages and disadvantages does a network structure have over a bureaucratic structure for trading in secrets?