Isto é tão verdade!

"Stacey next sets out his stall for viewing organisations as complex responsive processes of people interacting locally. In doing so, he re-emphasises the social and emergent nature of these processes, in which the future is perpetually constructed through present interactions. Everyone influences these dynamics, through their ongoing, local participation. And population-wide patterns emerge from (and, at the same time, influence) the content and patterns of these local, communicative interactions. This perspective contrasts starkly with the dominant discourse, which maintains that change results from managers‟ deliberate intentions and designs."

"locally" e há uns iludidos que ainda acreditam no poder do Grande Geometra do Grande Planeador que tudo sabe, até sabe, melhor do que nós, o que é o melhor para nós.

Fonte.

Acerca dos procedimentos escritos

No mês passado escrevi sobre a greve de zelo.
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Nas últimas semanas tenho estado a animar uma acção de formação sobre "Gestão de Processos" com gente interessada e que coloca muitas questões. Como todos têm sistemas da qualidade ISO 9001 implementados nas suas organizações acabamos por discutir muitas vezes o papel dos procedimentos e do grau de pormenor mais adequado.
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Pois bem, quando ontem citei Gary Klein, acabei por ir reler um pouco o que sublinhei das minhas leituras do livro "Streetlights and Shadows - Searching for the keys to Adaptive Decision Making" e recordei estes trechos sobre o papel pernicioso dos procedimentos escritos:

• "A paixão por procedimentos (parte I)"
• "A paixão por procedimentos (parte II)"

Volto também a Stacey com "Quanto menos, melhor"

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BTW, ao reler a parte inicial da parte I, sorrir e relacionar com o texto de Seth Godin acerca do nível 5.Expert... 

São estes textos que me fazem reflectir...

São estes textos que me fazem reflectir, que me questionam, que me obrigam a ser mais cuidadoso e humilde no que faço.
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São estes textos que me confortam na minha solidão, à medida que me afasto do mainstrean e me apaixono pela  desorganização aparente que resolve os problemas do dia-a-dia de muitas pequenas empresas que lidam com sucesso com clientes a operar em modo caótico... só de pensar na sua certificação... arrepia-me.
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"What people usually mean when they talk about the long term, big picture for a whole organisation is a clear view of the purpose of that organisation and the direction in which ‘it’ is intended to ‘move’, ‘going forward into the future’, so that its ‘resources’, ‘capabilities’ and ‘competences’ are ‘optimally’ ‘aligned’ to the sources of competitive advantage in its environment as ‘the way’ to achieve ‘successful’ performance." (Moi ici: Eu não resumiria melhor o propósito do meu livro e no entanto...)
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"It is also widely believed that there is a set of ‘tools and techniques’ which can be ‘applied’ to an organisation to yield ‘success’ and that there is ‘evidence’ that these tools and techniques actually do the job required of them." (Moi ici: O problema quando se salta para o mundo das ferramentas assepticamente, sem olhar à particularidade de cada organização)
...
"there is no body of scientifically respectable evidence that the prescribed tools and techniques do actually produce success" (Moi ici: É impossível garantir que a aplicação de uma ferramenta só por si faz milagres ou contribui para o sucesso... é o mesmo que assegurar que uma caneta usada por um humano só escreverá poesia, ou só contribuirá para o bem da humanidade)
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"For me, nothing could be more practical than a concern with how we are thinking and I can think of little more important for organisational improvement than having leaders and managers who can and do actually reflect upon what they are doing and why they are doing it." (Moi ici: Não há acasos... aquilo que vamos sendo e os resultados que vamos produzindo são a consequência do que fazemos, de como interagimos, de como actuamos. Se não gostamos das consequências... temos de mudar a nossa forma de actuar, pensar e trabalhar)
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"If the complex responsive processes perspective leads to a ‘tool or technique’ it is to the most powerful ‘tool or technique’ available to managers, indeed to any human being, and that is the self-conscious capacity to take a reflective, reflexive attitude towards what they are doing. In other words, the most powerful ‘tool’ any of us has is our ability to think about how we are thinking – if only we would use it more and not obscure it with a ready reliance on fashionable tools and techniques which often claim to be scientific even though there is no supporting evidence" (Moi ici: Ás vezes parece que o recurso a ferramentas é uma desculpa para não fazer esta reflexão, para não fazer um acto de contrição, para evitar o esforço da auto-catarse. )
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"An inquiry into thinking about management needs to be placed in the context of what people in organisations actually do, rather than with the main pre-occupation of the management literature with what managers are supposed to do but mostly do not seem to be actually doing. In other words, we are concerned with ways of thinking about management located in the context of thinking more widely about what people actually think, feel and do in organisations." (Moi ici: Realmente, quer aplicar o que é suposto fazer-se é, muitas vezes, criminoso, por que vai contra o ADN de uma organização... mesmo quando esse não é o problema, ou o desafio da organização)
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"the perspective of complex responsive processes, then the focus of attention shifts from the long term, big picture, and strategic macro level to the details of the micro interactions taking place in the present between living human beings. Instead of abstracting from and covering over the micro processes of organisational dynamics, such organisational dynamics become the route to understanding how organisations are being both sustained and changed at the same time and what part the activities of leading, managing and strategising play in this paradox of stability (continuity) and instability (change). " (Moi ici: O que tento é combinar as duas posturas: o médio longo prazo com a actualidade. O médio longo prazo como orientação para a definição do destino, e a actualidade para explicar o desempenho actual. Um problema reside numa eventual crença arrogante na nossa capacidade de prever o futuro... troca-nos as voltas. Por outro lado ao tirarmos "fotos" da realidade actual que conspira para que tenhamos o desempenho actual, aterramos em coisas concretas, coisas palpáveis, coisas sobre as quais podemos, ou julgamos que podemos, actuar, coisas sobre as quais as pessoas conseguem situar-se e relacionar-se. Como costumo escrever num acetato: "Coisas que podemos mudar já para a semana!")
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"It becomes understood that both continuity and change in all organisations are emerging in the many, many local communicative, political and ideologically-based choices of all members of all the interdependent organisations including the disproportionately influential choices of leaders and powerful coalitions of managers. What happens to an organisation is not simply the consequence of choices made by powerful people in that organisation. Instead, what happens to any one organisation is the consequence of the interplay between the many choices and actions of all involved across many connected, interdependent organisations. Instead of thinking of organisations as the realisation of a macro design chosen by the most powerful members of that organisation, we come to understand organisations as perpetually constructed macro or global patterns emerging in many, many local interactions. Continuity and change arise in local interactions, not simply in macro plans. Strategies are thus no longer understood simply as the choices of the most powerful but as emergent patterns of action arising in the interplay of choices made by many different groups of people." (Moi ici: Ora aqui está algo que não pára de me surpreender... o poder e a importância da comunicação interna, da comunhão de interpretações, do alinhamento voluntário dos agentes, das pessoas. Pressentem o poder da transparência? Pressentem a importância da clareza? Vislumbram o que acontece quando não há jogo limpo?)
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"Notions such as best practice, benchmarking and an evidence base for prescriptions for success all become highly problematic, indeed, often quite meaningless. Thinking in the second way calls for more reflective, reflexive modes of acting creatively in unique contingent situations for which there are no generally applicable prescriptions. The consequence of making the shift from the first to the second modes of thinking is a move from asking what organisations should be like and how they should be managed to asking what they are actually like and how they are actually being managed. It is only on the basis of fresh insight into what we are actually doing, rather than some rational fantasy of what we should be doing, that we might find ourselves acting more appropriately in specific contingent situations." (Moi ici: Não é um desafio fácil, apela à facilitação em vez da consultoria. O que poderia ser uma solução, apesar de fantasia racional, nunca o será, ou dificilmente o será, se for transmitida e não descoberta, se for comunicada e não co-construída pelos agentes. A solução comunicada apela ao racional e não joga no emocional. A solução comunicada é sempre genérica, não desce ao pormenor que facilita a implementação.)
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Trechos de Ralph Stacey e retirados de "The Demand for Management Tools and Techniques"

Dá que pensar... a sério

É impressionante...

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Li recentemente Linchpin de Seth Godin, ouvi recentemente Tribes do mesmo autor, ando a ler The Power of Pull de Hagel e outros.

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Todos estes autores escrevem sobre pessoas e a economia do futuro, todos eles escrevem, ainda que indirectamente, sobre o fim das empresas como as concebemos ainda hoje, todos eles escrevem sobre novas relações entre criadores, produtores e compradores e, sobretudo, sobre as novas relações que existirão entre quem vai constituir as entidades futuras, as task-forces, de criadores e produtores.

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Há momentos o cirandar pela net levou-me a esta citação:

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"This, I believe, is what separates the new networked thinking from industrial era doctrine. Peter Drucker said "In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts". Dan Pink pointed out that 'management' is an invented technology from the 1850s, and that "management leads to compliance, but only self-direction leads to engagement". "

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E páro... e recordo o que li ontem em "Complexity and Management":

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"A complex adaptive system consists of a large number of agents, each of which behaves according to its own principles of local interaction. No individual agent, or group of agents, determines the patterns of behavior that the system as a whole displays, or how those patterns evolve, and neither does anything outside of the system. Here self-organization means agents interacting locally according to their own principles, or “intentions,” in the absence of an overall blueprint for the system.
...
Kauffman’s ... shows how the dynamics of a self-organizing network consisting of a number (N) of entities is determined by the number (K) and strength (P) of the connections between these entities.
...
Kauffman is developing a notion of formative causality in which numbers and strengths of connection between entities in a system cause the patterns of behavior of that system. The patterns of behavior are not, initially anyway, caused by chance and competitive selection, on the one hand, or by an agent’s choice, on the other. No agent within the system is choosing the pattern of behavior across the system and neither is Kauffman, the simulator. Instead, that pattern emerges in the interaction between the agents, neither by chance nor by choice, but through the capacity to produce coherence that is intrinsic to interaction itself.
If this notion of causality were to apply to human organizations, its implications would be profound because it would mean that organizational change, strategic direction, is caused neither by chance nor by the choices of managers, but by the nature of interaction, relationship or cooperation between people in that organization. If one thinks along these lines, it immediately leads one to ask what managers are doing when they think they are choosing and planning their organization’s future. The notion that managers can choose what happens to their organization as a whole is so deeply ingrained that it leads to a typical response. The response is to argue that if managers cannot choose a creative outcome because it is radically unpredictable, then at least they can choose those numbers and strengths of connections, those qualities of relationship that produce the dynamics at the edge of chaos where creative change is possible. However, this misses the whole point because no agent within the system is choosing the numbers and strengths of connections for other agents in the system, or for themselves either; even if they were, this is not enough to determine the dynamic"

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'The chaos zone'

Continuando a minha leitura do livro "Complexity and Management" encontrei, ontem de manhã, um texto que fez acender umas luzes e me chamou a atenção para a importância do alinhamento das pessoas:

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"The possibility of the evolution of novelty depends critically on the presence of microscopic diversity. When individual entities are the same – that is, when they do not have any incentive to alter their strategies for interacting with each other – the model displays stability. When individual entities are different (Moi ici: aqui estou a pensar em culturas diferentes, em visões diferentes, em prioridades diferentes) and thus do have incentives to change their strategies of interaction with each other, the model displays rapid change of a genuinely novel kind. The “openness” of the individual entities to the possible, through some “error-making” or search process, leads to a continuing dialogue between novel individual “experiments” and (almost certainly) unanticipated collective effects. Since this kind of possibility will out-compete an equivalent system without it, the process might be described as an “evolutionary
drive.”"

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Entretanto à noite no twitter alguém escreveu: "Understanding organizations as ongoing processes of communication"

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Se as pessoas são diferentes uma organização pode colapsar por causa do excesso de variabilidade.

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Se as pessoas são iguais uma organização pode anquilosar por falta de renovação.

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Se as pessoas são diferentes mas existe uma comunhão entre elas, uma organização pode aproveitar as diferenças para se renovar e progredir.

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Como está na coluna de citações ao lado: "If an organisation is too stable it can ossify, but if it is too unstable it can disintegrate. Successful organisations work between these two conditions or states, in what Stacey called ‘the chaos zone’."

Quanto menos, melhor

Coincidência!

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Não acredito em coincidências, todos os acasos são significativos!

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Há dias reflecti sobre o risco de olharmos para o mundo ignorando as interacções.

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Ontem, à porta de uma empresa, enquanto aguardava pelo horário de uma reunião, encontrei um subcapítulo, no livro "Complexity and Management - Fad or radical challenge to systems thinking?" de Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin e Patricia Shaw, intitulado "Scientific management: ignoring interaction":

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"Frederick Taylor (1911) in the United States and Henri Fayol ([1916] 1948) in Europe, the founding figures of scientific management, were both engineers. Taylor’s central concern was with the efficient performance of the physical activities required to achieve an organization’s purpose. His method was that of meticulously observing the processes required to produce anything, splitting them into the smallest possible parts, identifying the skills required and measuring how long each part took to perform and what quantities were produced.

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His prescription was to provide standardized descriptions of every activity, to specify the skills required, to define the boundaries around each activity and to fit the person to the job requirement. Individual performance was to be measured against the defined standards and
rewarded through financial incentive schemes. He maintained that management was an objective science that could be defined by laws, rules and principles: if a task was clearly defined, and if those performing it were properly motivated, then that task would be efficiently performed." (Moi ici: Quantas pessoas estão de acordo com este recorte? E como ser coerente e continuar a ser consultor de sistemas de gestão sem acreditar nesta "prescription"?)

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"The particular approach that the manager is then supposed to take toward the organization is that of the scientist, the objective observer, who regards the natural phenomenon as a mechanism.
The whole mechanism is thought to be the sum of its parts and the behavior of each part is thought to be governed by timeless laws. An organization is, thus, thought to be governed by efficient causality and the manager’s main concern is with these “if-then” causal rules. There is a quite explicit assumption that there is some set of rules that are optimal; that is, that produce the most efficient global outcome of the actions of the parts, or members, of the organization." (Moi ici: Comparar uma organização a um mecanismo... essa é demasiado puxada. Não ver que uma empresa é mais do que a soma das partes é ignorar a emergência dos sistemas. Acreditar em leis independentes do tempo e em causas suficientes é ignorar a realidade.)

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"The scientist discovers the laws of nature while the manager, in the theory of management science, chooses the rules driving the behavior of the organization’s members. In this way, Rationalist Teleology is brought into play but it is one that differs in important ways from Kant’s notion. First, this Rational Teleology applies only to the manager. It is he who exercises the freedom of autonomous choice in the act of choosing the goals and designing the rules that the members of the organization are to follow in order to achieve the goals. Those members are not understood as human beings with autonomous choice of their own but as rule-following entities making up the whole organization. Closely linked to this point about freedom is that of acting into the unknown. Kant argued that the choices humans make are unknown. In its use in scientific
management, Rationalist Teleology is stripped of the quality of the unknown, and also of the ethical limits within which action should take place, to provide a reduced Rationalist Teleology. In fact scientific management does what Kant argued against. It applies the scientific
method in its most mechanistic form to human action, whereas Kant argued that it was inapplicable in any form simply because human freedom applies to all humans."

...

"Elton Mayo (1949), a social psychologist. He conducted experiments to identify what it was that motivated workers and what effect motivational factors had on their work. He pointed to how
they always formed themselves into groups that soon developed customs, duties, routines and rituals and argued that managers would only succeed if these groups accepted their authority and leadership. He concluded that it was a major role of the manager to organize teamwork and so sustain cooperation. Mayo did not abandon a scientific approach but, rather, sought to apply the scientific method to the study of motivation in groups."

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"From the 1940s to the 1960s, behavioral scientists (for example, Likert, 1961) continued this work and concluded that effective groups were those in which the values and goals of the group coincided with those of the individual members and where those individuals were loyal to the group and its leader. Efficiency was seen to depend upon individuals abiding by group values and goals, having high levels of trust and confidence in each other in a supportive and harmonious atmosphere. In extending freedom to all members of an organization and paying attention to motivational factors, the Human Relations school took up a fuller notion of Rationalist Teleology but still thought of this as encompassing an organizational whole driven by efficient causality with an implicit Natural Law Teleology in that the movement of the whole organization was toward an optimal state of harmony."

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"Taking scientific management and Human Relations together, we have a theory in which stability is preserved by rules, including motivational rules, that govern the behavior of members of an organization (a mixture of Rationalist Teleology and Natural Law Teleology). Change is brought about by managers when they choose to change the rules, which they
should do in a way that respects and motivates others (Rationalist Teleology) so that the designed set of rules will produce optimal outcomes (secular Natural law Teleology). Because they are governed by efficient cause, organizations can function like machines to achieve given purposes deliberately chosen by their managers. (Moi ici: Tanta ingenuidade!!!) Within the terms of this framework, change of a fundamental, radical kind cannot be explained.

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Such change is simply the result of rational choices made by managers and just how such choices emerge is not part of what this theory seeks to explain. The result is a powerful way of thinking and managing when the goals and the tasks are clear, there is not much uncertainty and people are reasonably docile, but inadequate in other conditions. Truly novel change and coping with conditions of great uncertainty were simply not part of what scientific management and its Human Relations consort set out to explain or accomplish."

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Depois, de tarde, estive a trabalhar nuns acetatos para uma acção de formação a realizar em Outubro próximo sobre a "Abordagem por processos". A certa altura construí este:

Ao fazê-lo, tinha em mente alertar os formandos para o absurdo de descrever processos em detalhe, querendo prever todas as situações, ter tudo "matematizado". Ás vezes encontro organizações com sistemas de gestão com longos procedimentos que tudo querem definir.

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Ao final do dia, neste blogue, encontrei esta frase que se ajusta bem ao tema:

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"Todos estes homens herdaram de Déscartes e dos racionalistas de seiscentos a firme convicção de que eram capazes de compreender integralmente a realidade, de conhecer e declarar as suas «leis», de a antever e de transformar os seus desígnios, tendo transposto para a política estas convicções."

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Agora que escrevo este postal ainda dou mais importância ao título dado por Rui Albuquerque no blogue acima referido "Quanto menos, melhor".

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Como respondo à primeira questão:

• "Estratégia, mapas errados e self-fulfilling prophecies" Este trecho é fundamental e poético "“Strategic plans are a lot like maps. They animate people and they orient people. Once people begin to act, they generate tangible outcomes in some context, and this helps them discover what is occurring, what needs to be explained, and what should be done next. Managers keep forgetting that it is what they do, not what they plan that explains their success. They keep giving credit to the wrong thing – namely, the plan – and having made this error, they then spend more time planning and less time acting. They are astonished when more planning improves nothing.”" Mas não basta um mapa qualquer, tem de ser um mapa em que acreditemos à partida, ainda que depois o alteremos.
• "Confiar a razão? (parte I)"
• "Eclesiastes, acção e sensemaking"
• "O tempo de feedback associado a um plano (plano I)"

Greve de zelo - uma anedota

Ainda me lembro do sorriso interno que fiz quando, ainda miúdo, ouvi na rádio o anúncio de uma greve de zelo, salvo-erro dos estivadores de Leixões, e percebi o seu sentido.

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Segundo a wikipedia temos: "Operação-padrão (ou greve de zelo em Portugal): Consiste em seguir rigorosamente todas as normas da atividade, o que acaba por retardar, diminuir ou restringir o seu andamento. É uma forma de protesto que não pode ser contestada judicialmente, sendo muito utilizada por categorias sujeitas a leis que restringem o direito de greve, como as prestadoras de serviços considerados essenciais à sociedade, por exemplo. É muito utilizada por ferroviários, metroviários, controladores de vôo e policiais de alfândega, entre outros."

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É espectacular este conceito!!!

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Não é de esperar que se sigam normalmente no dia-a-dia as normas previstas?

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Então, existem normas previstas, mas não se espera que as pessoas as sigam na realidade. Aliás, segui-las na realidade até prejudica o desempenho da organização...

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Isto quer dizer que as normas previstas existem mas não são para ser utilizadas?

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Estão a perceber porque sorri com a insanidade da situação?

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Então, para que é que existem essas normas? Por que é que não são postas em causa? Por que é que as organizações não têm normas previstas que as ajudem a realizar a sua missão no dia-a-dia?

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"We all know, however, that rules, procedures and systems on their own are not what make an organization function. One of the most reliable ways of bringing an organization to its knees is for its members to do precisely what the rules and systems stipulate and nothing more. In other words, systems in organizations can only function if the members of the organization weave their day-to-day interactions with each other through and around the rules of the systems they have designed. Systems work, to the extent that they do, because of the informal, freely chosen, ordinary, day-to-day cooperative interactions of an organization’s members, and this cannot be controlled. It seems that this is how they “get things done anyway.” If this is so, then such activity cannot be understood from either mechanistic or systemic perspectives because the underlying theories of causality upon which those perspective are built exclude the very human freedom upon which the kind of day-to-day cooperative interaction we are referring to depends. That ordinary, everyday freedom is not necessarily democracy or empowerment, but the ordinary choices people make as they weave their daily activities through and around systems guiding and constraining their work."

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Continuo, interessado e curioso, com a leitura de "Complexity and Management - Fad or radical challenge to systems thinking?" de Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin e Patricia Shaw. Curioso em saber onde nos leva o pensamento dos autores.

Por que está no calendário

Numa outra encarnação estudarei filosofia, sem dúvida:
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"If one thinks in terms of Rationalist Teleology then what happens now is an action chosen now to fulfill some selected goal for the future. Action is about filling the gap between what is desired for the future and what now exists. The movement of time is from the future to the living present. The meaning is located in the future, in the gesture made now as it points to the future.
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The experience of meaning is occurring in a micro-present and it accounts for the fact that we can experience presentness. What is happening here is truly paradoxical for the future is changing the past just as the past is changing the future. In terms of meaning the future changes the past and the past changes the future, and meaning lies not at a single point in the present but in this circular process of the present in which there is the potential for transformation as well as repetition.

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Transformative Teleology in which movement is toward an unknown form; that is, to a form that is in the process of being formed, to a form that is itself evolving. Truly novel change is possible and self-organization is a paradoxical process of repetition and potential transformation. It is emergence of identity in a transformative, self-organizing process and the paradoxical experience of identity in transformation. Here teleology is not contained in the process since the teleological is itself being formed. In other words, identity, or organization, is evolving in unknowable ways, being created as it goes along. Here, the parts form and are formed by a whole that is under perpetual construction."

O que fazem os gestores ou os líderes quando querem que uma organização atinja determinados resultados no futuro?

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Por que é tantas vezes esses resultados não são atingidos?

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Há dias ouvi algures uma pergunta que ficou cá dentro a ecoar:

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"Por que é que a selecção natural permitiu que chegássemos a um cérebro que consegue ao mesmo tempo, perante um desafio, dizer-nos "faz isso" e "não faças isso"?"

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Desconfio que parte da resposta passa pela incapacidade da razão em apreender toda a realidade que nos rodeia. A razão é importante mas... é insuficiente para lidar com todos os desafios da vida, como, por exemplo, os deste vídeo.

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Trechos retirados de "Complexity and Management - Fad or radical challenge to systems thinking?" de Ralph D. Stacey, Douglas Griffin e Patricia Shaw.

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Uma das questões iniciais que os autores colocam no início do livro é uma que me assalta uma e outra vez ao longo de cada ano:

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"Why do managers think that they ought to be able to design control systems and act in accordance with procedures so as to be in control of what happens to their organization? Just as important, why do they keep finding that they are not nearly as much “in control” as they believe they should be? Even more important, what then are they actually doing to “get things done, anyway”? Then, why do they repeat the same search for improved procedures and systems every year, ignoring the failure to find them in any previous year? Why do they continue, each year, not to ask how they “got things done, anyway”?"

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Nas empresas com sistemas de gestão da qualidade, a revisão pela gestão acaba por ser uma oportunidade perdida... picam-se todos os itens da checklist da cláusula 5.6.2 da ISO 9001 e, relativamente às conclusões há, muitas vezes, medo de escrever a verdade, não vá isso, depois, ser usado como evidência pela equipa auditora da entidade certificadora, para levantar problemas acerca do sistema.

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Assim, corre-se o risco de ficar preso a rituais cada vez mais esvaziados de sentido e que se repetem por que tem de ser, por que está no calendário, sem questionar os fundamentos do que se continua a fazer.