Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman страница 24

Название: Reframing Organizations

Автор: Lee G. Bolman

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Управление, подбор персонала

Серия:

isbn: 9781119756842

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ the consequences of many of our decisions” (p. 23). Learning is relatively easy when the link between cause and effect is clear. But complex systems often sever that connection: causes remote from effects, solutions detached from problems, and feedback absent, delayed, or misleading (Cyert and March, 1963; Senge, 1990).

We are not sure what the problem is.We are not sure what is really happening.We are not sure what we want.We do not have the resources we need.We are not sure who is supposed to do what.We are not sure how to get what we want.We are not sure how to determine if we have succeeded.

      Source: Adapted from McCaskey (1982).

      Senge emphasizes the value of “system maps” that clarify how a system works. Consider the system dynamics of Covid‐19. In February, 2020, while America's attention was focused on the risk of the coronavirus invading from China, it arrived in New York among some two million travelers from Europe. The virus then spread quietly at a time when testing capacity was severely limited. Residents in a city of eight million continued to do all the things they usually did – including riding crowded subways, eating at restaurants, attending large conferences, and going to concerts and the theater. Without realizing it, they were engaging in very risky behavior. But, in the short term, they got no feedback, and saw no visible signs saying: “Warning! You have just been exposed to a deadly virus!” The lag between infection and symptoms was compounded by asymptomatic carriers and delays in testing. By the time very sick patients began to show up in emergency rooms, the virus was out of control.

      Both Oshry and Senge argue that our failure to read system dynamics traps us in cycles of blaming and self‐defense. Problems are always someone else's fault. Unlike Senge, who sees gaps between cause and effect as primary barriers to learning, Argyris and Schön (1978, 1996) emphasize managers' fears and defenses. As a result, “the actions we take to promote productive organizational learning actually inhibit deeper learning” (Argyris and Schön, 1996, p. 281).

      According to Argyris and Schön, our behavior obstructs learning because we avoid undiscussable, verboten issues and carefully tiptoe around organizational taboos. That helps us avoid immediate conflict and discomfort in the moment, but in doing so we create a double bind. We can't solve problems without dealing with issues we have tried to hide. Yet discussing them would expose our cover‐up. Facing that double bind, Volkswagen engineers and Wuhan officials hid their cover‐up until outsiders caught on. Desperate maneuvers to hide the truth and delay the inevitable made the day of reckoning more catastrophic.

      In trying to make sense of complicated and ambiguous situations, humans are often in over their heads, their brains too taxed to decode all the complexity around them. At best, managers can hope to achieve “bounded rationality,” which Foss and Weber (2016) describe in terms of three dimensions:

      1 Processing capacity: Limits of time, memory, attention, and computing speed mean that the brain can only process a fraction of the information that might be relevant in each situation.

      2 Cognitive economizing: Cognitive limits force human decision makers to use short‐cuts—rules of thumb, mental models, or frames—in order to trim complexity and messiness down to manageable size.

      3 Cognitive biases: Humans tend to interpret incoming information to confirm their existing beliefs, expectations, and values. They often welcome confirming information while ignoring or rejecting disconfirming signals.

СКАЧАТЬ
Cognitive Challenge Solution Risk
Too much data to process Filter out everything except what we see as important and consistent with our current beliefs Miss things that are important or could help us learn
Tough to make sense of a confusing, ambiguous world Fill in gaps, make things fit with our existing stories and mental models Create and perpetuate false beliefs and narratives