The Syndrome of Superficiality

This is perhaps the most basic of all the conundrums of managing, the plague of every manager, although it can be especially frustrating for new managers who have come from specialized jobs as well as experienced managers who, in their souls, never left such jobs. How to get in deep when there is so much pressure to get it done? As I wrote in my earlier study and noted in Chapter 2:

The prime occupational hazard of the manager is superficiality. Because of the open-ended nature of [the] job and because of [the] responsibility for information processing and strategy-making, the manager is induced to take on a heavy load of work, and to do much of it superficially. Hence … the job of managing does not develop reflective planners; rather it breeds adaptive information manipulators who prefer a stimulus-response milieu. (Mintzberg 1973: 5)

“I don’t want it good—I want it Tuesday” was the quote that opened Chapter 2. A month from Tuesday may not be acceptable, but how about Thursday? Organizations certainly need to get things done, but in recent years there has also been a growing franticness in management, thanks additionally to e-mail (as discussed in Chapter 2). For example, “speed to market” has become fashionable: get the product out, be first. But why? To recall it?³

How are managers to avoid such pressures, which can lead them into practicing thin management? I concluded in my earlier study (1973:35) that they have to become proficient at their superficiality—for example, dealing with complex issues by breaking them into small steps that can be taken one at a time. They also have to hone their capacity to reflect in their work.

Refl’action Given the dynamic nature of their job, managers have to find time to step back and out; this has to become intrinsic to their work. Reflection without action may be passive, but action without reflection is thoughtless. As Saul Alinsky pointed out in his book Rules for Radicals, “most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings.” These “become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized” (1971:68–69).

We developed our International Masters in Practicing Management (www.impm.org) to allow managers to reflect with each other on their own experience. One of them coined the term “refl’action,” which captures perfectly this need to combine reflection with action. A number of the twenty-nine managers, such as Jacques Benz at GSI and Alan Whelan at BT, seemed especially adapt at maneuvering between the two.

It has been said of great athletes such as a Wayne Gretzky in hockey that they see the game just a bit slower than the other players, and so they are able to make that last-second maneuver. Perhaps this is also characteristic of effective managers: faced with great pressure, they can cool it, sometimes just for a moment, in order to act thoughtfully.

The Predicament of Planning

A variant of the Syndrome of Superficiality—a manifestation of it that deserves discussion in its own right—is the Predicament of Planning. If the former looks in from the outside, about the pressures to be superficial, then this conundrum looks out from the inside, about how to plan, strategize, just plain think, let alone think ahead, in such a hectic job. More than half a century ago, Sune Carlson noted this predicament in his research:

When asked what particular part of their duties the executives themselves regarded as neglected, they almost without exception answered the long-range planning of their business. The increasing amount of outside activities and the difficulty of getting enough time undisturbed by visitors and telephone calls were the common excuse in this connection. (1951:106)

This conundrum pits the dynamic characteristics of managerial work discussed in Chapter 2 (the hectic pace, the interruptions, the orientation to action, etc.) against the manager’s responsibilities for articulating direction and overseeing decisions made in the unit. As one manager (also in our masters program) put it: “Each day I go into the office with some preplanned action and at the end of the day, I have to regret that all the various things I [did] are very different…. [My] work is very interesting … up to now, [it is] the best work I have never [done].”

This is a conundrum because managers can neither avoid these natural pressures nor fail to get beyond them, although there is no shortage of managers who have done one or the other. As noted in Chapter 2, managers adopt their pace and workload because of the inherently open-ended nature of their job. They are responsible for the success of their unit, yet so much can flare up and get in the way: a strike, a disgruntled customer, a sudden shift in currency value. So they have to keep current, and that can even mean encouraging interruptions (which Robert Kaplan has called “the lifeline to fresh and necessary information” [1983:2]).

What to Do? Strategic Planning? So what is the harried manager to do? Shut the door? Go off to a retreat? Call a consultant? Sure—sometimes. Just so long as these are recognized as temporary alleviations more than fundamental solutions.

And then there is the most popular prescription of all: strategic planning—the ideal solution for the overburdened manager. If you are unable to think ahead and so are devoid of strategic vision, let the system do the thinking and the visioning for you. (A technique is something you can use in place of a brain.)

Unfortunately, strategic planning never worked as planned—it has never been conducive to developing strategy. Systems provide analysis; strategies require synthesis. Analysis can certainly feed into the mental processes needed for synthesis, but it can never substitute for them. When Michael Porter wrote in The Economist that “I favor a set of analytic techniques to develop strategy” (1987), he was dead wrong: nobody ever developed a strategy through a technique. The world of analysis is conceptual and categorical; the world of strategy is messy and mixed up. Planning unfolds on schedule; managing has to deal with strategic problems and opportunities as they arise.⁴

For example, how was anyone in the Canadian Parks supposed to reconcile “Our mission is to sustain the integrity, health, diversity, majesty and beauty of Western Canada’s Cultural and National Heritages” with a knock-down, drag-out battle over the expansion of a parking lot? (Recall the Chapter 3 box about Greenpeace, whose planning seemed to reduce to scheduling.)

Crafting Strategy Instead⁵ So how then do strategies—and managerial frames in general—come into existence? In terms of the model of Chapter 3, strategic planning works from the inside out: managers think in their heads—formulate strategies—so that others can act—implement them. The process is deductive and deliberate—in effect, close to the science corner of the art-craft-science triangle.

In our own research (reported in Mintzberg 2007) that tracked the appearance, use, and demise of strategies in ten organizations across decades (in one case, 150 years), we found something else. Strategies can form without being formulated: they can emerge through efforts of informal learning rather than having to be created through a process of formal planning.

In the Chapter 3 model, this works from the outside-in: acting drives thinking inductively as much as thinking drives acting deductively. In fact, the two go together, back and forth, interactively.⁶ It is their ability to bounce back and forth between the concrete and the conceptual—to understand the specifics and be able to generalize creatively about them—that makes for successful strategists, whether they be senior managers or anyone else: professionals venturing alone in project teams, middle managers innovating in skunkworks, and others.

Strategies are not tablets carved atop mountains, to be carried down for execution; they are learned on the ground by anyone who has the experience and capacity to see the general beyond the specifics. Remaining in the stratosphere of the conceptual is no better than having one’s feet firmly planted in concrete.

Add all this up and it appears that managers who deal best with the Predicament of Planning exhibit an engaging style, by letting a thousand strategic flowers bloom in their organizations, and an insightful style, to detect the patterns of success in these gardens of strategic flowers, rather than a cerebral style that favors analytical techniques to develop strategies in a hothouse. Thus, the strategy process is a lot closer to craft, enhanced by a good deal of art. The science enters in the form of analyses, to feed data and findings into the process, and in the form of planning, not to create strategies (“strategic planning” is an oxymoron) but to program the consequences of strategies created through venturing and learning.

The Labyrinth of Decomposition

The world of managing is chopped into little pieces, some natural, some not. Organizations are decomposed into regions, divisions, departments, products, and services, not to mention missions, visions, objectives, programs, budgets, and systems; likewise, agendas are decomposed into issues, and strategic issues are decomposed into strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities. Item 4 in a meeting of Sandy Davis of the Western Canadian Parks with her staff concerned the “Strategic Plan: Program Update.” A twenty-page draft was handed out, called “Defining Our Destiny—Leadership through Excellence.” It included sections on the mandate, the mission, a vision statement, ten “values” (ranging from pride in heritage to respect for “strategic thinking linked to strategic action”), and eight “strategic priorities and objectives,” described at some length (including “effectively managing protected areas,” “commemorating and protecting cultural heritage,” and “organizational excellence”).

Overseeing all of this are managers, who are supposed to integrate the whole confusing mess (albeit often of their own making). Hence, we get the Labyrinth of Decomposition: where to find synthesis in a world so decomposed by analysis? (Sayles 1979:11–12).

Synthesis is the very essence of managing: putting things together, in the form of coherent strategies, unified organizations, and integrated systems. This is what makes managing so difficult—and so interesting. It’s not that managers don’t need analysis; it’s that they need it as an input to synthesis.

So how can a manager see the big picture amid so many little details? It’s not as if the organization is a museum with that big picture on some wall. It has to be constructed, in the minds of its people.

Picture one of those organizational charts. This is supposed to be an orderly portrayal of the components of an organization. It might instead be seen as a labyrinth through which its people have to find their way. The assumption behind the chart is that if each unit does its job correctly, the whole organization will function smoothly. In other words, structure is supposed to take care of organization, just as planning is supposed to take care of strategy. Anyone who believes this should find a job as a hermit.

Chunking As noted earlier, Peters and Waterman (1982) have written enthusiastically about “chunking.” Managers have to grab hold of big problems by breaking them into little pieces—“chunks”—that can be dealt with one at a time. That makes sense, indeed is often necessary (as discussed under scheduling in Chapter 3). The problem is that the broken chunks do not fit together as in some sort of jigsaw puzzle. This is more like playing with Legos, except that the pieces don’t attach very well, and the manager may not even be clear what needs to be built.

In a colorful article entitled “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” George Miller (1956) pointed out that we humans can handle only about seven chunks of information in our short- and intermediate-term memories. So how are we supposed to get that big picture into our little brains?

Painting the Big Picture Let’s look at this metaphor literally. How does the painter see the big picture? He or she, like the manager, has nowhere to go to see it—short of copying that of someone else, in which case this person will not be a great painter (any more than a manager who copies other strategies is a great strategist).

That big picture has to be painted stroke by stroke, experience by experience. The painter may start with an overall perspective, in his or her head, but from there the picture has to emerge from a host of little actions—just as a big strategy does. Few companies these days have a bigger or better strategy than IKEA, the furniture chain. That is one big corporate picture. It reportedly took fifteen years to paint.

Of course, managers also have to appreciate that some pictures are simply too big to paint, some chunks are too heavy to carry, and some charts are too high to climb: the organization is too big, or the managerial job is too artificial.

Natural and Unnatural Managerial Jobs Some entities seem rather natural to manage: a company with a clear mandate, as in the case of IKEA, or a self-standing store in the IKEA chain. Others do not—for example, a conglomerate company, or two stores in the IKEA chain.

Consider Ann Sheen of the NHS. To manage nursing in a hospital seems natural enough. But what about managing nursing in two hospitals, a few miles apart, that have been magically merged on a sheet of paper? The hospitals may have needed Ann in both jobs, but what makes them one job? What is natural about managing that?

This is one example of the many managerial jobs that have been established on a geographic basis—often rather arbitrarily. Another among the twenty-nine managers was in the work of Sandy Davis, in charge of the national parks of western Canada. But what does that mean? The Banff National Park has its own space, services, tourists, and issues. But what do several such parks, which happen to be in three of Canada’s ten provinces, have in common? One danger is that the manager of such combinations will feel compelled to find things in common—for example, by calling meetings of park managers to search for synergies. Another is that the manager will micromanage.

Nothing is more dangerous in an organization than a manager with little to do. Managers are usually energetic people—that is how they got to be managers in the first place, and the more senior they are, the more energetic they tend to be. Put them in such geographic positions where they have little to do, and they will find things to do. Sometimes it amounts to control, other times it is something else. The accompanying box describes an example of the latter.

The Quandary of Connecting

As mentioned earlier, a major occupational hazard of managing is to know more and more about less and less until finally the manager knows nothing about everything. The Quandary of Connecting addresses what lies behind this: how to keep informed—in contact, “in touch”—when managing by its own nature removes the manager from the very things being managed? In other words, how does the manager connect when he or she is intrinsically disconnected (Watson 1994:13)?

Livingston (1971) has written about the “second-handedness” of conventional management education. He should have made that third-handedness, because managing itself is second-handed. Organizations are designed so that some people do the basic work and other people, called managers, mostly oversee it in one way or another—or, even more removed, oversee managers who oversee it. Management, to repeat, means getting things done through other people—whether that be on the people plane (leading and linking) or on the information plane (controlling and communicating). Even on the action plane (doing and dealing), as described in Chapter 3 managers generally work with others to take action. And, of course, as managers rise in the hierarchy of authority, they get further and further removed from this action—to the point where, as Paul Hirsch put it, the chief executive can become “the lightning rod for not knowing what is going on” (comment at the Academy of Management Conference, Chicago, August 15, 1986).

Some people claim that detachment can make a manager more objective. Surely so. But someone else remarked that to be objective is to treat people like objects. Is that what we want of our managers? And then there are those who believe that the Internet puts everyone in touch, no matter where they may be. In touch with a keyboard, to be sure (as noted in Chapter 2), but in touch with the nuances of organizational life?

Every Manager Incompetent—or Just Frustrated? The Peter Principle (Peter and Hull 1989) describes how managers in hierarchies rise to their level of incompetence: they keep getting promoted until they land in a job they cannot do, and there they remain—never to be promoted again. What we have in this conundrum is a Peter Principle for the field of management itself: as people rise from the action base of the specialist to the abstract planes of the generalist, they become disconnected from what they are supposed to manage. In this respect, all managers are somewhat incompetent. Yet someone has to manage. And so we have this conundrum.

If you ask the experts—not the experts on management, but the operating experts of the organizations being managed—many will sound off about the incompetence of their managers, as if no one should manage at all. One physician I know, the head of his hospital’s medical executive committee no less, claimed that a physician who became director of medical services in the hospital was no longer a physician. Physicians often make such comments. I will ask the next one who does what he or she proposes instead: Fill the job with an accountant? How about an MBA? Better still, we can eliminate the job altogether and let the CEO manage the physicians’ affairs.⁷

In my research, the Quandary of Connecting came out most clearly in the frustration expressed by Gord Irwin, who found himself squeezed between the tangible realities of the park he knew so well and his new responsibilities embedded in the abstractions of administration. But that frustration was hardly restricted to this new manager. Dr. Webb expressed it in his actions, as did Bramwell Tovey in his words, nostalgic about the specialized work he left behind.

It was certainly not all frustration, however. As noted in the last chapter, most of the twenty-nine managers reveled in their managing (Bramwell included). They understood this conundrum, so they did not get bogged down in it. Peter Coe of the NHS was a particularly interesting case in point. On one hand, he could not exercise direct control over the units in his own district that had autonomy. On the other hand, he delighted in doing other things instead; for example, on the day of observation, as described in the box, he was advocating up the hierarchy for more resources. He wasn’t frustrated; he just used his energy elsewhere. Under the circumstances, this seemed to be eminently sensible managing.

Slabs across Silos We talk a great deal about “silos” in organizations, vertical cleavages running up and down the hierarchy that separate functions from each other. This conundrum suggests another kind of cleavage, horizontal in nature, that separates hierarchical levels from each other. We can call them “slabs,” as shown in Figure 5.1, because they are often isolated layers of managerial activity, one upon the other, ever more abstracted from the operating realities. In the NHS, for example, we had Drs. Thick and Webb, perhaps as well as Ann Sheen, on one slab, Peter Coe on another, and Sir Duncan on the top one (with other slabs in between). When these hierarchical slabs become especially thick, often the case in machine organizations, the Quandary of Connecting can take the organization into strategic gridlock: layers of managers sit in their own no man’s land, each one lacking the information or the power necessary to connect adequately to the others.

Figure 5.1 SILOS AND SLABS IN ORGANIZATIONS

Connecting at the Base? This conundrum is probably least problematic for the managers on the lowest slab, who generally have ready and natural access to the operations. This struck me especially in the time I spent with Stephen Omollo in the refugee camps, watching him roaming about, picking up information so enthusiastically. At one point, after stopping at the food distribution area, he announced to me that there were no problems this day because no one had come to him to complain. Peters and Waterman (1982) have discussed “management by walking around”; here we had management by just “being there,” based on trust.

Be all this as it may, Linda Hill still found considerable frustration in regard to this Quandary of Connecting among the new first-line managers she studied:

As the months passed, [the new sales managers] found it more difficult to keep their technical knowledge and skills on the cutting edge. They did not even have time to read through all the new product announcements, much less figure out the best strategies for selling them. They found it disconcerting that they were beginning to feel rusty after such a short time frame. (2003:141–142)

Accordingly, the new managers “had to learn to handle their ignorance” (p. 180). As McCall et al. put it, such novice managers could not behave as they had in previous jobs: the “responsibility for doing the job was replaced with responsibility for seeing that systems and work processes … got done…. Increasingly they had to learn to ‘manage by remote control’” (1988:54). How interesting that this harks back to the posture described in the last chapter as mostly one of chief executives.

The Linking Layer or the Administrative Gap? In contrast, a number of the other managers among the twenty-nine, at middle levels in rather large organizations—for example, Abbas Gullet, Stephen’s manager, and Doug Ward of the CBC radio station—seemed quite able, not only to develop a reasonable sense of the operations, but to connect to their senior levels of management as well. I suspect that such managers are critically important. Every large organization likely requires a layer of middle managers who can link the so-called top with the base of operations.

It is, of course, ideal that the most senior managers be in touch all the way down the hierarchy, as I observed John Cleghorn doing in the bank branches. (See the description of his day in the appendix.) But except for entrepreneurial organizations, where the chief tends to be involved in everything, how often does this really happen? (Thanks to John, the Royal Bank had a target of its senior managers being out in the field 25 percent of their time, although he himself had attained only 16 percent in the recent period.) And so this linking layer of middle managers may be key to avoiding rupture between the concrete actions on the ground and the conceptual issues at the senior levels—a problem I find rampant in business, government, and other organizations these days.

Common these days is what can be called the administrative gap. Consider health care. All around the world, it seems to suffer from such a gap. A gaping hole exists between those who administer and those who deliver the basic services. The consequence is that above the gap, they talk abstractions (recall the NHS discussion of “quality,” “consumers,” and “risk”), while below it, people are confused and frustrated.⁸

How to close this gap? That’s easy—in principle: (1) bring the managers down, (2) welcome the operating people up, or (3) shrink the gap.

“Delayering”—namely, eliminating layers of middle management—shrinks the gap. It has been part of the “downsizing” discussed earlier. It can be helpful (let’s start with those unnatural geographic layers just discussed), so long as it does not put an excess burden on the middle managers left behind (or, as in the case of the earlier NHS, leaves districts and regions behind after eliminating areas). Otherwise, questions have to be asked about the size of the organization, not just about the arrangements made to cope with it. Many organizations, in health care and beyond, are just too big. (Does it make sense to have one NHS for all of England? The Scottish NHS functions with about one-tenth that population.)

Getting “in Touch” In “Managing beyond the Manager” of the previous chapter, we discussed welcoming the operating people up in order to close such a gap—for example, by encouraging the strategic initiatives of nonmanagers. But what about bringing the managers down?

The comment earlier about Stephen Omollo’s “being there” suggests that a prime way to deal with the Quandary of Connecting is to get managers out of their offices, away from their meetings, and into the places where their organization serves its basic purpose—not just to “drop in” but to have personal presence, in body and spirit. One executive described how having their “feet in the mud” can make senior managers “better strategists”: “My assumption is that a factory has a special character and personality when senior management understand its detailed working in their bones, and their hands; the system as a whole has a sense of integration in a way that split-off management can never achieve” (in Peters 1980:16).

Better still is the following. I was registering my car for service when the owner of the dealership said hello. We chatted, as we sometimes have, this time about management, and he said something that I should have realized but never did: “I have no office here.” No wonder he’s always around, on his feet, much like Fabienne Lavoie in the nursing ward.

The potency of managing standing up, or at least in easy speaking range of others, is not to be underestimated. It can promote rather holistic practice. Of course, not all managers are as lucky as these two, who have most of their contacts so close at hand. But that can be by choice, too. Why does so much managing have to take place in isolated offices and closed meeting rooms? Well known are Japanese companies that sit their managers in open areas, for ease of communication. One, Kao, even became known for holding management meetings in open areas; any employee who went by was welcome to join. Such companies, like that car dealership, don’t need an open-door policy.

In our International Master’s in Practicing Management (www.impm.org), a manager from Fujitsu took his colleagues to see the open area where he and his colleagues worked—with no partitions, just desks. “Who’s that?” asked a manager from a Canadian bank about someone she saw on his feet, talking to another person at a desk. “That’s our manager,” answered our host. “How can you work with your boss looking over your shoulder like that?” she replied in horror. “What’s the problem?” he asked. What looked like controlling to her was facilitating to him. This wasn’t micromanaging; it was keeping in touch.⁹

The big problem today is macroleading: managers who are disconnected, don’t know what’s going on. “Hands off” too often amounts to “brain off.” Here is a comment about the Challenger disaster at NASA: “Top management’s insistence [at a teleconference “far removed from the world of murky technology, shims, improvisation, and tacit understanding that engineers used to make the shuttle fly”] on explicit argument as a substitute for their own lack of firsthand experience silenced the tacit reservations that foreshadowed tragedy” (Weick 1997:395). Had the managers come down or, better still, had the engineers been welcomed up to close this administrative gap—had they the ear of their bosses, been part of the decision making—the tragedy might have been avoided.

The Dilemma of Delegation

Here we reverse the previous conundrum. There managers have trouble connecting because their job takes them out of touch; here managers have difficulty delegating because they are better informed than the people to whom they have to delegate.

Is this a contradiction? Not when we appreciate the kinds of information in question. The manager, as nerve center of the unit (as described in Chapter 3), should be its most broadly informed member, but not its most specifically informed. He or she has formal access to all the members, and usually to a wide array of the unit’s external contacts as well, many of whom are nerve centers of their own units. But much of this information comes secondhand, passed through others, often orally. And so the manager may lack some of the very tangible, or tacit, information.

Given, however, his or her breadth of information, what happens when it comes time for the manager to delegate, since no manager can do all that is expected of him or her? How to delegate when so much of the relevant information is personal, oral, and often privileged?

Consider the following incident.¹⁰ An employee calls to ask the chief executive if a certain staff appointment should be cleared through a particular committee. The executive replies that it should not. To a second question, on another appointment, the CEO gives an affirmative reply. The employee asks about a third person and receives another negative reply. Asked later why he did not give consistent responses, the chief executive said that his knowledge of the personalities of the people in question made individual decisions necessary.

Fair enough. But what was the result? The next time such a situation arose, the chief executive would have had to be consulted again. Quite clearly, if perhaps not consciously, he chose not to delegate responsibility for this kind of decision. The obvious reason is that he believed himself to be better informed.

Consider another story, told by Charles Handy, under the heading “the paradox of delegation” (1994:93–94). He encountered a chief executive who had divided up his job neatly into the functions of planning, financial control, sales, and so forth, and put someone in charge of each, thereby freeing himself, in his words, “to act as a counselor, consultant, and arbitrator” when needed. Three months later, Handy visited the chief executive again. “The system is fine,” he reported, but “the people, they’re not up to it … can’t take an overall perspective…. Everything I push down to them seems to come back to me as an argument to be resolved…. Now I’m busier than I ever was before I delegated it all so neatly.” Handy replied, “But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You delegated everything except coordination, compromise, and linkage, so that remains your job.” In this case, the manager delegated, but the structure impeded execution. The decisions could not be chopped up like the organization; things still had to come together at his level.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t Tasks involving only one specialized function are easily delegated to the person charged with that function, who likely has the necessary tacit as well as specialized information. But what about tasks that cut across specialties or that require the manager’s privileged information? How to delegate these?

There would be no problem if the manager could easily disseminate the relevant information along with the delegated task. But often that is not feasible because, as noted in Chapter 2, so much of this information tends to be oral, and therefore stored only in the natural memory of this person’s brain. Documented information, on paper or in a computer, can be transmitted easily and systematically; oral information in a human brain cannot. Even when some of this information can be accessed, transmission is a time-consuming and crude process. The manager has to “brief” the person orally. As Karl Weick (1974b:112) put it (in reviewing the discussion of this dilemma in my 1973 book): “delegation is a problem because the manager is a flawed and mobile data bank.” (Weick speculated that “managers with poor memories delegate more,” since the dilemma is less severe!)

Hence, managers seem damned by the nature of their personal information system to a life of either overwork or frustration. In the first case, they do too many tasks themselves or else spend too much time disseminating oral information. In the second case, they have to look on as delegated tasks are performed inadequately, by the uninformed (relative to them). It is too common to witness people being blamed for failures that can be traced to their inadequate access to the information necessary to perform their delegated tasks. Delegating by dumping is not responsible managing.

Hill concluded in her study of the new managers that, forced to choose between overworking and delegating with doubt, they largely succumbed to the latter, “mostly because circumstances forced them to [delegate]; in time, they realized their jobs were simply too big to handle alone” (2003:141). So the Syndrome of Superficiality trumped the Dilemma of Delegation.

To Hill’s managers, the issue thus became not “whether … to delegate” but “how to delegate.” At first, they went to extremes—“It tended to be all or nothing”—but eventually they came to understand how to treat the people reporting to them differentially (p. 143).

Weick identified the Dilemma of Delegation as a problem of “information equalization,” especially oral information (1974:113). And this suggests one way for managers to alleviate this conundrum: as regularly and comprehensively as possible, share the privileged information with some other people in the unit. Brief them regularly, and have them brief each other. And have a number 2 who is as fully informed as possible. Then, when it comes time to delegate, at least half the problem is solved.

Does this sharing raise the risk that confidential information will fall into the wrong hands? Sure, sometimes (although refusing to share information is often a smokescreen for political games). But contrast this with the benefits of having better-informed people all around.

The Mysteries of Measuring

It has become a popular adage in some quarters that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That’s strange, because who has ever really measured the performance of management itself (as we shall discuss in the next chapter)? I guess this means that management cannot be managed. Indeed, who has ever even tried to measure the performance of measurement? Accept this adage, therefore, and you have to conclude that measurement cannot be managed either. Apparently we shall have to get rid of both management and measurement—thanks to measurement.

In fact, the only reliable conclusion to draw from this is that measurement is loaded with its own conundrums, not the least of which is, how to manage it when you can’t rely on measuring it?

In one respect, measurement would appear to help resolve the last two conundrums. For if managers can get rzliable information from measurements, then they can sit in their offices and get fully informed. No need to spend all that time walking around, being there, communicating. And they can delegate to their heart’s content: hit the send button and off goes the information alongside the delegated task. Presumably that is what has made measurement so appealing, especially for managers removed from the tangible reality of their organizations. After all, numbers don’t lie, right? The data are reliable, objective, “hard.”

The Soft Underbelly of “Hard Data” What exactly is “hard data”? Rocks are hard, but data? Ink on paper or electrons in a computer are hardly hard. (Indeed, the latter are described as “soft copy.”)

If you must have a metaphor, try clouds in the sky. You can see them clearly from a distance; up close they are more obscure. When you get there, you can poke your hand through them and feel nothing. “Hard” is the illusion of having turned events and their results into statistics. And these are as clear and unambiguous as clouds. Objective, too. That employee over there is not an egocentric SOB, but a 4.7 on some psychologist’s scale. The company didn’t do just well; it earned a 16.7 percent return on investment last year. Isn’t that clear enough?

Soft data, in contrast, can be fuzzy, ambiguous, subjective. It usually requires interpretation; most of it can’t even be transmitted electronically. In fact, it may be no more than gossip, hearsay, impression. How objective is that?

So the dice are loaded. Hard data win every time, at least until they hit the soft material of the human brains that generated them in the first place, and try to use them in the second. So let’s consider the soft underbelly of hard data (from Mintzberg 1975a).

1. Hard data are limited in scope. They may provide the basis for description, but often not for explanation. So the profits went up. Why? Because the market was expanding? You can probably get a number on that. Because a key competitor has been doing dumb things? No numbers on that. Because your management was brilliant? No numbers on that either (so let’s assume it’s correct). Hence, we often require soft data to explain what’s behind the hard numbers: politics in the competitor’s company, the expression on a customer’s face. In comparison, hard data alone can be sterile, if not impotent. “No matter what I told him,” complained one of the subjects of Kinsey’s famous study of sexual behavior in the human male, “he just looked at me straight in the eye and asked ‘How many times?”’ (in Kaplan 1964).

2. Hard data are often excessively aggregated. How are these hard data presented? Usually lots of facts are combined and then reduced to some aggregate number, such as that quintessential bottom line. Think of all the life that is lost in producing that number.

It is fine to see the forest from the trees—unless you are in the lumber business. Most managers are in the lumber business: they need to know about the trees too. Too much managing takes place as if from a helicopter, where the trees look like a green carpet. As Neustadt was quoted in Chapter 2, presidents of the United States need “not the bland amalgams … [but] the tangible detail that pieced together in [their] mind illuminate the underside of issues put before [them]” (1960:153, 154). It is the latter, not the former, that provides the triggers for managerial actions and that enables managers to develop the mental models needed to take those actions.

3. Much hard information arrives too late. Information takes time to “harden.” Don’t be fooled by the speed with which those electrons race around the Internet. Events and results first have to be documented as “facts” and then to be aggregated into reports, which may have to await some predetermined schedule (e.g., the end of the quarter). By then, competitors may have run off with the customers.

4. Finally, a surprising amount of hard data is just plain unreliable. They look good, all those definitive numbers. But where did they come from? Lift up the rock of hard data and see what you find crawling underneath:

Public agencies are very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you just never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases. (attributed to Sir Josiah Stamp 1928, cited in Maltz 1997)

And not just public agencies. Business today is obsessed with numbers. Yet who goes back to find out what the watchmen put down? Moreover, even if the recorded facts were reliable in the first instance, something is always lost in the process of quantification. Numbers get rounded up, mistakes get made, nuances get lost. Anyone who has ever produced a quantitative measure—whether a reject count in a factory or a publication count in a university—knows just how much distortion is possible, whether or not intentional.

Ely Devons (1950), in his account of “statistics and planning” in the British Air Ministry during World War II, illustrated the potential for such distortion in sobering detail. The collection of such data was extremely difficult and subtle, demanding “a high degree of skill,” yet it “was treated … as inferior, degrading and routine work on which the most inefficient clerical staff could best be employed” (p. 134). Errors entered the data in all kinds of ways, even just treating months as normal although all included some holiday or other. “Figures were often merely a useful way of summing up judgment and guesswork.” Sometimes they were even “developed through ‘statistical bargaining.’ But ‘once a figure was put forward … no one was able by rational argument to demonstrate that it was wrong.” And when those figures were called “statistics,” they acquired the authority and sanctity of Holy Writ (p. 155).

All of this is not a plea for getting rid of hard information. That makes no more sense than getting rid of soft information. It means we have to cease being mesmerized by the numbers and stop letting the hard information drive out the soft, instead combining both whenever possible. We all know about using hard facts to check out the soft hunches. Well, how about using soft hunches to check out the hard facts (e.g., “eyeballing” the statistics)?

The Dangers of Idiosyncratic Information How can managers be sure that what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears is reliably representative of what is going on in their organization? On the day observed, John Cleghorn was visiting the Royal Bank branches he knew best, the very places in Montreal where he grew up. What if he had been in a branch in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan? Of course, in banking one branch can be very much like another: “You seen one, you seen ’em all.” Maybe. But what about the Wal-Mart executives who believed that the knowledge they gained in America was applicable in Germany?

Such information can certainly be problematic. But I think the point needs to be reversed too: what about the danger of remaining in an office and reading aggregated reports about the operations? What managers see and hear for themselves may be idiosyncratic, but it can also be direct and rich, and so counter the disconnect that is all too common in executive suites today. Think of all the information John picked up in those branches that would have been excluded, filtered, or distorted on its way to his executive suite. He needed the statistical reports too, but think of how useful was his opportunity to compare their results with his own direct observations.

Damned Again Again with this conundrum, the managers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They cannot avoid hard data—how else to manage a large complex organization?—yet they cannot become prisoners of it. Nor can they let themselves become prisoners of vague, idiosyncratic, soft information. The mysteries of measuring are a conundrum because, once again, there is no simple answer, no easy way out. Every manager has to find his or her own balance, not least by ensuring enough of each kind of information to check out the other.

The Enigma of Order

Organizations need order. They sometimes need disorder too—shaking up—but most of the time most organizations need to concentrate on the stable delivery of their goods and services. And it is on their managers that the responsibility for ensuring much of this order falls. The people working in a unit usually look to their manager to provide definition, predictability, a sense of what is, what can be, what is to be, so that they can get on with their work of hiring people, planning operations, and producing outputs.

Here, then, is where we find the traditional equating of the word management with control. Much of this order comes in the form of strategies and structures—one to establish direction, the other to specify responsibilities.

Yet even while seeking to impose such order, managers often find themselves functioning in a disorderly way. That is the message of pretty much every empirical study of their work, from that of Carlson in the 1940s on, as discussed in Chapter 2. As Tom Peters put it, in managerial work “‘sloppiness’ is normal, probably inevitable, and usually sensible” (1979:171).

Why? Because while the organization wants to keep going, some outside forces inevitably keep changing. The organization may need predictability, but the world has this nasty habit of sometimes becoming unpredictable: customers change their minds; new technologies appear; unions call strikes. As Len Sayles noted: “All plans are incomplete. There are always unforeseen and unforeseeable defects” (1979:166). This is true even for something so orderly as organization structure itself: “Subordinates need to be given a clear understanding of their jobs and their boundaries, yet jobs inevitably overlap and boundaries are blurred” (p. 4).

Someone has to deal with what was not expected, and often that is the manager: the person whose responsibilities are broad enough and whose job is flexible enough to deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities. In a sense, the manager is the sink for organizational disorder. Thus, if managing is getting order out of disorder, then the Enigma of Order reads: How to bring order to the work of others when the work of managing is itself so disorderly? (Watson 1996:339).

This has been a widely recognized conundrum in management, well described by Andy Grove of Intel. Managers in a fast-paced world need “to develop a higher tolerance for disorder,” while doing their “best to drive what’s around [them] to order.” They have to run things “like a well-oiled factory” yet be “mentally and emotionally ready for … turbulence.” Grove’s motto for this? “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos” (1995:141). The perfect conundrum!

Can disorderly activities produce orderly results? Of course they can, otherwise organizations—and lots more—would not work. Think about artists, inventors, architects (writers, too, as I see my handwritten scrawls before me, trying to get my ideas into linear order for you). Some of these people are about as disorderly as you can get, yet they can come up with the most orderly of results.¹¹

The Disorderly Nature of the Enigma of Order Is what we have here really a conundrum, or just a curiosity? It would seem the latter, until we begin to appreciate how a disorderly process can contaminate its orderly results, and vice versa.

Let’s go back to those painters. No few of them display their personal disorder on their canvasses—their inner turmoil, as in much of van Gogh’s work or Munch’s “The Scream.” Yet even these canvasses are surprisingly orderly. There is, of course, no shortage of disorderly art, but most of it is soon forgotten. In art, that may not much matter; in management, it does. What makes this a conundrum is how easily disorderly managing can render an organization disorderly too. Managers simply pass on their conflicts and ambiguities.

The reverse can also happen, with negative consequences. People in the unit can force an artificial order on their manager. Hierarchies work in both directions, so what is sent down has a habit of coming back up, as when a manager imposes a nice neat plan and gets back nice neat reports—on how nicely and neatly the plan was supposedly executed. To further complicate matters, there are times when, even though a manager does not wish to impose order, people in the unit, intent on finding it, read order into whatever they are getting from their manager. In other words, they adopt a false order.¹²

Letting Chaos Reign and Reining in the Chaos So how is a manager to deal with this conundrum? Like all the others: by nuancing its two sides. He or she has to weave back and forth between, to return to Grove’s phrase, letting the chaos reign and reining in the chaos.

Giving in to either side wreaks havoc on an organization. Too much order and work becomes rigid, detached. Too little order, and people can’t function. We all know managers who let the chaos of their jobs and the outside world flow into their units, without providing the necessary buffering. These are the sieves discussed under the liaison role in Chapter 3. And so, too, do we all know managers who do the opposite: so protect their units that these become detached from reality. Everything seems so neat and orderly—until it blows up in everybody’s face.

The Pervasive Enigma of Order This conundrum would seem to apply to chief executives above all. As the main representative of the organization to the outside world, this person has to live with the cumulated chaos all around—changing technologies, demanding stakeholders, shifting markets, and so forth. If the chief cannot point the way through all of this—define “mission,” present a coherent “vision”—who else can get their work done?

Yet this conundrum can have even more of an impact at the base of the hierarchy, because (as noted in Chapter 2) this is where the characteristics of managerial work can be the most pronounced—the pace most hectic, the brevity and fragmentation most severe, and so forth. Recall Fabienne Lavoie on the hospital ward, or the factory foremen studied by Guest (1955–1956) who averaged one activity every forty-eight seconds. As he noted, “the characteristics of a foreman’s job—interruption, variety, discontinuity—are diametrically opposed to those of most hourly operator jobs, which are highly rationalized, repetitive, uninterrupted, and subject to the steady, unvarying rhythm of the moving conveyor” (p. 481).

And what about the managers in between, who may not have the same pressures as the chief executive or the same pace as the first-line managers? Does this alleviate the Enigma of Order? No, it brings on the Paradox of Control, which worsens it.

The Paradox of Control

The Enigma of Order is difficult enough. It describes the problem of dealing with disorder from without in the face of the need for order within. Add to this pressures for order from above—pile one manager upon another—and you get the Paradox of Control.

All but the smallest organizations tend to have managers neatly stacked up in hierarchies of authority, down which pass the directives emitting from “above,” designed to impose order. In other words, the senior manager who works under conditions of controlled disorder expects his or her subordinate managers to work under conditions of controlled order. The problem, illustrated in Figure 5.2, is that these other managers face their own pressures from the sides—from customers, communities, and others. So this imposition of order from above can just make things worse. Managers want “control of their own circumstances” (Watson 1994:84), but their own managers, and not just outside circumstances, often impede it. As a consequence, the Enigma of Order becomes the Paradox of Control: How to maintain the necessary state of controlled disorder when the manager above is imposing order?

The Damage from Deeming Here is where management by deeming can become especially destructive. It is certainly convenient for senior managers to deem, sweeping ambiguity under the rug by imposing specific performance standards on their reports. “They need order? Good. Here it is. The targets are clear. Meet them!”

Figure 5.2 THE ENIGMA OF ORDER CASCADING INTO THE PARADOX OF CONTROL

But what do these targets constitute—where did these numbers come from? As we all know, they can sometimes be arbitrary, and even contradictory, picked out of the thin air of wish lists, with little regard for the difficult situations in which they have to be met. An awful lot of the ambiguity associated with such targets gets swept, not just under the rug, but into the faces of other managers. So a good deal of deeming, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in our large organizations, amounts to an executive cop-out. Tengblad studied eight chief executives of large corporations who were influenced by stock market pressures to produce “shareholder value.” He found that these pressures “were passed down the hierarchy,” which “resulted in some managers working to exhaustion, and also in conformity and non-constructive communication” (2004: 583).

Compounding the Conundrum Compared with other managers, chief executives have somewhat of a free rein. Boards may be demanding, but usually not so much as these CEOs themselves. So they usually face just the Enigma of Order. It is below them in the hierarchy where the Paradox of Control begins.

As the pressures for order descend the hierarchy—as managers “prove to their bosses that they are loyal and responsible by transmitting a goodly percentage of the demands of upper management down to their subordinates” (Sayles 1979:115)—the weight of these pressures increases until finally the whole “cascade” falls on the managers at the base of the hierarchy.¹³ Yet these are the ones least able to hide, for they usually have to face directly the disgruntled customers, the angry workers, the strident activists. Recall the Banff National Park, where the environmentalists battled the developers about a parking lot, while more senior managers discussed this in their polite offices in the big cities.

It is the senior managers who can hide (for a time, at least)—in their systems, that is, their abstractions. They can pretend that all that planning and controlling will take care of the ambiguities. It does, at this level at least, and for some time, until these ambiguities reemerge at lower levels. President Truman was famous for a plaque on his desk that read “The buck stops here.” All too often these days it is the opposite: deeming managers pass the buck down, level by level, until it stops where the rubber hits the road, where the environmentalists battle the developers.

Delayering, as noted, has become fashionable in recent years: thinning the hierarchy by eliminating levels of middle managers. Does that help the Paradox of Control? Again, its effect may be the opposite: the managers left behind may become more overworked while still facing the conundrum.

Fighting Back Up So what are the pressured managers at lower levels of the large organizations to do? Morris et al. suggest that sometimes they can ignore the chain of command, at least when they have the “wisdom of knowing where and how to disobey” orders. “Sophisticated” managers develop this “into an art form” (1981:143). Moreover (as discussed in the posture of Managing Out of the Middle), they can turn the tables and promote change up the hierarchy. And managers at more senior levels can help by appreciating the consequences of passing down problems that are essentially theirs to resolve.

The Clutch of Confidence

Our last people conundrum is easier to explain if no less difficult to handle.

It takes a good deal of confidence to practice management effectively. Think about all the pressures discussed in Chapter 2, not to mention all the conundrums discussed here. As was evident in so much of the managing I observed (in the refugee camps, the NHS, Greenpeace, etc.), this is no work for the feint-hearted or the insecure. Anyone inclined to avoid problems, pass them on, or simply cover their own rear ends, can make things dreadful for everyone else.

But how about the supremely confident? They can be even worse. Bear in mind the shaky foundations on which such confidence can lie: information about which the manager is never sure; issues loaded with ambiguities; conundrums that can never be resolved, often forcing the manager to “wing it.” This expression comes not from airplanes but from the stage, where actors who didn’t know their lines had someone call them in from the wings. Managers have no such someones. All alone, they have to convey the impression that they know what they are doing, even when they are not sure where they are going, so that others feel safe to follow. In other words, managers often have to feign confidence. For reasonably modest managers, this can be difficult enough; for the supremely confident, it may be not difficult at all, just catastrophic.

The trouble with even reasonable confidence is that it can go over the edge and put the manager on a slippery slope—to arrogance. It does not take much for someone in this job to stop listening, become isolated, think of him- or herself as heroic.

The line between confidence and arrogance can be not only thin but also vague. A manager can cross it without being aware. And once on the way down that slope, there may be no stopping, until reaching the bottom. So the Clutch of Confidence reads: How to maintain a sufficient level of confidence without crossing over into arrogance?

This is not a casual conundrum. It probably undermines as much management practice, and causes as much grief for other people, as any of the other conundrums. This is especially true in this age of heroic leadership, where even modest managers, when successful, can get put on pedestals for all to revere.

In Praise of the Modest Manager How can a manager avoid the Clutch of Confidence? Honest friends and advisers can help. When someone is getting close to that edge, as every successful person does from time to time, it is helpful to have someone to yank him or her back. But, of course, having such friends and advisers—and listening to them—requires a certain amount of confidence too, at least inner confidence, which, happily, is usually accompanied by a certain modesty. So perhaps the key to dealing with this conundrum is to ensure that more people who are confidentially modest end up in management positions in the first place. But in this age of heroic leadership, how many truly modest people get to be managers? (In Chapter 6, we shall discuss a simple way to change this: give voice in the selection of managers to the people who know the candidates best, namely, the ones who have experienced their management.)

But even when more modest people get into managerial jobs, this conundrum does not disappear. That is because of managers being put on that pedestal, at least in the eyes of others. Every manager, therefore, has to recognize the challenge of not taking him- or herself too seriously. And that, of course, requires a good deal of confidence, really inner confidence. So let’s look for inner, not just outer, confidence in our managers.

The Ambiguity of Acting

If managing is about making sure that things get done, then managers have to be decisive. They cannot hedge too much, and they can be reflective only to a point. They have to take stands, make certain decisions, and provoke actions that move their units forward.

The problem is that much of this has to be done under difficult circumstances, full of ambiguities, not to mention the conundrums so far discussed. And this gives rise to another conundrum: How to act decisively in a complicated, nuanced world?

The Doubtfulness of Decision Consider decision itself. The very term seems decisive. Decisions, after all, are commitments to action. But need we always commit—that is, decide—in order to act? If you think so, have someone hit you on the knee. Or visit a courtroom and listen to a second-degree murder case—that is, action without decision. Organizations sometimes get tapped on the knee, too. There was a story some years ago about the senior management of a major European automobile company hiring consultants to find out how a new model came to be.

When we do make a commitment to act, is it necessarily as clear as it appears? In the Canadian parks, they made some decisions about that parking lot. Good luck! And just because we commit, does that mean we act? A lot can happen between deciding and doing. Alan Whelan of BT decided to sign that contract. Did that commit his senior management? As Len Sayles put it in discussing one of what he referred to as “contradictions”: “Managers need to be decisive, but it’s difficult to know when a decision is made, and many decisions must be reconsidered and remade” (1979:11). Thus, one of Hill’s new managers talked about “how disillusioning and frustrating it is to be hit with problems and conflicts all day and not be able to solve them very cleanly” (2003:181).

This conundrum takes us back to the last one, in the sense that confidence enables a manager to act decisively, yet being too decisive in the face of ambiguity can amount to arrogance—especially when the manager is distant from the issue in question (harking back to the Quandary of Connecting). Consider all those ill-conceived acquisitions in large corporations, where bold decisions were taken in remarkable ignorance of their consequences. Or how about George W. Bush’s decision to go to war in 2003?

Conversely, managers who hesitate to act can bring everything to a halt. Some sort of decision, when action is truly necessary, is often better than no decision at all—at least it gets people moving (Weick 1979). But managers who act too quickly, even when well informed, may be forcing their organizations into premature action on events that are unfolding.

Of course, events are always unfolding. And major events usually unfold unpredictably. So the trick is to know when to wait, despite the costs of delay, and when to act, despite unforeseeable consequences. And for that there is no manual, no course, not even any convenient five easy steps—just good, informed judgment.

Limiting Decisiveness Perhaps the best way to deal with this conundrum is to put some limits on decisiveness. If “the organization will tolerate only a certain number of proposals” from its management (Wrapp 1967:93), then that management has to be selective in what it gets decisive about. Moreover, if many decisions have to be remade anyway, why not make whichever possible in successive steps, with time in between for feedback? In their book Zen and the Art of Management, Pascale and Athos quote a manager who delayed decisions, giving himself time to understand the issues and his organization the opportunity to learn how to deal with them:

If you are sure of the facts and are positive of the right corrective action to be taken, if you endorse any single answer, you’re dead. So … I “juggled.” … What I needed was time to “massage” the problem down to the level … where [it] occurred so that … the system could learn from the problem and correct itself. Yet at the same time, I had to hold the problem in “suspended animation.” (1978:89)

Chapter 2 also used the metaphor of juggling, but about the many projects and issues that managers have to handle concurrently. As each comes down, it is given a boost—a new burst of energy—while the manager integrates on the run. This kind of juggling and integrating likely comes naturally to people predisposed to the calculated chaos of managerial work (Noël 1989:45). By learning about complex issues over time, the manager helps to alleviate not only the Ambiguity of Acting but also the Syndrome of Superficiality—at the expense, of course, of the Labyrinth of Decomposition.

Charles Lindblom labeled such behavior “disjointed incrementalism,” describing it as “typically a never ending process of successive steps in which continual nibbling is a substitute for a good bite” (1968:25–26). He referred to “the piecemeal remedial incrementalist” as perhaps not looking “like a heroic figure” but someone who “is, nevertheless, a shrewd, resourceful problem-solver who is wrestling broadly with a universe that he is wise enough to know is too big for him” (p. 27; see also Quinn [1980], who labeled this “logical incrementalism”).

The Riddle of Change

We hear a great deal of hype about change these days. It seems that no management speech can begin without paying homage to the claim that “we live in times of great change.”

Are we sure? My car uses the same basic internal combustion technology as the Ford Model T; we all dress in many of the same fabrics we’ve been using for decades, often even in basic styles of years gone by. (Why in the world do men wear ties? Imagine someone trying to introduce them now.) Every morning I get up and button buttons, just like my ancestors did (which may well have been sewn on a Singer sewing machine; these covered the globe a century ago, no less than the products of “global” corporations do today.) Indeed, even the claims about change haven’t changed:

Few phenomena are more remarkable yet few have been less remarked than the degree in which material civilization, the progress of mankind in all those contrivances which oil the wheels and promote the comforts of daily life have been concentrated in the last half century. It is not too much to say that in these respects more has been done, richer and more prolific discoveries have been made, grander achievements have been realized in the course of the 50 years of our own lifetime than in all the previous lifetimes of the race.

This appeared in Scientific American—in 1868! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (The more things change, the more things stay the same).

My point is that we only notice what is changing, not what isn’t, which includes most of what is around us. (This morning did you ask why, in these times of great change, you are still buttoning buttons?) Sure things change—some things, some of the time. Now it is especially information technology and the economy. We all have to deal with that. But not to the point of blinding us to what isn’t changing, because all of us, especially managers, have to deal with that too.

We hear plenty about the problems of avoiding change—organizations have to adapt, better still, lead. What we need to hear more about is that too much change leads to a perpetual and dysfunctional angst, among other problems. Thus, no manager can manage change alone—that is anarchy. Every manager has to manage continuity as well, which gives us the Riddle of Change: How to manage change when there is the need to maintain continuity? Once again, the trick is to get the balance right.

Chester Barnard was quoted earlier that “executive work is not that of the organization, but the specialized work of maintaining the organization in operation” (1938:215). This means keeping the organization on track and getting it back on track when it goes off, alongside improving the track when necessary, and sometimes building a new track to a different place. The manager “endeavors … constantly to readjust … behavior, marginally, in response to the ever-changing environment,” while seeking “stability, holding deviations to a minimum … by constant change” (Sayles 1964:259; see also Aram 1976:119).

My colleague Jonathan Gosling interviewed a number of managers about how they managed change. To his surprise, mostly they talked about managing continuity. Likewise, during the twenty-nine days I saw a good deal of change totally intertwined with continuity. Abbas Gullet and Stephen Omollo in the Red Cross refugee camps were seen promoting changes to ensure stability, while John Cleghorn of the Royal Bank was seen championing changes small and large—fixing a sign, acquiring an insurance company—to keep the big bank on its course. And Fabienne Lavoie had developed a new system for better control in the nursing station.

The Dual Search for Certainty and Flexibility In an insightful book of 1967 entitled Organizations in Action, James D. Thompson wrote about this conundrum as “the paradox of administration”—“the dual search for certainty and flexibility.” Mostly he described how organizations function for the “reduction of uncertainty and its conversion into relative certainty” to protect its “technical core.” Yet “the central characteristic of the administrative process [is a] search for flexibility” (p. 148).

Thompson believed that this paradox could be addressed by favoring certainty in the short run—for operating efficiency—and flexibility in the long run—for “freedom from commitment” (p. 150). The problem, of course, is that the long run never arrives (or, at least as John Maynard Keynes put it, we are all dead by then). So managers have to face this conundrum, like all the others, in the short run—namely, in their current behavior.

As already suggested, there is always some change amid the continuity, even if just in some hidden skunkworks, and always some continuity—some pockets of stability—amid the change. And as this itself suggests, organizations can experience some periods where change is pervasive, and other periods of relative stability. Cyert and March (1963) have written about the “sequential attention to goals” in organizations, in this case addressing these conflicting needs for change and continuity by first attending to one and then to the other, back and forth in cycles of some kind. In managing, as in the Bible, there can be a time to sow and a time to reap.

We saw this clearly in our studies that tracked strategies in different organizations over long periods of time (discussed in the Predicament of Planning). The National Film Board of Canada, for example, experienced from 1939 to 1975 surprisingly regular periods, of about six years each, in the films made: periods of much experimentation were followed by others of relative consistency, and then back. This seems to be common in adhocracies, which thrive on change, compared with the more machine-like as well as some of the entrepreneurial organizations, which seem to favor long periods of relative stability interrupted by short bursts of quantum change (Mintzberg 2007: Chapters 2–3 and 6–8).

The Ultimate Conundrum

How are managers to keep their balance when they are constantly being pressured to tilt every which way? Put differently: How can any manager possibly manage all these conundrums concurrently? “Realizing that the managerial role was one of balancing fundamental tensions was one of the most difficult and important insights that new managers made” (Hill 2003:80).

These are not convenient conundrums that appear on schedule or that arrive happily spaced apart. They are all mixed up in managing. So to manage is not just to walk a tightrope, but to move through a multidimensional space on all kinds of tightropes. Managing is about nuance as much as it is about decisiveness. As Paul Hirsch was in the habit of telling his incoming MBA students at Northwestern, “Welcome to the error term!” Or in the words of Charles Handy, from his book The Age of Paradox:

Paradox I now see to be inevitable, endemic, and perpetual…. We can, and should, reduce the starkness of some of the contradictions, minimize the inconsistencies, understand the puzzles in the paradoxes, but we cannot make them disappear, or solve them completely, or escape from them. Paradoxes are like the weather, something to be lived with … the worst aspects mitigated, the best enjoyed and used as clues to the way forward. (1994:12–13)

I have noted a few times that the trick is to get the balance right. But this is not a stable balance; rather, it is a dynamic one. Conditions cause managers to tilt much of the time (e.g., toward greater confidence when challenged, or toward more change in the face of opportunity) and later back. In its multidimensional space, managing is a balancing act of the highest order.

I have also noted repeatedly, as did Charles Handy, that such conundrums are unresolvable. There are no solutions because each has to be dealt with in context, its pressures always in a state of flux. These paradoxes and predicaments, labyrinths and riddles, are built into managerial work—they are managing—and there they shall remain. They can be alleviated but never eliminated, reconciled but never resolved. To try and escape them is to fall into the managerial dogma of which we have had more than enough already. Managers have to face them, understand them, reflect on them, play with them.

In Management of the Absurd, Farson wrote that what he called predicaments “require interpretive thinking … the ability to put a larger frame around a situation, to understand it in its many contexts, to appreciate its deeper and often paradoxical causes and consequences” (1996:42).¹⁴ The intention of this chapter has been to encourage all this. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Can we afford any other form of intelligence in the world of managing?

Of course, all of this means that the manager’s ultimate conundrum—how to deal with all these conundrums concurrently—remains. Maybe, then, the only hope lies in my final conundrum.

My Conundrum

Finally, my own conundrum: How do I reconcile the fact that, while all these conundrums can be stated apart, they all seem to be the same? I have offered plenty of comments about the overlapping of these conundrums, the similarities among them, even one that seems to restate another. Maybe these are all just one great big jumbled management conundrum. In that case, you needn’t be bothered by the previous, ultimate conundrum—just all the ones that preceded it.