Management Theorizing

Copycat models and lazy thinking

Everyone has their own pet management theory. It seems that every organisation must have its own copycat version of how to do things and do them better than the competition.

Entangled with culture, strategic analysis, leadership, organising principles and theories of change, these models provide the basis for generating coherence in any large community or enterprise. Or at least, that's the idea. They prescribe standards, behaviours, anticipated outputs, process quality, and a host of things like reward, recognition, teamwork, diversity, inclusion, planning, and people development all thrown into the mix.

Yet none of them are comprehensively indispensable. Indeed, most of them are useless if managers are blind to shifting contextual conditions, ignorant of the gravitational pull of the past on their expectations, gullibly accept the predictable counsel given to them by their "trusted advisers" and remain oblivious to each other's innate behavioural traits. If their models are not dynamic, future-ready, and adaptive, then they may as well start looking for new jobs now.

Over a career spanning 40 years I have attempted to operationalise a number of revered management models ranging from the supposedly sublime to the clearly ridiculous. I have cavorted with Strategic Navigation, invented by myself and Marvin Oka, noting its several shortcomings as well as its uplifting nature. I have been a certified practitioner of Total Quality Management and watched fads like Lean, Agile, Kanban, Transformational Leadership, Scientific Management, Design Thinking, Contingency and Systems theories initially fly before plunging to earth in flames as the next fad takes hold.

The problem seems to be that all senior executives assume static conditions and need to be instructed what to do from one moment to the next. The one big failing of all these models is that they rely on an instruction manual instead of giving people the freedom just to be themselves and to act in the best interests of the organisation. I have only seen that rarely, most obviously in Zappos when the remarkable Tony Hsieh was CEO.

But mostly, executives have no reliable mechanisms for self-organising around generative mobilising memes like complexity and 3rd-order change. And the advisers they use are so immersed in what they learnt in business school, so fearful of talking about inconvenient truths, that most executives remain blind, deaf and dumb to the realities of a changing civilisational source code.

In order to endure, organisations must find a way of dancing with the future. A unique way. Not a pale copy of what their competitors might have been doing a decade ago. The world is changing fast, boys and girls. We're not paying attention. And we most definitely aren't keeping up!