POPULARITY
6 episodes with mary parker follett
5 episodes with mary parker follett
3 episodes with mary parker follett
2 episodes with mary parker follett
In the latest episode of The Workplace Podcast, William Corless sits down with Dr. Tammy Lenski to discuss her groundbreaking book "The Conflict Pivot: Turning Conflict into Peace of Mind." Since 1997 Dr. Tammy Lenski has worked with individuals and organizations worldwide as a mediator, executive coach, speaker, and educator. Her work centres on addressing conflict in ongoing personal, team, and business relationships. Tammy has mediated thousands of private, court-affiliated, and online cases. She was in eBay's first group of online mediators in 1999 and on the first panel of probate court mediators in the U.S. Co-founder of the world's first master's degree program in mediation, she has taught conflict resolution and negotiation in four university programmes. Tammy holds a B.A. from Middlebury College, and a master's and doctorate from The University of Vermont. Prior to her ADR career she was a college vice president and dean. In 2012 the Association for Conflict Resolution recognized Tammy with the Mary Parker Follett award for innovative and pioneering work in the field. Her two books, The Conflict Pivot and Making Mediation Your Day Job, have sold more than 50,000 copies worldwide. In this enlightening conversation, William and Tammy explore:
Toute personne qui a déjà organisé un repas de famille le sait : un repas sans accroche peut parfois relever de la mission impossible. Pour ce dernier épisode de la saison 1 de Grand écart, on a décidé de vous donner la parole : qu'est-ce qui fait le sel de vos dîners de famille ? Qu'est-ce qui vous lie les uns aux autres ? Au contraire, quels sont les sujets récurrents qui vous opposent ? Et finalement, comment aborder sereinement les repas de famille ? Lucie et Solène s'interrogent sur comment faire de ces repas des moments de joie et sans trop de prises de bec ! RÉFÉRENCES Pierre Bourdieu : À propos de la famille comme catégorie réalisée. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 100, décembre 1993. pp. 32-36; https://www.persee.fr/doc/arss_0335-5322_1993_num_100_1_3070 Sur Mary Parker Follett et le conflit : MOUSLI Marc, « Éloge du conflit. Mary Parker Follett et le conflit constructif », Négociations, 2005/2 (no 4), p. 21-33. Sur le calling in/ calling out de Loretta Ross https://lorettajross.com/ La page Soundcloud de la géniale Talia : https://soundcloud.com/user-21352821 CRÉDITS Grand Écart est un podcast produit par makesense. Co-écriture : Solène Aymon et Lucie Chartouny. Montage/réalisation : Aurore Le Bihan. Identité sonore : Simon Drouard. Accompagnement éditorial : Hélène Binet. Chanson originale et interprétation : Talia Sarfati. Identité graphique : Daniel Buendia.
Le conflit n'a pas que des inconvénients. Il peut être source de créativité lorsqu'il y a intégration des objectifs des deux parties. C'est ce que montre le travail pionnier de Mary Parker Follett.
Introduction Gary A. DePaul is an accomplished speaker, with over 100 talks, workshops, and seminars. He is an author, and his books include Nine practices of 21st Leadership, What the heck is Leadership and why should I care & several books on HR and Talent Development. Gary is a performance consultant using analysis, instructional design, knowledge management and performance support interventions. He is also a researcher on subjects such as Leadership, DEIB and allyship, HRBP development and performance improvement. Gary is an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina, and he is also a podcast host. His show is called The Unlabelled Leadership Podcast Podcast Episode Summary Leadership is misunderstood. Gary is passionate that in the 21st century we get clear on the distinctions between Management and Leadership, and we immerse ourselves in the practices that can yield qualitatively different experiences of Leadership. In this podcast Gary's latest book, What the heck is Leadership and why should I care is explored and one vignette an audio clip Gary shares illuminates the difference between management and leadership in nano seconds. Points made across the podcast episode Leadership started for Gary after being laid off from a company called Lowes and after a meeting with a gentleman by the name of Jim Hill who is a performance consultant. He encouraged Gary to “Think Big” You never know the impact of your comments to another but in this instance, Gary took to heart the encouragement to think big and he decided to write a book. When you have enough people practising Leadership in an organisation it gives you a clear competitive advantage. The challenge for 21st Leaders is the often-held belief of traditional leadership thinking. Our thinking about leadership has not evolved Leadership is not the domain of the person at the top, wisdom or the second version of leadership says anyone can practice leadership There is a famous definition by Mary Parker Follett, that says management is the art of getting stuff done through people. It is often considered a definition of Leadership Management is a role Leadership is not. Leadership is not a role, but it is something you apply to a role. Gary provides a technical definition for Leadership which is to help people mature, mentally and morally David Marquett says Leadership is not about you but other people it's about creating a work environment in which people can be at their best and Ron Karr from the Velocity Project says Leadership is about making people succeed beyond their wildest dreams. So Leadership is really about helping others build character that is revolutionary from Traditional views of Leadership Gary shares an audio clip that illuminates the difference between doing managerial tasks and practicing leadership. Michael Junior is the compare. The first clip sees a person asked to perform a task and he willingly obliges. The second practices leadership through a managerial task by encouraging the person to sing from his history, context where meaning is infused in the piece. The result is transformational Gary shares an example of firing someone, where in one instance the manager can slave a script and execute the task perfectly or he can choose leadership and simultaneously give the person a “why” for the termination, help that person learn from the experience and grow. The important thing to take from Gary's 7 principles of Leadership is that it is not about you. They appear so simple, like for example the first principle “believe in others”, yet putting that principle into practice is beguiling challenging. An executive for example believe that a person on joining an organisation must prove themselves before he believes in them. This is counter intuitive and can have the opposite affect that a person doesn't perform. It is so easy on a team to have in-groups and out-groups when you have people that might be a little different from you and you inadvertently exclude their opinions etc. In a workforce reduction project, an executive warns against unwittingly firing minority groups and it turns out that is what happened. Further investigation proved that managers were reluctant to give Black people feedback and so their performance suffered, and they then suffered termination. Another example in Gary's books showcases making assessments of people without due diligence to see if anything else might have been contributing to the workers seemingly being “lazy” So believing in others might sound simple but it is often much more nuanced. You have to dig deeper to understand what is driving people to behave as they do and your job as a manager is to remove those barriers. Learning & Leadership go hand in hand. To practice the 7 principles outlined in Gary's book, What the Heck is Leadership and Why should I Care, involves practice. The Seven Principles include: Believe in others, Connect, Put Others First & Sacrifice Ego, give up Control, Encourage Change, Collaborate, Practice. Gary studied 16 books academic books written on Leadership in the 21st century and from his analysis he derived the 7 principles from the patterns he saw repeat. He then wrote a book called the 9 practices of Leadership which showcases how to do Leadership. Gary illuminates one of the 9 practices called Facing the Lion which incorporates listening and feedback. He shares that we comprehend so much faster than for example what we can read out loud and so when it comes to listening to another person the brain is nearly always focusing on how to respond rather than carefully listening and enquiring into what is being said for meaning. Giving up or ceding control and sacrificing ego is a tough challenge for Leaders especially those new to Leadership. Often employees feel they must ask for permission from line managers or leaders and the way to cede control is to ask for example “well how would you do it” very quickly initiative and learning can flourish. Psychological safety, play and purpose are the wholly trinity on teams. If you as a member on a team believe that the Leader is not allowing for psychological safety to be the outcome necessary for great work, then you can initiate psychological safety by admitting “I wish I could do this better” or “I made a mistake” it is uncanny how quickly people row in behind you. It be being vulnerable and allowing vulnerability it encourages others to do the same. In response to phenomenon observed on teams Gary explains the “Fundamental attribution error” You need to study this idea, learn from examples, and not assume you know it. We get in our own way. We assume as Leaders that we are the authority on so much and we fail to recognise the brilliance of others. When you can recognise that you need the contribution of others, like those closest to the customer and you can contribute by way of your managerial experience then you can accomplish great things together Gary explains group thinking and the importance of contribution and different contribution by team members. Gary quotes Jack Zinger who says that “we take too long to train our leaders” and Gary adds to that by saying when we come into management, we do not express enough interest in Leadership we are all about the doing. Instead of taking more than 10 years to assume a Leadership mindset combine Leadership training with management training in combination. A good practice for people coming into roles is to assign them a mentor and a better practice is to do that from outside of their discipline Important to exercise our emotional and social intelligence in addition the exercise we already devote to our intellectual intelligence. Gary would love to see a de-emphasise on technical functional skills, more emphasis on trying to avoid outgroups, championing ideas and enquiry. He wishes organisations were more attentive to biases, to championing leadership not just with executives but with many more across an organisation. Gary would like to see organisations model values that are around Leadership to allow for innovation, creativity, and improved performance. At the end of our conversation, I ask Gary for a Leadership hack and he offers his 4-step process to Leadership -material from Marshall Goldsmith Foundation: You must read about leadership & acquire knowledge about leadership Feedback: How am I doing? - what are two ideas to help me be a better listener for you? Let people know about your blind spots Follow up. Am I doing what I said I would? Resources shared: Books written by Gary A. De Paul- What the Heck is Leadership and Why Should I Care The Nine Practices of 21st Century Leadership
I dagens podd har jag ett samtal med Anna Rylander Eklund, organisationsforskare på Chalmers, om ett av mina favoritämnen, nämligen om managementpionjären Mary Parker Follett som redan för 100 år sedan formulerade en ledarskapsfilosofi som fortfarande idag framstår som banbrytande och kanske ännu mer modern än mycket av det som kommer från dagens agila gurus. Annas aktuella forskningsprojekt handlar om hur Mary Parker Folletts filosofi kan användas av dagens organisationer. Innan vi kör igång samtalet med Anna vill jag tipsa dels om min egen bok Ut ur boxen – förändringsledning på riktigt – där det inledande kapitlet handlar om Mary Parker Follett och om Sonders hemsida sonder.se där det finns en stor mängd material för de företag som vill utveckla sina styrformer och organisationer i riktning mot självledarskap och agila organisationer. Ett boktips får vi också av Anna – boken Aktivist för mångfald och integration: Pionjären Mary Parker Follett av Gunnela Westlander. Länkar till var du kan köpa böckerna finns i avsnittstexten. Nu över till samtalet med Anna Rylander Eklund, mycket nöje! Boken Aktivist för mångfald och integration: Pionjären Mary Parker Follett: https://www.pricerunner.se/pl/802-2000193657/Boecker/Aktivist-foer-maangfald-och-integration-pionjaeren-Mary-Parker-Follett-(Inbunden-2016)-priser Boken Ut ur boxen – förändringsledning på riktigt: https://www.pricerunner.se/pl/802-2001921077/Boecker/Ut-ur-boxen.-Foeraendringsledning-paa-riktigt-priser Om Anna Rylander Eklund: https://research.chalmers.se/person/annaryl Sonders inspirationsmaterial och seminarier: https://www.sonder.se/inspiration/
We conclude our discussion of Follett's Dynamic Administration with a look at contemporary issues. The COVID-19 pandemic arguably made pragmatists of many of us as we navigated the challenges and shifted to different modes of working! But as the pandemic recedes to an uncertain new normal, now what? Can we sustain and grow ‘power-with' and avoid falling back to old forms of competition and ‘power-over'?
We return to the works of Mary Parker Follett and explore her ideas on professionalizing business. Expanding on our examination of her “law of the situation” in Episode 5, we look at constructive conflict, organizational integration, and power. Together, these ideas represent a pragmatic approach to business where collaboration is the norm and channels competition toward the good of the organization rather than any one party within it.
We return to the works of Mary Parker Follett and expand upon “The Law of the Situation” that we covered in Chapter 5. In this episode, we revisit Dynamic Administration with a look at the first five chapters as a whole – focusing on Chapter 1 (“Constuctive Conflict”), Chapter 3 (“Business as an Integrative Unity”), Chapter 4 (“Power”), and Chapter 5 (“How Must Business Management Develop in order to Possess the Essentials of a Profession”) that introduced Follett's conception of professionalizing business.
Ambassador Matthew Barzun, owner and publisher of Louisville Magazine and former US ambassador to Sweden and the United Kingdom, joins McConnell Center Director Dr. Gary Gregg to discuss his latest book, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go. The two explore the fascinating differences between Pyramid and Constellation Leadership styles, Ambassador Barzun's own leadership experience, and the original leadership guru—Mary Parker Follett. Important Links Matthew Barzun, The Power of Giving Away Power: How the Best Leaders Learn to Let Go. Follow Ambassador Barzun's work at his author page, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2191667/matthew-barzun/. Stay Connected Visit us at McConnellcenter.org Subscribe to our newsletter Facebook: @mcconnellcenter Instagram: @ulmcenter Twitter: @ULmCenter This podcast is a production of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. Views expressed in this show are those of the participants and not necessarily those of the McConnell Center.
In dieser Folge spreche ich mit Marie Ringler, Leiterin von Ashoka Europa, Mitglied der Ashokas Global Leadership Group, Vizepräsidentin des Europäischen Forum Alpbach. Sie erzählt uns, wie Ashoka gesellschaftliche Veränderungen möglich macht, um komplexe Probleme erfolgreich zu lösen, wieso wir kooperativen, unternehmerischen Wettstreit der besten Ideen brauchen, was eine gesunde, eine starke Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft ausmacht und wie wir eine Changemaker-Dynamik erzeugen können. Das erfolgreiche Netzwerk Ashoka besteht mittlerweile über 4000 Changemaker*innen, Fellows in über 93 Ländern und mehr als 300 MA*innen weltweit. Ich spreche mit der „demokratie unternehmen“-Meisterin Marie Ringler über Forum Alpbach 2021, über die Bedeutung von Changemaker*innen in und außerhalb von Unternehmen, über die Kraft von Sozialunternehmen in unserer Welt und wie es Ashoka schafft, weltweit ein partnerschaftliches Netzwerk der Zusammenarbeit zu kreieren. Ergänzend dazu gibt es Zitate von Mary Follett, Riane Eisler und dem Ashoka Gründer Bill Drayton, Spuren der Ashoka Fellow Emilia Roig, Politologin und Gründerin und Direktorin des Center for Intersectional Justice über Empathielücken, über die Konsequenz einer gesellschaftlichen Bevormundung und radikale Solidarität und Wortspenden aus anderen Folgen von Jos de Block, Niels Pfläging und Wolf Lotter. „Wenn jeder ein Changemaker ist, kann ein Problem nicht vor einer Lösung davonlaufen“. Dieses Zitat stammt von Bill Drayton … und von Lösungen erwischte Probleme gefallen mir als Bild sehr gut. **ASHOKA Marie Ringler https://ashoka-cee.org/austria/team/marie-ringler **ASHOKA Wirkungsbericht https://ashoka-cee.org/austria/2021/07/ashoka-wirkt **ASHOKA Changemaker Summit https://bit.ly/3qy3cXq **BUCH WHY WE MATTER Emilia Roig www.thalia.at/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1059550661 **ARTE-Talk mit Emilia Roig: Rassismus kommt selten allein https://youtu.be/YFYq7992xQQ **POSTER“ demokratie unternehmen“ www.sichtart.at/demokratie-unternehmen **#23 mit Jos de Blog www.sichtart.at/lets-get-swinging-again **BETA-UNTERNEHMEN Wie Buurtzorg wirkt www.sichtart.at/das-problem-und-die-symptome **#24 “Zusammenhänge" mit Wolf Lotter www.sichtart.at/zusammenhaenge **#26 “Demokratie ist nicht selbstverständlich” mit Niels Pfläging www.sichtart.at/demokratie-ist-nicht-selbstverstaendlich** **#31 “Mary Parker Follett” www.sichtart.at/mary-parker-follett-beta-grundlagen **#36 “Wirtschaft von Anfang an und zu Ende gedacht” mit Riane Eisler #36 www.sichtart.at/36-wirtschaft-von-anfang-an-und-zu-ende-gedacht-riane-eisler **Impftermine Wien https://impfservice.wien **Elisabeth Sechser www.sichtart.at
01:20 - The Superpower of Sociotechnical System (STS) Design: Considering the Social AND the Technical. The social side matters. * Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson (https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Systems-Thinking-Management-Complexity/dp/1119118379) * Open Systems * Mechanical * Animate * Social * Ecological * On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events (https://www.amazon.com/Purposeful-Systems-Interdisciplinary-Analysis-Individual/dp/0202307980/ref=sr_1_3?crid=IJR9EM3K73NE&dchild=1&keywords=on+purposeful+systems&qid=1625847353&sprefix=on+purposeful+systems%2Cstripbooks%2C157&sr=8-3) 09:14 - The Origins of Sociotechnical Systems * Taylorism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management) * Trond Hjorteland: Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines”* (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sociotechnical-systems-design-digital-coal-mines-trond-hjorteland/) * Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-232X.1970.tb00505.x) 18:42 - Design From Above vs Self-Organization * Participative Design * Idealized Design * Solving Problems is not Systems Thinking 29:39 - Systemic Change and Open Systems * Organizationally Closed but Structurally Open * Getting Out of the Machine Age and Into Systems Thinking (The Information Age) * The Basis for the Viable System Model / Stafford Beer // Javier Livas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaLHocBdG3A) * What is Cybernetics? Conference by Stafford Beer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg) * Jean Yang: Developer Experience: Stuck Between Abstraction and a Hard Place? (https://www.akitasoftware.com/blog-posts/developer-experience-stuck-between-abstraction-and-a-hard-place) * The Embodiment and Hermeneutic Relations 37:47 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution) * 4 Historical Stages in the Development of Work * Mechanization * Automation * Centralization * Computerization * Ironies of Automation by Lisanne Bainbridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation) * Ten challenges for making automation a "team player" in joint human-agent activity (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1363742) * Jessica Kerr - Principles of Collaborative Automation (https://vimeo.com/369277964) Reflections: Jessica: “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn't know you see.” – Trond Trond: In physics we do our best to remove the people and close it as much as possible. In IT it's opposite; We work in a completely open system where the human part is essential. Rein: What we call human error is actually a human's inability to cope with complexity. We need to get better at managing complexity; not controlling it. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: REIN: Welcome to Episode 242 of Greater Than Code. I'm here with my friend, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thanks, Rein and I'm excited because today we are here with Trond Hjorteland. Trond is an IT architect aspiring sociotechnical systems designer from the consulting firm Scienta.no—that's no as in the country code for Norway, not no as in no science. Trond has many years of experience with large, complex, business critical systems as a developer and an architect on middleware and backend applications so he's super interested in service orientation, domain driven design—went like that one—event driven architectures and of course, sociotechnical systems, which is our topic today! These happen in industries across the world like telecom, media, TV, government. Trond's mantra is, “Great products emerge from collaborative sensemaking and design.” I concur. Trond, welcome to Greater Than Code! TROND: Thank you for having me. It's fun being here. JESSICA: Trond, as a Northern European, I know our usual question about superpowers makes you nervous. So let me change it up a little bit: what is your superpower of sociotechnical system design? TROND: Oh, that's a good one. I'm glad you turned it over because we are from the land of the Jante, as you may have heard of, where people are not supposed to be anything better than anybody else. So being a superhero, that's not something that we are accustomed to now, so to speak. So the topic there, sociotechnical system, what makes you a superhero by having that perspective? I think it's in the name, really. Do you actually join the social and the technical aspects of things, whatever you do? But my focus is mainly in organizations and in relation to a person, or a team cooperating, designing IT solutions, and stuff like that, that you have to consider both the social and the technical and I find that we have too much – I have definitely done that. Focused too much on the technical aspects and not ignoring the social aspects, but at least when we are designing stuff we frequently get too attached to the technical aspects. So I think we need that balance. JESSICA: Yeah. TROND: So I guess, that is my superpower I get from that. JESSICA: When we do software design, we think we're designing software, which we think is made of technical code and infrastructure, and that software is made by people and for people and imagine that. Social side matters. TROND: Yeah, and I must say that since Agile in the early 2000s, the focus on the user has been increasing. I think that's better covered than it used to be, but I still think we miss out on we part that we create software and that is that humans actually create software. We often talk about the customer, for example. I guess, many of your listeners are creating such a system that actually the customers are using, like there's an end user somewhere. But frequently, there's also internal users of that system that you create like backend users, or there's a wide range of others stakeholders as well and – [overtalk] JESSICA: Internal users of customer facing systems? TROND: For example, yes. Like back office, for example. I'm working for our fairly large telecom operation and of course, their main goal is getting and keeping the end users, paying customers, but it's also a lot of stuff going on in the backend, in the back office like supporting customer service support, there is delivery of equipment to the users, there's shipment, there is maintenance, all that stuff, there's assurance of it. So there's a lot of stuff going on in that domain that we rarely think of when we create their IT systems, I find at least. JESSICA: But when we're making our software systems, we're building the company, we're building the next version of this company, and that includes how well can people in the back office do their jobs. TROND: Exactly. JESSICA: And us, like we're also creating the next version of software that we need to change and maintain and keep running and respond to problems in. I like to think about the developer interface. TROND: Exactly, and that is actually, there's an area where the wider sociotechnical term has popped up probably more frequently than before. It's actually that, because we think of the inter policies we need and organize the teams around for example, services are sometimes necessary and stuff like that. JESSICA: Inter policies, you said. TROND: Yeah, the inter policies offices go into this stuff. So we are looking into that stuff. We are getting knowledge on how to do that, but I find we still are not seeing the whole picture, though. Yes, that is important to get the teams right because you want them to not interact too much but enough so we want – [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh yeah, I love it that the book says, “Collaboration is not the goal! Collaboration is expensive and it's a negative to need to do it, but sometimes you need to.” TROND: Yeah, exactly. So that'd be a backstory there. So the main system, I think and the idea is that you have a system consisting of parts and what sociotechnical systems focus a lot about is the social system. There is a social system and that social system, those parts are us as developers and those parts are stakeholders of course, our users and then you get into this idea of an open system. I think it was Bertanlanffy who coined that, or looked into that. JESSICA: Bertanlanffy open systems. TROND: Open system, yeah. JESSICA: Fair warning to readers, all of us have been reading this book, Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity by Michael C. Jackson and we may name drop a few systems thinking historical figures. TROND: Yes, and Bertanlanffy is one of those early ones. I think he actually developed some of the idea before the war, but I think he wrote the book after—I'm not sure, 1950s, or something—on general system thinking. It's General Systems Theory and he was also looking into this open system thing and I think this is also something that for example, Russell Ackoff took to heart. So he had to find four type of systems. He said there was a mechanical system, like people would think of when they hear system, like it's a technical thing. Like a machine, for example, your car is a system. But then they also added, there was something more that's another type of system, which is animal system, which is basically us. We consist of parts, but we have a purpose that is different from us than a car that makes us different. And then you take a lot of those parts and combine them, then you've got a social system. The interesting thing with the social system is that that system in of its own have a purpose, but also, the parts have a purpose. That's the thing which is different from the other thing. For an animal system, your parts don't have a purpose. Your heart doesn't really have a purpose; it's not giving a purpose. It doesn't have an end goal, so to speak that. There's nothing in – [overtalk] JESSICA: No, it has a purpose within the larger system. TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: But it doesn't have self-actualization. TROND: It's not purposeful. That's probably the word that I – [overtalk] JESSICA: Your heart isn't sitting there thinking, going beat, beat, beat. It does that, but it's not thinking it. TROND: No, exactly. [laughter] TROND: So I think actually Ackoff and I think there was a book called On Purposeful Systems, which I recommend. It's really a dense book. The Jackson book, it's long, but it's quite verbose so it's readable. Like the On Purposeful Systems is designed to be short and concise so it's basically just a list of bullet points almost. It's just a really hard read. But they get into the difference between a purposeful system and a goal-seeking system. Your heart will be goal-seeking. It has something to achieve, but it doesn't have a purpose in a sense. So that's the thing, which is then you as a person and you as a part of a social system and that's where I think the interesting thing comes in and that's where we're sociotechnical system really takes this on board is that in a social system, you have a set of individuals and you also have technical aspects of those system as well so that's the sociotechnical thing. JESSICA: Now you mentioned Ackoff said four kinds of systems. TROND: Yeah. H: Mechanical, animal, social? TROND: And then there's ecological. JESSICA: And then ecological, thanks. TROND: Yeah. So the ecological one is that where every parts have a purpose like us, but the whole doesn't have a purpose on its own. Like the human kind is not purposeful and we should be probably. [laughs] For example, with climate change and all that, but we are not. Not necessarily. REIN: This actually relates a little bit to the origins of sociotechnical systems because it came about as a way to improve workplace democracy and if you look at the history of management theory, if you look at Taylorism, which was the dominant theory at the time, the whole point of Taylorism is to take purposefulness away from the workers. So the manager decides on the tasks, the manager decides how the tasks are done—there's one right way to do the tasks—and the worker just does those actions. Basically turning the worker into a machine. So Taylorism was effectively a way to take a social system, affirm a company, and try to turn it into an animate system where the managers had purpose and the workers just fulfilled a purpose. TROND: Exactly. REIN: And sociotechnical system said, “What if we give the power of purposefulness back to the workers?” Let them choose the task, let them choose the way they do their tasks. TROND: Exactly, and this is an interesting theme because at the same time, as Taylor was developing his ideas, there were other people having similar ideas, like sociotechnical, but we never heard of them a late like Mary Parker Follett, for example. She was living at the same time, writing stuff at the same time, but the industry wasn't interested in listening to her because it didn't fit their machine model. She was a contrary to that and this was the same thing that sociotechnical system designers, or researchers, to put it more correctly, also experienced, for example, in a post-war England, in the coal mines. JESSICA: Oh yeah, tell us about the coal mines. TROND: Yeah, because that's where the whole sociotechnical system theory was defined, or was first coined what was there. There was a set of researchers from the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, which actually came about like an offshoot of the Tavistock Clinic, which was working actually with people struggling from the war after the Second World War. JESSICA: Was that in Norway? TROND: No, that was exactly in England, that was in London. Tavistock is in London. JESSICA: Oh! TROND: Yeah. So it was an offshoot of that because there were researchers there that had the knowledge that there was something specific about the groups. There was somebody called Bion and there was a Kurt Lewin, which I think Jessica, you probably have heard of. JESSICA: Is that Kurt Lewin? TROND: Yes, that's the one. Absolutely. JESSICA: Yeah. He was a psychologist. TROND: Yeah. So he was for example, our main character of the sociotechnical movement in England in the post-war was Eric Trist and he was working closely with Lewin, or Lewin as you Americans call him. They were inspired by the human relations movement, if you like so they saw they had to look into how the people interact. So they observed the miners in England. There was a couple of mines where they had introduced some new technology called the longwall where they actually tried to industrialize the mining. They have gone from autonomous groups into more industrialized, like – [overtalk] JESSICA: Taylorism? TROND: Yes, they had gone all Taylorism, correct. JESSICA: “Your purpose is to be a pair of hands that does this.” TROND: Exactly, and then they had shifts. So one shift was doing one thing, then other shift was doing the second thing and that's how they were doing the other thing. So they were separating people. They had to have been working in groups before, then they were separated to industrialize like efficiently out of each part. JESSICA: Or to grouplike tasks with each other so that you only have one set of people to do a single thing. TROND: Yeah. So one group was preparing and blowing and breaking out the coal, somebody was pushing it out to the conveyors, and somebody else was moving into the instrument, or the machinery to the next place. This is what's the three partnership shifts were like. What they noticed then is that they didn't get the efficiency that they expected from this and also, people were leaving. People really didn't like this way of working; there was a lot of absenteeism and there were a lot of crows and uproar and it didn't go well, this new technology which they had too high hopes for. So then Trist and a couple of others like Bamford observed something that happened in one of the mines that people actually, some of them self-organized and went back to the previous way of working in autonomous teams plus using this new technology. They self-organized in order to actually to be able to work in this alignment, but this was the first time that I saw this type of action that they actually created their own semi-autonomous teams as they called them. JESSICA: So there was some technology that was introduced and when they tried to make it about the technology and get people to use it the way they thought it would be most efficient, it was not effective. TROND: Not effective? JESSICA: But yet the people working in teams were able to use the technology. TROND: Yeah. Actually, so this is the interesting part is when you have complex systems then you can have self-organization happening there and these workers, they were so frustrated. They're like, “Okay. Let's take matters in our own hands, let's create groups where we can actually work together.” So they created these autonomous groups and this was something that Eric Trist and Ken Bamford observed. So they saw that when they did that, the absenteeism and the quality of work-life increased a lot and also, productivity increased a lot. There were a few mines observed that did this and they compared to other mines that didn't and the numbers were quite convincing. So you should think “Oh, this would use them,” everybody would start using this approach. No, they didn't. Of course, management, the leadership didn't want this. They were afraid of losing the power so they worked against it. So just after a few research attempts, there wasn't any leverage there and actually, they increased the industrialization with a next level of invention was created that made it even worse so it grinded to a halt. Sociotechnical was a definer, but it didn't have the good fertile ground to grow. So that's when they came to my native land, to Norway. JESSICA: Ah. TROND: Yeah. So Fred Emery was one of those who worked with Trist and Bramforth a lot back then and also traced himself, actually came to Norway as almost like a governmental project. There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program, I think it was called, it was actually established by – [overtalk] JESSICA: There was a Norwegian Industrial Democracy Program. That is so not American. TROND: [laughs] Exactly. So that probably only happen in Norway, I suppose and there were a lot of reasons for that. One of them is, especially as that we struggled with the industry after the war, because we were just invaded by Germany and was under rule so we had nothing to build. So they got support from America, for example, to rebuild after the war, but also, Norwegians are the specific type of persons, if you like. They don't like to be ruled over. So the high industrial stuff didn't go down well with the workers even worse than in England, but not in mines because we don't have any mines so just like creating nails, or like paper mills. Also, the same thing happened as I said, in England, that people were not happy with the way these things were going. But the problem is in Norway that this was covering all the mines, not just a few mines here and there. This was going all the way up to the – the workers unions were collaborating with the employers unions. So they were actually coming together. This project was established by these two in collaboration and actually, the government was also coming and so, there were three parts to this initiative. And then the Tavistock was called in to help them with this project, or the program to call it. So then it started off your experiments in Norway and then I went more – in England, they observed mostly, like the Tavistock, and in Norway, they actually started designing these type of systems, political systems, they're autonomous work groups and all that. They did live experiments and the like so there was action research as a way of – [overtalk] JESSICA: Oh, action research. TROND: Yeah, where you actually do research on the ground. This was also from Kurt Lewin, I believe. So I know they did a lot of research there and got similar results as in England. But also, this went a bit further than Norway. This actually went into the law, how to do this. So like work participation, for example and there was also this work design thing that came out of it. It's like workers have some demands that goes above just a livable wage. They want the type of job that meant something, where they were supposed to grow, they were supposed to learn on the job, they were supposed to – there were a lot of stuff that they wanted and that was added to actually the law. So this is part of Norwegian law today, what came out of that research. JESSICA: You mentioned that in Norway, they started doing design and yet there's the implication that it's design of self-organizing teams. Is that conflict? Like, design from above versus self-organization. TROND: Yes, it did and that is also something that I discovered in Norway so well-observed, Jessica. This is actually what happened in Norway. So the researchers saw that they were struggling to getting this accepted properly by the workers, then I saw okay, they have to get the workers involved. Then they started with this, what they call participative design. The workers were pulled in to design the work they worked on, or to do together with the researchers, but the researchers were still regarded as experts still. So there was a divide between the researches and the workers, but the workers weren't given a lot of freewill to design how they wanted this to work themselves. One of the latest experiments, I think the workers weren't getting the full freedom to design and I think it was the aluminum industry. I think they were creating a new factory and the workers weren't part of designing how they should work in that factory, this new factory. They saw that they couldn't just come in and “This is how it works in the mines in England, this is how we're going to do it.” That didn't work in Norway. REIN: And one of the things that they've found was that these systems were more adaptable than Taylorism. So there was one of these programs in textile mills in India that had been organized according to scientific management AKA Taylorism. And what they found, one of the problems was that if any perturbation happened, any unexpected event, they stopped working. They couldn't adapt and when they switched to these self-organizing teams, they became better at adaptation, but they also just got more production and higher quality. So it was just a win all around. You're not trading off here, it turns out. JESSICA: You can say we need resilience because of incidents. But in fact, that resilience also gives you a lot of flexibility that you didn't know you needed. TROND: Exactly. You are capable of taking in stuff that you couldn't foresee like anything that happens because the people on the ground who know this best and actually have all the information they need are actually able to adapt. Lots better then to have a structure like a wild process, I think. REIN: One of the principles of resilience engineering is that accidents are normal work. Accidents happen as a result of normal work, which means that normal work has all of the same characteristics. Normal work requires adaptation. Normal work requires balancing trade-offs competing goals. That's all normal work. It just, we see it in incidents because incidents shine a light on what happened. TROND: I think there was an American called Pasmore who coined this really well. He said, “STS design was intended tended to produce a win-win-win-win. Human beings were more committed, technology operated closer to the potential and the organization performed better overall while adapting more readily to changes in its environment.” This has pretty much coining what STS is all about. REIN: Yeah. I'm always on the lookout because they're rare for these solutions that are just strictly better in a particular space. Where you're not making trade-offs, where you get to have it all, that's almost unheard of. JESSICA: It's almost unheard of and yet I feel like we could do a lot of more of it. Who was it who talks about dissolving the problem? REIN: Ackoff. TROND: That's Ackoff, yeah. JESSICA: Yeah, that's Ackoff in Idealized Design. TROND: Where he said – [overtalk] REIN: He said, “The best way to solve a problem is to redesign the system that contains it so that the problem no longer exists.” TROND: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: And in software, what are some examples of that that we have a lot? Like, the examples where we dissolve coordination problems by saying the same team is responsible for deployment? REIN: I've seen problem architectures be dissolved by a change in the product. It turns out that a better way to do it for users also makes possible a better architecture and so you can stop solving that hard problem that was really expensive. JESSICA: Oh, right. So the example of item potency of complete order buttons: if you move the idea generation to the client, that problem just goes away. TROND: Yeah, and I have to say another example is if you have two teams that work well together. [chuckles] You have to communicate more. Okay, but that doesn't help because that's not where our problem is. If you redesign the teams, for example, then if they – instead of having fun on the backend teams, if you redesign, you have no verticals, then you haven't solved the problem. You have resolved it. It is gone because they are together now in one thing. So I think there is a lot of examples of this, but it is a mindset because people tend to say, if there is something problem, they want to analyze it as it is and then figure out how to fix the parts and then – [overtalk] JESSICA: Yeah, this is our obsession with solving problems! TROND: Yes. JESSICA: Solving problems is not systems thinking. TROND: No, it's not. Exactly. JESSICA: Solving problems is reactive. It feels productive. It can be heroic. Whereas, the much more subtle and often wider scope of removing the problem, which often falls into the social system. When you change the social system, you can resolve technical problems so that they don't exist. That's a lot more congressive and challenging and slower. TROND: It is and that is probably where STS has struggled. It didn't struggle as much, but that is also here compared to the rest of the world. They said because you have to fight – there is a system already in place and that system is honed in on solving problems as you were saying. JESSICA: That whole line management wants to solve the problem by telling them what workers want to do and it's more important that their solution work, then that a solution work. TROND: Yes, exactly and also, because they are put in a system where that's normal. That is common sense to them. So I often come back to that [inaudible] quote is that I get [inaudible], or something like that is that because a person in a company, he's just a small – In this large company, I'm just a small little tiny piece of it; there's no chance in anyhow that I can change it. JESSICA: Yeah. So as developers, one reason that we focus on technical dilutions and technical design is because we have some control over that. TROND: Yes. JESSICA: We don't feel control over the social system, which is because you can never control a social system; you can only influence it. TROND: So what I try to do in an organization is that I try to find a, change agents around in the organization so I get a broader picture not only understanding it, but also record broader set of attacks, if you like it—I'm not just calling it attacks, but you get my gist—so you can create a more profound change not just a little bit here, a little bit though. Because when you change as society, if we solve problems, we focus on the parts and we focus on the parts, we are not going to fix the hole. That is something that Ackoff was very adamant about and he's probably correct. You can optimize – [overtalk] JESSICA: Wait. Who, what? I didn't understand. TROND: Ackoff. JESSICA: Ackoff, that was that. TROND: So if you optimize every part, you don't necessarily make the system better, but he said, “Thank God, you usually do. You don't make it worse.” [laughs] REIN: Yeah. He uses the example of if you want to make a car, so you take the best engine and the best transmission, and you take all of the best parts and what do you have? You don't have a car. You don't have the best car. You don't even have a car because the parts don't fit together. It's entirely possible to make every part better and to make the system worse and you also sometimes need to make a part worse to make the system better. TROND: And that is fascinating. I think that is absolutely fascinating that you have to do that. I have seen that just recently, for example, in our organization, we have one team that is really good at Agile. They have nailed it almost, this team. But the rest of the organization are not as high level and good at Agile and the organization is not thrilled to be Agile in a sense because it's an old project-oriented organization so it is industrialized in a sense. Then you have one team that want to do STS; they want to be an Agile super team. But when they don't fit with the rest, they actually make the rest worse. So actually, in order to make it the whole better, you can't have this local optimizations, you have to see the whole and then you figure out how to make the whole better based on the part, not the other one. JESSICA: Yeah. Because well, one that self-organizing Agile team can't do that properly without having an impact on the rest of the organization. TROND: Exactly. JESSICA: And when the rest of the organization moves much more slowly, you need a team in there that's slower. And I see this happen. I see Agile teams moving too fast that the business isn't ready to accept that many changes so quickly. So we need a slower – they don't think of it this way, but what they do is they add people. They add people and that slows everything down so you have a system that's twice as expensive in order to go slower. That's my theory. TROND: The fascinating thing, though—and this is where the systems idea comes in—is that if you have this team that really honed this, that they have nailed the whole thing exactly, they're moving as fast as they can and all that. But the rest of it, they'll say it's not, then you have to interact the rest of organization, for example. So they have been bottlenecked everywhere they look. So what they end up doing is that they pull in work, more work than they necessarily can pull through because they have to. Unless they just have to sit waiting. Nobody feels – [overtalk] JESSICA: And then you have nowhere to fucking progress. TROND: Exactly. So then you make it worse – [overtalk] JESSICA: Then you couldn't get anything done. TROND: Exactly! So even a well-working team would actually break in the end because of this. REIN: And we've organized organizations around part maximization. Every way of organizing your business we know of is anti-systemic because they're all about part optimization. Ours is a list of parts and can you imagine going to a director and saying, “Listen, to make this company better, we need to reduce your scope. We need to reduce your budget. We need to reduce your staff. TROND: Yeah. [laughs] That is a hard sell. It is almost impossible. So where I've seen it work—no, I haven't seen that many. But where I've seen that work, you have to have some systemic change coming all the way from the top, basically. Somebody has to come in and say, “Okay, this is going to be painful, but we have to change. The whole thing has to change,” and very few companies want to do that because that's high risk. Why would you do that? So they shook along doing that minor problem-solving here and there and try to fix the things, but they are not getting the systemic change that they probably need. JESSICA: Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why startups wind up eating the lunch of bigger companies; because startups aren't starting from a place that's wrong for what they're now doing. TROND: Exactly. They are free to do it. They have all the freedom that we want the STS team to have. The autonomous sociotechnical systems teams, those are startups. So ideally, you're consisting a lot of startups. REIN: And this gets back to this idea of open systems and the idea of organizationally closed, but structurally open. TROND: Yeah. REIN: It comes from [inaudible] and this idea is that an organization, which is the idea of the organization—IBM as an organization is the idea of IBM, it's not any particular people. IBM stays IBM, but it has to reproduce its structure and they can reproduce its structure in ways that change, build new structure, different structure, but IBM is still IBM. But organizations aren't static and actually, they have to reproduce themselves to adapt and one of the things that I think makes startups better here is that their ability to change their structure as they produce it, they have much more agility. Whereas, a larger organization with much more structure, it's hard to just take the structure and just move it all over here. TROND: Exactly. JESSICA: It's all the other pieces of the system fit with the current system. TROND: Yeah. You have to share every part in order to move. JESSICA: Right. REIN: And also, the identity of a startup is somewhat fluid. Startups can pivot. Can you imagine IBM switching to a car company, or something? TROND: I was thinking exactly the same; you only see pivots in small organizations. Pivots are not normal in large organizations. That will be a no-go. Even if you come and suggested it, “I hear there's a lot of money in being an entrepreneur.” I wouldn't because that would risk everything I have for something that is hypothetical. I wouldn't do that. REIN: Startups, with every part of them, their employees can turn over a 100%, they can get a new CEO, they can get new investors. JESSICA: All at a much faster time scale. TROND: Also, going back to Ackoff, he's saying that we need to go get out of the machine age. Like he said, we have been in the machine age since the Renaissance, we have to get out of that and this is what system thinking is. It's a new age as they call it. Somebody calls it the information age, for example and it's a similar things. But we need to start thinking differently; how to solve problems. The machine has to go, at least for social systems. The machine is still going to be there. We are going to work with machines. We're going to create machines. So machines – [overtalk] JESSICA: We use machines, but our systems are bigger than that. TROND: Yes. JESSICA: Systems are interesting than any machine and when we try build systems as machines, we really limit ourselves. TROND: So I think that is also one of the – I don't know if it's a specific principle for following STS that says that man shouldn't be an extension of the machine, he should be a part of machine. He should be using the machine. He should be like an extension of the machine. JESSICA: Wait. That the man being an extension of machine, the machine should be an extension of man? TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: Right. [inaudible] have a really good tool, you feel that? TROND: Mm hm. REIN: This actually shows up in joint cognitive systems, which shares a lot with sociotechnical systems, as this idea that there are some tools through which you perceive the world that augment you and there are other tools that represent the world. Some tools inside you and you use them to interact with the world, you interact with the world using them to augment your abilities, and there are other tools that you have just a box here that represents the world and you interact with the box and your understanding of the world is constrained by what the box gives you. These are two completely different forms of toolmaking and what Stafford Beer, I think it might say is that there are tools that augment your variety, that augment your ability to manage complexity, and there are tools that reduce complexity, there are tools that attenuate complexity. JESSICA: Jean Yang was talking about this the other day with respect to developer tools. There are tools like Heroku that reduce complexity for you. You just deploy the thing, just deploy it and internally, Heroku is dealing with a lot of complexity in order to give you that abstraction. And then there are other tools, like Honeycomb, that expose complexity and help you deal with the complexity inherent in your system. TROND: Yeah. Just to go back so I get this quote right is that the individual is treated as a complimentary to machine rather than an extension of it. JESSICA: Wait, what is treating this complimentary to machine? TROND: The individual. JESSICA: The individual. TROND: The person, yeah. Because that is what you see in machine shops and those are also what happened in England when they called mining work again, even more industrialized, people are just an extension of the machine. JESSICA: We don't work like that. TROND: Yeah. I feel like that sometimes, I must admit, that I'm part of the machine. That I'm just a cog in the machine and we are not well-equipped to be cogs in machines, I think. Though, we should be. REIN: Joint cognitive systems call this the embodiment relation where the artifact is transparent and it's a part of the operator rather than the application so you can view the world through it but it doesn't restrict you. And then the other side is the hermeneutic relation. So hermeneutics is like biblical hermeneutics is about the interpretation of the Bible. So the hermeneutic relation is where the artifact interprets the world for you and then you view the artifact. So like for example, most of the tools we use to respond to incidents, logs are hermeneutic artifacts. They present their interpretation of the world and we interact with that interpretation. What I think of as making a distinction between old school metrics and observability, is observability is more of an embodiment relationship. Observability lets you ask whatever question you want; you're not restricted to what you specifically remember to log, or to count. TROND: Exactly. And this is now you're getting into the area where I think actually STS – now we have talked about a lot about STS in the industrial context here, but I think it's not less, maybe even more relevant now because especially when we're moving into the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution where the machines have taken over more and more. Like, for example, AI, or machine learning, or whatever. Because then the machine has taken more and more control over our lives. So I think we need this more than even before because the machines before were simple in comparison and they were not designed by somebody in the same sense that for example, AI, or machine learning was actually developed. I wouldn't say AI because it's still an algorithm underneath, but it does have some learning in it and we don't know what the consequences of that is, as I said. So I think it's even more relevant now than it was before. JESSICA: Yeah. TROND: [chuckles] I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or see, that is. JESSICA: Or hear something about it. You want to define it to our listeners? TROND: Somebody called it this hyperphysical systems. JESSICA: Hyperphysical? TROND: Yes, somebody called it hyperphysical systems. I'm not sure if you want to go too much into that, to be honest, but. So the Fourth Industrial Revolution is basically about the continuous automation of manufacturing and industrial practices using smart technology, machine-to-machine communication, internet of things, machine learning improves communication and self-monitoring and all that stuff. We see the hint of it, that something is coming and that is that different type of industry than what we currently are in. I think the Industrial 4.0 was probably coined in Germany somewhere. So there's a definition that something is coming out of that that is going to put the humans even more on the sideline and I think for us working in I, we see some of this already. The general public, maybe don't at the same level. REIN: So this reminds me of this other idea from cognitive systems that there are four stages, historical stages, in the development of work. There's mechanization, which replaces human muscle power with mechanical power and we think of that as starting with the original industrial revolution, but it's actually much older than that with agriculture, for example. Then there's automation, there's a centralization, and then there's computerization. Centralization has happened on a shorter time span and computerization has happened at a very short time span relative to mechanization. So one of the challenges is that we got really good at mechanization because we've been doing it since 500 BC. We're relatively less good at centering cognition in the work. The whole point of mechanization and automation was to take cognition out of the work and realizing you have to put it back in, it's becoming much more conspicuous that people have to think to do their work. TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: Because we're putting more and more of the work into the machine and yet in much software system, many software systems especially like customer facing systems, we need that software to not just be part of the machine, to not do the same thing constantly on a timescale of weeks and months. We need it to evolve, to participate in our cognition as we participate in the larger economy. TROND: Yeah. REIN: And one of the ironies of this automation—this comes from Bainbridge's 1983 paper—is that when you automate a task, you don't get rid of a task. You make a new task, which is managing the automation, and this task is quite different from the task you were doing before and you have no experience with it. You may not even have training with it. So automation doesn't get rid of work; automation mutates work into a new unexpected form. JESSICA: Right. One of the ironies of automation is that now you have created that management at the automation and you think, “Oh, we have more automation. We can pay the workers less.” Wrong. You could pay the workers more. Now collectively, the automation plus the engineers who are managing it are able to do a lot more, but you didn't save money. You added a capability, but you did not save money. REIN: Yeah, and part of that is what you can automate are the things we know how to automate, which are the mechanical tasks and what's left when you automate all of the mechanical tasks are the ones that require thinking. TROND: And that's where we're moving into now, probably that's what the Fourth Industrial Revolution is. We try and automate this stuff that probably shouldn't be automated. Maybe, I don't know. JESSICA: Or it shouldn't be automated in a way that we can't change. TROND: No, exactly. REIN: This is why I'm not buying stock in AI ops companies because I don't think we figured out how to automate decision-making yet. JESSICA: I don't think we want to automate decision-making. We want to augment. TROND: Yeah, probably. So we're back to that same idea that the STS said we should be complimentary to machine, not an extension of it. JESSICA: Yes. That's probably a good place to wrap up? TROND: Yeah. REIN: Yeah. There's actually a paper by the way, Ten Challenges in Making Automation A Team Player. JESSICA: [laughs] Or you can watch my talk on collaborative automation. TROND: Yeah. JESSICA: Do you want to do reflections? REIN: Sure. JESSICA: I have a short reflection. One quote that I wrote down that you said, Trond in the middle of something was “You are capable of taking in stuff that you didn't know you see,” and that speaks to, if you don't know you see it, you can't automate the seeing of it. Humans are really good at the everything else of what is going on. This is our human superpower compared to any software that we can design and that's why I am big on this embodiment relation. Don't love the word, but I do love tools that make it easier for me to make and implement decisions that give me superpowers and then allow me to combine that with my ability to take input from the social system and incorporate that. TROND: I can give it a little bit of an anecdote. My background is not IT. I come from physics—astrophysics, to be specific—and what we were drilled in physics is that you should take the person out of the system. You should close the system as much as possible. Somebody said you have to take a human out of it if you want observe. Physics is you have no environment, you have no people, there's nothing in it so it's completely closed, but we work and here, it's complete opposite. I work in a completely open system where the human part is essential. JESSICA: We are not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. TROND: No, we are not. That is highly restricted for a closed system. We are not. So the idea of open system is something that I think we all need to take on board and we are the best one to deal with those open systems. We do it all the time, every day, just walking with a complex open system. I mean, everything. JESSICA: Eating. TROND: Eating, yeah. REIN: And actually, one of the forms, or the ways that openness was thought of is informational openness. Literally about it. JESSICA: That's [inaudible] take in information. TROND: Yeah. Entropy. JESSICA: Yeah. TROND: Yeah, exactly. And we are capable of controlling that variance, we are the masters of that. Humans, so let's take advantage of that. That's our superpower as humans. REIN: Okay, I can go. So we've been talking a little bit about how the cognitive demands of work are changing and one of the things that's happening is that work is becoming higher tempo. Decisions have to be made more quickly and higher criticality. Computers are really good at making a million mistakes a second. So if you look at something like the Knight Capital incident; a small bug can lose your company half a billion dollars in an instant. So I think what we're seeing is that this complexity, if you combine that with the idea of requisite variety, the complexity of work is exploding and what we call human error is actually a human's inability to cope with complexity. I think if we want to get human error under control, what we have to get better at is managing complexity, not controlling it – [overtalk] JESSICA: And not by we and by we don't mean you, the human get better at this! This system needs to support the humans in managing additional complexity. REIN: Yeah. We need to realize that the nature of work has changed, that it presents these new challenges, and that we need to build systems that support people because work has never been this difficult. JESSICA: Both, social and technical systems. TROND: No, exactly. Just to bring it back to where we started with the coal miners in England. Working there was hard, it was life-threatening; people died in the mines. So you can imagine this must be terrible, but it was a quite closed system, to be honest, compared to what we have. That environment is fairly closed. It isn't predictable at the same size, but we are working in an environment that is completely open. It's turbulent, even. So we need to focus on the human aspect of things. We can't just treat things that machines does work. JESSICA: Thank you for coming to this episode of Greater Than Code. TROND: Yeah, happy to be here. Really fun. It was a fun discussion. REIN: So that about does it for this episode of Greater Than Code. Thank you so much for listening wherever you are. If you want to spend more time with this awesome community, if you donate even $1 to our Patreon, you can come to us on Slack and you can hang out with all of us and it is a lot of fun. Special Guest: Trond Hjorteland.
I vårt senaste podcastavsnitt pratar vi med forskaren Anna Rylander Eklund om två olika synsätt som påverkar hur vi arbetar i projekt och i våra organisationer idag. Annas inspirerande resonemang utgår från två tänkare som levde under samma period men som hade helt olika ansatser: Frederick W. Taylor och Mary Parker Follett.
Lückenhaft Wirtschaft gedacht. Am Bespiel Pflege oder sagen wir am Pflegenotstand, wird sichtbar, was wir als Gesellschaft, was der Staat, was Politik verstanden haben und was noch nicht. Wir erkennen in welchen Mustern wir auf Problemlösungssuche gehen und wieso das so nicht funktionieren kann. Wenn wir glauben, Pflege betrifft nur Pflege, haben wir Wirtschaft nicht verstanden. In diesem Podcast schauen wir kurz nach. Wir blicken zurück in Folge 23 mit Jos de Block, dem Gründer des Beta-Unternehmens Buurtzorg. Er bzw. die 15.000 Menschen bei Buurtzorg zeigen, was erfolgreiches Wirtschaften für alle ist. Wir erinnern hier auch an Folge 25, an Buurtzorg Cura Cummunitas in Österreich und hören gemeinsam mit dem GF Wolfang Huber rein, wie sich Themen entwickelt haben bzw. vielleicht auch nicht. Diesmal gibt es hier meine Aufregung über den WK-Präsidenten und seine skurrilen und sowas von unwirtschaftlichen Vorschlägen zum Thema Fachkräftemangel und ein ebenso skurriles WK Projekt zur Minderung des Pflegenotsandes durch das „Importieren“ von philippinischen Pflegekräften nach Österreich. Was die Taskforce Pflege an wichtigen Maßnahmen entwickelt hat, könnt ihr in den Shownotes nachlesen. Was sie leider vergessen hat, erzähle ich euch hier. Wir hören Zitate von Riane Eisler, der Ökonomien für eine Caring Economy, vom Intensivkrankenpfleger Ricardo Lange, von Mary Parker Follett, der Pionierin der demokratisch-dezentralisierten Organisation und von Kurt Lewin, dem Sozialpsychologen. Wir brauchen Wirtschaftstheorien und Organisationsgestaltung, wo sich Fürsorge, Vertrauen, Mitgefühl entfalten kann. Einen weiteren Aspekt dazu hört ihr hier. **Wolfgang Huber von Buurtzorg Cura Communitas https://cuco.at/ **Folge 23 mit Jos de Blok „Let´s get swinging again“ §9 www.sichtart.at/lets-get-swinging-again **Folge 25 „Zurück zum Ursprung“ www.sichtart.at/zum-ursprung **Wege zu einer Cairng Economy von Riane Eisler www.sichtart.at/die-verkannten-grundlagen-der-oekonomie/ **TaskForcePflege Maßnahmen https://bit.ly/2RzEUNH ** Alle Podcastfolgen auf einen Blick **Mir schreiben könnt ihr so elisabeth.sechser@sichtart.at ** Wir hören uns! www.sichtart.at
Von der Pionierin für demokratisch-dezentralisierte Organisation stammt die bekannte These, dass "Macht über", also Führung durch eine Führungskraft in hierarchischen Strukturen, Organisationen schwäche, Potentiale mindere, einen Kardinalfehler darstellt und dass es "Macht durch" benötige. Das Teilen von Verantwortung, das gemeinsame Erreichen von Zielen, das Vermehren von Macht hole die Potentiale hervor, die Organisationen in sich tragen. Diese Folge steht ganz im Zeichen der großartigen Vordenkerin Mary Parker Follett (1868 - 1933). Sie war Meisterin ihres Fachs. Ihre Arbeiten sind Grundlagen für das Gestalten von wertschöpfungsstarken, dezentralen, agilen, menschgerechten Organisationen. Bereits 1924 skizzierte sie Organisationen als eine Sammlung kleiner, lokaler Communities. Das von ihr stammende "self-governing principle" beschreibt, dass der beste Mehrwert für Organisation als auch jedes Individuum entsteht, wenn diese Communities mit der größtmöglichen Selbstorganisation ausgestattet sind. Sie betrachtete Organisationen als Gruppennetzwerke und kümmerte sich um den Einfluss menschlicher Beziehungen innerhalb der Gruppe. Das Miteinander-füreinander-leisten. Gemeinsam mit Silke Hermann, der Meisterin für Dezentralität in Unternehmen, holen wir das Schaffen von Mary Parker Follett auf die Podcast-Bühne. **MARY PARKER FOLLETT Buchempfehlungen www.sichtart.at/mary-parker-follett-creating-democracy-transforming-management **SILKE HERMANN www.silkehermann.de & Buchempfehlung Zellstrukturdesign www.sichtart.at/zellstrukturdesign-buch **DIE STUDIE www.dezentralisierteuch.com **DAS POSTER www.sichtart.at/demokratie-unternehmen **Mir schreiben könnt ihr so elisabeth.sechser@sichtart.at **Mich anrufen so +436766103913 **Gutes Neues Arbeiten für alle!“ Wir hören uns! Elisabeth Sechser www.sichtart.at
This episode discusses power, defined simply as the ability to act. It focuses on the relationship between power and democratic politics, the distinction between "power over" or unilateral power and "power with" or relational power, and questions such as who has power, how should it be analyzed, is anyone really powerless, the nature of self-interest, and how does organizing build power to effect change.GuestsRobert Hoo is the Lead Organizer and Executive Director for One LA-IAF. He has fifteen years of organizing experience with the Industrial Areas Foundation in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Sacramento. And before that served as an AmeriCorps member in Connecticut.Ben Gordon is senior organizer with Metro IAF which he joined in 2016. He currently works with the IAF organizations in Boston, Connecticut, Milwaukee, as well as several labor union partners. Prior to joining Metro IAF, he was Director of Organizing for the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), a 200,000-member affiliate of the public employees union (AFSCME). He began his professional organizing career in 1987 with the Southern Region of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union organizing clothing factory workers in the Southeast.Resources for Going DeeperFrederick Douglas, “West India Emancipation” (1857). A key statement of the importance of power in radical democratic politics. Available online: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/ Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” Discussed in this and other episodes. Available online: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1965-bayard-rustin-protest-politics-future-civil-rights-movement-0/ Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975). Considered a classic, this book gives an account of the urban planner Robert Moses. Organizers consistently refer to this book as a detailed and very revealing case study in how to gain power even when you don't hold an official or elected post, how power operates institutionally, how to get things done, and how to analyze power; Saul Alinsky, John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Vintage, 1970). Another case studies in how power is built up and wielded effectively, this time in a non-state focused form of politics, that of union organizing; The distinction between “power with” and “power over” originates with Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930 [1924]); Hannah Arendt also sketched a conception of relational power in her essay “On Violence.” See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2006 [1963]), 105–98; Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). A reading of the New Testament and the ministry of Jesus as exemplifying creative, non-violent resistance and the use of relational power to bring change; Amy Allen, “Feminist Perspectives on Power,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on-line), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-power/ Gives a helpful overview and evaluation of different modern social theories of power.
We're talking with Laura Sanchez-Greenberg. She's the founder of Verde Associates… a performance acceleration firm focusing on transforming individuals and the companies they lead. She's incredible and a true expert on grit and perseverance. And… as you listen, you'll hear some simple but powerful strategies to beat that feeling of “meh” that can creep in. You know. Covid's causing a lot of our days to be the same. Plus, now that a lot of us are facing cold temps… so we're feeling more limited on the stuff we can do. So yeah… we need some real-world strategies to beat the crap out of the “meh.” THAT is what we're talking about and I think you're going to love it! Let's get to this! RESOURCES: Dr. Fredrickson's Positivity Self-Test: Here's where you can Track your Positivity on Dr. Fredrickson's website and some of her interventions to increase positivity resonance. Go to “tools” on the website menu and click on “positivity self-test” - it will give you your positivity ratio for the day and also track it across time. It's got some neat features which is that it will let you map too. Positive Image, Positive Action: The Affirmative Basis of Organizing: Laura mentions a study by David L. Cooperrider from Case Western Reserve University. Download the study here. The “Implications for management” around positivity starts on pg 14, but a really good read overall. Enjoy! “We are sometime truly going to see our life as positive, not negative, as made up of continuous willing, not of constraints and prohibition.” – Mary Parker Follett. TRAVIS ENSLEY: Manage Time & Live Intentionally Laura and I got connected through my good friend and DTD guest, Travis Ensley. So, I wanted you to have access to his episode too!: www.mitchmatthews.com/182 Laura is a true “PRACTITIONER SCHOLAR.” She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business... a certificate in Change Management from Harvard Business School, and has studied Group Dynamics and Organizational Design from Georgetown University, and Negotiation and Mediation at the University of Chicago. Plus, Laura is currently pursuing her PhD in Values Based Leadership. Specifically... her research focuses on strategies and traits of teams that have experienced accelerated growth and maintained excellent cultural, people, and financial success. And… as you guys know… at DREAM THINK DO… we're always encouraging experimenting and stretching yourself… and Laura is a big believer in this too! So much so that in addition to the academics… Laura has trained in improv, culinary arts, and she's certified in over 25 different types of assessments. Yeah… she's wicked smaaaat and pure awesome. So let's get to the conversation. EPISODE MINUTE BY MINUTE: 0:02 Welcome to episode 308 1:32 The Dream Think Do App is coming! 3:46 Get to know Laura 5:52 Conversion starts 5:57 How Laura became passionate about the topic of positivity 7:44 Practical tools for being positive 12:58 Small things that lead to big impact 15:26 You have to start slow 16:32 Novelette vs. new 21:17 Practical ways to beat the “meh” 25:01 Lauras encouragement to you today 25:58 Mitch's biggest takeaways LET'S HEAR FROM YOU! I want to hear from you. What's something that stood out to you? What's something you're going to try as the result? Comment below and let me know. Can't wait to hear about YOUR experiments.
In our 42nd "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This month he looks at Management Theories. Show Notes [00:00:14] Deming Lens #42 [00:02:16] Deming's Profound Changes [00:03:25] Weber, Taylor and Fayol [00:07:11] Mary Parker Follett Transcript Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:14] In Episode 42 of The Deming Lens, we'll begin to discuss management theory, starting with some history. Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:29] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt, host of the Deming Institue podcast. Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:46] This month I wanted to do a two-part series or start a two part series on management theory. And the first part will go through and we'll cover people that were influential in management theory and what their thinking was from the really the beginning of the industrial revolution to until today. Tripp Babbitt: [00:01:54] A lot of that influence still exists and maybe some of the problems associated with some of those theories. And the next month, what I'll do is I'm going to walk through how the Deming philosophy, the system of profound knowledge differs from some of the classic management theory. Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:16] And I'm a big fan for those of you who are watching the video of Deming's profound changes and Dan Robertson and Ken Delevingne or two folks that wrote it, influenced by the work of Perry Gluckman, who they liked as a mentor and coached them on the Deming philosophy. But Perry Gluckman actually was a student of Dr. Deming back at NYU. But he walks through a lot of the differences and some of the things a lot of the information that I have will be drawn from Deming's profound changes. Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:56] Now, let's set the scene a little bit. So the industrial revolution starting late. Seventeen hundreds to the late eighteen hundreds, energy changed. We have steam and hydropower. Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:09] We've got machinery coming out. We have new ways of transporting people. And now the question becomes, how do we organize all of this and and how do we increase productivity and manage the people? Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:25] And so there were three, in essence, influencers during that time for what some folks will call classic management theory. And one wasn't Max Weber or Veber Frederick Taylor and Henry Fayol. And those three primarily made up a lot of what we know today with Frederick Taylor. To me, being probably the most influential of those particular three opinion, Max Weber basically was very big picture. He talked a lot about bureaucracy and that these organizations should be an extension of government, a lot of legal, rational types of thinking, and also came up with the original philosophy of hiring the best people. Henry Faile talked a lot about management and administration science, and it really focused on a few things, five things planning, organization, command, coordinate and control. And those were his five things associated with management and emphasized that management should stay out of the details of the work. And then Frederick Taylor, obviously scientific management, which is the basis of a lot of the book, Deming's profound changes and the differences, but he kind of kind of grabbed some of the ideas of Max Weber and Henry fail and put them into his system, but of scientific management. And it's really applying science to the work. And he did things like time and motion studies. And we'll get into a little bit more of the detail associated with that next month as we kind of contrast the thinking of these thinkers. Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:29] Now, what were some of the problems associated with this thinking that came from these areas? Well, I am I guess not going to say the problems at this point, the commonalities of these three philosophies. There was the hierarchy. They all believed in hierarchy. They believed in the division of labor. They believed and the centralization of authority, the separation of work and personal life, that those two things should be different, that you have always hire the best employees and pay you wanted to pay people with their your best people. And that there was one right way to do things. So those are kind of the commonalities, some of the flaws associated with some of this management thinking, this management theory is, and this is out of Deming's profound changes, is one belief in management controls the essential precondition of increasing productivity to belief in the possibility of optimal processes. Three, a narrow view of process improvement for low level. So optimization instead of holistic total system improvement. Five Separation of planning and doing. Recognition of only one cause of death affects people seven. Failure to recognize systems and communities in the organization. And a view of workers as interchangeable bionic machines. Now, I want to make a kind of a side note here. Tripp Babbitt: [00:07:11] And Mary Parker Follette, who worked with Frederick Taylor, actually was the first person to kind of come out and say that there's something out there with regards to systems. And so this will kind of set us up for next month, will walk through some of these management theories. And I've got to tell you that these management theories are still well entrenched in management today and almost subconsciously, but they're taught in a university still today. And I think that that's part of the problem and that we haven't advanced beyond that. To other thinkers like Dr. Deming, like Russell Akef, like Ludwig von Berlanti, those people have kind of advanced the management. But it seems like we're still teaching and doing the things of some of these thinkers from the Industrial Revolution time period. So anyway, that's what we'll do next month. If you have comments. You can reach me at tripp@Deming.org. That's it for this month. We'll talk to you next month in the second part of this series. Tripp Babbitt: [00:08:51] Hi, this is Tripp Babbitt. One way that you can help the Deming Institute in this podcast is by providing a reading on Apple podcasts. If you have additional comments, you can reach me at Tripp@deming.org.
I det här avsnittet av Art of Collaborating pratar vi om en tänkare och författare som har inspirerat oss mycket, Mary Parker Follett. Trots att hon levde mellan åren 1868-1933 fortsätter hennes tankar vara högaktuella.
In this special COVID-19 episode of the BG Ideas podcast, we talk with Dr. Albert Dzur, professor of political science at BGSU and a Spring 2020 ICS Faculty Fellow. He studies collaborative governance and how citizen engagement with government institutions might impact the opioid crisis. Transcript: Announcer: From Bowling Green State University and the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, this is BG Ideas. Intro Music: I'm going to show you this with a wonderful experiment. Jolie Sheffer: Welcome to the BG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Dr. Jolie Sheffer, associate professor of English and American studies and the director of ICS. This is a special episode of the BG Ideas Podcast, which we are recording during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means we're not in the studio, but working via phone and computer. Our sound quality will be different as a result. But now more than ever, I thought it was important to share with you some of the amazing work being done by members of the BGSU community. Even or especially when conditions are challenging, we need to recognize and celebrate great ideas. Jolie Sheffer: As always, the opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of BGSU or its employees. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Albert Dzur, a distinguished research professor of political science at BGSU. He studies citizen participation and power-sharing in criminal justice, healthcare, public administration and education. He joins me today to talk about research undergone in spring 2020 as an ICS faculty fellow. This project considers the opioid epidemic, particularly within Ohio, as a wicked problem. Thanks for joining me, Albert. I appreciate your flexibility here. Albert Dzur: Thanks for putting this on, Jolie. Jolie Sheffer: Obviously, due to COVID-19, a lot has changed in the world since the beginning of the semester. As an ICS faculty fellow, you were already released from teaching and service to focus on research. How has your work in life changed due to the coronavirus restrictions? Albert Dzur: So much academic research is already done inside, so as long as you have a good chair, a good table, internet, you can do it anywhere. But there was field work, part of this research, face-to-face interviewing, which is really important. That has to be set aside temporarily. Interlibrary loan services stopped for now and professional talks that I had scheduled on this have been postponed in some cases to one year later. But, I have to say the biggest negative impact is emotional. A lot of people found it very disorienting to have to think about health and wellbeing all the time. It's in the back of our minds all the time. Our loved ones, our friends, our colleagues, right? We care about them, but it's way in the back of our brain,. But this COVID-19 epidemic puts it at the forefront such like you're constantly thinking about it, and if you're a news junkie like myself, you read and listen to the news all the time. Albert Dzur: Anyway, I turn on my New York Times app and it's like looking at a gravestone every day. It's really sobering. I mean, I heard an interview the other day on BBC Radio with a woman who had lost her mom to COVID-19, and she was talking about how she had been watching the news on TV, and every day I guess in Britain they have cases, case numbers on the left and mortality rates on the right, and she was just talking very methodically about how she was watching this as an outsider and then one day her mom became one of the numbers on the left, and then a week later her mom became one of the numbers on the right. It was heartbreaking, and it was like a reminder that these numbers that we're looking at, the curve and the flattening, we use all these numbers, but they're real people, right? On the curve. They're real people on the curve and there are tons and tons of people looking at the curve worrying about them. So it's been very disorienting in that way. Yeah, for everybody else. Jolie Sheffer: Has this COVID-19 pandemic made you think any differently about participatory democracy? Because that is your core research area about its promise or perhaps challenges to it in a time of crisis, particularly a time of public health crisis. Albert Dzur: The core idea, and we can talk more about this later too, is that democracy is a way of life that extends from the private sphere into the public sphere and that supports formal political institutions like elections, branches of government, state agencies, and other public institutions at every level, or at state, national, et cetera. So that's to say that if our social relations are hierarchical, are marked by gender or racial inequality, that's going to absolutely undermine the democratic character of our formal institutions even if those institutions are constitutionally established to follow democratic rules, like one person, one vote. So the basic idea behind participatory democracy is to say that rules and process are never enough, we need participation and engagement to have a democracy. A common criticism of participatory democracy is that it makes everything so political. Albert Dzur: Man, who wants to be politically active all the time? I mean, even activists don't want to be politically active all the time? Oscar Wilde had that famous saying about socialism, right? That it takes too many evenings. But what I've seen in the COVID-19 crisis is just how deeply engaged people want to be. The CDC says that masks are good and almost instantaneously you have people making masks, and not just for their family, but for the healthcare workers in the community, and healthcare workers actually don't want homemade masks. It's the thought that counts. People aren't happy staying at home, especially when there's a public problem. They want to do something about it, and I think that there's some exciting possibilities there for more participation along the lines of contact tracing and how ordinary folks like us without medical training might get trained up a little bit to do this in the future. Albert Dzur: That's interesting to me. So that's I think the promise. On the challenge side of this, participatory democracy has always been seen as face-to-face, face-to-face participation, right? The question is then is virtual participation of the sort that we're forced to do here, is that enough? The answer is no. It's not enough. We actually do need face-to-face engagement to have the kind of democracy that we deserve, and I've seen this in a lot of different domains, public administration, criminal justice, public health, that we carry around with us so many assumptions, fixed ideas, stereotypes about other people, about political positions, about political parties, political history, and these can't be changed unless we're actually engaged face to face with somebody in conversation, especially somebody that we didn't really want to have a conversation with to begin with. Albert Dzur: I think that we need to get out of this comfortable zone of the familiar, and that can't be done virtually or that's not enough. So I don't think that if you're committed to participatory democracy you can be satisfied with virtual democracy, but it's here to stay and I think we have to figure out a way to do it better. So I think once this thing is over, I mean, people like me have to really get behind internet as a public good. Whatever that means, low cost equipment, municipal broadband access, whatever it takes, everybody in the United States has to have internet access, cheap, available, good internet access. It's not negotiable. Jolie Sheffer: It's a public [crosstalk 00:08:30] utility now, right? The same the way we need water, we need clean water and things, we need internet access. The world doesn't function without it. Yeah. Albert Dzur: I'm not a millennial, so I'd never really struck me that it was a public good, but it's a public good. Jolie Sheffer: The project you're working on, one of the key elements of it is thinking about the opioid crisis as a wicked problem. Can you talk about what that term means and how the opioid crisis fits that criteria? Albert Dzur: You've heard the expression, "If we can send a person to the moon, we can fill in the blank." That's actually the literal origin of this concept of wicked problems. After the successful moon landing, NASA freed up some grant money to see how what they thought of as systems analysis and technical rationality that was so successful for the space program could be applied to social problems, and the particular social problems they're worried about, at the time, this is the late '60s, right? And early '70s, were the urban riots. So the urban riots in Detroit, LA and elsewhere. So in other words, if we can send a person to the moon, why can't we solve urban dysfunction? So NASA grant money funded a Berkeley seminar on this issue, and at this seminar, a Berkeley mathematician by the name of Horst Rittel presented a list of 10 major differences between technical problems that could be solved by systems analysis and social problems that couldn't, and this became the basis of the idea of so-called wicked problems. Albert Dzur: These are complex, multifaceted, they're difficult to define. Rittel called these demarcation issues. They're hard to demarcate. Any possible policy solution will lead to unpredictable and potentially negative repercussions, and it gets worse. There are conflicting values involved. You can see how this applies to the opioid crisis pretty well. There's this kind of uncertainty, a little bit of stumbling around, difficult normative choices. It's funny, I came across, they call these Delphi surveys and they're being used more and more, even during the COVID-19 crisis. The recent Delphi poll on the opioid crisis brought together experts in public administration, in public health and criminal justice, and asked them where they would spend a hypothetical bunch of money and the experts really disagreed on what was the most efficacious in ways that you would predict, right? I mean, the public health people talked about therapy and public health, the criminal justice folks talked about ended argument punitive measures, public administrators talked about community economic development. All these different solutions are equally valid within their frame of reference, but they're very, very different [inaudible 00:11:42] Jolie Sheffer: As a political scientist, how do you bring your training into this subject matter? In what ways are you trying to get outside of a particular disciplinary perspective to approach a wicked problem like the opioid crisis? Albert Dzur: One difference that marks political science as a discipline is that, for better or worse, we're obsessed with power and we think a lot about it and we're worried about it. That's what drove me to political science. I didn't like the way that power was exercised over me, and I saw the difference between institutions that I felt had humanitarian methods of exercising power and institutions that were much more careless about it. I think we can see power in a more constructive way, less as power over and more as power with. There's this great early public administration organization theory person named Mary Parker Follett, sort of a progressive era thinker, and she talked about what she called relational power. That's not necessarily a compromise between A and B, it's a kind of coming together such that they recognize common interests or realize they share common ground. This power with conception is about encouraging the growth of capacities to do something rather than constraining people or organizing them with an eye on getting them to do something they don't want to do. Albert Dzur: The kind of political science that I do is to see how public agencies and institutions can bring out citizen capacities, enhance the power we have to work constructively on public problems, developmental ways to see even punitive institutions as learning environments. This learning goes in both directions, from people running institutions to those outside, so we have something to learn from them, but also from those outside to those inside, which is to see those people outside as more than clients, service users, patients, victims, offenders, and to see them more of along the line of a classic model of a citizen. What we know, what we experience, what we have to say needs to be learned by our institutions. So there is a sort of real shift in my thinking of how to look at the opioid crisis, and how to look at institutions actually. I think the crisis is signaling to us that we have a lot to learn about public problem solving. That's not going to come from NASA. Jolie Sheffer: We're going to take a quick break. Thanks for listening to the BG Ideas Podcast. Intro Music: Consider the following. Announcer: If you are passionate about big ideas, consider sponsoring this program. To have your name or organization mentioned here, please contact us at ICS@bgsu.edu. Jolie Sheffer: Hello, and welcome back to the BG Ideas Podcast. Today I'm talking with Dr. Albert Dzur, about his research into the opioid crisis. Albert, your work emphasizes as you were just discussing the importance of collaboration between citizens and professionals. Can you talk about some of the ways that it is working well? Are there case study examples that can be models for Ohio that may be are already in progress in places? Albert Dzur: I think that there are more hurdles, more challenges to collaboration than I had realized at first. I was following a line of argument in public administration that suggests that wicked problems put pressure on officials to sort of open up, to work together. Like that Delphi poll, you guys have to get out of your silos, you got to work together and figure out the right resources. Plus, just like Horst Rittel said, you've got to get out of your official domain and you've got engaged citizens, right? From a participatory democratic standpoint, that's kind oo cool because here you have, from the inside, pressures to bring in folks from the outside in some genuine public work. There's evidence that that's happening. There's no doubt that you could argue the wicked problem with the opioid epidemic in Ohio is leading to more collaboration and more community engagement than we'd seen before in these domains. Okay? Albert Dzur: That's the good news, and we can talk about that good news in a little bit. Okay? But there are amazing challenges to this collaboration, and there's kind of a ... You know how in the theater there's the happy face and the sad face or a comedy tragedy? There's sort of a double side to the collaboration. A lot of what I see is what you could call top-down collaboration, where the insiders, yes, they're engaging the outsiders, they hold public forums, they listen, et cetera, but they don't really work with them. So that's a doing-for kind of collaborative governance. That I would say is the standard operating model. I think real challenge is there's distrust from both sides, right? There's conventional professional distrust of ordinary people and what they know. Professionals are used to treating citizens as victims, offender, patients, right? Voters, right? But not as coworkers, and there are lots and lots of reasons for that. Albert Dzur: But there's resistance on the other side too. I'm really struck by trust and distrust in the opioid epidemic, that's reflecting something deeper and reflects, I think, maybe a need go beyond just tweaking policymaking to really resetting the way public agencies and institutions work with the citizenry. So in other words, combining different conventional narratives about opioid use may not result in much change to a dynamic of stigma, isolation, fear, et cetera, that is part of the issue. You can fuse together mental illness and illegal drug use, but you still have a problematic compound, right? This issue of trust is really a big deal. Your question has to do with sort of positive [crosstalk 00:18:32] Jolie Sheffer: Yeah, are there examples of communities that are experimenting with participatory democracy in ways of addressing the crisis that seem like they could be models that could be followed by other communities like in ours in Ohio? Albert Dzur: There's a lot of what you could call relatively unorganized do-it-yourself citizen action that has been happening since day one. The stories of grandparents taking care of grandchildren, right? Because the parents are either dead or incapacitated from drug use or incarceration. That's citizen agency. There's citizen action in the form of Samaritan care. Librarians, for example, are pressing for the use of Narcan in libraries across the state and across the country. This has become a big deal for librarians. These kinds of things go beyond personal interpersonal work. These are people who are doing governance-like work, right? So even though it's unorganized, I think it's providing a sort of public service. Beth Macy's got a great book. She was scheduled to speak in Bowling Green, I guess that's going to be postponed to hopefully next year. Her book is amazing. It's a wonderful description of just how patchwork the system of care and treatment is. Albert Dzur: There's a lot of DIY citizen work helping family members, helping community members navigate through this utterly threadbare patchwork of therapeutic intervention. So that's one area that I think is really important and often gets set to the side as, "Well, that's what citizens do, so that's not so important," or that's what you know people would do in a loving family, so it's not important. Well, it's actually really important and it's governance work. There's also what you could call organized do-it-yourself citizen action, for example, shelter houses, and these are some times completely community funded. There's what you could call monetary work where you have groups of citizens that come together and use whatever tools at their disposal to monitor the ways that public agencies are operating. Public journalism effort, Your Voice Ohio, has done a fantastic job of monitoring public policy making and agency activity in the opioid crisis, hosting public forums and so on. Albert Dzur: As for government, we're also seeing some signs of useful collaboration. Part of the research project, I'd like to learn more about how this works on the ground at a pretty microscopic level, like what are the motivations, what kinds of resources are available, how it's causing people to rethink the nature of their own professional work and their own agency work. These are, I think, hot questions for me in the coming months. So for example, some police departments are using a program called Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative. So police channel drug offenders into therapy rather than jail, and that's really interesting to me because it sparks a different way of thinking about policing and that's kind of hard to do. There are also a number of juvenile and adult drug courts in Ohio, right? That do a similar sort of thing in terms of adjudication of drug offenses, and a subset of these drug courts use peer supporters and that's really fascinating to me, right? Albert Dzur: Because one way to think about criminal justice is see it as a cycle of stigma and de-stigmatization, okay? So helping people come to an awareness of the harms they've done to themselves and others, but also bring about their awareness of their capacity to make good, right? That's a really complicated thing to do, to shift between stigma and de-stigmatizing, right? Or reintegration. The key question for me there is how peer supporters help that along in a process that really very, very easily can be incredibly bureaucratic. So if you go to the website of almost any drug court in the country, even in Ohio, it will look like a morass of rules and step by step by step by step you got to do this, you got to do that, doesn't seem very empowering. It doesn't seem, in Follett's terms, like power with sort of operation. But to the degree that they do de-stigmatize and peer support is part of that process, that's a pretty interesting development. Albert Dzur: You also see some of this peer support stuff happening at the municipal level with cities using rapid response teams, including police, social workers and pure peer supporters, and that's really fascinating to me too. I don't think I can claim that collaborative governance is the solution to the opioid process. With a wicked problem you can't claim solutions. I do think that collaborative governance, the kind of doing-with collaborative governance we're talking about, is the way that we as citizens, as officials can learn more about ourselves, our communities, our institutions, our failings and our capacity to to work together on problems like this. I think it's quite useful. Jolie Sheffer: I'm curious to get more from you. You began early on by talking about some of the challenges to participatory democracy is the fact that we're not talking about a level playing field, right? Not everyone has access to those levers of participation. When thinking about some of these possibilities for more participatory actions with addressing the opioid crisis, what are your worries about which communities get included in the with and who's left out? Albert Dzur: That's a complicated question. We have to say that there are issues of racial justice that come into play here, people who suggest that the opioid epidemic is a public problem in a way that say the crack cocaine epidemic was not a public problem because it affects more white Ohioans, right?I think that you have to say that that's accurate, that's problematic. So it raises genuine concerns of racial justice moving forward. The marginalized populations that are left out of the picture in this epidemic tend to be the substance abusers, the substance users. They're seen as victims, offenders, patients, but they're rarely seen, heard and collaborated with. They're rarely seen as full citizens. So yes, there's a racial issue involved, but there's also a sort of marginalized population issue involved, and I don't think that if you focus on one, you're distorting your focus on the other. Albert Dzur: I think you have to consider both things at the same time. I do think that leaving out marginalized populations like substance users and former substance users, it's a justice problem and it's also a sort of effective public policy problem. Are we really doing justice when we send a substance user to jail rather than to therapy? I think that that's an open question and even the system realizes that it's a bad deal, right? Criminal courts are less effective in many ways than drug courts. It doesn't take an activist to realize that. So it helps immensely to learn how to work with substance users, not work on them from the perspective of justice, but also just for the perspective of public policy, I'm struck. Getting back to this point we talked about earlier with COVID-19 and the latent civic energy that's out there, that's just waiting for something, in emergency response research, right? How people deal with crisis times like an earthquake or tornado or whatever. Albert Dzur: Early sociological research has a model, this idea that people would freak out, that crowd control was your big problem in a crisis, and it turns out the opposite was true. People wanted to do something, they wanted to lift rubble out of main street when the earthquake hit. So the problem for governance wasn't crowd control, the problem for governance was how do you make use of all the civic capacity? I think that one thing that this ICS research has clued me into more was just how much civic energy there was among some unbelievably marginalized populations. So these narratives of substance users, former substance users in jail or in prison, many of them surprisingly want to get out and stop other people from following the same kind of path. They want to get busy. So it seems crazy I mean not to make use of this energy. Especially when given the distrust of professionals, peer-to-peer counseling maybe way more effective. Albert Dzur: I think this issue of subpopulations that have not been heard from, it's an issue of justice and it's an issue of effective public policy. By the way, I think just as the participatory Democrat looks at the institutions of American democracy and says, "We've really learned a lot about democracy since the 18th century, and we've learned a lot because we put pressure on these institutions to do things that they haven't done before," so we can say that our system is learning from citizen voices that they had excluded for hundreds of years. Similarly, I think in crises like this, like the opioid crisis, I think there's a lot to learn. I think there's a lot to learn about policing, there's a lot to learn about public health, there's a lot to learn about social work, there's a lot to learn about public administration by learning from these folks. Yeah. Jolie Sheffer: Thank you so much, Albert. It's been a pleasure talking with you. You can find the BG Ideas Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. Our producers are Chris Cavera and Marco Mendoza. Research assistance was provided by Renee Hopper, with editing by Stevie Sheurich. Special thanks go out to Marco Mendoza for his extraordinary sound editing in challenging conditions. Thanks everyone.
On this episode of en(gender)ed, our guest is CV Harquail, a change agent, author, consultant and retired management professor who works at the intersection of organizational change, feminist praxis, leadership, and digital technology. We will be talking about her recent book, Feminism: A Key Idea for Business and Society--the first to combine feminism and business. We explore how the ideas in the book craft a vision of work where businesses are profitable, products and work are meaningful, financial returns are consistent and fair, and individuals, communities, and the planet all flourish. CV offers practical tools, useful frameworks, and novel resources for initiating and sustaining real change. For part 2 of our conversation, CV and I referenced the following resources: Bengt Holmstrom and Jean Tirole's paper, "The Theory of the Firm" What is a land acknowledgement? The concept of "oblivious discovery" in which feminist ideas or concepts have been appropriated and reformulated as "new" How Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms' book, "New Power" bro-propriates the concept from Mary Parker Follett, an organizational theory and behavior philosopher and often called the "Mother of Modern Management" and coined the term "power with" rather than "power over" as a way to share power Examples of organizations applying feminist business practices or values to growth including Lunapads, Bumble, Percolab, Basecamp, and Loomio Samantha Slade's book "Going Horizontal: Creating A Non-Hierarchical Organization, One Practice At a Time" The role of the ERA or Equal Rights Amendment in incentivizing businesses to prioritize gender equality and equity in the workplace Andrea Dworkin's ideas about sex and violence The expansion of material and resources to teach and learn about oppression and be anti-racist, beyond the book, "Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory" by Philomena Essed Be sure to check out Part 1 of our conversation with CV if you haven't heard it already. We chat about what feminism is and how she expands the definition for business, how businesses can benefit, and current approaches to gender equality in the workplace. --- Thanks for tuning in to the en(gender)ed podcast! Be sure to check out our en(gender)ed site and follow our blog on Medium. Consider donating because your support is what makes this work sustainable. Please also connect with us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Don't forget to subscribe to the show!
What a treat! An exclusive LIVE episode featuring Paul Adler, Silvia Dorado and Marc Ventresca talking about management classics. This was recorded from a PDW hosted by Pedro at the 2018 AoM Annual Meeting in Chicago, the purpose of which was to raise interest towards classic authors/ideas in the field of organization and management theory. It offered scholars from all levels the opportunity to reflect on insights of earlier scholarship and their relevance for current research, complementing the strong emphasis (on new ideas and approaches. This is of great importance as the field has thus far been more attentive to disruptions than continuities; pursuing novelty over tradition.In the workshop, senior scholars presented talks on four classic authors (Karl Marx, Mary Parker Follett, Mary Douglas, and Albert Hirschman) to discuss their contemporary relevance. This was followed by a roundtable discussion limited to fifty participants.The workshop demonstrated how attentive (re)readings of classic scholarship reaffirm time and time again their enduring importance. The discussion provided valuable insights on central organizational research problematics (e.g., coordination and control), stimulated complex thinking, enabled analytical comparisons between current and past phenomena (e.g., industrialization and digitization), and serve as ‘exemplars’ of academic excellence and of research that is problem-driven and focused on real-world issues.
In Part 2, we conclude our discussion of the Giving of Orders by Mary Parker Follett. Most significantly we finally arrived at an understanding of what a situation is and how it manifests itself in Follett's understanding of management. We also went in more depth on such topics as normative control, organizational and individual learning, and historical and theoretical context within which this work is situated. This has been a very enjoyable reading and a thought-provoking discussion and we urge you to join us and learn about one of the founding thinkers of management and her alternative take on how to achieve efficiency.
How to issue orders? When is it right to do so? Are you going to hurt the feelings of your employees? Does it matter? These and many other questions are at the centre of 'The Giving of Orders' (1926) by Mary Parker Follett. This seminal work written at the height of Scientific Management dares to compete with the establishment and, in doing so, contributes so much to our current understanding of business and organization. Easy to read and simple to follow, this text is a lecture given by Mary Parker Follett at a scientific management conference where she outlined a part of her scholarship - all in all, an excellent overview of something as central to management as the giving of orders.
What will your leadership legacy look like? Listen now as Dr. Steve Greene shares how discussing Mary Parker Follett's theories 100 years later is an example of her legacy and what a leader leaves behind is not in the physical but the spiritual.
Do you ever use the phrase, "I gave and order," toward your team members? Listen as Dr. Steve Greene tells the story of a little boy and his water bucket and how it is an example to the ideals of Mary Parker Follett in relation to the real problems with giving directions or how we say it.
Mary Parker Follett wrote, "There is no wall between my private life and my public life." Listen as Dr. Steve Greene shares Follett’s thoughts on how personal life experiences develop her progressive and effective notions of organizational productivity.
Conflict is good. It is a way to view differences and find a new solution instead of both sides giving up to compromise. Hear Dr. Steve Greene share Mary Parker Follett's writings on conflict resolution. In turn you will not end up with a team of bobble heads nodding yes out of fear.
Do you lead your team using the power with or the power over? Many leaders and managers use coercive leadership skills instead of being a coactive leader using the power with to push their team. Listen as Dr. Steve Greene shares the story of Mary Parker Follett and how her words on management theory a century later ring true today.
Mary Parker Follett and Chester Barnard both developed theories on how to manage groups. Dr Susan Inglis explores their contribution to management theory. Find out more about the online Masters of Business Administration at http://online.latrobe.edu.au Copyright 2014 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
