Organisations as Machines.

As with any new paradigm, the more light it shines, the more shadow it can cast. One of these shadows is "innovation gone mad". Disruptive and nondisruptive creation. With most of our basic needs taken care of, businesses increasingly try to create needs (situational and needs analyses), feeding the illusion that the more stuff that we do not really need (most new needs are created by marketing and so on) - more possessions, the latest fashion, a more youthful body (this can harm self-esteem) - will make us happy and whole. We increasingly come to see that much of this economy based on fabricated needs (like conspicuous consumption), is unsustainable from a financial and in fact ecological perspective. In sociology and in economics, the term?conspicuous consumption?describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality,?price, or in greater quantity than practical.?The sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term?conspicuous consumption?to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of?luxury commodities?(goods and services) specifically as a public display of?economic power?— the income and the?accumulated wealth of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of?discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or of maintaining a given? social status (keeping up to the Joneses - ?which is an idiom that originated in a comic strip in the early 1900s and represents comparing your peers or neighbours as a benchmark for what goods and lifestyle upgrades you should have. If you aren’t keeping up, then you are being left behind.

We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth's sake. Another shadow appears when success is measured solely in terms of money and recognition (extrinsic and intrinsic rewards). When growth and the bottom line are all that count, when the only successful life is one that reaches the top (succession planning) we are bound to experience a sense of emptiness in our lives. "Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for" - Victor Frankl.

The midlife crisis is an emblematic disease of life in many organisations - so for 20 years, we ran the game of success and ran the rat race. And now we realize that we will not make it to the top (remember getting old is a crime), or that the top is not all that it is made out to be. In principle, this frantic success trait can be a vehicle for self-expression and fulfillment. But - when year after year things boil down to targets and numbers, milestones and deadlines (PERT, CPA, Gantt Charts), and yet another change programme and cross-functional initiative (the horizontal line of a T manager), some individuals cannot help but wonder about the meaning of it all and yearn for something more. Look at self-actualization. Although self-actualization is most often associated with Maslow, the term was first coined by Kurt Goldstein. Goldstein characterized self-actualization as an individuation, or process of becoming a “self,” that is holistic (i.e., the individual realizes that one’s self and one’s environment are two pieces of a greater whole) and acts as a primary driving force of behaviour in humans (Whitehead, 2017).

Although Goldstein’s concept didn’t get much traction at the time, it was popularized when Maslow adopted it into his theory on the human hierarchy of needs. In his seminal paper about human motivation (in which he first introduced his hierarchy of needs), Maslow discussed self-actualization by stating, “What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization” (Maslow, 1943).

Every paradigm has its leadership style that suits its worldview. Achievement oriented leadership tends to look at management through an engineering perspective (Blake and Mouton - production-centric and not people-centric). Leadership at this stage is typically goal-oriented (also my way or the highway), focused on solving tangible problems, and putting tasks over relationships. It values dispassionate rationality and is wary of emotions; questions of meaning and purpose feel out of place. So achievement oriented leadership thinks of organisations as machines, a heritage from reductionist science and the industrial age. Imagine how things will pan out in the 4th Industrial Revolution (Digital Business Transformation)? The engineering jargon we use to talk about organisations reveals how deeply (albeit unconsciously) we hold this metaphor in the world today. We talk about units and layers, inputs and outputs, efficiency and effectiveness, pulling the lever, moving the needle, accelerating and hitting the brakes, scoping problems and scaling solutions, information flows and bottlenecks, reengineering and downsizing (now termed rightsizing). Humans are resources (inputs/resources in the Transformation Stage), that must be carefully aligned on the organisation chart or organogram, rather like cogs in a machine.

Changes must be planned and mapped out in blueprints, then carefully implemented according to plan, and then evaluated using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and so on, and then performance evaluated using evaluation feedback loops and Business Intelligence Dashboards. If some of the machinery functions below the expected rhythm, it is probably time for a soft intervention - the occasional team-building - like injecting oil to grease the wheels. All of the above is practiced by all of us, but the great reset will change all of this.

Prof Rory Dunn.