Seeing like an organisation

In James C. Scott's book Seeing Like a State, the author asks the question why have large-scale schemes that have set out to improve the human condition so often gone awry? Across dozens of domains from forestry and agriculture, through to urban planning and collectivised economies, he concludes that the state's desire to make a society legible - to simplify the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion - has often been at the heart of these failures.

Scott uses the word legibility purposefully. He shows through dozens of photographs and illustrations the contrast between medieval towns and cities that evolved, versus modern conurbations that were planned and designed. He highlights the clear difference between sprawling ancient woods that emerged over-time and industrialised forests that were plotted and curated.

He also explains what the state gained through the introduction of surnames, and standard weights & measures, but also what was lost in local understanding as a consequence. Census Records, Land Registries and other state-wide lists and tables replaced practices and language that carried information and understanding that was important locally to the situation, but not globally from the perspective of the state. He concludes that in the context of "state craft" legibility literally does mean more readable.

Making an organisation legible

As the book progress, Scott goes on to show example by example how legibility taken to ideological extremes has led to some of the worst of these failures. A natural question to ask therefore is does something similar happen in organisations? Does our desire for legibility lead to unintended consequences that are worse than the problems we were trying to solve?

I think there is little doubt that as management teams, executives and team leaders we seek to make our organisation(s) legible. We believe in reason and its ability to help us progress, and our organisation designs, operating frameworks, KPIs, metrics and standards are some of the manifestations of that reasoning. These are the techniques and interventions we use to make our worlds - our organisations, functions and teams - legible. This is unsurprising as the same forces are at work. Our need and desire to simplify what we see and to extract only the necessary features that help us grasp the "big picture". If Minds Make Societies, then it's reasonable to assume Minds Make Organisations.

I think also few would argue that the failure to understand a complex situation and simplify it unduly can lead to unintended consequences inside an organisation. The tyranny of metrics, for example, is well known and described.

However, I believe there is a key difference between states and organisations, which is how unintended consequences play out. For example, in his book Scott describes the example of scientific forestation and explains how the tremendous improvement in timber yields decreased over 2nd and 3rd generations as the practices used undermined the overall sustainability of the ecological environment. He highlights this as a failure to understand second and third order consequences at the outset.

However, the breadth of a nation state provides many more degrees of freedom to "absorb" the variety of consequences in the long run, whether these are intended or unintended, beneficial or harmful. In the case of scientific forestry the tremendous increase in affordable timber powered many unexpected uses and drove significant societal and economic benefit beyond that originally imagined.

In contrast an organisation typically has less degrees of freedom. Its purpose, mission and scope are more fixed over the time period that the consequences play out. The "variety" - good or bad - will play out in "real time". As a colleague you see and experience second and third order effects often in weeks and months, not the years and decades you do as a citizen.

The art of correct reasoning from incorrectly drawn pictures

So common sense suggests there are three questions we should explore before we seek to make things legible:

• Do we understand the problem we are trying to solve?
• Do we have good evidence that the probability of achieving our intended outcomes outweighs the probability of second and third order effects taking over?
• How will we know if it is working and having the desired effect?

And therein lies the dilemma. States and Organisations are complex systems and it is precisely because they are hard to understand, precisely because we can't see the wood for the trees, precisely because we don't have a good sense of what is going on, that we seek to simplify. If we intuitively and consciously thought in terms of dynamics, interactions, feedback loops and emergence we wouldn't seek a simplified, accessible, static and legible view.

Our response to this dilemma to date has been two-fold. People, teams and organisations are not "instrumented" to help us see and understand the dynamics between them, so we have developed frameworks that make complexity and dynamics legible (e.g. Viable System Models, Cynefin, Mapping). Or we prescribe a way of operating that we believe has a good chance of achieving first order effects and encapsulate the dynamics we seek in frameworks (e.g. SAFe), which we expect can be implemented with limited unintended consequences.

Of course, having done this we then debate them. We ask, is this framework good or bad? Is it right or wrong? Will it work in my organisation or not? But to quote the mathematician Henri Poincare, these questions have no meaning:

"If geometry were an experimental science, it would not be an exact science. It would be subject to continual revision. Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient"

Henri Poincare, 1902

So does this mean we shouldn't try to see like an organisation? Does it mean we should avoid making our organisation legible?

No, not at all. But until a better way comes along - let's call it the instrumented organisation - that helps us as individuals, teams and organisations see and understand better our dynamics and interactions, then we should choose our geometry carefully. We should understand what benefit legibility brings and to whom. And we should be alert to the new dynamics and consequences that emerge. Because unlike geometry, organisational craft IS an experimental science.