I've been around new ways of working since the mid 90s, researching systems that support new working practices, and working with senior executives struggling to create the conditions for new working practices to emerge.

Now is not then. Even so, I think there are first principles and concepts that remain highly relevant for the world we are moving into - interpreted and applied for operating conditions that prevail now.

The sources in this deck barely scratch the surface.

Karl Weick is a social psychologist. His classic Social Psychology of Organising is a foundation text that continues to influence academics and practitioners.

Weick quotes a man called Peter Vaill, commenting that:

"art is the attempt to wrest coherence and meaning out of more reality than we ordinarily deal with."

Weick goes on to say:

"Organisational theorists bite off too little, too precisely, and we've tried to encourage them to tackle bigger slices of reality.

And if poetry, appreciation and the artistry of inquiry need to be coupled with science to produce those bigger bites, so be it."

Denison traces the evolution of process-based approaches to work design beginning with lean's focus on efficiency, progressing through time away from this narrow focus to creating value

He says that process perspectives "redefine organizations themselves as a collection of processes that create value."

He was already then observing that there are many different ways to create value and competitive advantage through mobilising, influencing and managing relationships among partner organisations to create value networks.

In my eyes, this far-sighted paper echoes Weick's focus on dynamic relationships as the source of value creation.

Partnerships and alliances among organisations are increasingly prevalent. This means that organisations are beginning to "look and behave like social networks."

This comes from an article, 'Of Whales and Suckerfish’ - unfortunately no longer available - previously at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/business/peopleready/resources/economist.mspx.

The article argues that a new type of job therefore emerges, in managing networks of external relationships.

Persuading, influencing, negotiating and dialogue becomes core skills.

Many themes emerge from relationship and interactions among people and organisations.

Where to start?

Power, culture, complexity, diversity, conflict, collaboration, and shared knowledge learning are just a few of these themes.

The research literatures on each are enormous. The few sources listed for each theme are just for illustration.

French and Raven's work on the bases of social power is a core contribution to the foundation literature. This is is useful summary:

http://www.sagepub.com/northouse6e/study/materials/reference/reference1.4.p...

The Baundura quote on the slide is from:

Bandura, A. 1999. ‘Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities’.
Personality and Social Psychology Review , 3, 193–209. Available at:

http://www.sociology.uiowa.edu/nsfworkshop/journalarticleresources/bandura_...

The US academic, Bob Sutton agrees, saying that even normally well-behaved and sensitive people can turn
nasty given even small amounts of power.

He cites ‘a huge body of research’ showing that once people are put in positions of power, they become more self-centred, ignore how less powerful people react to their behaviour, and treat others as a means of getting what they want.

Here he is on YouTube talking about 'Power poisoning':

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDBWg9e_cZk

Sutton, R. 2007. The No-asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t. London: Sphere.

Hofstede, G. 1999. ‘The cultural relativity of organisational practices and theories’, in Managing Organisations: Text Readings & Cases, ed. R.H. Rosenfeld and D.C. Wilson. 2nd edn, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 466–80.

Schein, E.H. 1996. ‘Culture: The missing concept in organisation studies’. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(2) 229–40.

Schein, E.H. 2009. The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. 2nd edn, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Trompenaars, F. and Hampden-Turner, C. 1997. Riding the Waves of Corporate Culture. 2nd edn, London: Nicholas Brealey.

According to Hirsch and colleagues, inter-organisational collaboration can be an emotional roller-coaster.

They need to be able to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, plus have inter-personal and political skills to mediate among conflicting perspectives and agendas.

Hirsch, W., Garrow, V. and Holbeche, L. 2005. Supporting Collaborative Working in Business Alliances and Partnerships. Horsham: Roffey Park Institute.

And Morten Hansen says that collaboration within organisations collaboration rarely happens naturally because of barriers that get put in the way, often unintentionally.

This leads him to ask: ‘How do
we cultivate collaboration in the right way so that we achieve the great things
that are not possible when we are divided?’

Find out more in:

Hansen, M. 2009.Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Manual Castells. 2004. ‘Informationalism, networks, and the network society: a
theoretical blueprint’, in The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective, ed.
M. Castells. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Dr Westley maintains that constructive conflict is a critical element in surfacing
knowledge - learning how to engage with conflict is crucial.

She said we had to move beyond traditional discipline based knowledge to transgressive, cross-disciplinary, collaborative and reflexive knowledge creation.

The skills required to engage in new knowledge include deep knowledge, risk-taking, making judgements, pattern discernment, interpersonal
skills, negotiation, active listening and conflict management.

Westley, F., Zimmerman, B. and Quinn Patton, M. 2007. Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

2006, Health in an Unequal World. The Lancet, Vol 368 December 9.

http://www.who.int/social_determinants/publications/health_in_an_unequal_wo...

CIPD 2008. Smart Working: How Smart is UK PLC? Findings from Organisational Practice.

http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/corpstrtgy/general/_smrtwrkgd.htm

CIPD 2008. Smart Working: The Impact of Work Organisation and Job Design.

http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/64A02358-8993-4185-BEEB-9812A9175383/0/s...

Tamkin, P., Cowling, M. and Hunt, W. 2008. People and the Bottom Line. Institute
for Employment Studies.

http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/corporate/migratedd/publications/d/diu...

Guest, D. 2006. ‘Smarter ways of working: The benefits of and barriers to adoption of high-performance working’. SSDA Catalyst.

http://www.ukces.org.uk/assets/bispartners/ukces/docs/
publications/ssdaarchive/ssda-catalyst-issue-3-smarter-ways-of-working.pdf

Towers Perrin 2007. Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior
Business Performance - I heard two of the researchers present initial findings of this large-scale survey (86,000 people in 18 countries).

They said that 'whole systems of learning and leadership' were linked to engagement.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot - referenced earlier in Autonomy - particularly stresses the health effects of community:

His research suggests that being part of social networks leads to the accumulation of social capital (affirmation of status, support and opportunities from connections) - and that this is important for health and well-being.

Our need to belong to informal communities and social networks is profound. How many business leaders understand that?

This section of the deck points to insights from past thinkers that I think constitute first principles that underpin agile system design for distributed autonomy and capability?

By 'first principles', what I mean is that is they have universal application no matter what the context is.

Of course interpreted and applied for unique contexts.

This is important - information systems, rewards systems and performance environments can be analysed and designed.

These things set the conditions for what people to together.

Our interactions are complex and emerge in a probabilistic way from the performance conditions as designed by designers and experienced by people who use the designed systems.

http://www.moderntimesworkplace.com/archives/ericsess/sessvol3/Ackoffp417.o...

Redesigning the Future: Systems Approach to Societal Problems. 1974

http://www.amazon.com/Redesigning-Future-Approach-Societal-Problems/dp/0471...

Stacey says that every organisation possesses a shadow system of unofficial and
spontaneous relationships among people, who are engaged in self-determined actions directed towards self-seeking objectives that can support or sabotagethe legitimate system.

Stacey, R.D. 1996. Complexity and Creativity in Organisations. San Francisco, CA:
Berrett-Koehler

If shadow systems can be positively influenced through enabling performance environments ...

What principles might underpin their design?

What structures enable distributed autonomy, capability and accountability?

See slide summarising Beer on structuring for distributed autonomy through interlinked and nested 'viable systems.

What 'rules' to these social systems follow?

See slide on Ashby's rule (law) for distributing capability

See Cherns' rules (principles) for distributing autonomy - how to enable self-determined action and decision-making

See slide on Beer's rules (management functions) for distributing autonomy - how to enable self-determined action, decision-making and coordinating.

(Jackson 1986, Espejo 1989, Espejo et al. 1996).

How can all these social systems possibly act in a self-determined, autonomous way?

We'll start with Ashby's rule - his Law of Requisite Variety

This means that capabilities within a social system have to be up to the task of dealing with the complexity it faces.

Skills have to be sufficient and appropriate

The full range of skills and capabilities within all interlinked systems must be mobilised.

This is 'all brains on deck'. All eyes need to be on the lookout, all ears listening and everyone know what to do without being told.

Otherwise the top-level system - a business for example - gets overwhelmed.

Albert Cherns, who proposed a Cherns proposed a set of principles that allow people to continually adapt systems as circumstances change.

Here just a few of his principles:

•Specify as little as possible – his principle of minimum critical specification - say what needs to be done, let people decide how best to do it.

•Make performance information and support available to those on the spot, where the action is happening and problems need solving.

•Draw boundaries so that they facilitate learning, information-sharing and knowledge-sharing.

See Cherns, The Principles of SocioTechnical Design available at:

http://hum.sagepub.com/content/29/8/783.full.pdf+html

This is not the language Beer uses but essentially each system:

1. Looks inwards to monitor operations - what does the system do?

2. Looks outwards to the environment for opportunities and threats.

3. Control and coordination work together with other viable systems it interacts with - control is a residual role that deals with anything coordination cannot deal with.

4. Policy - Control and the outward-looking role feed internal and external information to policy. Does policy need to adapt?

Multiple functions can be allocated to one person - how each system interprets and applies each management function is up to them.

This is consistent with Cherns' principle of 'minimum critical specification.'

In my mind, this is in a similar vein to Ghoshal - in that it is a call to think critically.

Whereas Ghoshal was taking a pop at the arrogance and misplaced certainties of business schools, Marchington takes aim at published accounts in management journals of 'successful' accounts of new employment practices. Failure is rarely reported.

He also singles out managers who set a change in motion, get promoted and then abandon the change project. He talks about impression management.

I think this is a huge problem on the internet - the pretense of knowledge and impression management are rife. Learn to question who's telling you what and why.

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=879566

Pettigrew, A.M. and Fenton, E.M. 2000. The Innovating Organisation. London:
Sage.

Bandura, A. 1982. ‘Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency’. AmericanPsychologist [online], 37(2), 122–47. Available at: http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1982AP.pdf

"Perceived self-efficacy is concerned with judgements of how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations."

Bandura, A. 1999. ‘Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities’.

Personality and Social Psychology Review [online], 3, 193–209. Available at:

http://www.sociology.uiowa.edu/nsfworkshop/journalarticleresources/bandura_...

Bandura, A. 1978. ‘The self system in reciprocal determinism’. American Psychologist, 33(4), 344–58. Available at:

http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/Bandura1978AP.pdf

My take-away from the concept of 'reciprocal determinism' is the hypothesis / belief that people are not prisoners of their work environments - they shape and are shaped by them.

Bandura's thinking (my reading of it) is consistent with Ralph Stacey's shadow systems - this is where innovation and change takes place.

Senge, P.M. 1993. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. London: Century Business.

Some might consider this text to be old hat now but I think it has new significance as connected learning extends beyond 'the organisation' - as people gather in co-working spaces and cafes away from the office, and in online 'creation spaces' to learn and experiment together.

'Creation spaces' attributed to:

Hagel, J., Seely-Brown, J. and Davison, L. 2010. Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. New York: Basic Books

Staying with the thought that 'the learning organisation' is extending beyond physical walls and institutional boundaries - the many workplaces we use - home, office, cafes, co-working spaces - must be appropriate to our needs.

Many of us now work from multiple places:

See the slide on Frank Duffy's article, Lumbering to Extinction in the Digital Age

Combined with another trend, that knowledge is increasingly abstract, conceptual and distributed - we have to work with others to get partially-formed ideas out of our heads.

See the slide on Judith Heerwagen's article on 'distributed cognition'

This in turn means that the physical spaces and places we use have to support our learning conversations.

See the slide about Harrison and Dourish on how communities of users confer a sense of place on physical workspaces.

Frank Duffy, 2008. Lumbering to Extinction in the Digital Age. Available at:

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/images/content/5/5/553169/29-Duffy.pdf

Heerwagen’s insight strongly implies that the physical workplace has a key role to play:

1. In giving us congenial spaces where we can have shared conversations to bring thoughts out of our heads;

2. And in providing furniture and infrastructure where we can record and display the outcomes of our shared thoughts.

Heerwagen, J.H. 2004. ‘Does your office feel like a zoo?’

Available at:
http://www.creativityatwork.com/articlesContent/May04Heerwagen.html

Heerwagen, J.H., Kampschroer, K., Powell, K.M. and Loftness, V. 2004 ‘Collaborative knowledge work environments’. Building Research & Information, 32(6), 510–28.

Harrison, S. and Dourish, P. 1996. ‘Re-place-ing space: The roles of place and space in collaborative systems’. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Rank
Xerox Research Centre, Cambridge Lab (EuroPARC)

Available at:
http://www.dourish.com/publications/1996/cscw96-place.pdf

Stowe Boyd talks about "sharpening our own shovels" to describe taking control of our own destinies - taking responsibility for developing our own skills and capabilities.

http://stoweboyd.com/post/82703837968/socialogy-interview-anne-marie-mcewan