“Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates”, 2019-06-26 (; backlinks; similar):
This paper examines how employees become simultaneously empowered and alienated by detailed, holistic knowledge of the actual operations of their organization, drawing on an inductive analysis of the experiences of employees working on organizational change teams. As employees build and scrutinize process maps of their organization, they develop a new comprehension of the structure and operation of their organization. What they had perceived as purposively designed, relatively stable, and largely external is revealed to be continuously produced through social interaction. I trace how this altered comprehension of the organization’s functioning and logic changes employees’ orientation to and place within the organization. Their central roles are revealed as less efficacious than imagined and, in fact, as reproducing the organization’s inefficiencies. Alienated from their central operational roles, they voluntarily move to peripheral change roles from which they feel empowered to pursue organization-wide change. The paper offers two contributions. First, it identifies a new means through which central actors may become disembedded, that is, detailed comprehensive knowledge of the logic and operations of the surrounding social system. Second, the paper problematizes established insights about the relationship between social position and challenges to the status quo. Rather than a peripheral social location creating a desire to challenge the status quo, a desire to challenge the status quo may encourage central actors to choose a peripheral social location.
…Some held out hope that one or two people at the top knew of these design and operation issues; however, they were often disabused of this optimism. For example, a manager walked the CEO through the map, presenting him with a view he had never seen before and illustrating for him the lack of design and the disconnect between strategy and operations. The CEO, after being walked through the map, sat down, put his head on the table, and said, “This is even more fucked up than I imagined.” The CEO revealed that not only was the operation of his organization out of his control but that his grasp on it was imaginary.
[See HBR popularization: “Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization?”, 2019.:
But as the projects ended and the teams disbanded, a puzzle emerged. Some team members returned, as intended by senior management, to their prior roles and careers in the organization. Some, however, chose to leave these careers entirely, abandoning what had been to that point successful and satisfying work to take on organizational change roles elsewhere. Many took new jobs with responsibility for organizational development, Six Sigma, total quality management (TQM), business process re-engineering (BPR), or lean projects. Others assumed temporary contract roles to manage BPR project teams within their own or other organizations.
…Despite being experienced managers, what they learned was eye-opening. One explained that “it was like the sun rose for the first time…I saw the bigger picture.” They had never seen the pieces—the jobs, technologies, tools, and routines—connected in one place, and they realized that their prior view was narrow and fractured. A team member acknowledged, “I only thought of things in the context of my span of control.”…The maps of the organization generated by the project teams also showed that their organizations often lacked a purposeful, integrated design that was centrally monitored and managed. There may originally have been such a design, but as the organization grew, adapted to changing markets, brought on new leadership, added or subtracted divisions, and so on, this animating vision was lost. The original design had been eroded, patched, and overgrown with alternative plans. A manager explained, “Everything I see around here was developed because of specific issues that popped up, and it was all done ad hoc and added onto each other. It certainly wasn’t engineered.” Another manager described how local, off-the-cuff action had contributed to the problems observed at the organizational level:
“They see problems, and the general approach, the human approach, is to try and fix them…Functions have tried to put band-aids on every issue that comes up. It sounds good, but when they are layered one on top of the other they start to choke the organization. But they don’t see that because they are only seeing their own thing.”
Finally, analyzing a particular work process, another manager explained that she had been “assuming that somebody did this [the process] on purpose. And it wasn’t done on purpose. It was just a series of random events that somehow came together.”]