Template:M intro design org chart: Difference between revisions

[[File:Desirelines.jpg|300px|thumb|right|[[Desire lines]], yesterday. {{copyright|2014}} Steve Bates]]We should not underestimate the importance of the “want” in that calculus, by the way: there is always a choice ''whom'' to call to progress a given task. [[All other things being equal]], we choose those who we have found to be helpful, co-operative and imaginative over those who tend to be defensive, hostile, boring or stupid. It is reflexive: “no good deed goes unpunished”: over time, popular staff field more calls, get more experience, build better networks and give better outcomes: “want” converges with “need”. ''Lesson: if you want to get ahead, don’t be a dork.''

===What management sees is all there is===

Management is obliged to focus on this [[formal]], static structure, made flesh in reporting lines, because ''that is all it sees''.  Consider an imaginary employee: [[Dan Grade]].<ref>Readers may wonder whether the JC had someone in mind when drawing this pen sketch. He did. If you think it might be you, you are almost certainly wrong, because it would never occur to Dan that he was this important. That is what is so good about him. </ref>

''Dan is an ED in the risk team. He is an agreeable chap: he handles anything from dumb questions to tricky escalations with equanimity. He’s runs a tight ship during his twenty-five years in organisation building a trove of [[institutional knowledge]] and personal capital which he applies deftly to manage risk, tamp down flare-ups, calm intemperate traders and head off incipient [[snafus]], patiently educating generations of grads, juniors and his own line management in the mystical ways of sound of risk management, while maintaining a heroic sense of composure, a superhuman tolerance for [[Tedium|tedium]], time wasting and the petty initiatives of [[middle management]].  

''Dan does all this so well that he rarely comes to the attention of anyone important. No news is good news. From the Eagle’s Nest, he’s just tiny, fungible node in the thickets of branches fanning out across the valleys and plains of the org chart chart below. Only his reporting line and salary is visible from the executive suite. They can count and optimise the [[spans and layers]] of which he is part, and attribute to them the profits and losses of the organisation even if, in practice, they don’t map awfully well, but they have no clue as to what Dan does to move the organisation on.  

''Closer at hand, there are hundreds people — all of them indistinguishable nodes on the org chart, of course — who know the place would fall apart without people like Dan.}}

Now this is not to suggest that there are ''no'' meaningful communications between line manager and direct report: that would be absurd. If they are both in the office, they will be ''constantly'' be in contact — one more reason [[working from home]] is not the [[paradigm|paradigm shift]] some would like to believe — relaying important information to each other more or less in real time. But this, too, will be an ''informal'' dialogue: unminuted, off-the-record, oral, instantly evaporating, plausibly deniable and, ''until formalised'', entirely beyond management’s purview.  

Consider what it takes to formalise that live dialogue into “management information”: firstly, it must be filtered to weed out the usual interpersonal pleasantries, low-level exchanges about the technical details various projects; updates about the [[BAU]]. That leaves the revenue and risk items, the latter being the usual hitches, [[snafu]]s, market dislocations and brewing ructions with clients and counterparties that is the basic ''raison d’être'' of a risk department. Here, the key objective of any report is to get this information to the boss P.D.Q. ''so she isn’t blindsided by someone further up the chain''. If someone outside your chain of command knows about an unfolding problem, you best make damn sure your manager knows it, so she can tell ''her'' manager about it, and so on, up the chain. But all this, to reiterate, is still informal, off-grid communication.

By the time an unfolding “situation” makes it into the written record, it has been euphemised, contextualised, narratised and put into an absolving passive that will give little hint of the potential enormity of the problem, whilst still allowing scope to claim “I did tell you” should the problem reach its potential.

Thus, formal communications along the official chain of command are as likely to mislead management into a state of complacency as they are to alert it to a real problem. This was more or less the tale of the [[Credit Suisse]] losses on [[Archegos]].