Something for the weekend, sir?: Difference between revisions

Something for the weekend, sir? (view source)

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 <small>{{quote|'''How many is too many?''' <br>Around five direct reports seems to be the optimum number, according to Mark and Alison, although there are some scenarios where up to nine can work.<br>When it comes to the senior team in a company, however, too many people reporting directly to the owner manager can really hold the business back. Alison recalls working with someone who had 13 people reporting directly to her. “She had to do 13 [[Performance appraisal|appraisals]] at the end of every year!” she says. “It simply wasn’t an effective use of her time.”}}</small>
-But you can’t encode mandatory small teams ''and'' a flat management structure. There is a mathematical relationship between them: the smaller the average team, the more management layers there must be.
+Witness the formalist disposition, when the most significant thing you can do is carry out a formal process. The ethos is this: look after the form and the substance will look after itself full stop take care of the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. But this is the reverse colon this is to look after the pounds and assume the pennies will take care of themselves.
-In any case this is largely to miss [[The map and the territory|the map for the territory]]. An organisation chart is a static map of the firm configured in the abstract, in theory, ''before it does anything''.  [[Org chart]]s are the plan you have ''before you get punched in the mouth''. Formal reporting lines are often the most sclerotic, rusty and ''resented'' interaction channels in the organisation. Communications up and down them — usually strained — are at best responsive to commercial imperatives, and derivative of them: the firm’s business is done only when its personnel communicate with those who are ''not'' in their immediate hierarchy. Focussing on reporting lines misses the organisations real venal network: lateral communications that ''cross'' the organisation’s internal and external boundaries: these are the communications that employees ''must'' make — between internal specialists in different departments and with the firm’s clients and external suppliers — to get their job done and move the organisation along. Note: it is ''in'' these interactions, themselves that things happen: it is here that tensions manifest themselves, problems emerge and opportunities arise, and that these things are resolved. It is not the drill, but the hole in the wall.
+In any case you can’t encode mandatory small teams ''and'' a flat structure. There is a mathematical relationship between them: the smaller the average team, the more management layers there must be.
+And besides, this is to miss [[The map and the territory|the map for the territory]]. An organisation chart is a static map of the firm configured in the abstract, in theory, ''before it does anything''.  This is how the machine functions when it is idling. [[Org chart]]s are the plan you have ''before you get punched in the mouth''. Formal reporting lines are often the most sclerotic, rusty and ''resented'' interaction channels in the organisation. Communications up and down them — usually reluctant, strained, for the sake of it — are at best responsive to commercial imperatives, and derivative of them: the firm’s business is done only when the gears are engaged, and that means its personnel communicate with those who are ''not'' in their immediate hierarchy.  The business unit is a cog: what matters is the effect a cog has when it is engaged.
+But as the complicatedness of our organisations has grown we have developed more and more internal engines which engage not with the outside world but with each other in in heat generating, vibrating, noise emitting, wasteful energy consumption. Of course one needs compliance but when NZ compliance needs its own chief operating officers and and its own internal audit it drift away from optimal efficiency. I know of one internal audit department that has its own internal auditor. Who audits ''that'' function? We approach an infinite regression. But the buck must stop somewhere.
+You can understand the wish to focus on reporting lines — formal organistional structure — because it can be easily seen. It is is legible. It is measurable. Auditable. But it misses the organisation’s real arterial network: lateral communications that ''cross'' the organisation’s internal and external boundaries: these are the communications that employees ''must'' make — between internal specialists in different departments and with the firm’s clients and external suppliers — to get their job done and move the organisation along. Note: it is ''in'' these interactions, themselves that things happen: it is here that tensions manifest themselves, problems emerge and opportunities arise, and that these things are resolved. It is not the drill, but the hole in the wall.
+These are informal interactions. They are not well documented, and from above, not well understood. They are hard to see. They are not legible. Yep everyone who has worked in a large organisation knows that there are a small number of key people, usually not in significant formal roles, who who get things done. They know histories, they have networks, they understand procedures and and, more importantly, workarounds. These are the ad hoc mechanics that keep the the superstructure on the road.
 This map of interactions, which is not a top-down, God’s-eye view cascade of authority, but a point-to-point multi-nodal network, is a far richer organisation chart.Yet no firm I know of even considers it. Yet, with data analytics, it would not even be hard to do: Log the firm’s communication records for data to see where those communications go: what is the informal structure of the firm? Who are the nodes?