Keys to Strategic Organizational Communication

Chapter 2 of Strategic Organizational Communication: In a Global Economy by Charles Conrad and Marshall Scott Poole is the launching point for today’s highly intellectual blog posting.

The chapter starts off by encouraging “systems thinking”. Usually in trying to look at an issue, or resolve a problem, we are encouraged to break things down.  I think of the formula “root cause, resolution, and expected clear date.” We assign a particular incident, a particular person, a particular procedure as the cause, and think adjusting that resolves the issue. The concept of assigning blame. System thinking recognizes that a chain of interconnected events can be the cause, rather than one single item.  Each event could be working correctly, just not successfully together.

Organizations can become like silos in their functions and thinking. My process, my procedures, are paramount, they have to work this way. I cannot do anything without the inputs set to match exactly what I have. And thus in the silo things may seem to work fine. But how the silos interact with each other can create an entirely unsatisfactory outcome, even if each of those separate division, those separate teams, is operating at peak performance. The system view is missing.

Interestingly, this reminds me of the book Dream Thief by Stephen Lawhead. Published in 1983, I think I read it when it first came out, as a gift book from my parents, and I think it was the first Lawhead book I read.  In the book, one of the characters is called a “spark plug.” This character explains to the protagonist, Spence, that each of the scientific specialties keeps on getting narrower and narrower, where the experts know more and more about less and less, and don’t realize the connections between their fields — which is where the “spark plug” comes in.  He is a sort of generalist that sees the “sparks” that can jump between the specialties, to cross-fertilize them and lead to greater discoveries, and prevent the diminishing returns  that the silo effect experts lead to — the narrowing to a point with nowhere further to go.

I think the “spark plug” and the “systems thinking” viewpoint are a part of the same concept.

So what are the main points to know about “systems thinking”?

1. The whole is more than the sum of the parts
2. Cause and effect relationships are complex — simple single causes don’t exist
3. You need to find the right lever to move all the interrelated pieces
4. You need to look at a system, its suprasystems and subsystems to understand a system
5. Systems adapt or perish
6. Systems have history
7. Systems must renew themselves

From this point, the chapter gets interesting in a different way.The next section is on uncovering assumptions, and the authors use an example that I find quite interesting — mostly because of how I don’t completely agree with their example, yet agree with what they are trying to represent.

Dominant values create social myths that most people take for granted as permanent, the authors tell us. The example they give is that of the Anglo-US optimal economic system of laissez-faire capitalism.  This is the idea that the free market works best when government does least. The theory has three assumptions:

1. Futility Thesis — government cannot effectively direct an economy
2. Perversity Thesis — government makes things worse by trying to make things better
3. Jeopardy Thesis — government action creates unintended side effects.

But while this is the ideal, the authors quickly point out that very few areas of the economy fit the strict definition of laissez-faire capitalism. They then assert that “while the model works well in some sectors, in other sectors a mixture of government regulation and free market principles is more effective and efficient than a pure free market, and in still others government is more efficient than the private sector.” Exactly how they come by this, when they have no means of comparison, is beyond me, yet it is stated as unequivocated fact.

They then put forward the idea that there are other capitalistic models that are challenging laissez-faire capitalism, and present the Chinese method of authoritarian capitalism as a significant challenge to laissez-faire.

But where they really get into interesting examples is in the discussion of the 2008-2010 financial meltdowns, which they attribute to relatively deregulated laissez-faire capitalism. As one who was inside the banking industry when the financial meltdowns occurred, I saw the meltdown as a symptom of misdirected regulations. When government tells banks they have to be non-discriminatory by making loans to people who might not be able to repay, and that they will indemnify the banks for making the loans, what are the banks supposed to do but make the loans the government wants. And when it melts down, as was inevitable, the governments blame the banks, rather than themselves, and put more regulations on the banks to prevent them from doing the things their good business sense would have prevented previously, if not for the governments encouragement to make financial institutions support social policy instead of sound economic policy.

Curiously, they discuss social mobility — the ability of those born in lower economic percentiles to move up into higher economic percentiles, and show how that mobility dropped drastically after 2008 — during the time when regulations on the economy increased. But they never tie the increase in regulations to the decrease in mobility. That gets all blamed on the laissez-faire capitalism that is being hobbled by the regulations.

The other example they give that I find curious is that of Alexis de Tocqueville’s book “Democracy in America”. They draw from the book that de Tocqueville found Americans so individualistic that they could barely recognize their common interests to create communities. The only reason the US remained cohesive, de Tocqueville saw, was through the informal nonwork organizations like churches and lodges that created community outside their work environments. I found this interpretation of de Tocqueville’s work quite negative and depressing.

As one who avidly read de Tocqueville’s work on my own, I recall reading the same passages and getting a different conclusion. Americans felt government was best when it did least, because when they saw something that needed doing, they created one of those “informal organizations” to do the job instead of the government, and when it was no longer needed, unlike the government, the organization would wither away, not having taxes to continue a no longer needed bureaucracy. The American sense of community was based on responding individually to needs before them, instead of waiting for governments to do it.

The authors quote sociologist Robert Putnam in saying that the decline in these organizations in the late 20th and early 21st century has created isolation among Americans. They don’t consider that the decline of these organizations has come because government has grown and co-opted the roles of these organizations, teaching Americans to stop being proactively involved in their communities, and “just let the government do it.”

So once again, while I agree with their point that one needs to uncover the underlying assumptions, I find that the authors do so by unconsciously exposing their own dominant values and social myths.