Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization?
How much do you know about the end-to-end operations of your organization? If you looked closely, would you see a deliberate strategy or the results of years and years of patches, workarounds, political truces, and shadow systems? Now imagine you had carte blanche to clean it up — redesign operations to be more efficient, more effective, more focused on getting things done. Would this experience change how you see your current efforts and responsibilities? According to research, it might: A study of six project teams tasked with redesigning their organization’s operations found that many ended up disillusioned with the patchwork systems they saw. Further, almost half of the participants left their established careers as managers, feeling as though they couldn’t enact meaningful change in their roles.
How much do you know about the end-to-end operations of your organization? The communication channels? The decision-making processes? The handoffs and coordination? The political walls? If you looked closely, would you see a deliberate strategy or the results of years and years of patches, workarounds, political truces, and shadow systems?
Now imagine you had carte blanche to clean it up — redesign operations to be more efficient, more effective, more focused on getting things done. Would this experience change how you see your current efforts and responsibilities? And what might happen to your motivation when you see your job in the context of this large, complex machine that needs a good redesign?
These questions emerged from a study I conducted of six project teams tasked with redesigning their organization’s operations. Each team’s assignment was to create a new operational model intended to radically alter the everyday routines of the organization. Once they completed the assignment, everyone was expected to return to their regular jobs.
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.
Given that team members were established, successful professionals who could have returned to their jobs, or accepted attractive lateral transfers or promotions, these post-project role choices were surprising. They took people off their relatively stable career paths in line roles and onto new, often less stable assignments in staff roles.
Understanding these post-project role choices became the focus of my study. As I analyzed managers’ accounts of their decision to move from central line roles to peripheral staff roles, I found that their accounts revolved around a new sense of agency or possibilities for real change. In particular, they downgraded the contributions they had made and could make from central managerial roles and came to see peripheral roles, in which they stood apart from the complex system that required redesign, as a place from which they could add more fundamental and long-term value to the organization.
This finding is important for two reasons. One, because it challenges an established idea about who is most likely to push for significant change in organizations. The prevailing wisdom has been that centrally located employees — those high in the hierarchy and close to the core operations — are less likely to challenge the status quo compared to employees located on the periphery. That’s largely because employees on the periphery have more to gain and less to lose from radical organizational change. This research shows that, when given the opportunity, centrally located employees may also be likely to push for change – but that, in doing so, they may also see their former roles as less important and useful as they once thought. This suggests that organizations may want to be more proactive in reintegrating line managers who work on organizational redesign assignments if they want to retain them.
Two, and more importantly, it shows that dedicated, high-achieving employees largely assume the system in which they work will transform their day-to-day tasks into larger, long-term gains — that their short-term work is valuable for the whole organization. If employees see this is actually not the case, it may be difficult for them to return to their work in this system at all.
To conduct this research, I analyzed activities of six project teams in five organizations. These teams were made up of 52 people total (48 of whom participated in the study) tasked with projects like redesigning a major product production, customer service, or claims processing process. Four of these organizations were Fortune 500 companies in the natural resources, high technology, durable products, and consumer goods sectors. The fifth was a midsize regional insurance company. To maintain confidentiality, I don’t describe the contents of the projects themselves.
Because the teams had considerable responsibility, project team leaders selected employees carefully, generally using three main criteria. First, team leaders selected top performers — “the best and the brightest” as one team leader explained. Second, they wanted employees with credibility and attitude: “someone who is a healthy skeptic, meaning that they question things until they are convinced that they make sense and usually those kinds of people are vocal.” Third, team leaders selected employees who had experience and expertise related to the work being redesigned. Securing the participation of these employees required extensive negotiations with their superiors.
Aside from these traits, the selected employees were well established in terms of hierarchical position, educational attainment, and organizational tenure. They were primarily white-collar workers; more than half held managerial or director-level positions. Across the teams there were about equal numbers of women and men. Tenure averaged about 14 years across all team members.
I collected my data via interviews and observations. I also analyzed documentation that the teams created, including team activities, goals, project plans, data, and team members’ reflections. Some of the most important pieces of documentation were schematics or maps of all the activities and resources that contributed to producing a good or service: What were the work activities? Who did the work? What interactions and hand-offs occurred? What information and tools were used? How long did each work activity take? What happened when errors were found? To collect this information, the participants traced the entire string of activities involved in building a product, processing a claim, or attracting and retaining a client. They also watched other employees work or spoke with them about their work.
Finally, to generate context for the team members’ experiences, I also interviewed the executive sponsors, members of the steering committee, or the project leader.
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.”
This lack of perspective is quite common, for three reasons. One, as we do our jobs and build our careers, we pay limited attention to how the organizations we work in are designed and operated as a system. Instead, we mostly focus on our day-to-day work, interacting primarily with the people needed to get that work done. Two, organizations do not willingly lend themselves to being analyzed. This is particularly true in large, complex organizations where the division of labor, functional boundaries, and centralized authority generate partial and myopic views. Finally, what we know about systems in which we work is very different from what we know about working within these systems. We may be skilled at executing in a particular role without being aware of how the organization is shaping and being shaped by what we do.
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.”
Ultimately, the managers realized that what they had previously attributed to the direction and control of centralized, bureaucratic forces was actually the aggregation of the distributed work and uncoordinated decisions of people dispersed throughout the organization. Everyone was working on the part of the organization they were familiar with, assuming that another set of people were attending to the larger picture, coordinating the larger system to achieve goals and keeping the organization operating. Except no one was actually looking at how people’s work was connecting across the organization day-to-day.
This new perspective on the design and operation of their organization was described by the participants as “a turning point”; some went so far as to call it an “epiphany.” It revealed two things: that there were many opportunities to improve the organization, but also that working within the current design as managers with line responsibilities might be a waste of their efforts. Overall, it changed their evaluation of where — in which roles — they could best improve the organization.
On the first insight concerning heretofore unrecognized opportunities for change, they now came to understand their organizations as continuously operating and changing with few design constraints and limited direction. This new understanding produced among the team members a sense of efficacy and commitment to consciously create an efficient structure to coordinate work. This sense of potential focused them on, as one explained, “inventing the board and not just playing the game . . . [seeing] what’s really out there and not arguing too much for the limitations that maybe aren’t so real.” They expressed a desire to move from participating in the system to designing a new system, taking advantage of their numerous insights to improve the organization.
One team member realized how much his perspective had changed through an interaction with colleagues about changing a particularly entrenched way of doing things: “They said ‘Well, you can’t.’ I said, ‘Why can’t we? … We can do anything we want. We made it up. We’ll make it up some more.’” Where his colleagues saw routine as rigidity and a lack of possibility, he saw a time-bound fabrication — made up in a different era and adjusted over time — and one that they could improve on and reinvent. Another person suggested that organizational boundaries become so familiar that we forget that we created them:
“So what are we doing? We are really filling customer orders. However, we have it broken down into smaller pieces, and we give each one of those pieces to someone we are calling a department manager. These structures [departments] that we put in place sometime in the past have become real in peoples’ minds, and we think there is a difference between someone who works in department A and someone who works in department B.”
When they reconsidered these features (boundaries, roles, reporting relations, work flows) as emergent, contingent, and mutable — and therefore as inviting change rather than constraining it — they found that they could look at their organizations in unfettered ways and imagine greater possibilities for change.
At the same time, as they felt a sense of empowerment about changing the organization, they felt a sense of alienation about returning to their central roles. “You really start understanding all of the waste and all of the redundancy and all of the people who are employed as what I call intervention resources,” one person told us. “The process doesn’t work, so you have to bone it up by putting people in to intervene in the process to hold it together. So it is like glue. So I would look around [the company], and I would see all these walking glue sticks, and it was just absolutely depressing and frustrating at the same time.”
It was also disheartening to think about how the organization’s design discounted the effort they and others put into their job and meeting targets. One of the managers in my study explained it this way:
“If you asked just about anybody in the organization how much of the work they do all day is value added, they would tell you some very, very high number. And in actuality it is usually a very small number…”
After such analyses, team members could not look at existing roles and occupants in the same way. They also pointed to their own prior work as creating the problems they had observed on the map. “I was responsible for so much of what was screwed up on that wall. I created it,” one person lamented. “I had made my little piece of the world better, but when I looked at it from the big picture … I had spent my entire 10 years in that part of the business, and it was pretty ugly. And I was responsible for a whole bunch of that.”
Returning to their job and career meant returning to the belly of this beast — the organization, being limited to local, small-scale change. A manager who left the organization to continue to work in an organizational change role explained what this felt like:
“I could have stayed, but there were so many things that we discovered — I personally discovered, and the team discovered — during our process journey, that I could not get back into the mold of status quo and small incremental improvement, and don’t rock the boat, and don’t make waves, just plug away, and check the boxes as you go.”
In the end, a slight majority of the employees returned to their role to continue their career (25 cases). They either were promoted (7 cases), moved laterally (8 cases), or returned to their jobs (10 cases). However, 23 chose organizational change roles. Some moved into permanent roles located in organizational change, organizational development, or human resources departments (13 cases), and the rest found temporary or contract roles that allowed them to continue working on restructuring projects intended to radically transform bureaucratic organizations (10 cases). Interestingly, only half of the projects the teams originally worked on moved toward wider implementation in their organizations, frustrating those who participated.
This study suggests that when companies undertake organizational change efforts, they should consider not only the implications for the organization, but also for the people tasked to do the work. Further, it highlights just how infrequently we recognize how poorly designed and managed many of our organizations really are. Not acknowledging the dysfunction of existing routines protects us from seeing how much of our work is not actually adding value, something that may lead simply to unsatisfying work, no less to larger questions about the nature of organizational design similar to those asked by the managers in my study. Knowledge of the systems we work in can be a source of power, yes. But when you realize you can’t affect the big changes your organization needs, it can also be a source of alienation.
Ruthanne Huising is an ethnographer of work and organizations. She received her PhD from MIT Sloan School of Management. She is a professor at emlyon business school in Lyon, France.
Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization?
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