Preparing
for Conversations II with Richard Cross
Organizational
Ethnography
Richard
Cross
Co-Founder MCHGlobal
North Yorkshire, Great Britain
 Introduction
While browsing the
2002 STAR Series Dialogues archives I came across the AOK STAR
Page of Richard Cross, then a Xerox veteran whose career had
followed the path of KM development.
Among the jewels
in his STAR Page were a few paragraphs on Organizational Ethnography
-- big words that describe a simple yet powerful goal -- to understand
work from the worker's perspective and the principles they use
to get work done.
Unfortunately, we
didn't get into ethnography much during Richard's two weeks as
moderator because our members gravitated toward issues of QM
and KM. Richard has a strong background in quality management
as well as knowledge management and the members saw an opportunity
to explore the similarities and dissimilarities of the two disciplines.
Too much time has
elapsed, but the subject of organizational ethnography is still
critical, if not more so.
Richard has left
Xerox, as so many do, and with a partner, established his own
independent consulting practice -- MCHGlobal in Great Britain.
It is good to have Richard, one of the pioneers of KM, back as
a moderator, though he remains a member and occasional contributor.
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Introduction
An organization
development exponent by education, strongly influenced by the
work of Professor Andrew Pettigrew, Richard started his career
with responsibility in Xerox (UK) for leadership development,
running assessment centers for the company. He then moved to
a personnel management role, piloting the use of Psychometric
Testing to professionalize sales recruitment skills.
He then gained international
experience as Human Resource Development Manager covering Africa,
Eastern Europe, and India. As part of the Xerox expansion into
Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall collapsed, Richard initiated
strategic development programs centered around succession planning,
skill building and helping organization and individuals change
in the move from a closed to market economy.
In 1991 he moved
to work in the European corporate headquarter's Quality Office,
responsible for business assessment and strategic benchmarking
where he designed and deployed an internal best practice process
featured in Fortune magazine, as well as making a key
contribution to the winning Xerox application for the first ever
European Quality Award (similar to the Baldridge Award in the
US).
Following this Richard
worked globally with a wide variety of multi-nationals. He conducted
an action research project exporting TQM techniques to China
and Hong Kong. He then progressed to responsibility for Knowledge
Management as part of Xerox Global Services where he specialized
in the use of ethnographic techniques to support technology projects.
On the editorial
board of Inside Knowledge since its inception, Richard
now works independently as co-founder of MCHGlobal.
Richard's core interests
are in helping organisations balance continuity and change, hierarchy
and networks in developing their effectiveness.
Most recently Richard
has completed a major organization intervention, facilitating
a grassroots led project that resulted in the restructure and
reorientation of one of the most knowledge intensive and 'league
of nations type' organizations in the world.
Richard has an eclectic
approach centered on achieving competitive advantage through
people. Currently he is participating in the trialling of the
acclaimed Saville Consulting wave suite and, as guest
contributor to Bioteams,
is exploring how we can learn from nature and real life in helping individuals
and organizations operate successfully in the Knowledge world.
Richard has been trained
in Six Sigma (but prefers not to talk about it) and is an advocate
of the Hoshin Kanri approach to strategic planning.
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Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
After the both heady
and down-to-earth discussion on metrics or 'Storytelling with
Data' as Doug Madgic called it in his introduction, I'd like
to explore how we can build on the previous dialogue through
an appreciation of the 'real world of work' as seen through an
ethnographic and change activist lens. I'd also like to see how
we can collaborate and contribute to KM stepping up to the 2020
challenge.
By this I mean the
survey, mentioned by Doug in his later but I hope not last post , which indicated that knowledge management
offers organisations the greatest potential for productivity
gains over the next 15 years. The report identified five principal
trends promising to contribute most to the reshaping of the world
economy over the next 15 years.
No longer a peripheral
business process, knowledge management is considered as important
as the other four trends identified in the Foresight report:
- Globalization
- Demographics
- Atomization and
- Personalization.
With regard to Knowledge
Management it says
. . . the focus
of management attention will be on the areas of the business,
from innovation to customer service, where personal chemistry
or creative insight matter more than rules and processes. Improving
the productivity of knowledge workers through technology, training
and organisational change will be the major boardroom challenge
of the next 15 years.
Appealing words.
As David Gurteen suggests in the latest Inside Knowledge,
we will no longer have to apologise for using the term Knowledge
Management. Yet, how do we help 'eminent organisations' to paraphrase
Lytton Stracheyn, to appreciate this boardroom challenge and
address the 'realpolitik ' of organisational life sooner rather
than later? How can we ensure they pay as much attention to KM
as they do to Six Sigma? Should we? How can we translate our
insights to overcome organisational inertia and inherent cultural
conservatism.
As a student of
Professor Andrew Pettigrew, formerly at Warwick and Harvard but
now dean at Bath University, I recall his description of change
agents at one particular organisation (Shell, I think) as 'characters
in search of a play'. So have we in KM found our play or are
we authors in search of a stage in, as Goffman might term it
'The Presentation of Ourselves in Everyday Organisation life?'
I have more questions
than answers to the questions above. I'm eclectic in my approach
and my current hot topics are understanding the dynamics of motivation,
talent and preferred culture and how we can learn from nature
via the discipline of 'biosociomimetics' and Bioteams. I fully
endorse Kurt Rieger's view that 'People are the business and
the better we manage people, the better the business; so how
can we help contribute to this aspiration becoming a reality?
So my goal for this
dialogue is to explore what's really happening in the KM field,
how we can use insights from anthropology and build on the last
discussion from a different perspective.
I'm sure that you
have your own perspectives and 'war stories' from around the
organisation campfire. I look forward to a fascinating discussion
and hope to entice some lurkers 'hanging around' in the Knowledge
Work version of 'StreetCorner Society' to participate.
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Organizational
Ethnography Revisited
The press still
abounds with high profile stories of business-transforming IT
projects such as the UK National Health Service with failed business
benefit realisation results. Almost any business manager has
war stories of projects where hard work, hard cash and the best
laid plans of Project Managers have both failed to provide adequate
business solutions. One perspective on this might be that there
are fundamental issues about the very technology itself and its
fit with the social context within which it is used in these
organisations. Over the past 15 years, technology change has
swept across our workplaces. The way we were and how we work
has undergone significant shifts. The promise of ubiquitous computing
has been delivered, but not as expected. If we were to time travel
from a meeting in 1989 into a typical meeting today, we would
face a technological tidal wave of 'futureshock'.
Yet despite the
growth of KM, technology has yet to be tamed, workplaces suffer
from a low-tech equilibrium. An iSociety report, Getting by,
not getting on: Technology in UK workplaces, adopted an ethnographic
approach and provided a candid look at the reality behind ICT
deployments.1 The report reviewed
how technology really works, is used and what people really think
about it. It showed that workplaces are not getting the most
from ICT and how techno-scepticism exists in many boardrooms.
The KM field emphasises the need to understand culture and yet,
paradoxically, deterministic deployment methodologies prevail
in organisations. Similarly, those who buy technology may refer
to the importance of the softer aspects and need for change management,
but rarely do they walk the talk or budget according to these
espoused sentiments. Sellers of technology bid accordingly.
Ethnography's roots
are in anthropology with social scientists observing tribes in
their natural habitat. When applied to organisations, we can
see what people do, not do just what they say they do. We can
appreciate the reality of organisational life in routines and
rituals that are typically developed as workarounds.
At the Palo Alto
research centre of Xerox Lucy Suchman, an anthropologist now
at Lancaster University, was a pioneer in using ethnographic
techniques. She observed some individuals making use of photocopiers
and attempted to understand how they followed (or not) the user
instructions that the machine provided. Looking at a copier in
its natural environment was not something that had previously
occurred to designers. Neither had it occurred to computer designers
to observe a machine in a work environment.
Suchman's studies
contributed to the diagnosis of the frequent, sometimes disastrous
failure of large-scale computer systems that were poorly designed
for the work they were intended for. Within the discipline of
computer-supported work, Suchman's theories became known as 'situated
action.' For the first time, software designers actually had
to visit the shop floor.
The award-winning
Eureka project (described in another paper), based on how Xerox
engineers share knowledge, can also be traced back to this anthropological
heritage and demonstrates the benefits of studying the 'knowledge
ecology' within an organisation, the qualitative real-life work
practices that exist, rather than exclusively concentrating on
quantitative generalisations under the guise of cost-savings
or formal processes.
The goal of organisational
ethnography is to understand work from the workers' perspective
and the principles they use to get work done -- what is called
'practice over process.' We all know that there is a big difference
in what people are supposed to do in their jobs with what they
actually do. Practice over process aims to improve existing practices
by really understanding how work is done. The emphasis here is
on the social dimensions of work and the informal practices and
processes used as opposed to the ways in which formal job specifications,
documented processes and 'perfumed' managerial overviews may
assume that work is done.
Nearly all companies
have at some time failed in the implementation of technology
because the real-life work practice and social side of the organisation
have been underestimated. One notable example is the London Ambulance
Service (LAS) and its attempt to introduce a computer-aided dispatch
system called LASCAD. In the mid-1980s, the LAS decided a new
dispatch system was vital to maintain its three-minute dispatch
standard and 14-minute target for ambulance arrival. The aim
of the new computer-enabled system was to remove the inefficiencies
of the paper-based manual system, and voice-based radio or phone
mobilisation. It would identify and dispatch the most suitable
resource automatically.
When the new system
went live it promptly underwent massive failure at all levels,
including back-up. It was then switched off and manual working
reintroduced. The subsequent enquiry concluded that four years
would pass before a fully operational computer-aided dispatch
could be in place.
So what went wrong
and what can we learn from their mistakes? The formal inquiry
that followed determined that LAS failed to involve the stakeholders
of the system. With the new system, the ambulance staff were
no longer able to decide which ambulance to take or which crews
to assign. The control assistants were under increased pressure
because they entered the data on which the system based its decisions.
Personal contact between Central Ambulance Control staff and
the ambulance crews was eliminated by the move to computer communications.
This deteriorated staff-management relations, convincing the
staff that management was trying to marginalise them.
To be successful,
technologies must always be accommodated within some social context
and must always involve people -- right from the start. Project
managers must always be aware that there is a knowledge element
in even apparently simple tasks that requires collaboration between
humans, most of which will not be documented and are therefore
can be easily overlooked by technology developers.
Quite simply, there
is something very personal about knowledge and about how information
moves around an organisation. Each time knowledge changes hands
or is communicated it mutates and evolves. Any strategy or project
must take into account of this dynamic and understand how information
is shared and grows within a work community. The natural collusions
that occur and the implicit ways of explaining, learning and
understanding must be understood and valued if a project is to
succeed.
To achieve this,
detailed observational studies of work practices are undertaken.
Such an approach emphasising the social and cultural context
of work offers an insight into how work is actually done,
as opposed to the ways in which formal documentation and abstract
or 'perfumed' managerial overviews characterise work processes
or business problems.
Moving to this social
based approach relies on the people who are actually engaged
in the practice to interact with as opposed to be subject to
the rationality, 'control' and assumptions of an implementation
team, whilst the concept of organisational ethnography may seem
a bit 'blue-sky' to business persons who likes to think of themselves
as hard-nosed and focused on the bottom line. Technology projects
that can respond to the informal and the implicit may help foster
trust and remove a great deal of the burden and barriers to deploying
technology.
1Nathan,
M., Carpenter, G. Roberts, S., Ferguson, L. & Knox, H., Getting
by, not getting on: Technology in UK Workplaces (The Work
Foundation, 2003).
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