I very much liked Barry's rules for consensus, and especially the
closing notion, that agreeing to disagree AND COMMIT NEVERTHELESS was
essential. It's like a good marriage, where you don't always get your way,
yet are respected and listened to and taken into account. Underlying the
willingness to commit anyway, it seems to me, is the trust that a long-term
relationship is involved, and that underlying values are very consonant.
That is, disagreements are "relatively trivial" in the whole scope of
things. Yet these ethical and moral concerns - trust, underlying values,
long-term commitment on the part of both parties - are frequently absent.
In Silicon Valley, commitment is often for the duration of a project, and
after that, to the larger Silicon Valley community, including LOTS of
companies, which flex and flow by interchange of personnel. Thus commitment
to the larger community takes the place of mutual commitment between
individuals and their company at any instant (see Saxenian's description).
This seems fairly straightforward; but then comes the question: how
can individuals be prepared to survive and not feel bereft and abandoned
when companies outsource everything, downsize, etc.? So many industries
lack the growth prospects of Silicon Valley, and thus shifting the burden
of outcomes to employees (as opposed to managers, for example), seems to
result in egregiously dysfunctional insistence by unions at GM's parts
works, for instance, on "job security" and "no work rule changes." Dilemma:
change is needed, in an actively competitive environment; people need some
form of security, and it's manifestly unfair to offload all business risk
onto employees - especially when so many organizational problems are due to
poor managerial decisions. It's tough to see how to manage these apparent
contradictions.
Consensus decision making fits into this, in my view, because
genuine consensus of the sort Barry describes would appear to broaden the
data input into decisions, thus improving managerial decision making. Yet
it would also require trust beyond the ordinary, in these days of
downsizing and outsourcing as "managerial prerogatives." We're back to our
conundrum. Ideas?
I note that Chris Michel's comments fit in here, too: lack of trust
is frequently a symptom of systematic problems - i.e., problems in the
system. If managers don't "walk their talk and talk their walk," this
inconsistency is as subversive of trust, enthusiasm and good problem
solving as the wet=blanket phenomena that Martha and some others have
described. How will we get organizations to change? How will we produce
systemic shifts? Surely we will have to attempt to change individuals to
some degree to achieve the systemic change needed?
Sam
MXJELI@MAIL.WM.EDU
Mariann Jelinek
Richard C. Kraemer Professor of Business
Graduate School of Business,
College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, VA 23185
Tel. (804) 221-2882 FAX: (804) 229-6135
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The only enduring strategic advantage is the ability
to change the rules of the game.
--mxjeli@mail.wm.edu (Mariann Jelinek)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>