COMMUNICATION IN HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATIONS



COMMUNICATION IN HIERARCHICAL ORGANIZATIONS

Brigitte Jordan and Friends[1]

Last edit: 01.11.06

This is a draft. Comments welcome to

Brigitte Jordan

Consulting Corporate Anthropologist

Jordan@

I. INTRODUCTION

What Is The Issue Here?

No organization would exist if its members were unable to communicate. Communicating effectively, appropriately, and meaningfully, however, is difficult. People often assume that communication is simply transferring information from one person to another. They also assume that those for whom the information is intended actually “get it” -- that is, impute the same meaning to the message as the sender. But communicating is more than just transferring information – it is also engaging with each other and actually creating meaning together in a process of negotiation, adaptation, and adoption. It may be more productive to think about communication as mutual engagement in meaning-making than with the old transfer of information model. In this report we talk about the standard transfer model and the newer engagement model of communication; we also talk about what we saw when we observed and participated in typical communications in your company and then make some suggestions about how the engagement model could be applied to the systemic issues you are trying to solve.

Why Should You Care About Communication?

Ask almost anybody at your company what the primary barrier to good work is and they’ll say “communication.” In fact, communication has become “one of those world hunger things," something that’s too scary to even try to fix because it seems just too big and complicated. Using new technologies like email, voicemail, and phone conferencing to strengthen communication has helped some, but even as new technologies ease certain kinds of problems they create new ones. Meanwhile, the bigger problems associated with communication seem to linger and even to increase as the organization grows in size and complexity.

When solutions have been seriously considered without effect, sometimes what is needed is to re-examine the issue and to ask different kinds of questions. As your company grows, you will face increasingly intractable problems if your communication issues don’t get resolved. But fixing those problems will require breaking your current paradigm – rethinking what communication means and how people really communicate.

Communication is central to the functioning of any organization. Generating and sustaining change is dependent on it. To continue to respond to the environment in which you operate -- a rapidly changing environment that demands flexibility and continuous learning -- it is crucial that attention be given to improving communication. If a primary barrier to good work is poor communication, then rethinking what communication is, and how it happens, or could happen in your company is a first step toward finding these solutions. So rather than just jumping in and trying to fix "it”’, let’s begin by asking some basic questions. How do people, including people at your company, think about communication? And what follows from these ways of thinking? We'll start by contrasting two different communication models.

II. MODELS OF COMMUNICATION

Communication As Information Transfer

sidebar: The Funnel of Nuremberg Many years ago, in the German city of Nuremberg, there lived a learned man, a would-be educator of the people who were neither scholars nor clerics, and who hadn’t studied Latin, which was the mark of an educated person then. Somewhere around the year 1642 this man wrote a book to convey to those folks the art of -- guess what? -- the art of rhyming and making poetry -- another mark of educated people in those days. He called it “The Poet’s Funnel: How to Instill the Rules for Making Artful Poetry without Benefit of the Latin Language in Six Hours.”

This image of the funnel and the idea that you can instill information in somebody’s head, pour it from one container into another so to speak, is still with us in many forms. Nowadays, it often appears as the idea of information transfer from one person to another, from a sender to a receiver, and something like this model is what most people in today’s society subscribe to. We found that it is also the mental model held by most people in your company.

Here is a typical definition from one of the standard books on organizational behavior:

"Communication [is] the process by which a person, group, or organization (the sender) transmits some type of information (the message) to another person, group, or organization (the receiver)”. [2]

A sender, a receiver, plus a message that is transferred are the important elements here. Somehow the message gets from the sender to the receiver and is received as intended. In this view, the information contained in the message exists in and of itself out there in the world, apart from people who are thinking about it, talking about it, and using it.

This is quite similar to the way we tend to think of there being “facts” out there in the world around us that are divorced from any particular person’s position or understanding.

sidebar: One of your co-workers asked: What’s the meaning of 42? “42” seems straightforward enough. But, she mused, there is no real substance to 42 until we put it in a context. “My manager is 42” is quite different from “My manager has 42 cats.” And even those statements take on very different meanings to different listeners. To someone who is a cat lover, “My manager has 42 cats” might seem like a wonderful thing indeed, whereas to a person with allergies, the thought of dinner at the manager-with-42-cat's house might sound like a nightmare.

People who hold this model believe that communication is simply about transferring information from one head to another and assume that in the transfer nothing changes. They are likely to miss how the meaning of that message gets modified as it makes its rounds. For example, consider a Vice President who informs Chester Carleson, a General Manager, that your company will be a billion dollar business by the middle of next year. To that figure the Vice President probably attaches a meaning of, ‘and that’s a wonderful thing – something we can all be proud of.’ To the Vice President, this might well be a noble goal and maybe worth a promotion. But Chester might go beyond the piece about “this is something to be proud of”, and focus instead on the sinking feeling in his gut that tells him it’s in part up to him to make that happen.

In other words, communicating is more complicated than just transferring information – it is in fact an interactive act of constructing the meaning of a particular message, or a particular program or innovation, as the case may be, by the people who are engaging with it and each other. If this engagement doesn’t happen, the information may have moved from one place to another, and in that sense one could say that communication has occurred. But it doesn’t mean anything because the relation building needed to support action was lacking. This may be one of the key elements of failed program implementation within your company, when people assume that participation will happen when, in reality, no commitment to engage has occurred. The information may have moved, but true communication has not occurred.

Pure information doesn’t exist. Words are never delivered or received in a vacuum – they are part and parcel of people’s experiences, positions and interests. Any message will be understood in different ways by different people in the organization.

If we want to "improve communication", maybe we need to check out some other ways of thinking about how people in your company could communicate with each other.

Communication as Meaning-Making

Meanings are reshaped, adapted and transformed in every communication encounter.

Remember the Rumor Game we used to play as children? Somebody whispers something in their neighbor's ear who whispers it to their neighbor who does the same to the next person. And remember the laughter and squeals of delight when it is revealed that what comes out at the other end isn't even close to what the message started out as.

"Surely" you say, "serious business communication doesn't work like that." But does it ever work like this?

sidebar: The Plan

In The Beginning was The Plan

And then came The Assumptions

And the Assumptions were without form

And The Plan was completely without substance

And darkness was upon the face of The Workers.

And they spoke among themselves, saying,

"It is a Crock, and it stinketh."

And The Workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,

"It is a pail of dung and no one may abide the odor."

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth,

"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."

And the Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth,

"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."

And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,

"It contains that which aids plant growth, but it is very strong."

And the directors went to the Vice Presidents and sayeth to them,

"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."

And the Vice Presidents went to the President and sayeth to him,

"This new Plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of this Company."

And The President looked upon the Plan,

And saw that it was good, and The Plan became Policy.

(Anonymous)

Well, maybe communication at your company doesn't work exactly like this, but the fact is that in your world, too, any message that goes out, officially or unofficially, undergoes a process of continuous reconstruction and appropriation by the people who need to do something with it -- maybe they are supposed to change a work process, rephrase it, explain it to somebody else, adapt it to local conditions, translate it into a different language, file it, merely pass it on or act on it in some other way. Something happens with the message. Something happens which is not explained in the transfer view of communication.

In our work on learning in the workplace, we -- and we are not alone in this -- have come to understand that the meaning of a message is not inherent in the message. Rather, the meaning gets constructed, actually co-constructed, by the "senders" and the "receivers" in their interaction. The construction process is shaped by many factors: position in the hierarchy (as in our sidebar above), prior history, whether you like the person or not, whether you care what they think about you or not. You may feel you need to impress them because they’re your boss, or you’re so frustrated with your boss that you don’t care what she/he thinks any more. Factors like these come into play when you decide what to say and how to say it. And, equally important, these factors also matter in what kind of a "hearing" the message gets. The relationship and what you would like it to be shape not only the content of the message and the style in which it is delivered but also how it is understood. And of course that, then, shapes the relationship. So we would argue that moving information around is not the only important aspect of communication. Beyond that, communication makes meaning, and thereby defines and constantly redefines relationships.

To recapitulate: things don’t have meaning in and of themselves, they are given meanings by people. People figure out together what something means in a given situation. And the meanings they construct together will be influenced by their experiences, their histories and their relations to their co-workers around them. Put this all together and it means that meanings change through time as messages encounter different parts of the organization where people “understand” them according to their own needs. Meanings are built in our interactions with others, so that different groups of people will attach different meanings to messages and events. This also means that people may well learn different things from the same interaction. On second thought, this is pretty obvious. Just think of the different ideas people take away from a presentation they attended together. The question is always: how will what they heard fit in with what they already know and what they need to know to deal with the issues they face in their work and their life.

We’ve seen it happen again and again that people walk out of meetings with different understandings of what decisions were made. We know that because, in the days after the meeting, we have watched them do work in their offices, and what they are doing is at odds with what others think they are doing. The discrepancies become clear when they gather at the next meeting and realize that they’ve been going indifferent directions. And we have seen programs, applications, and good ideas “delivered”, only to gather dust in the corner because people were unable to come to a shared view.

A final thought about communication: when we talk about messages and the meanings that necessarily get constructed around them, let’s remember that we are not just talking about verbal messages or messages written on paper. What we have been saying also applies to electronic messages, software packages, training programs, artifacts and technologies. What these messages mean is also a function of context. That is as true for us living in a digital world as it was for stone age aborigines in Australia a couple of generations ago. What the message means will be constructed as it is incorporated in the life of social communities.

Consider this:

sidebar: Steel axes for stone-age aborigines In the 1930s, the Yir Yiront were a well-functioning group of aborigines living in relative isolation on the Cape York Peninsula of Australia. They gained their livelihood by gathering, fishing and hunting. The tools they needed they made from locally available materials or they acquired them from other aboriginal groups with whom they established important ritual and trading relationships. Of particular significance in their tool set were the stone axes they used for building their huts, for cooking, hunting, gathering and many other activities. The axes also played an important role in certain rituals during which only people from a particular clan could use them.

The interesting thing is that only adult men could own stone axes. If women needed an axe, and they needed one often, they had to borrow it from their husband, older brother, or father. Younger men also had to borrow from older brothers or fathers.

When missionaries came into the area, they began to hand out steel axes to make people’s lives easier. They gave them to anybody who could use them, including women and children..

What happened? Axes took on a whole new set of meanings in this society. In the long run, age and gender hierarchies were undermined, the traditional trade relationships broke down, and eventually the entire religious and ritual system was destroyed.[3]

Here the tool, the axe, constitutes the message. For the missionaries, it had a strictly utilitarian meaning. For the aborigines, however, it became a symbol, and an instrument for radical change -- not always to the better -- as the new axes changed the shape and flavor of people’s daily interactions, their institutions, and their expectations about the world.

In our society, too, it is very common that only the obvious, the use value of tools is considered. The less apparent symbolic communication value is often ignored -- also not always to the better.

sidebar: PC’s for your company

Recently, PC’s were introduced throughout your organization. What is the meaning of the PC for different people in the company? Does the PC have a value beyond its utilitarian use value? What exactly is its use value? For whom? Does it have a symbolic value? For whom?

We will revisit some of these issues in the next chapter when we talk about learning and the learning organization. Teaching/learning are of course just one kind of communication, though a specially important one. If you think about learning as changes in what people know and do, and if you consider that each and every time people communicate they shift what they know and do, then any act of communication can also be thought of as an act of learning. Because communication and learning are tightly interconnected, it is not surprising to find that there are strong parallels between how people understand communication and how they understand learning.

 

III. HOW WE SEE YOU COMMUNICATING

Like most large corporations, your company is hierarchically organized. This hierarchy has an impact on how information and innovation flow through your organization. Sometimes the communication channels we saw worked well. Sometimes they didn’t. In the sections that follow we try to lay out some of the patterns we observed throughout the system. We'll also discuss where we think those served you well and where you might want to reconsider how you communicate. Keep in mind that much of what doesn't work is due to the transfer model we talked about earlier. As soon as you look at communication as the construction of meaning between individuals and groups of people, you will see why, and understand in what ways, “transfer” sometimes runs into trouble.

Communicating in the Hierarchy

In all companies there are close linkages between communication and the company’s social structures, whether we are talking about fairly organized attempts to move information through the system or whether we are looking at the informal ways meaning gets constructed and shared.

A number of strong patterns can be seen in your company:

• People tend to talk to people who are their peers within their own functional silos.

For example, it is very common for someone who reports to the Vice President of Technology to talk to others who report to that same Vice President. It is less common for that person to talk to someone who reports to the Vice President of Finance or the Vice President of Information Management.

In order to get information to or from a peer in another functional group, we saw many examples of someone talking to their boss, and the boss talking to their peer in the other functional group, who talked to their report. And then when “information” needed to flow back to the origin, it went through all the same steps, but backward.

• People generally talk to people who are one rung up or one rung down in the reporting structure, but don’t much skip rungs.

For example, it is very common for someone to talk to their boss or to their direct report. It is seldom the case that someone talks directly to their boss’ boss, or to someone who reports to someone who reports to them.

To get a message up or down the hierarchy, a person talks to their boss, and that boss talks to her or his boss. And in fact, when we saw cases where someone had talked to their boss’ boss, we also often saw resentment and anger from the boss, who expressed feelings of having “been gotten around.” When someone skips a level in the hierarchy, they may be suspected of either trying to circumvent their boss or of being too eager to rise through the ranks.

Communication Patterns We Observed

We observed three primary paths along which information flows through your company or, we might say, three axes along which meaning is constructed by the people of your company. In the most common direction, we saw it flowing through a “rolling out” process downward through the hierarchy – what we have talked about as a “cascade.” We also observed information flowing in the opposite direction from cascade, that is, upwards through the hierarchy, as people higher up request information of people lower in the hierarchy. We call this kind of information flow a “suck-up.” In addition, but much less, we saw lateral information exchange, information moving through the organization across silos and between peers. Much of this turns out to be informal and largely invisible. As we will see, this form of communication is nevertheless crucial to getting things done. In the section “Is there a better way” we will talk about how strengthening lateral communication could help solve problems generated by cascade and suck-up.

Each of these axes has its proper uses but each can also be employed in unproductive ways. We'll identify these patterns for you (you'll recognize them!), talk about their pluses and minuses, and try to point out where we see you relying too heavily on one or the other.

The Cascade

The most common form of official communications in your company is to cascade programs, initiatives, projects, technologies and news downward through the hierarchy. This model of communication is built on the assumption that important messages come from the top and "cascade" down through layers of the organization, eventually reaching front line employees. One can think of it as a sprinkler providing beneficent moisture to the fields; or as a series of stepped waterfalls that move life-giving water from a higher to a lower plane, maybe with flumes deviating at different levels in order to irrigate those below. In your company, whether a message came from the Policy Committee to be communicated across the organization or from a Customer Account Manager to be conveyed to Account Associates, the most common way to get information and programs out was to pass them from managers to their direct reports, and from each of those people to the people who report to them, and so on down the line.

The cascade model assumes that authoritative knowledge lives at the top. It assumes that good things, important things, come from the top and are spread out from there in a uniform manner to the “lower regions”. What is conveyed from the top down (information, resources, training programs, new projects, initiatives, beliefs, values, visions) carries authority. Whether the origin of cascading messages is a particular functional unit, a manager, or the Policy Committee, in each case the implication is that there is an "authoritative source" of knowledge whose wisdom gets packaged and transferred to appropriate recipients.

What’s good about the cascade model: The cascade process has the strength of spreading messages uniformly through the organization (or parts thereof) in a systematic manner. This is clearly a good thing when information needs to be in everybody’s possession. Now, what kind of information might that be? Obviously, all kinds of policies and ground rules that require rapidity and uniformity of coverage fall into this category – the kind of stuff everybody should have in their desk drawer. What also might be useful to cascade are such things as the production figures, the profit figures, information about the market, how we stack up against the competition, what kinds of deals we are currently negotiating about, and the like. However, in these cases, attention needs to be paid to what kind of meaning is attached to such figures by different parts of the organization.

What is immediately apparent is that such information does not become useful unless it is appropriated by communities of practice, unless people make sense of it in a way that actually affects what they do in the workplace. It’s probably okay for an announcement of changes in health benefits to wander into a drawer. But that may not be okay for information on new initiatives or changing market conditions. Yet, we observed again and again that important information was cascaded and then did not affect behavior. Thus well designed initiatives ended up on a shelf. Soo ……

What’s not so great about cascading: It turns out, unfortunately, that only a small proportion of business communications is best served by the cascade process. Why? Because in a cascade, not enough attention is paid to meaning making and to making the information actionable. To get it done, not just suffered, there has to be a step where people actually take in and take on the information, evaluate it and make it part of their way of being in the world. That is when passive information becomes active knowledge. We have seen again and again that most of the time, people need to engage with the content, appropriate it to their own situation, and co-construct the meaning it has for them and their work group. And that requires something in addition to just getting the information from above. So let’s try to better understand why cascaded programs fail so often.

Here are some of the reasons:

• Distortion. As demonstrated by the rumor game, communication that passes through many points will almost certainly be distorted and lose much of whatever value it had originally. For cascade to work as intended there must be no information breaks. When there is a break, information is lost or miscommunicated. A cascade is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

sidebar: three-ring binders with PowerPoint slides A trainer at company university goes through bulleted slides, reading them, but often commenting "I can't speak to that", because on many occasions she doesn't know much more than what's in front of her. Why not have the students read the bullets themselves? It'd be even more efficient!! This is a model that says delivery is the critical factor, and dissemination of information is more important than accepting, absorbing and acting on the information.

• No feedback. In its pure form, the cascade has no built-in mechanism for providing effective feedback to the originators of the message. The flow of information is unidirectional, from the top down. While “it” comes down, there is nothing that goes up. Not even like the salmon struggling up the stream. Or the mist rising around a waterfall. This is strictly a one-way movement.

And because of that, those who initiated the messages are likely to believe that the intended meanings have indeed reached all parts of the organization when, in fact, in many places the messages never arrived at all, and those messages that did arrive had acquired a very different meaning than the one intended.

So the source has no chance to improve subsequent messages or to evaluate the impact. By the time they find out that an initiative has died somewhere, it is usually too late to modify it.

sidebar: hello, there .... Madelaine has heard that headquarters is planning to eliminate the dispatcher position. She believes this is happening because headquarters thinks that most jobs are coming in over the network now, and hence don't need to go through the dispatcher. In fact, they have yet to receive even ONE job over the net.

• No recipient design. People often think that if the information gets to where it belongs, the work of communicating is done. They assume that the recipient will, first, hear it, and second, act on it as the sender intended. But anyone who throws away junk mail knows that just putting information out there isn’t enough. For people to learn and to use what you have to offer, they need to have the motivation to use it.

Pronouncements from a distance usually lack the familiarity with local conditions that would make the information relevant. There is, in the funny language of systems designers, “no recipient design”. This means that cascaded messages and technologies tend to fall into a “black hole” from which they may never emerge.

 

sidebar: Why things die in the field People at the frontline are well aware of this problem. Carole, a training administrator, speaks about how programs which are developed at headquarters are cascaded down to local trainers but often don’t take. For example, she delivered the Standard Products Launch to senior staff and training supervisors, but after one presentation they concluded that it was not effective or appropriate for their administrative and production staff. So the program was quietly discontinued.

She talked about this experience with other trainers. They all believe that this is closer to the norm than the exception.

• Productivity drain. When management rolls out program after program but has little idea of the realities front-line managers and workers confront, cascading can generate not only tremendous new demands on frontline resources but also tremendous productivity drains. This is a serious matter. We’ve seen a number of cases where valuable time had to be spent on responding to headquarter initiatives which were irrelevant at the frontline level. As one of our informants said: “Any hour I spend on that, I don’t spend with my customers or thinking about my customers and what they might need.”

sidebar: A classic example of mindless double suck-up was a business review we witnessed in which the Senior Staff of a Center was asked to collect information about their operation in order to present it to their Regional Vice President and his staff. They spent several days gathering it and preparing for the meeting, and enlisted the help of members of the Control Team, Sales, and Production. This Vice President left his post two weeks later, with a new Vice President to be named. They knew that at that point they would be requested to go through the entire process again.

• Doesn’t work. Finally, and this may be the worst drawback of all, cascade isn't effective in changing practice. It may get people to line up with the official version of what should be done, but what they do (and have to do) in actual practice, under the pressures of no spare parts, short staffs, irate customers, and yet another demand from headquarters is something else. What we found out is that the reality of cascade quite often turns out to be different from the ideal!

Curiously, at management levels all the way up to senior staff, there is a shared awareness that many, many programs are rolled out never to be heard from again. The phenomenon appears to be clearly recognized but no one seems to have any ideas of how to make this recognition active, either for the present project or for the next one. But people at headquarters don't seem to take the next step in trying to find out why the things they deliver die a horrible death at the field level.

To recapitulate: We aren’t suggesting that cascade is bad. Cascade is one means of getting information out to large numbers of people, and as such, is one of many possible ways to try to reach people. However, when used for the wrong kind of information, cascade is rife with problems. We have heard people say, “We’ll just cascade this out.” It’s not the cascade that needs to be addressed so much as the “just.” Cascade is useful in certain times and places, but when it is used, it needs to be carried out consciously and carefully, recognizing the potential weaknesses and doing everything possible to avoid them, and providing back-up help to temper the problems that are likely to arise.

We’ll talk later about some ways in which cascade and other one-way flows could be used more effectively.

 

The "Suck-up"

The complement to the cascade is the “suck-up” which is supposed to tell top management what is happening in the company.

Like cascade, suck-up is unidirectional, but it goes in the opposite direction, that is, from the bottom of the hierarchy upward. Data and information are "sucked up" through the organization, often by way of required periodic reports, surveys, reviews and the like. It is practiced everywhere in the organization – between Headquarters and the Field, as well as between different levels of functional units. In your company we saw exceedingly frequent requests for information made by people higher in the hierarchy of people lower in the hierarchy. (When is the last time you were asked to provide data for a survey or an assessment?)

What’s good about the suck-up: As with the cascade, suck-up is not inherently bad. It is used precisely because it fulfills a central need, the need of the company to gather uniform, standardized data from across the organization. Standardized information is crucial for making comparisons across different parts of the organization as well as for assessments of how we are doing compared to last month, or last quarter, or last year. This is vital, among other things for decision making about the allocation of resources and for timely modification of business strategy. So, if used right -- and we’ll make some suggestions on how to do that below -- suck-up can be an important means of gathering aggregate information across the company. This is, in principle, a good thing. There is lots of information that needs to be provided to higher levels so they know what's going on in the field, at the front lines, in the implementation spaces for their programs where the company rubber hits the customer road.

Nobody would deny that data gathering is good but we have to ask: good for what. Remember that extensive data collection is an inherent and crucial feature of TQM. But in TQM, measurements are used by the people who gather them to improve their own operation. They decide what needs to be measured, they track their own performance and they use their figures to improve their processes. What these data mean and what implications they have for action in the workplace gets hashed out amongst the people doing the work. This kind of data collection is crucial for shared meaning making that leads to action. Where collectors and users of information are the same community, there is intrinsic motivation to collect data of high quality because this data is needed by the very people who collect it. Now, what happens when data collection and data consumption become disjoint, as they are in the suck-up mode?

sidebar: Unforeseen consequences At Ford, when higher-level management began to ask for plant-level performance measurements, a number of disastrous things began to happen. Indexes were developed and compared across the plants. Billions of bits of data accumulated in company computers, adding to the overhead and busywork which the quality effort was meant to remove. Operations were performed on the data such as computing averages, comparing them amongst plants and compiling them in division-wide reports.

Now if the score was too low one quarter, the manager had to come up with an explanation. The game in each plant changed from using the numbers to make internal improvements to making the plant look good against its neighbors, a competitive game in which few employees have a deep interest. Furthermore, people became fearful that the numbers might be used to punish them.[4]

What’s not so great about the suck-up: What are the pitfalls of suck-up in your company then? One clear issue is that sucked-up data, by definition, does not participate in shared meaning making, but provides input for unilateral decision-making by senior staff and other higher level decision makers. This has consequences, the most serious of which is probably the less than optimal quality of data thus assembled. It often happens that suckup reports that reach top management do not contain much authentic or useful information since the requested information is usually of no value to the people who gather it nor are they necessarily aware of what the data will be used for. But it is nearly impossible to compile appropriate information and to organize it in a meaningful way without understanding (and valuing) the reasons for putting that information together. Thus time spent in this way may well be time wasted.

Beyond these kinds of issues we also saw again and again that the people compiling information spent lots of time getting it together – time they often described as “wasted,” and as “keeping me from doing my work.” They often didn’t see the reason why they had to provide yet another set of figures, another screen of data, and their motivation to do a good job was understandably low. Many of them were aware that suck-up may constitute a productivity drain, thereby affecting employee morale and, potentially, customer satisfaction.

In these cases nobody asked: What is the purpose of this exercise? Who needs to make meaning with this information? What resources are expended to get it? Is the effort worth it? We are not exactly surprised if under such circumstances the people who gather the information are less than vitally concerned with the accuracy and relevance of what they report. As a matter of fact, it is commonly the case that in suck-up/cascade companies subordinates tell supervisors what the supervisors want to hear. Passing through set channels and often laid out in a prescribed manner, suck-up reports communicate less and less real information as time passes and the mechanical nature of the task saps the interest and energy of everyone involved. There is good reason to believe that making decisions based on data of bad quality may constitute a systemic problem in your company (as it does in all suck-up/cascade companies).

sidebar: trust me A manager is working late. Lots of paperwork. Still has to do the report that headquarters requires every month. His daughter calls. She needs help with her homework. “I’ll be out of here in a minute.” He hangs up. Pulls out last month’s report, changes a few figures, eyeballs the result and off it goes. “Trust me, that’s what they get from all of us.”

Is this kind of thing, then, a problem peculiar to you? No, definitely not! It is a systemic problem (or opportunity, as we shall see) for all hierarchically organized bureaucratic organizations. This is clear not only from our own work but also from research done by others. For example, renowned organizational theorists Feldman and March examined what happens in the suck-up companies they worked in. Reporting on their research in the prestigious Administrative Science Quarterly,

they tell us that :

1. Much of the information that is gathered in companies has little decision relevance;

2. much of the information that is used to justify a decision is collected and interpreted after the decision has been made;

3. much of the information is not considered in making the decisions for which it was requested;

4. regardless of the information already available at the time a decision is considered, more information is requested;

5. complaints that an organization does not have enough information to make a decision occur while available information is ignored;

6. most organizations collect more information than they can reasonably expect to use in the making of decisions[5].

At this point one might well ask: Why then do companies persist in sucking up data? It may well be that this phenomenon has more to do with symbolic cultural values than with effective business practice. In our society, we pride ourselves on intelligent decision making. Intelligent decision making is based on hard data and not on intuition, your horoscope, or the whim of the day. So there is a strong pressure for people to demonstrate that they are making intelligent decisions and are not just flying by the seat of their pants. And the way you demonstrate that to your peers and your subordinates is by asking for data, and more data, and more data.

Is There A Better Way? Consider What This Costs You

 

By now it is probably pretty clear that we believe your company is paying too high a price for the convenience of sticking with the conventional cascade/suck-up model of information transfer. It’s not that that is all there is, but we believe that you are not paying enough attention to joint meaning making in the company. As we have seen, information that cannot be appropriated and made actionable by recipients is worse than useless because it wastes everybody’s time, energy and good will. Let me repeat again that we are not saying that cascade or suck-up should be entirely eliminated but rather that serious attention needs to be paid to supporting shared sense-making across as well as up and down the organization. We do think that the conventional approach can be modified in ways that more meaningfully engage individuals and groups.

We propose four starting points for rethinking internal data gathering and data dissemination procedures at your company:

Seriously consider the cost of cascaded information and suck-up requests. We saw front liners in your company consistently chafing under the burden of yet another project, another initiative, another data request, on top of the already scheduled periodic ones. To begin to understand what the true cost of such unilateral impositions is, you might consider requiring that with each new request a time estimate is delivered to the recipient, followed by a negotiation process about what items already on their plate can be re-prioritized or eliminated. This process happens anyway since workers and lower-level managers have to decide how to fit the new requests into their working lives, but now it happens quietly under the table as a hidden, unacknowledged activity. Dealing with it as a shared issue that requires adjustments in tasks and expectations would eliminate much of the rancor currently associated with these requests.

Prune non-productive data collection activities. We’ve seen that most of the information collected in corporations is not used. To what extent can the collection of superfluous data be eliminated? This would require looking at the kinds of decisions that need to be made by top level managers and asking: What information do we really need in order to make these decisions. Our suspicion is that that much unnecessary data gathering could be eliminated if data requests would have to be justified. This would automatically free up time at the hard-pressed lower levels which could be used to do the all-important customer work.

Move from cascade and suck-up to shared meaning making across functions and across hierarchy. Consider that the quality of data is seriously affected by the extent to which frontline data producers have a stake in that quality. And they have a stake in it when the data they collect have an impact not only on high-level decision-making but are also relevant for their work groups and for themselves (an insight that underlies the success of TQM). One could imagine a process by which every data request has to be accompanied by a rationale, by an explanation of why we need these data and what benefit they might have for users on all levels. Knowing what decisions the data will affect will allow data gatherers to put down what makes sense in relation to an impending decision rather than simply eye-balling last month’s report and updating it. In all cases one needs to consider to what extent the information that is being collected is actually useful to lower level managers and workers. Only when there is a shared understanding on all sides that the data have to support not only management decisions but also increasingly productive interaction with customers will there be a shared interest and motivation to produce data of the highest quality.

Strengthen lateral networking structures and encourage lateral information sharing. Your company, as most hierarchical organizations, needs to make greater efforts to support lateral information exchanges that allow effective meaning-making across work groups, across functional divisions, and across informal communities of practice. At this point, much valuable local knowledge is not shared because few structures exist that would make such sharing possible. What an account manager in Dallas has found to be a useful approach with a customer does not help the account manager who deals with the same type of customer in Seattle because there are too few occasions where they get together and no company-supported technologies that would allow this kind of exchange. In this regard technologies along the lines of chat rooms on the Intranet, tip-sharing software and company-sponsored learning events help to overcome local isolation. Lateral linkages, both formal and informal, are crucial to the economic and political health of any company. Lateral connections create a type of knowledge capital in the form of far-flung networks of social relationships through which information and technologies can travel. It is by being richly connected to multiple networks of this kind that individuals can most fully contribute to the work of the organization.

We’ll be delighted to continue this conversation with you.

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[1] This manuscript draws extensively on a report entitled “Reflections on a Journey of Transformation: Learning, Growth and Change”, originally prepared for a rapidly expanding business division of Xerox Corporation. My co-authors on the report were Meredith Aronson, Libby Bishop, Melissa Cefkin, Nancy Lawrence, Connie Preston and Lindy Sullivan. They were collaborators on an ethnographically grounded Systemic Assessment of the division of which I was the Principal Investigator. Most of the insights in this account are due to their hard work and dedication. I thank them all for their friendship, team spirit and the revelations their work provided.

[2] The reference is from Greenberg, Jerald and Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations: Understanding and Managing the Human Side of Work. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 1993., p. 148. But then again it may be from Morris, Langdon, Managing the Evolving Organization. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold (1996).

[3] You can read more about what happened there in “Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians.” by the anthropologist Lauriston Sharp, who wrote about the Yur Yoront in 1953 in the journal Human Organization.

[4] This is reported by Edward M. Baker in Senge’s Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, p.454.

[5] If you want to find out more about how information is used in corporations, you might read Information in Organizations as Signal and Symbol. Administrative Science Quarterly 26:171-186, 1981 by Martha S. Feldman and James G. March, or any other paper by Jim March who is one of the foremost organizational theorists of our time.

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