🌿🧭🌳 OD97: Honoring Edgar H. Schein
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Edgar H. Schein has been one of the authors that have influenced our OD praxis the most. We regret his passing earlier this year and dedicate the main section of this edition to highlighting some of his works.
Mr. Schein was the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus and a Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management and his work focused on organizational culture, process consultation, research process, career dynamics, and organization learning and change.1
You might want to explore some of his many books or collaborations:
Organizational Culture and Leadership - “how to transform the abstract concept of culture into a practical tool that managers and students can use to understand the dynamics of organizations and change.”
Corporate Culture Survival Guide - “Framed around the questions managers ask most often, the book uses case studies to show what successful change looks like.”
Humble Inquiry - “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.”
Humble Leadership - “a reimagined form of leadership that coincides with emerging trends of relationship building, complex group work, and diverse workforces.”
Humble Consulting - “consultants have to jettison the old idea of professional distance and work with their clients in a more personal way, emphasizing authentic openness, curiosity, and humility.”
Process Consultation - ”how to influence a situation in the workplace without the direct use of power of formal authority.”
Career Anchors - “designed to help people uncover their real values and use them to make better career choices.”
Teaming (foreword for Amy Edmondson’s book) - “organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities.”
We’ve also picked a few Youtube videos, in which you can listen to mr. Schein talking about:
Culture Fundamentals (30 min)
Humble Inquiry (20 min)
Humble Leadership (58 min)
Process Consultation (7 min)
Also, here are a few excerpts from 5 enduring management ideas from MIT Sloan's Edgar Schein:
1. Coercive persuasion
“If I’m economically committed to [an] institution, I have tenure, I am going to allow myself — or be forced — to be socialized into their culture.”
2. Career anchors and dynamics
Career anchors (…) are a “motivational/attitudinal/value syndrome which guides and constrains the person’s career.”
(…) The eight anchors are general managerial competence, technical/functional competence, entrepreneurial creativity, autonomy/independence, security/stability, service/dedication to a cause, pure challenge, and lifestyle.
3. Organization culture
(…) organization culture can be analyzed on three levels
Artifacts. The constructed environment of an organization, including its architecture, technology, office layout, dress code, visible or audible behavior patterns, and public documents like employee orientation handbooks.
Values. The reasons and/or rationalizations for why members behave the way they do in an organization.
Assumptions. Typically an unconscious pattern that determines how group members perceive, think, and feel.
4. Humble inquiry and leadership
“Our culture emphasizes that leaders must be wiser, set direction, and articulate values, all of which predisposes them to tell rather than ask,” (…) “Yet it is leaders who will need humble inquiry most, because complex interdependent tasks will require building positive, trusting relationships with subordinates to facilitate good upward communication.”
5. Organization change
“In that sense, he had a holistic view of organizations that you can’t just change the incentive system, or you can’t just have the leader tell people to do something different,” (…) “You have to look at all of these touch points so that you can drive holistic change that makes sense to people.”
Finally, some food for thought from the Organizational Culture and Leadership preface of the 5th edition (highlights ours):
I continue to be impressed that culture as a concept leads us to see the patterns in social behavior. I have, therefore, ignored much of the recent research that (1) picks out one or two dimensions of culture, (2) relates those to desired outcomes of various sorts, and then (3) claims that culture matters.
I thought we always knew that. However, the growing interest in unraveling the patterns we see in nations and in organizations and the various typologies of culture that have sprung up deserve review and analysis in this edition.
In that regard it is important to differentiate the quantitative diagnostic studies from the more qualitative dialogic inquiry processes, and, with help of my son, to reflect on some of the more recent "rapid" diagnostic methods.
(…)
I continue to believe that culture is serious business, but it will be a useful construct for us only if we really observe, study, and understand it.
Strategy & Organization Goodies
Curated resources you might find useful in the areas of strategy, org design, org development and adjacent fields of research & practice
💡 Strategy: Explore the visual map with ideas from the Good Strategy / Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters book by Richard P. Rumelt, created by Bülent based on visual notes by Vlad Rybalkin;
💡 Strategy: App Economy Insights (another excellent newsletter for strategists, well worth the paid subscription) offers a good 101 article about economic moats. Article: The Art of Spotting Economic Moats (highlights ours)
An economic moat is a term popularized by Warren Buffett to describe a company's sustainable and durable advantage over its competitors, creating a barrier to entry for potential rivals.
(…) Common types of economic moats include:
Intangible assets
Economies of scale
Network effects
Switching costs
Cost advantages
(…) there are several strategies that investors can use to assess a company's competitive advantage:
Analyze industry trends
Assess competitive advantages
Consider management quality
Study financial metrics
💡 Org Design: Prof. Phanish Puranam from INSEAD makes the case for gamified randomised control trials in the form of day-long hackathon for testing new designs. Article: How to Rapidly Test New Organisation Designs (highlights ours)
Field experiments, also known as randomised control trials (RCTs), are the gold standard for determining whether a design will work in a specific context.
Experiments involve randomly assigning some units (i.e., people, teams, projects or departments) to a treatment condition (the new policy you’re thinking of implementing) and others to the control group (where things stay as they were without the new policy). We then check if outcomes are statistically different between the two conditions.
(…) All organisation designs ultimately specify how people interact. With ingenuity and drawing on theory, we can find ways to put just the interactions that matter under the microscope.
💡 Collaboration: Erika Hall shares details about the wonderful practice of generating questions around a challenge. Article: Brainstorm Questions Not Ideas
Getting together and listing every question you can think of about a problem, a process, or a situation is uncomfortable at first, and then in very short order enhances collaboration, decreases risk and puts you on the path to being a learning organization.
💡 Change and Transformation: David Michels, Bain Japan’s Managing Partner offers insights about links between organizational change capacity and energy supply & demand in the organization. Article: How to run a transformation that creates more energy than it consumes
Assessing and managing an organization’s change capacity involves two things under executives’ control: first, the demand for the organization’s energy, which leaders regulate through the prioritization of work; second, the supply of energy, which they can expand by practicing inspirational leadership.
💡 Conceptual Linguistics: Harish Jose offers good food for thought with his article about Conceptual Metaphors in Lean:
The conceptual metaphor theory notes that metaphors are primarily used to understand abstract concepts, and that these are used subconsciously on an everyday basis. The conceptual metaphors are treated as an inevitable part of our thinking and reasoning.
Lean has become “doing more with less”, while Ohno’s goal was “doing just what is needed with less.” Ohno’s goal was being efficient and effective, even if it meant machines remained idle.
For Better Orgs: Mega Pack
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Visual Knowledge Maps featured in previous editions:
Platforms: Boundaryless posts
Business Model families: Platformation Labs playbook
Org Design: Organisation Models curated by Sergio Caredda
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Source: MIT Faculty Directory