Why discipline destroys creativity

If you believe that the best you can do, as in the last post, is to get people all in line with you, as a manager, I think the math works out that you have made the "cosine" term as large as it can get, namely 1.0, between each of the staff members and the boss. AS far as that goes, it's good.

However, this typically comes at the cost of people so interested in pleasing the boss that they no longer independently measure or evaluate the worth of activities, so their interaction term with the outside world goes to zero. Typically also, tight hierarchical authoritarian organizations typically, but not always, pit employees against each other to see who can please the boss MORE. So the interaction terms between individuals all go negative.

The best this structure can achieve is an almost perfect synchrony with the boss's view of the world, which is one person's view, and limited by that. These kinds of organizations destroy creativity, destroy initiative, destroy camaraderie and trust, and tend to do a perfect lockstep job at carrying out the wrong solution to the wrong problem in perfect cadence. They are EASY to evaluate however -- just as "How much did each employee do exactly what I told them to do?"

Over time, they do worse because the retention rate in such organizations tends to be poor, lacking teamwork or a sense of team, or a sense of progress or awareness of the outside world. Over time they also tend to degrade since the boss, as one person, is missing a lot of facts about the world and inevitably pursuing sub-optimal goals with sub-optimal means.

The highly ordered group has the same KIND of order that, say, a crystal of salt does -- perfectly organized, perfectly passive, perfectly inert, and perfectly dead.

Even worse than that, the employees tend to become all "yes-men", telling the boss exactly what the boss wants to hear, and stifling any type of dissent. This makes the boss completely blind to indications that the plans are not working the way everyone says they are. Success in such organizations is typically an illusion, as things seem to work fine until is becomes one day suddenly clear that there is no success, and in fact, hasn't been success for a long time -- there is only the fiction of success.

So long as the boss knows and can see clearly what needs to get done, this type of organization converts people into a kind of blind machine or amplifier, that gets that job the boss THINKS is the right job done. The completion is flawed because the thousand other small ways that the task might have been done that would have increased its fit with the outside world, or with future teamwork, are missing.

As soon as a novel situation comes along, however, the flaw in this organizational structure becomes visible. It is non-adapative. The boss cannot issue orders like "Be creative!" or "Solve this!" or "Figure this out!" because the staff have all been trained to be helpless and blind servant slaves, and have systematically quenched all internal systems that could have provided assistance at solving NOVEL problems.

So, the tight-hierarchy is often good at mechanically reproducing an old solution to an old problem -- but is a visible disaster when it has to come up with new solutions, suddenly, to new problems. Sadly, for it, the world we are in is dominated by NEW problems, new types of problems, whole new dimensions of problems, coming at a faster speed than any one boss can possibly track.

So, organizations with such structures typically attempt to cope by "prioritizing", which seems to make sense to them, as focusing all attention on the two or three BIGGEST problems which management or the management team can conceive of or get its head around.

Hopefully, my readers can by now see how this kind of approach will fail.

First, since each level of management in such organizations is being lied to consistently by underlings that are trying to please them instead of tell the truth, each level of management is increasingly blind to reality. At the very top of the organization, what is reported in by lower management is probably completely disconnected from reality. This doesn't result in good decisions being made, regardless how otherwise bright, well-intentioned, and competent central management or the central team or joint chiefs or whatever might be. ("garbage in, garbage out.")

Having a "war room" and using high-technology to speed up the process does nothing to improve it, and, in fact, tends to make it worse, because the simulations of reality generated by underlings and vendors, being very high tech, tend to look extremely realistic. IN addition, the subtle parts of reality, the nuances, that might give clues that something is seriously wrong with this picture, are typically trimmed off as "noise" because they don't fit into the categories conceived of by the person who did the computer programming. That person, some systems team manager 12 levels below the joint chiefs, say, makes bad decisions about what does and what does not matter, based on their OWN level of strategic wisdom, which is typically not very well developed (or they'd have a better job!). THAT person, in total absence of any dissenting voice from his (typically) paranoid and terrorized team, effectively decides what KIND of information to forward to the joint chiefs, and what to simply discard.

IN fact, at each level, the manager if presented with reality, would cringe and complain that they are getting "too much data" and "too much complexity of data" and will demand that underlings "cut through all that complexity" and "simplify it." So, yes, the underlings remove the crucial fragments of discrepant facts, and rearrange the remainder to make a pretty picture with cartoon-type simplicity, which the manager CAN get his head around.

The process is repeated at each level, as the parts of complexity that don't fit are pruned off and the gaps covered over by rearranging the parts that are left, to make an even simpler picture.

FINALLY, at the very top, the few people who ARE capable of coping with tremendous complexity and uncertainty, the Joint Chief types, are presented totally sterilized and systematically "simplified" data that has removed all of the important content that requires 30 years experience to make sense of.

This is way, way too late in the process to bring in expertise.

The US Army, at least in part, has become aware of this problem, both the "group think" at the top, and the problem that people on the ground, even if privates, seem to have a better handle on reality than the people with the "big" [and completely oversimplified] "picture".

Army field manuals, such as the last generation FM-22 Leadership Manual, and the new FM-6, and whatever has replaced that, are starting to recognize that LEADERS are not defined by those who TALK LOUDLY and give orders ("are bossy"), but those who are capable of LISTENING to their men and women, and who are capable of giving sensible orders that still allow those staff to have initiative and creativity at how they approach the solution as a team.

The same situation is true in health care. A few years ago Doctor Peter Pronovost, from Johns Hopkins, made the discovery that doctors in intensive care units were suppressing dissent from nurses and not actually open to listening to what the nurses saw or had to say. The doctors measured "teamwork" as the ability of the nurses to follow orders, and certainly teamwork did NOT include ever questioning an order. When told to jump, or remove a kidney, the only acceptable response was "how high?" not "Didn't we do that to this patient yesterday already?"

Dr. Pronovost won a very prestigious award from the Joint Commission for this insight, which apparently the other doctors found to be surprising, if not astonishing. A process was created to have a "time out" just before a surgical incision, a window in which nurses could speak. After that, for the most part, things went back to business as usual. The rate of totally wrong operations went down, and everyone was happy.

What is missing in this picture, of course, is the thousand other ways in which staff can see things that doctors, or hospital administrators are doing wrong, that are being suppressed by the current tightly hierarchical "Shut up if you know what's good for you and do as I say" system.

Oh yeah, the other thing wrong with the "prioritize" model is that the boat we are afloat in doesn't HAVE two huge holes and 7 tiny ones, in which case it makes sense to prioritize. The boat essentially has 300 medium size holes, some slightly larger than others. In order to fit the problems onto the very small brainsize and to-do list that the highest management works from, 294 of these problems are down-played, so that say the top 6 get visibility and attention. No matter how well those 6 are addressed over the next year, the damage from teh 294 ones that were not priorities this year will exceed the benefits from the 6 that were addressed. And, sadly, since all these problems interact, fixing the six prioritized ones will have created 25 NEW problems elsewhere, out of sight, and worsened 100 OLD problems.

THERE IS IN FACT NO SEQUENCE OF PRIORITIZING this kind of problem, and dealing with them in serial order, that will work. These are what are known as "complex adaptive systems".
Unless you understand ALL of the system, you are almost certain that anything you do to "fix" a problem over here, under the little light you have, will worsen at least as many problems over there, in the dark where you can't see.

The mental bandwidth and the total intellectual capacity of the central planning team is far below what is required to deal effectively with such problems. It doesn't do any good to have "good discipline" and have everyone follow the broken orders more efficiently and more "cost-effectively." The ship is still continuing to sink.

The ship WILL continue to sink until the creative power of the entire staff is awakened and empowered to become aware of the situation, to become aware of each other, and to act accordingly. This almost NEVER happens, as the central planning group does not want to be "second guessed" by others reviewing the same data, and, in their infinite ego, also feels that exposure to real data, especially bad data, would discourage, demoralize, or "confuse" the troops. The highest form of deception comes when feedback arrives that, despite putting the best foot forward, makes it clear that the wonderful plans by the central committee have failed to stop the bleeding, and in fact, in some areas, made things worse. That's the kind of information that gets stamped "Classified" and "Top Secret" and suppressed entirely from being redistributed to the troops.

So, data from the troops doesn't make it up the hierarchical pyramid, because of the filtering and sucking up involved, and the simplfication so complexity of life is removed and the situation fits on Powerpoint slides. Data from the top does not make it back downwards, because, not too surprisingly, a lot of what's seen at the top is that things are actually getting worse.

Again and again, the "solution" presented for this failure to deliver the goods is to make the process "more efficient", to concentrate more and more power at the top, to attempt to get faster and faster response time and better and better "war rooms" with better visual effects and more simplified views of the world that are "easier to understand." The concurrent rise in dissent that results from people at the front pushing back when they see the orders from above are disconnected from reality is met with swift and terrible force, to get these "impediments to progress" or "enemies of the people" out of the way.

What we end up with instead is exemplified by the auto company General Motors. We have here a company where the top management levels are undoubtedly staffed with the "best and the brightest" that money can buy, operating in a manner that, to any normal person on the street, appears to be completely blind to reality. The more management "manages", the worse things seem to get. Management's attempted solutions, to lay off more and more workers, also don't seem to get anywhere.

Undoubtedly, what will follow will be the same classical "solution" consisting of blaming a variety of external and enemy factors and calling totally predictable events that have been going on "unpredictable." Who could have foreseen, they asked, literally, that the price of oil might go up? Or who could have foreseen (since they didn't) that, WHEN the price of gasoline went up to $4 / gallon, people might respond by driving less, and being less interested in huge cars that only got 12 miles a gallon. They literally seem to be shocked and surprised by these events, and I'll take them at their word that they were and are. Undoubtedly, the facts that are obvious to us do not fit the carefully sanitized picture of the world THEY are working from in their high-tech war room offices. These facts "can't possibly be correct, so fix them." Change the facts till they fit the preconception.

My point is that it doesn't MATTER who is the President and CEO of GM. It doesn't matter how bring their think tank is. It doesn't matter how rapidly they "prioritize" problems. More and "leaner" management is not the solution, it is the PROBLEM. It doesn't matter how many workers they lay off, or how many products they trim. Their underlying model of how to manage is broken, and that fact is evident to almost everyone except them.

And where they are meeting, almost certainly questions about how to improve how well management listens are NOT on the agenda, or welcomed on it as last minute additions. What is on the agenda will be cost-cutting and faster, more efficient ways to do the same old things that don't work. Maybe if they can just do them FASTER they'll work. Right.

Meanwhile, I know without even looking that the GM car dealerships near me are closed today, because it's Sunday. It doesn't matter that for essentially any other product or service, customers want and can get them on Sunday, when they have a day off from the 2 jobs apiece mom and dad both have. Car dealers are closed in the Detroit area on Sundays, whether its the only day you can go shopping for a new car or not.

Talk about detached from reality. GM goes to the government for billions in bail out money, but can't hear the complaint that people would like to shop on their day off, instead of having to take off a work day to shop for a car. They only hear what they want to hear, and discount the rest to the point of non-existence.

I feel bad for the people who are suffering and the jobs that are lost, the lost plants and tax revenues, and the general destruction of social services that used to depend on that whole automobile empire. But I don't feel bad for management that continues with the "More of the same" approach to a solution. OF COURSE they are overwhelmed and overworked -- no human being can comprehend all of the issues involved, let alone how they interact.

So, duh, let's stop trying approaches that expect or required some small cadre of human beings to grasp problems, to prioritize them, and to come up with solutions for the rest of us, who passively sit by while this occurs.

If anything has been shown by this financial disaster to be bankrupt, it is that approach to problem solving and to making a society that will prosper and thrive into the future.

Heck, they can't even create jobs, let alone successful innovative industries that are enough in touch with world markets and local resources that they can find new ways to meet the new needs and survive at home, in a win win fashion.

IN "The Toyota Way", Jeff Liker discusses early days at Toyota, two decades ago, when the question came up of whether to allow the Americans to come by and make site visits, and whether to reveal to the Americans the secrets of high-productivity.

The Chairman of Toyota considered this question very seriously, and finally concluded that it wasn't a problem at all. Let the Americans come, he said, because they won't be able to accept what their eyes see. The Americans will attempt to implement the visible, technical portions of what Toyota does, and will ignore and dismiss entirely the philosophical and human portion of what Toyota does to achieve greatness.

He was correct, from all I've seen. American management gets to the part where management is told it has to listen to workers, and culture has to be changed, and management loses its interest in going any further. We did the same with what W. Edwards Deming told us, trying to implement statistical quality control but at the same time to avoid changing the way evaluation of employees was done. And of course, anything involving questioning or changing the way management managed was obviously just noise and could be ignored or left for (decades) later.

So, Toyota and Honda are taking over the American market, while GM is bouncing and will continue bouncing in and out of bankruptcy.

Wisdom is realizing that it's not the technology that is being tested here, it's the philosophy of how human beings and management relate to each other and to themselves.

So far the score seems to be, Toyota 1, GM zero.