In my last blog post, I maintained that the deeply ingrained mechanistic view of organizations, stemming from utilitarian economics, causes an over-emphasis on operational efficiency in the application of IT. Likewise, employees, in this mechanistic view, have value only to the extent that they produce profit at low cost. Separation of thinking and doing, segmented task structures, scripted work patterns and narrow-skilled proficiencies are all aimed at maximizing efficiency of human efforts. Human beings are molded to fit the organizational machinery rather than the organization built around their strengths and potentials. People are considered as resources that can be characterized by the skills, expertise and experiences that they possess. This is reflected by the term "human capital", whereby people are likened to financial assets. Consequently, the development of human capacities is limited, creativity stifled and employee involvement diminished.
However, human beings are purposeful systems that exhibit will. As such, we can observe, learn, change our goals, choose our behavior and communicate with each other. We are continually co-evolving in the co-adaptive process of sense-making called life. Because of human intentionality, social situations are inherently uncertain, indeterminate and ambiguous. "There's no map / to human behavior," as Björk fantastically sings − we can only see the next turn in the road, as unpredictable events in the social environment unfold.
Russell L. Ackoff maintains that an organization, too, is a purposeful system that contains at least two purposeful elements with a common purpose. It is this notion of multiple purposeful elements that makes an organization a challenging system to maneuver: both its internal and external dynamics are unpredictable and render any longer term projections tentative at best. In the face of increasing complexity, precipitating events belie planning and call for rapid, in-the-moment responses.
People bear great potential of synergistic collaboration and contribution to the goals of the enterprise, but there is also a risk of the opposite. There is a fine line between success and failure, and it comes down to the leaders' ability to align purposes and create conditions conducive to employee involvement. Decisive for this ability are the basic assumptions and mental models held by the leaders: do they hold to logical either-or thinking and ideas of objective reality and linear causality, or do they embrace the complexity of things in all their uncertainty, non-linear interdependencies and paradoxes; do they see people as cogs in the machine or as co-creators of enterprise success; as human capital or as human beings?
Whereas the mechanistic top-down planning approach attempts to abstract human beings as economically 'rational' agents and to reduce the concept of human behavior to utilitarian self-interest, the non-mechanistic, or organic, view desists from extrapolating the new order that emerges through bottom-up self-organization. "There's definitely no logic / to human behavior." Nevertheless, or just therefore, Henry Mintzberg suggests that learning and visionary approaches are superior to planning for creating strategy.
"But, oh, to get involved in the exchange / of human emotions is ever so satisfying." As individuals, teams and organizations learn to cope with increasing complexity, the focus is on the process, not the outcome. Learning, innovation and value co-creation are not just instrumental means, but intrinsic virtues in their own right.
Hi,The behavior of people (and other organisms or even mechanisms) falls within a range with some behavior being common, some unusual, some acceptable, and some outside acceptable limits. In sociology, behavior is considered as having no meaning, being not directed at other people and thus is the most basic human action. Behavior should not be mistaken with social behavior, which is more advanced action, as social behavior is behavior specifically directed at other people.
Hi, I agree with your contention that the mechanistic view applied to the understanding and application of IT, assumes a rationality that doesn't exist and ignores the fundamental variability of human behaviour. Like it or not IT is part of a wider social environment. That social environment houses a set of systemic and situational factors that strongly influence human behaviour, and hence impact the shape, application and development of IT in that environment. Understanding the influence of human behaviour is a challenge IT increasingly can't avoid.