Management and the retreat from reason - IT Directions

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September 09, 2007
Management and the retreat from reason

Business Process Management is generally acknowledged - at least by practitioners, if not by software vendors - to be a form of management, not a form of technology. With this in mind, 2 books I read recently are illuminating on what BPM currently stands to achieve.

Peter Drucker used to say that management contained elements of both art and science - he thought of it as a "liberal art". Despite his pivotal status in the development management thinking, this put him rather at odds with the general current of 20th century work in the field, most of which focused on extending Frederick Winslow Taylor's efforts to develop a "Scientific" approach to management. The ideas of Drucker, Senge, Handy and other such systems-oriented thinkers may inspire people, but on balance they have probably had far less impact on the day-to-day operations of business (and certainly less prominence in MBA courses) than figures such as Shewhart and Deming, who developed Taylor's principles into a set of simple practices via which business people could organize their activities. Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and BPM all stem in the end from Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.

PDCA bears only a peripheral relation to true science. It may employ a variant of the Scientific Method in its iterative approach to developing a useful process, but it can hardly be thought of as seeking to uncover any fundamental truths about the universe! However, let's stick with the analogy with science for a moment.

The first of the 2 books mentioned above is "Progress and the Invisible Hand: The Philosophy and Economics of Human Advance", by Richard Bronk. This work typifies a general trend in 20th century ideas about science. From the First World War onwards, disillusion with the potential of science grew and grew, reaching its apotheosis in Rachel Carson's 1962 polemic against DDT, "Silent Spring", which many people consider to have marked the start of the Green movement in politics. Bronk's book epitomizes this attitude, and is particularly wide-ranging. It's central thesis is that Enlightment thinkers were misguided - scientific control over nature, as expressed via the operation of a free market, has not in fact made us happier, and is unlikely ever to do so.

The second book, by contrast, is an impassioned defence of science. "Science and the Retreat from Reason", by John Gillott and Manjit Kumar, argues that any problems caused by science are simply due to misuse and misinterpretation. Rather than being our undoing, science has the potential to solve most evils, if only it were properly funded and its practitioners properly motivated.

The books are not exactly opposed. Both of them can be taken to make the case for greater and more thoughtful government intervention to support the efforts of scientists. However, there is a piece of the puzzle missing, which is this. Science cannot be used effectively without society being ready and able to do so. In other words, there must be an effective mechanism via which new technology resulting from scientific discovery can be put to use for the general good.

TAKE AWAY

What has all this discussion of science and society to do with BPM?

Let's suppose that management is in fact a quasi-scientific discipline. Then BPM in its current form - and the software used to implement it - can be likened to a brutalizing technology such as DDT. A workplace dominated by BPM is one in which innovation is stifled, collaboration is reduced to depersonalized approval routing, and an individual person's duties consist of carrying out particular steps in a pre-defined and mostly automated sequence. This Kafka-esque vision is all that we can possibly build with methods such as Six Sigma and Lean, and tools such as BPMN and BPEL4People. Just as the side-effects of DDT were to lay waste to ecological diversity for decades, unrestricted use of BPM in its current form has the potential to lay waste to healthy workplaces worldwide.

In fact, this is only scratching the surface of the impact in store for organizations that commit whole-heartedly to current BPM methods and technologies. In future postings to this blog, I will illustrate some disastrous end results that may lie in store for adopter's of today's technology buzzword, SOA, and show how SOA has a good chance of completely destroying your IT infrastructure.

This is not the fault of BPM and SOA itself, which are simply technologies - ones that, used appropriately, have every chance of delivering all their promised ROI. However, like science in general, they cannot be positive forces unless applied within an organizational "society" that permits innovation to thrive, collaboration to take place naturally, and individuals to work in a healthy way. What we need is not more systems thinking, but a simple, practical, step-by-step way for people to work together better, both within and across organizational boundaries.

Does any of this strike a chord with you? If so, stay tuned to this blog over the Autumn to find out why SOA is so potentially dangerous, and how the techniques of Human Interaction Management can be used to avoid meltdown.

Posted by keithhb in Management |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Comments

Drucker was quite a fan of Taylor and Deming, whom he has credited with nearly all of the productivity increases of the 20th century. Having said this, Drucker followed up by saying that Taylorist techniques do not help knowledge work, yet knowledge work has become the primary activity of the economy since the 1970's. This is where collaboration & human interaction needs to thrive, and is arguably why Western productivity has lagged since the 70's (with the brief spike in the 90's arguably attributable to the Web).

From 1999's "Management Challenges for the 21st Century"....

And yet every method during these last hundred years that has had the slightest success in raising the productivity of manual workers--and with it their real wages--has been based on Taylor's principles, no matter how loudly its protagonists proclaimed their differences with Taylor. This is true of "work enlargement," "work enrichment" and "job rotation" --all of which use Taylor's methods to lessen the worker's fatigue and thereby to increase the worker's productivity. It is true of such extensions of Taylor's principles of task analysis and industrial engineering to the entire manual work process as Henry Ford's assembly line (developed after 1914, when Taylor himself was already sick, old and retired). It is just as true of the Japanese "Quality Circle," of "Continuous Improvement" ("Kaizen"), and of "Just-In-Time Delivery."
    The best example, however, is W. Edwards Deming's (1900-1993) "Total
    Quality Management." What Deming did--and what makes Total Quality
    Management effective--to analyze and organize the job exactly the
    way Taylor did. But then he added, around 1940, Quality Control
    based on a statistical theory that was only developed ten years
    after Taylor's death. Finally, in the 1970s, Deming substituted
    closed-circuit television and computer simulations for Taylor's
    stopwatch and motion photos. But Deming's Quality Control Analysts
    are the spit and image of Taylor's Efficiency Engineers and function
    the same way.
Whatever his limitations and shortcomings--and he had many--no other American, not even Henry Ford (1863-1947), has had anything like Taylor's impact. "Scientific Management" (and its successor, "Industrial Engineering") is the one American philosophy that has swept the world--more so even than the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. In the last century there has been only one worldwide philosophy that could compete with Taylor's: Marxism. And in the end, Taylor has triumphed over Marx.

Posted by: Stu Charlton at October 4, 2007 11:27 PM

Thanks for this, Stu. I wasn't trying to suggest that Drucker disagreed with Taylor et al - simply that:

Drucker's own contribution was of a different nature

Contribution of this nature, that I term "systems-oriented", have had less impact on the workplace.

Your quote from Drucker is evidence that he himself agreed with this assertion. As you say, Drucker often emphasized the importance of knowledge work to the modern economy - in other words, we now need to go beyond Taylorist techniques.

However, my view is that Drucker, Senge et al have inspired people without giving them enough step-by-step guidance to implement systems-oriented ideas. It is partly in response to the need for such concrete support that I developed Human Interaction Management and the associated free software tools.

--
All the best
Keith

Posted by: Keith Harrison-Broninski at October 5, 2007 07:51 AM