Can We Imagine?

Can We Imagine?

Can we imagine alternatives to conventional management? Different ways of coordinating organisations, large and small?

“Finding deficiencies and getting rid of them is not a way of improving the performance of the system. An improvement program must be directed at what you want, not at what you don’t want. And, determining what you do want requires redesigning the system, not for the future, but for right now, and asking yourself what would you do right now if you could do whatever you wanted to. If you don’t know what you would do if you could do what you wanted to do how could you ever know what you would do under constraints?”

~ Russell L. Ackoff

Of course there are constraints on what we can do right now to improve the fundamentals of how we coordinate and direct our organisations. But if we can’t even imagine other ways, better ways, then what does that say about our imaginations?

As a starter for ten, here’s a comparison of just three alternatives for coordinating our organisations:

Different Forms of Organisational Coordination
Conventional Management	Vs.	Lean Management	Vs.	Fellowship
Authority	Vs.	Responsibility	Vs.	Mutuality
Results	Vs.	Process	Vs.	Relationships
Give answers	Vs.	Ask questions	Vs.	Make refusable requests
Plans	Vs.	Experiments	Vs.	Conversations
Formal education	Vs.	Gemba learning	Vs.	Mutual exploration
Specialists own improvement	Vs.	Line manager and teams own improvement	Vs.	Those doing the work own improvement
Data-based decisions made remotely	Vs.	Facts-based decisons made at the gemba	Vs.	Decisions made together
Standardisation by specialists	Vs.	Standardisation by manager and team	Vs.	Standardisation by team
Go fast to go slow	Vs.	Go slow to go fast	Vs.	Play
Vertical focus	Vs.	Horizontal focus	Vs.	People-as-individuals focus
Fixed mindset (cf Dweck)	Vs.	Growth mindset	Vs.	Mutuality mindset
Extrinsic motivations	Vs.	Intrinsic motivations	Vs.	Mutual joyfulness
Violence	Vs.	Respect	Vs.	Nonviolence
Imposed or opaque purpose	Vs.	Shared (static) purpose	Vs.	Mutually-evolving purpose
Key decisions made by a few	Vs.	Key decisions made by a few	Vs.	Key decisions made by consensus of all
Economics of Cost	Vs.	Economics of Flow	Vs.	Economics of Joy

What other forms can you imagine?

– Bob