di
Francesco Zanotti
Ho partecipato, insieme a
due Colleghi di CSE Crescendo (Maria Chiara di Luzio e Riccardo Profumo), al seminario
della EUS (European Union for Systemics) dal titolo: “Knowledge for the Future
of the Knowledge Society" che si è tenuto a Charleroi (Belgio) il 20 settembre
scorso. Abbiamo presentato tre contributi le cui slides di presentazione
sono disponibili e scaricabili su questo blog nella sezione Libri, Link, Eventi.
Ho provato a scrivere un
commento finale. In inglese, come sono in inglese le presentazioni, per permettere
un più vasto utilizzo del nostro blog.
“When
we think of people at work we imagine people manufacturing some products or
delivering some services. We try to manage them, for example, prescribing
procedures or proposing a list of values .... Wrong!
People
are writers of specific “local” human stories. Different stories in different
“loci” of the organization. Inputs (procedures, values etc.) of managers can be
just “interferences”. It is impossible, both theoretically and practically, to foresee
their impact.
In
fact.
Let’s
consider procedures.
At
first glance procedures might be considered a “play script” that people are
asked to represent. Wrong!
Procedures cannot be considered an exhaustive play script because it’s
impossible to prescribe all behaviors. That means that people have a lot of
spaces of freedom (that often managers are not aware of) they have to fill-in
with self-defined behaviors. The inevitable conclusion is that a group of
procedures can just be an interference for the “story creation” processes.
Procedures will be applied or not, will be “completed” with certain
self-defined behaviors or with others, depending on the cognitive systems of
story “writers”, on their relations system, on the anthropology of each group
in the organization.
Let’s consider values.
Something
similar happens with values. Reasons are that values are not things, but
emergencies from the informal organization and there is a non-casual connection
between values and behaviors.
Suppose
a CEO wants to manage an organization through values. First problem is that a
CEO does not have a defined list of values, already recorded in some places of
its (or her) mind. He (or she) thinks of values just when he (or she) decides
to wright down a list of them. Secondly, the process of emergence of values in
the mind finishes when the ideal list in the mind becomes a concrete list in a
piece of paper, in a group of slides, in a speech …
Well
… it is evident that the process of emergence of values depends on
psychological condition and relational context of the CEO. And on types of media
and languages he (or she) used. From a different psychological condition,
relational context and using different media and languages, a different list of
values will emerge.
Beyond
of that it is important to consider the hermeneutical process. When people
receive the defined list of values, each of them interprets in different ways
that list, depending on his (or her) psychological conditions and relational
context, his (or her) reactions to particular media and languages used by the
CEO.
Last,
but not least, the process of real stories creation evolves. If CEO just gives
people “orders” (procedures are orders, values are used as orders) this process
becomes self-referential: it regenerates always the same story. The
self-referentiality generates what it is called “resistance to change”
Conclusion:
the process of “constructing real stories of real life at work” it is
completely in the hands of people. Real stories are the real strategy of an
enterprise. Real stories generate cash.
If
a CEO wants to govern the process of cash generation (are there any CEOs who
are not willing to govern the process of cash generation?), he or she has to
govern the process of “constructing real stories of real life at work”.
In
which way?
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