Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together by William Isaacs

Author:William Isaacs [Isaacs, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Currency
Published: 1999-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

DIAGNOSING STRUCTURAL TRAPS

A structural trap is a condition where one part of the system requires people to act in one way, while another part of the organization requires them to do something else that directly contradicts this. This is because different subsystems of any organization often have very different assumptions and ideas about what is wrong and what needs correction, and tend not to communicate well to one another. The net effect is that people feel their efforts to produce change are constantly being undermined and neutralized despite many well-intentioned efforts to reverse the decline.

For instance, senior managers in a division of a well-known industrial equipment company I know were deeply frustrated with their lack of progress. They were entrepreneurs who had virtually invented their industry, and had led it for many years. They had several highly successful local operating businesses around the world.

But now new competitors were entering. Their global market share had eroded significantly, profitability was down, and their once-unchallenged dominance now lost. Yet every effort to regain leadership had failed. The senior managers reflected on what they needed to do, and developed clear ideas about what actions were required. They would agree on a change, only to find some months later that nothing had been done.

The cause lay in the fact that this was a highly individualistic group where every leader took responsibility to effect change, while at the same time furiously working to make his part of the organization successful. They launched numerous uncoordinated change efforts, many of which overlapped. More critically, these change efforts had deeply embedded inner contradictions. Everyone agreed, for instance, that they needed to dramatically overhaul their centralized manufacturing process, shifting to a “lean” production system that had very limited inventory and very fast turnaround times. But this required that the division’s local operating businesses give up some of their control and that everyone manage from a common forecasting system.

It turned out that each local business had a phantom forecasting system in addition to the “official” one that actually guided their decisions. The local businesses believed they had to compete with each other for manufacturing resources. To make their actual needs known by sharing their private forecasts meant they might not be able to meet their customer’s requests, harming their local profitability. The local managers were measured and rewarded on the basis of their local, not companywide, performance, a system tightly controlled by yet another part of the organization. The local managers were caught: To help the overall business, they might suffer individually. But to protect their local efforts would cause them all to fail in the long run, as competitors continued their assault, making the very changes they were resisting. Everyone agreed that they needed a new system. But in practice, people were reluctant to act.

This kind of trap often goes unspoken and undiscussed. In this case, the problems were endlessly analyzed and seemingly well understood, but no one could seem to bring all the players together in the same room to talk about their different assumptions and dilemmas.

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