BETH MOTT's answer to applying

4 of the 5 frames to her stories.

Note: you have a 5th one (ante-narrative).


In the context of organizational theory, managing and
organizing after the "modern" era is known as
"postmodern". At the most basic level, postmodern
organizational theory defines the manner in which
organizations plan, organize, influence, lead, and
control. In this day and age, the words "postmodern
organizational theory" evokes images of TQM,
self-directed work teams, employee empowerment and
enfranchisement, and many other buzzwords circulated
among managers and academics. But what do these words
really mean to the workers in the trenches, and the
managers who have to implement them?

The postmodern organization at the dawn of the 2nd
millennium of mankind may be described as a relatively
flat organization with few hierarchical "layers" of
management between the CEO and the janitor. Most
business functions or processes are carried out by
cross-trained groups of workers that are self-managed
and controlled, and which coordinate with other similar
groups according to the requirements of the task.
Employees are highly empowered, and frequently
enfranchised using performance based bonus systems.
Information travels freely throughout the organization.
Employees mentor and train other employees to achieve
high levels of efficiency and provide positive
interactions between workers, thereby facilitating
personal growth at the individual level (an abstract
form of compensation). Employees actively participate
in the formulation of the corporate mission and vision
of the company to ensure organizational success within
highly competitive industries. Continuous improvement
in products, processes, and on an individual personal
level is emphasized throughout the organization.

In theory, the postmodern organization is a wonderful
entity that works effectively and efficiently with
little or no traditional management interference.
Unfortunately, in practice, implementation of the
idyllic state described above is problematic at best,
and frequently unattainable for many organizations. It
takes years to successfully implement concepts such as
TQM and self-directed work teams, because effecting
shifts in corporate culture to support these postmodern
orientations are no easy feat. My own experience as a
manager in a small software company in the early 90s is
a good case in point, and illustrates hardships that
many similar companies suffered in the implementation
phase during the "salad days" of TQM and self-directed
work teams.

By way of history, early in 1992 I was hired as the
Operations Manager for a local software company that had
been in business for more than 13 years. The company
sold scientific word processing software worldwide, and
was just releasing the first version of a newly
developed software package that operated on the Windows
3.1 operating platform. Due to severe slowdowns in
sales of the company's previous DOS-based product as a
result of the impending and widely publicized release of
the new Windows-based product (which killed the sales of
the old product!), there were only 9 other employees at
the time I came on board. Like many software firms in
the early 90s, consumer acceptance of technological
innovations such as the Windows operating system was
expanding many of the existing DOS-based software
markets as consumers migrated to the new platform, and
picked up many new entrants along the way. Once the new
product was released, we started adding employees at a
regular pace and had 16 by the end of 1992. The new
product was growing our market and our company at a
rapid pace. As managers we were compelled to ensure
that we were planning, organizing, influencing, leading,
and controlling effectively in order to take advantage
of core competencies and market opportunities while
minimizing threats in a highly competitive marketplace.

Using Wang's (2001) ten criteria, the company structure
was closest to a bureaucracy when I was hired in 1992.
For example, there was a "division of labor into spheres
of influence". The company was physically split into
two halves by virtue of the type of work that was
performed by workers in that area: development and
operations. Interestingly, the company lexicon provided
for a formal bifurcation between the two halves, as they
were referred to as the "development side" and
"operations side". Development included the group of
software architects, programmers, and testers.
Operations included personnel involved in
administration, marketing, sales, production and
shipping. There was also a "definite hierarchy of
official offices". A privately held corporation, the
structure included the Board of Directors and
Shareholders at the highest level, then President,
director/managers (operations and marketing), and
workers at the lowest level. Furthermore, selection to
office was "by technical qualification", and each office
had a "clearly defined sphere of competence". In other
words, there were clear lines between departments and
their areas of functional responsibility. Employees
were "personally free and subject to authority only with
respect to their impersonal official obligation".
Furthermore, the office was "filled by a free
contractual relationship", and employees were
"remunerated by fixed salaries in money". Promotion was
"dependent on the judgement of superiors". (Wang,
2001)

Our company President had been reading books on TQM and
self-directed work teams. He believed that
implementing these concepts would reduce some of the
territorial friction that existed between departments
and individuals on the operations side of the business.
He also felt that cross-trained employees on both sides
of the organization could reduce some of the stress of
release deadlines, and understaffing on the operations
side during peak demand times. Furthermore, his vision
was to create an organization which relied less on
specific individuals and managers, and more upon teams
of people that interacted on an as needed basis. In
typical bureaucratic fashion, he decreed that the
organization would undergo this transformation, which in
postmodern theory is referred to as a Quest.

According to Shipley (2001), a Quest is:

"…a journey toward success. An organization used the
story or vision of being able to develop a new
organization by setting out on a journal of discovery
and reform."

Shipley goes on to state that quests can be negative or
positive, and typically consist of three stages: Call
to adventure. In the call, the organization and
individuals become aware that they must change and
transform. The journey. The journey is the time of the
transformation and in organizations, it is typically a
time of innovation, discovery and reform. A series of
obstacles are encountered along the way, and many times
in the end a great enemy or an abyss must be overcome.
The return. The purpose of the journey is to acquire
the "boon", which is the magic elixir or great discovery
that saves the day. The right boon can save a business
(a positive quest), while the wrong boon can leave the
organization in a worse position (a negative quest).

I was convinced that our company needed to go on a quest
in order to achieve our goals of TQM and self-directed
work teams, and break down the barriers caused by our
bureaucratic structure. For the record, at the time I
did not possess this postmodern nomenclature, and only
now am fitting my past experiences into this new (to me)
theoretical framework. I'm sorry to report that our
Quest met with limited success (we returned from the
journey with no boon), and I found that implementation
was always difficult, and sometimes chaotic. One of my
pet peeves is that management theory rarely takes
practical reality into account. The reality of any
workplace is that you will find employees with a wide
range of personalities, levels of education, and
willingness to embrace change. The culture of any
organization is a complex, abstract entity that is a
synergy of all of the people who are part of the
environment. Furthermore, corporate culture evolves and
is affected by stronger players in the environment (for
better or for worse). I believe that corporate culture
cannot be legislated or controlled, but can be affected
and molded over time to fit new goals and orientations
(short of firing everyone who doesn't buy in to the
Quest and hiring people who do). Short of mass
attrition, how can any management paradigm effectively
deal with the complexity and unpredictability of human
behavior in organizations? Perhaps we should have tried
to use a stealth approach to implementation, rather than
legislation.

As a manager responsible for team building in the
organization, it was difficult to accept that we (there
were three managers and the President) were unable to
effectively and completely implement our vision for
organizational change. We had received training, worked
hard, and genuinely wanted it to work - it was difficult
for four overachievers to admit defeat at any level,
regardless of the limited success we did claim (there
were measurable positive outcomes such as making sales
goals, process improvements, etc.). I have often
pondered the reasons for our lack of success. I won't
enumerate my thoughts here as on any given day I have a
different set of top 20 reasons, all of them valid. As
I perused David's extensive and chaotic website for this
class, I ran across a treatise on chaos theory in
organization behavior. This led me to my stretch. Does
Chaos theory fit the circumstances better to explain
what was happening in the dynamic environment of the
software company before and during the Quest?

Chaos is defined as "the irregular, unpredictable
behavior of deterministic, non-linear dynamical systems"
(Hillon, 2001). According to Hillon, "Chaos is fast
replacing bureaucracy as the new science of
organizations." Although chaos is a scientific theory
used to explain the behavior of natural phenomena, it
has been extended to explain the behavior of human
organizational systems. Anyone would be hard pressed to
refute the assertion that "human systems exhibit chaotic
behavior" (Hillon, 2001). Theorists in management have
translated scientific Chaos theory into management
practice using Complexity Theory and Complex Adaptive
Systems. These theories are to complex to describe in
a sentence or two. However, the gist is that chaotic
behavior has a definite form that can be broken down and
captured into a system that models the collective of
behavior of individuals in an organization. The model
then becomes a predictive tool for group behavior. The
American College of Physician Executives (ACPE, 1999)
states that, "the complexity paradigm…offers a better
chance of achieving success in organizations operating
in a system characterized by constant change and thus
great uncertainty."

Perhaps Chaos and Complexity Theory could have helped us
to find a more productive approach to ensuring that our
Quest was successful.




_______________________________

References

ACPE (1999). Chaos and Complexity Cyberforum. The
American College of Physician Executives. Available
online http://www.acpe.org/cyber/abstract6.html.

Hillon, Mark (2001). What is Chaos and Complexity?
Chaos and Complexity Storytelling Organization as linked
to David Boje MGT 503 website. Available online
http://horsenseatwork.com/psl/pages/chaosdefined.html.

Shipley, George (2001). What is Quest? Quest
Storytelling Organization as linked to David Boje MGT
503 website. Available online
http://horsenseatwork.com/psl/pages/questdefined.html.

Wang, Kum (2001). What is Bureaucracy? Bureaucratic
Storytelling Organization as linked to David Boje MGT
503 website. Available online
http://horsenseatwork.com/psl/pages/bureaucracydefined.html.