The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  Shoshana Zuboff in her book In the Age of the Smart Machine describes the conversation in a large pulp mill in North America after a computer-controlled production system had been introduced: ‘In fifteen years’ time,’ the workers said, ‘there will be nothing for the workers to do. The technology will be so good it will operate itself. You will just sit there behind a desk running two or three areas of the mill yourself and get bored.’

  In fact, as she goes on to demonstrate, it did not turn out like that. Once the workers got used, and it took some time, to running the mill by remote control, by reading the screens rather than by feeling the pipes and squashing the pulp, every small deviation from the norm became a mini-puzzle. The operators would gather round and test out options and possibilities until they found the cause and could put it right. As one operator said, ‘Things occur to me now that would never have occurred to me before. With all this information in front of me, I begin to think about how to do the job better. And, being freed from all that manual activity, you really have time to look at things, to think about them, and to anticipate.’ Or, as the plant managers said, ‘We are depending on the technology to educate our people in abstract thinking . . . you can no longer make a decision just based on local data . . . you have to derive your decision from the inter-relationships among the variables’; you have to start thinking.

  On the other hand, I have stood and watched a man watching a machine count out pills and put them in bottles – watching just in case the machine went bonkers, in which case he pressed a red button, stopped it and called for help. Or, as one of the pulp workers said, ‘Sometimes . . . I realize that we stare at the screen even when it has gone down. You get in the habit and you just keep staring even if there is nothing there.’

  Smart machines can reduce humans to attendant watchdogs, but smart organizations see the computers and their machines as aides to clever people. To quote one of Shoshana Zuboff’s managers again, ‘We never used to expect them to understand how the plant works, just to operate it. But now if they don’t know the theory behind how the plant works, how can we expect them to understand all of the variables in the new computer system and how these variables interact?’

  Zuboff likes to distinguish between automating and informating. Automating tends to concentrate on the smart machine and to cut out or reduce people. Informating organizations also use smart machines but in interaction with smart people. In the short-term automating pays off, but informating wins in the longer term because the organization’s thinking or ‘intellective’ capacity has been increased. In this vision the organization is full of colleagues and co-learners, its thinking skill becomes its most precious resource and the challenge of keeping that skill upgraded the major task of the organization. It really has to be a sort of corporate university.

  The hard facts of economic life mean that organizations will:

  — Increasingly have to invest in smart machines if they want to be as effective as they used to be.

  — Increasingly want to use skilled and thinking people to use those machines in order to get the most out of them.

  — Need to pay those people more and therefore, if they can, to have fewer of them.

  It all puts pressure on the core, a pressure which could be summed up by the new equation of half the people, paid twice as much, working three times as effectively, an equation which, once you start believing it, has a built-in momentum. To get that three times improvement the smart organization will equip their people with all the technological aids they need, be it car telephones or computers in their homes or audio-printers which translate the spoken word into typescript on the screen, or expert systems which do the first analysis. It will also expect those people to be smart, to be dedicated to their work (none of the leisure age here), and to be prepared to invest enough time and energy to keep ahead of the game, to go on learning, in other words, in order that they can go on thinking.

  The Intelligent People

  The new organizations need new people to run them, people with new skills, new capacities and different career patterns. More of them, interestingly, are likely to be women, not from any sudden enthusiasm for equality between the sexes, but because organizations will increasingly find that there will not be enough of the skills and the capacities they need if they exclude from their recruitment half of the population.

  I was being shown round one of Japan’s new businesses – a women’s fashion house, designing, making and marketing women’s fashions worldwide, although, as it turned out, the actual making was now done in Taiwan (Japan, too, is susceptible to the price of labour). I noticed on my tour that there was an unusually high percentage of women in the offices and, particularly, in the design rooms; nor were they wearing the kind of air hostess uniforms which women in Japanese offices customarily wear. ‘Are they allowed to work in jeans and tee-shirts?’ I asked. My guide shook his head, scornfully almost. ‘They should not,’ he said, ‘it is not customary, but they are our designers, we need their talent, we have to let them dress as they please.’ As in Japan, that bastion of the male executive, so it will be elsewhere.

  In Britain it is estimated that 800,000 additional women will join organizations in the next eight years – almost equivalent to the total net increase in the working population. Women, in other words, are poised to take up any extra jobs that are going, plus some that were not going. These will not all be the part-time counter assistants in the supermarkets. Many of them will be the well-educated, qualified women re-entering the workforce.

  Organizations will be squeezed, as we have seen, by the need for all the intelligent, qualified people they can get and by the shortage of well-educated, well-qualified youngsters. They will be forced to look to less convenient sources of intelligent people. Some have suggested that the intellectual élite of Africa and China and India will be lured to the West. More obviously, however, organizations will turn first to the pool of talent on their doorstep, the married women with young families.

  These women, however, as even the Japanese discovered, will not be men in skirts. They will want proper recognition of their need to raise a family while they are working. Crèches at the office are not the whole answer, although they will be a standard facility by the end of the century. A more flexible way of working is required, one which allows the woman to be at home when she has to be at home, which accepts that full-time attendance in an office is not essential for all types of work, which allows people to work in their own ways as long as the work is done on time and to standard.

  The shamrock organization and the federal organization, telecommuting and work centres, are made-to-measure for the working mother. The necessity for organizations to woo more working mothers into their cores will only increase the pressures to move towards these sorts of organizations. In time, then, it will be working fathers as well as working mothers who will be living these more flexible working lives.

  In my British paper today there is a picture of the Chalk family, a youngish couple with three small children. The father works from home in the country designing books and educational kits. ‘There is no need, today,’ he says, ‘to work in cities. I like the space and the freedom of the countryside.’ His wife, now that the children are starting to go to school, would like to return to the nursing she did when first she was married. Unfortunately, she says, the hours they demand do not permit it. ‘Hospitals,’ she says, ‘have to offer me more flexible work so that I can choose the hours I work to fit in with my family.’ They will, Mrs Chalk, they will – because they will have to if they want people with your skills.

  The most important difference, however, in the Triple I organizations is the growing realization that everyone in the core will have to be a manager while at the same time no one can afford to be only a manager. Smaller numbers in the core require more flexibility and more responsibility. Everyone will increasingly be expected not only to be good at something, to have their own professional or technical expertise, but will also
very rapidly acquire responsibility for money, people or projects, or all three, a managerial task, in other words. The days of British India thinking are over, the kind of thinking which boasted in the fact that 2,500 Britons ran India, with the help of technicians, foremen and workers. It was the kind of thinking that led to ‘management cadres’, management trainees and ‘fast-tracks’ to the top, for a selected few. I was once one such management trainee, and management was the only role ever expected of me; others would be the experts and the supervisors. It was a business equivalent of British India and the officer class. In future, everyone in the core will be an officer and will be expected to be both competent and in command.

  In the newer, more hi-tech, organizations in the USA the word ‘manager’ has begun to disappear. People are not ‘managers’, they are ‘team leaders’, ‘project heads’, ‘co-ordinators’ or, more generally, ‘executives’. They attend executive development programmes even though the topic is still that of management. The language is significant, once again signalling a change of attitude and a new way of looking at the world. Managers, after all, imply someone to be managed, they suggest a stratified society. An organization could not logically be staffed only by managers, but it could by executives.

  The implications of this shift in thinking are considerable. Management ceases to be a definition of a status, of a class within an organization, but an activity, an activity which can be defined, and its skills taught, learnt and developed. The re-definition gives management a professional basis, something which, in Britain at least, it has never had. Management, after all, was held by the British to be akin to parenting, a role of great importance for which no training, preparation or qualification was required; the implication being that experience is the only possible teacher and character the only possible qualification. To study management, when it was seen as a definition of a status, was somehow to suggest that one was unworthy of that status, while ‘to manage’ as an activity remained a word with a very lowly pedigree in English, meaning colloquially to cope or to contrive, as when one says to one’s friend ‘did you manage all right today’ or ‘did you manage to get it working’.

  The new respectability

  In 1987 two reports castigated Britain’s preparation and development of her managers in comparison with other leading industrial nations. The hangover of management as a class was still there. Some of the discrepancies were telling:

  — In Japan and the USA some 85 per cent of top managers had degrees whilst the only available comparative figure in Britain was 24 per cent.

  — Britain graduated only 1,200 MBAs in 1987 compared with 70,000 in the USA.

  — Nearly half of America’s 300 biggest companies provided five days off the job training each year for their managers. The comparable figure in Britain (with some noticeable exceptions) was closer to one.

  — Most would-be managers in West Germany do not join their firm until the age of 27 after periods in an apprenticeship, in military service and in 6-year university degrees, whereas the well-educated Britisher joins at 22.

  The two reports only confirmed what was long suspected, that British managers were amateurs, sometimes talented amateurs, by comparison with other managers in other countries. The new organizations needed something better.

  The reports found ready listeners both among leaders of business and among the young. There was an explosion of interest in MBA degrees, a rush by organizations to link their development plans to some form of qualification and a general readiness to accept that at least the technical knowledge and skills of management, ‘business education’ as the reports termed it, could be taught and should be taught at an early age even if the human and conceptual skills needed to be honed by experience. The new activity was an outward and visible sign that management was increasingly seen to be the name for an activity and not a class of people. Another discontinuity had occurred even if not everyone perceived it this way at first.

  It cannot stop, however, with business education and early qualifications. If executives in every part of the organization, any organization, are to be truly professional they must continue to build on that early base of understanding. Life for a manager, say the Japanese, should be a continual process of self-enlightenment, which is their way of saying that study and learning should never stop. In Japanese organizations, in fact, the seniors spend more time on thinking and study than their juniors, reading books and articles; meeting with experts; going on study tours to find out how their competitors work; sitting with their subordinates, listening to them not talking at them.

  The Japanese are more conscious than most that the other two skills of management, as defined long ago by Professor Katz of Harvard, the human skills and the conceptual skills, are as important as the technical skills. Neither of these two skills can be taught in the classroom, although they can be discussed and debated there; both skills need to be developed by practice, improved by comment, sketched by example; they have to be worked at, for they do not come easily to most people or without effort.

  The point about the new organizations is that everyone in the core will increasingly be expected to have not only the expertise appropriate to his or her particular role but will also be required to know and understand business, to have the technical skills of analysis and the human skills and the conceptual skills and to keep them up to date. Intelligence, for the manager, has three dimensions. The Japanese use mentors to make sure it happens, at least at the beginning. The Americans rely on a philosophy of individual initiative and corporate support which suits their more individualistic culture. The properly intelligent manager, they believe, will develop himself or herself. The British have hitherto relied on a Darwinian belief that the best will come through in the end, but that belief is a wasteful and a cruel philosophy in a world where good jobs are precious and talent rare. The threefold intelligence which the new organizations need in all their people does not just happen. The seeds of intelligence may have to be there in the beginning, at the recruitment stage, but those seeds will need a climate in which to germinate and careful husbandry to let them grow. The intelligent organization has to be a learning organization, at every level.

  America’s big corporations talk of five days off-the-job training for every executive every year. One British bank is trying to gear up its middle managers to run the kind of federal organization outlined in Chapter 5, and is currently requiring them to spend nine weeks every year on study courses. That is 20 per cent of their working time. Perhaps it should not all be spent on courses, but to expect the intelligent executive to devote one fifth (one day a week) of his or her time preparing themselves for a different and a better future would not be unreasonable in new organizations. It has, after all, long been a tradition of universities that one day a week should be reserved by their faculty for study and research. If all organizations are going to be universities of a sort, pursuing truth in their own fields, running a learning culture, growing new knowledge and new people, then 20 per cent of time devoted to these ends would not be a wasted investment.

  The new careers

  The new organization will seek to bind its core executives to itself for as long as it thinks it needs them. The new executives, however, will be less ready to be tied, particularly if they have some sort of qualification as a passport. It is rather like the paradox of tenure in universities; those who deserve tenure don’t need it and those who need it don’t deserve it. In fact, as management becomes more professional, with more professional-type qualifications, the executives will begin to think of their careers as professional careers, as a sequence of jobs which may or may not be in the same organization. Companies, too, will be reluctant to guarantee careers for life to everyone, even in the core. More contracts will be for fixed periods of years, more appointments will be tied to particular roles or jobs with no guarantee of further promotion. The appointments pages of the papers already reflect this trend: the advertisements offer a job more often than they promis
e a career.

  To the younger new recruit a career is still promised, but the days when the booklet outlining the pension scheme arrives with the letter of appointment are now rare. Whatever they may say, neither the young applicant nor the employer today believe that the appointment is forever. Indeed, fewer and fewer organizations now promise to manage your career; instead they promise opportunities along with help to develop your capabilities to take up some of those opportunities. No longer is there the feeling that somewhere someone is thinking about your future, watching your development, planning your next steps. It probably always was an illusion, now few even pretend. It is a case of ‘individual initiative and corporate support’, as the Americans describe it.

  This change has partly been forced on organizations by the harsher realities of competition. No longer is it possible to carry as passengers those who have failed to live up to their earlier promise or to keep people in jobs which could be done as well by others younger and, usually, cheaper. Partly, however, organizations have found out, too late, that people who have been with the organization for thirty continuous years are not always best able to cope with increasing discontinuity.

  I have met too many organizations who have been religiously committed to a policy of growing their own, even recruiting them straight from school at age 15 or 16, only to end up 30 years later with a severe case of group-think at the top, with people who have only known one way of doing things, one set of people, one philosophy; who distrust outsiders, dislike conflict and expect continuity. ‘Group-think’, as we know from studies of historical events, most famously the ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco early in Kennedy’s presidency, comes about when well-meaning people become too close and cohesive to challenge assumptions, to check out facts, to explore new options or to risk too much argument. It is often more important to agree together than to get it right. In conditions of continuity group-think in organizations made for a strong corporate culture, a sense of family, tradition and solidarity. In conditions of discontinuity it leads to falling profits, to merger or takeover, to the end of the cosy club.