Organizations and Garbage Collection
Many stable, complex systems produce some sort of garbage - waste material. If allowed to accumulate, waste material interferes with the function of such systems. So systems of this sort tend to have provisions for garbage collection and removal.I propose that an organization's waste material consists in large part of constraints. Contraints arise from procedures, rules, habits, norms, definitions, titles, etc. These are initially thought up to make things more regular, less chaotic, and therefore easier to arrange in effective ways. With time, and as new rules (etc.) pile up and interact, their effectiveness lapses. Only the rigidity remains.
A colleague of mine wants to install a Wiki for a work group, but he is not allowed to install anything on a server that's not on a corporate list of approved software. There is one thing remotely like a Wiki, that costs a few thousand euros a year, that he was told they'd be glad to install for him if he but asked. Nor can he just install a wiki on a local workstation - that's also locked down by corporate policy.
One sanitation system consists of collective purpose - people decide that there are some results they value more than they value the stale constraints they operate under, and negotiate the constraints away.
(I'd been thinking about this topic for a while, and where does it pop up but on the AYE conference wiki. Kind of spooky - the conference that reads your mind.)
one comment:
Of course, there is something even darker at work here. Constraints are erected as a response to a (perceived) threat — of chaos, disruption, etc.
Constraints advocates believe such corporate “rules” will help reduce the chaos. In a sense, they may be right, at the beginning at least. When later they see chaos remains, they will tend to think constraints were not applied enough and the organization needs stronger policies.
I have never seen such advocates pause and think for a second that the chaos may rise from the constraints themselves — and that more constraints may only lead to more chaos.
Emmanuel Gaillot () - 11 06 05 - 13:48
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