In praise of mere description
<Wish I had some exotic or interesting reason for my absence from writing here. Sadly, it’s mainly been down to extra shifts at the PowerPoint factory leaving little time or energy for much else. It’s nice to be back.>
Description is unfairly maligned in organizational life. Relegated to the ranks of why bother, it’s insight and, depending on where we are in the pendulum swing of concept-attention, foresight that get all the glory. Bring me solutions not problems, the playbook advice seemingly passed along to every neophyte manager intones. Why spend time and energy describing things when there are issues to solve, actions to drive, and superiors to dazzle? Causality, or at least path to divining it, is what matters. Focus on answering “why” not “what”. This is interesting for both what it implies about how organizations decide and the sorts of decisions it creates. But more importantly, this discounting of description robs organizations of the marrow of decisions.
This odd state of affairs emerges from the ways that organizations seek to harness two contradictory forces. On the one side is standardization. A defining feature of bureaucracies, standardization with its clearly defined roles and responsibilities and consistent procedures for executing them, is largely responsible for the competitive advantages that have enabled the form to dominate the organizational landscape. Consistency also provides measurability. Standardized units of input transformed into standardized units of output which are readily quantified and valued. And given the prevailing logic of financialization, the ability to standardize, count, and value are critical to sustained organizational existence.
On the other side is novelty. An organization’s continued existence emerges from a never-ending cycle of useful variety creation. A relentless need to identify new way of existing in the world. This variety-creation may look outwards - identifying or creating new users, needs, products, applications, etc. - or inwards - developing new ways of doing things or even reasons to exist - all to extend and refine organizational operations to ensure their ability to continually reproduce in an environment where everything else is doing the same.
In contrast to the forces of standardization, novelty creation is a process of non-standardization. The gathering and interpretation of fresh information. New uses for existing capabilities. Novel configurations of parts, processes, or frames of reference all in an effort to generate variety that be useful to respond to other emerging variety. Random variations created through standard activities that fold back, remaking the processes that created it. A process of bringing things into existence that are difficult, by definition, to immediately count, standardize, or value. As cybernetics reminds us, we can only manage variety with variety.
The reconciliation of these two distinct forces is what makes organizations a sort of magic. By hiving off these activities into different subsystems / components / parts / units, the division of labor enables these contrasting forces to kinda, sorta peacefully coexist. Anyone who’s set foot in an organization with more than 10 people in it will recognize how these dynamics come to be effectively wrangled. To manage both known variety and the need to generate and capture useful variety, work is broken into pieces. These pieces are given names - marketing, finance, HR, supply chain, IT, etc. - and are cordoned off along with rights to decide what happens to the work and how it may be managed and delivered.
But these efforts to wrangle the organization in turn generate different types of complexity. The transition from undifferentiated mass to discrete units organized into a larger whole introduces new demands for coordination. The existing tension between exploration (creating useful variety) and exploitation (reaping the benefits of known standardization) become functionally aligned. These functional alignments create boundaries. Identities form by the integration of these boundaries. What “marketing” or “supply chain” mean is, at least partially, defined in contrast to what’s it’s not.
These boundary-created/defining identities are further shaped and reinforced by activities outside the organization. Professional bodies, regulatory agencies, consultants, etc. etc. provide frames of reference, ways of working, and career-defining anchors that make the activities of these functions externally legible, often to the detriment of internal legibility. That is, IT teams or HR units undertake activities and describe themselves and their work in terms that often come to make more sense to fellow travels outside the organization than those with whom they share letterhead.
To quell the resultant tower of babel created by these everyday processes, organizations rely on a variety of mechanisms. These include status hierarchies. Some functions come to hold more sway and as a result are able to impose their particular way of understanding the world on everyone else.1 Neil Fligstein traces the rise of finance in the American context in his book, “The Transformation of Corporate Control.” A process that has only been further cemented since the book was published in 1990.
Rituals similarly play a role in quieting the din. Uniform board papers, stylized quarterly business reviews, thematically organized annual forecasting session, and everyone’s favorite, the off-site planning workshop are vital rituals that serve to renew the faith while making the mythical power of the organization concrete.
Local knowledge - organizational epistomologies - emerge within distinct subunits which help to ensure internal consistency of operation. But also end up framing the same event or information in very different ways. R&D’s test and learn, which creates an environment of experimentation and layered learning, is finance’s squandered opex.
These efforts to ease the cross-cutting tensions inherent in the process of organizing locks organizations and their sub-units into a particular set of dynamics. Once an organization breaks ~100 people and has established a division of labor with its attendant means of coordination and decision rights it begins an inexorable process of compounding complexity. Feedback loops, unintended consequences, local epistemologies, and a host of other interactions, weird and otherwise, come to co-exist with ongoing efforts to impose and maintain standards and consistency. Or as James March explains,
Imagine that you’re either the referee, coach, player or spectator at an unconventional soccer match: the field for the game is round; there are several goals scattered haphazardly around the circular field; people can enter and leave the game whenever they want to; they can throw balls in whenever they want; they can say ‘that’s my goal’ whenever they want to, as many times as they want to, and for as many goals as they want to; the entire game takes place on a sloped field; and the game is played as if it makes sense.”2
From the vantage of those ostensibly in charge of managing, efforts that bring order and explanation to the ongoing flow of events are valuable activities worthy of significant investment in time and resources. Hence the derision of mere description and the elevation of insight.
However well-intentioned these efforts are, though, they often work counter to the stated aims of organizational improvement.3 I want to describe three reasons why this happens while advocating for descripton’s role as mechanism of improvement.
Organizations are unclear technologies.
As described above, the actual operation of most organizations is poorly understood, especially by the organization itself. Ongoing interactions both inside and outside the confines of the organization generate complex flows of activity and information. Rituals, status displays, and variable organizational ways of knowing combine with end-to-end processes too complex to be followed over time, to shroud most activities in ambiguity. The means by which things happen are presented as just-so stories that are made and remade over time into accepted wisdom or means for inter-departmental warfare. In short, organizations don’t have effective means of understanding themselves or how they accomplish things. And even if they wished to dedicate the efforts to determine this, the ongoing creation of variety inherent in organizing would have moved the organization into a new dynamic rendering the answer obsolete by the time it is discerned.
Against this backdrop, description is a powerful means of knowing. Rather than seeking to impose cause-effect dynamics on a noisy, ambiguous environment, description provides a mechanism for taking the organizational world as it is. Describing situations as they appear from a particular organizational vantage. Providing a means by which collectively understood meaning by be created. Finance provide the example par excellence. A statement of accounts, an annual report, an audit statement is a set of descriptive statements negotiated over by a set of organizational actors - both internal and external - to create a commonly agreed understanding of events experienced by the organization.
Organizations are multivocal.
The division of labor and the multiple points of interaction within and across the organization generate and support a variety of local knowledge systems. This doesn’t preclude the search for “capital T” truth that holds across time and place but it does point to the additional effort required to define, capture it, and communicate it across these contexts. For any organizational information required to travel across different boundaries, be they internal or external, description provides a less resource intensive approach versus alternatives. This is because local use broadly relies on reinterpretation into specific context. In light of the need to generate useful variety, description offers a more amenable raw material as it may be woven into local narratives, combined with existing capabilities, ways of working, etc. to generate novelty that is responsive to current or emerging variety management challenges. Rigidity of interpretation threatens flexibility, drives competency traps (organizations become really good at things that no longer help to respond to shifting variety absorption needs), and ultimately stifle resilience. Description, by nature, forces flexible interpretation. By explaining what, description is better suited to describing change.
Organizations are superstitious learners.
I originally titled this section: “organizations have terrible theories of the world.” Organizations are complex. But like game described above by James March, we experience them as sensible (if often ridiculous). This creates a weird dynamic that most of what happens, for good or ill, is poorly understood. But no one gets promoted for saying it’s complicated, so organizations substitute ritual and status competition to create explanations for what’s happening and why. It creates a dynamic where tools are deployed - statistical analysis, for example - that few understand, even fewer question, and almost no one knows how to effectively operationalize - to stand in for actually trying to understand what’s happening and why. Experiences are filtered through local knowledge systems, strange lessons are drawn, translated into rituals, and especially when drawn from higher status elements, treated as worthy of action.
Richard Feynman described this as cargo cult science:
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.4
This is a common enough state of affairs in organizational life. An inability to discern what’s actually happening or may happen is substituted with the trappings of ritual. Description is a strong first step to escaping the cult. Describing what’s happening, seeking to fit it into local knowledge system, previous history, and wider interpretative frames may not by itself provide a theory of the world but it does force a reckoning with what is being described. It provides a way into understanding what is happening, what assumptions are being made about things work, how this set of events connect, and what may be happening that provides a mechanism by which understanding may be developed. Description open a window onto the unstated, often terrible, theory of the world by laying bare its assumptions.
While far from a silver bullet, description does provide a way for an organizations to better navigate their complex realities. By providing a mechanism for evaluating the world and feeding useful variety generation without imposition of likely incorrect frames of reference, description is good, actually.
As someone who’s worked across every function in the contemporary organization, perhaps the main thing that connects them all is a seemingly endless search for “their seat the table.” Even finance, the masters of the contemporary organization, complain that no one listens to them.
James March quoted in Weick, Karl E. “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems.” Administrative Science Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1976): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391875.
Improvement is such a loaded term. Here I am using it to mean the ability of a organization to successfully reproduce itself over time while it seeks to meet some set of stated goals.
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm