The Cultureship Blog

- Any organisation is one thing. We must never forget that it is only our metaphors that make it seem many things.

I was at a seminar on Agile Business Processes at the Daresbury Innovation Campus yesterday. I like going to stuff there – the cross-fertilisation of people, ideas and subjects is hugely stimulating.

And yesterday’s session proved no exception. The presenter, Dr Hossam Ismail, is a hugely experienced and competent manufacturing expert, who spoke with precision, illumination and passion.

And it got me thinking how we all, with our different vocabularies, all take about much the same thing but from different viewpoints and in different words.

He spoke of Robustness, Responsiveness and Proactiveness. We speak of Community Contribution and Recognition. He looks towards a mechanised production process, we look towards a humanised productive community.

He is calling for excellence and integrity in relation to planning, teamwork and a culture of quality and initiative. We are calling for excellence and integrity in relation in relation to planning, teamwork and a culture of quality and initiative. Oh! We appear to have very rapidly merged on common ground! I suppose you could say that he is looking to the machines, whilst we are looking to the people – but the two merge as a relationship within manufacturing, yet each with some distinctive needs, or there is no manufacturing going to take place at all.

My point is that that we lose sight of wholes through Reductionism at our perspective’s peril.

That we struggle to understand or express wholeness is a human tendency, born of our relentless curiosity and a desire to influence and control. In those very drives that make us so successful lie the conditions of our greatest limitations.

What do I mean by this? I am referring to what I refer to as methodological “Thin-slicing”. By and large we do not find adequate meaning in statements such as “It’s about everything”, so we tend to go various ways. We are tutored to jump one way or another – by instinct Hossam may take you down the route of the “Hard” processes of manufacturing, whilst I may be tempted to first show you my own favoured way of the “Soft” processes of human relationships.

But when we seek to Totalise theories, to demand their status as a single possible lens, then we lose any use in our Reductionism – and it becomes a dangerous myopia.

We must always remember that first and foremost we are looking at wholes and it is always about getting a whole right as a whole, not in the neatness of being table to claim stand-alone useful essence within artificially Thin-sliced parts.

Alongside the former approach lies a corporate culture of sustainable success, in the latter lurks the beginnings of corporate dogmatism and failure.