Reducing Risk: CL5

A prime influence on effectiveness relates to whether organizational choices for achievement, especially strategies and goals, are concordant with objective realities. When they are not, management is in denial: perhaps the commonest cause of small business failure.

Given certainty about relevant facts, much of the risk in choosing goals and implementing them can be markedly reduced. Ensuring greater certainty in this way becomes possible at the fifth level using Empiricist Mode values.

«Individual v Organization» Tension

Can there be an individual perspective on facts and objective reality that is distinct from incontrovertible organization-wide facts?  Or does each imply the other? Or are they the same thing?

There is certainly corporate data ►

This is collected according to corporate standards, using corporate data-structures and specifically designed to give a full picture of operations, customer-relations and so on.

If well set up and accessible, such data allows all in the organization to share identical objective facts (e.g. falling sales, increased absenteeism, new entrants in the market). The result is to generate group conviction about relevant organizational matters.

But each staff member also has unique local knowledge ►

This is obtained simply and naturally through seeking to objectively understand their particular work situation. Even people opposed to empirical methods observe, notice, ask, check and inquire informally. This creates a reasonably valid, if idiosyncratic, picture of local factors.

The nature and quality of this knowledge will vary according to the person's interests, situation and experience. But all staff become certain about what they see with their own eyes, and what they hear directly from customers or co-workers.

So at this level, the «individual v organizational» duality forms two polar Centres.

Dominance: Which is more critical to an organization: corporate data or local knowledge?
Given that:

● staff come and go,
● staff vary greatly in their reliability and objectivity, and
● disparate pieces of knowledge cannot be meshed to create some global equivalent,

the dominant centre needs to be corporate data-CL5_O.

But top management must never become isolated from shop-floor realities. So the two different Centres of certainty and empirical knowledge requisitely connect via a channel of mutual influence i.e. corporate data must be used to put local issues in perspective; while local knowledge needs to contribute to selection and interpretation of management information.

We name the CL5_I ↔ CL5_O channel: CONNECTEDNESS

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• Now consider other work processes based on links to lower Centres previously identified.

Originally posted: 17-Sep-2011