Improving Control

Activities within an organization can be better controlled in the service of achievement if inquiry is brought to bear, and if the achievement tensions are directly handled.

Increasing Effectiveness

The upper section, CL7-CL4, is about increasing effectiveness.

Basis: CL4. The meaning of effectiveness in regard to achievement is provided by the values & goals (CL4) of the organization, which direct all action.

Empirical realities: CL5. Corporate data and personal knowledge provide confidence about what has happened and what is going on, and also shape what might and can be planned. Unlike CL6 & CL7, these realities are not intangible forces but brute factors that require respect and adaptation. So staff must actively pursue inquiry.

Imaginative realities: CL6. Aspirations can be created, and once created they are forces that push and pull people: enlivening values, inspiring bold objectives and stretching everyone gratifyingly. Aspirations are therefore the necessary context for organizing inquiry.

Social realities: CL7.  These realities are also forces, but now impersonal and wholly independent of individuals. Such forces cannot be controlled, and they cross organizational boundaries. These realities include such things as:Closed technological changes, demographic impacts on manpower, political manipulation of markets, growth of disciplines, and altered consumption patterns. These and other forces require identification, exploration and appreciation in terms of the organization's present and future identity.

Taking a systemicist view harmonizes inquiry, based on differing ideas or aspirations or evaluations, which could otherwise lead to clashes.

Handling Tensions

Choice of values and goals in the Rationalist Centre (CL4) is the primary link between Inquiry-Centres that increase effectiveness and Action-Centres that control activity.

● All Centres in the upper 3 levels have direct channels of influence to CL4B.

● All but one Centre in the lower 3 levels have direct channels of influence to CL4B.

The Pragmatic Centre is the wild card: not only does it lack a direct link to choice of values and goals (CL4), but it can bypass accountability (CL2)—and will certainly do so if roles and reporting relationships are confused and weak.

The only other links between the two halves of the Tree are CL5 ↔ CL3. These links have two effects in relation to duality-based tensions:

► bridging the internal duality i.e. effectiveness control is linked more solidly with activity control
► bridging the «individual v organizational» dynamic duality i.e. the counter-pointing of individuals' values and knowledge with those of the organization is sharpened.

Selection of corporate data is the primary method of management to force viable resolution to power-based disputes: CL5O ↔ CL3I. The powerful groups use data in a similar fashion to press their case. Such data may be used to define resolutions which may well lead to further confrontations
e.g. Closed "should productivity increase from 45 units per hour to 50 units per hour in that department, an end of month bonus of 5% of salary will automatically apply". When the time comes, the agreement is perceived to have omitted other relevant factors.

We name the CL5O ↔ CL3I channel: CONFRONTATION

Personal knowledge of specific examples of work issues and problems is usually invaluable in developing a resolution to structural and managerial conflicts: CL5I ↔ CL3O. The resolution of such issues encourages and stimulates a better understanding of local situations.

We name the CL5I ↔ CL3OO  channel: STIMULATION

ClosedTHEE Technical Note  

Originally posted: 29-Sep-2011