Hi Michael,

Great to see you guest blogging and learn more about your KM approach. Looking forward to a coffee in the outback of BC (I live there too!) one of these days.......

Cheers,
Michelle

Thanks for the note Michelle! Looking forward to a f2f coffee chat soon...

Reflecting on the work of Gary Klein, one can form a view that people are largely pattern matching devices. Thus in this post, the pattern being deployed is one of 'a model of complexity including emergence' and it is being fitted to the problem situation of organisational morale. While this particular model/pattern fitting may indeed generate some interesting insights, it also exposes a number of potential problems.

The first is that we over-deploy our models, often into situations where they are not helpful. Models will necessarily illuminate certain aspects of observed phenomena, and also necessarily, completely ignore others. There is no guarantee that, when using a model, the parts which are being illuminated are the most interesting or significant. I would suggest that this may be the case in this circumstance.

There is a second problem, which is that organisations are not like swarms. In a swarm, no one individual, or group of individuals, is trying to exert overall influence or control over the entire swarm. Also, organisations usually have significant structure, and frequently this is hierarchical. Thus in the case of typical organisations, management set a 'climate' which will tend to accentuate or suppress any changes in morale (and here, there may indeed be a case for thinking about the concept of attractors).

Other models (or metaphors) could equally well be deployed to represent organisational morale, for example the metaphor of a medium in a Petri dish. If organisational morale is the bacterial agent, we might put an anti-biotic in the medium (which will stunt growth), or conversely, put in bacterial nutrients (which will accelerate growth). This is also potentially not a one shot activity; we can choose to put in more of either the anti-biotic or nutrients i.e. actions that are likely to promote or suppress morale, over a period of time. You can switch this model either way around - the agent can be either good or poor morale.

The third and final problem is the notion that people unconsciously promote good or bad morale. This may occur sometimes, even frequently, but we are not mere automata, we are aware of what we are doing and what the potential consequences of our actions might be. We can thus rationalise the behaviour of spreading good or bad morale as follows (but there may obviously be other equally valid rationalisations). In the case of good morale, individuals wish to see a beneficial state of affairs being sustained, and so there is a collective gain from everyone continuing to promote morale. In the case of bad morale, both individuals and collectives wish to create a sufficiently large indicator that cannot readily be missed, which informs the organisation that there is a continuing problem that needs to deal with. These are conscious rational behaviours, not just individual agents following blindly the 'morale' signals being transmitted by others.

Sadly, managers in general are not well educated in creating and sustaining a positive climate in organisations. See here.

To affect this climate in a positive manner requires 'people' and 'social' skills, something that many managers do not have the aptitude or social intuition for. This is unlike Churchill for example, who seemed to understand the importance of morale all to clearly, as this article clearly recounts. See here.

In the inverse case of avoiding poor morale, managers can be very ineffective at spotting the obvious indicators of organisational problems. If they are spotted, it is frequently too late, and often inappropriate or insufficiant action is taken that can make matters worse (i.e. nutrients were added when it should have been the anti-biotic).

This is an important topic, but one where I fear complexity science may obscure, rather than illuminate, the significant issues that sorely need to be addressed.

Peter, Let me respond in to your three points in sequence:

1. I agree that models can constrain our scope of vision and illuminate or put focus on aspects that may or may not be important and/or interesting. In this sense it is therefore important that we be open to apply, test, think about, multiple models to arrive at a more robust and more complete sense of a situation (employee morale or otherwise). I would suspect that the models that have resiliency will more consistently provide utility in relation to reality (perhaps the link between phenomenology and ontology, however I make this comment lightly as I am not an expert in this area). I suspect that the resilience of any model then as applied individually can be tested through mental simulation and decision making as Gary Klein writes about in his work.
2. Organizations are obviously not swarms however are there aspects of organizations that exhibit swarm-like behaviour. Such aspects would likely not be under direct (or any) control of a central authority and yet make up a key part of every employee’s day to day environment. Perhaps identity (refer to Snowden and Kurtz's Brambles in a Thicket selection, knowledge sharing, attitude, behaviour choice may offer such uncontrolled aspects. So yes we individually see the world as patterns and make decisions based a pattern match to previous experience or stories, but how do the decisions, actions, attitudes, etc. aggregate over 100s or 1000s of employees. Does the aggregate reveal emergent properties that can be understood better through complexity theory? Or is this a misinformed application of a mismatched model.
3. I think the fact that people are not automata is what makes organizations so complex and fascinating. So I acknowledge the point that we are not simply automata. However I do believe that individuals can be engaged in conscious rational behaviours but still not be completely aware (perhaps beyond their direct sphere of influence and feedback) of how their behaviours aggregate across an organization. How the aggregate effect impacts individual behaviours that feeds back to the aggregate is an area I am not clear on but am very curious and continue to make observations in my work. This is one reason I find Gary Klein’s work fascinating as it is research done in the field in real and natural environments outside of the lab.

I could not disagree more to your last point namely that ‘complexity science and thinking may obscure rather than illuminate the significant issues [related to this topic area] that sorely need to be addressed’. In my work and discussing complexity theory concepts with sr. managers and executives it appears that complexity thinking offers a scientific basis for better understanding what they intuitively have been sensing. I guess with more practice the validity and resilience of this model will be tested. At this stage we need to be careful not to discredit it and should embrace multiple models, complexity included, to ensure we have diversity in our perspectives.