Management by crisis

Management must be as comfortable with uncertainty as what science is. There must be freedom to adapt. It will only be then that free-flowing relationships will find their natural points of equilibrium. Management typically has no understanding of this principle. Margaret Wheatley puts this succinctly:

Fluctuations in nature create new ordered systems, but fluctuations in management are seen as signs of impending disorder.

Complex systems analysis (chaos theory) and quantum physics describe the uncertainty in the substratum upon which the physical world we observe sits. We know the physical outcomes of these processes with exactness, but not the path which led to the observation. Within that substratum and beyond our observation are the relationships which determine everything. It requires a whole new perspective to accept a world which is primarily not of objects but only of hidden connections.

In desperation we push and pull in our desire for success. Our fear of defeat does not allow for a natural unfolding. The rigidity imposed by mechanical analysis and adversarial stances is the world of the controller. Religious ritual can be the path to ultimate control.

A management decision based on incomplete information eventually runs out of road when some hidden variable in the human “ecosystem” suddenly exposes itself. All management decisions are based on incomplete information to some degree. The more incomplete the information, the sooner the day of reckoning.

Mental conditioning

Albert Einstein warned us that the solution to a problem cannot emerge from the same consciousness that created it. The first step in escaping the trap is to be aware of the power of mental conditioning which gradually funnels thinking into a tunnel.

Very few people ever come to realise that their sense of free thought is a delusion. They will go to their graves having spent their lives looking through a small window created by family, society, school, religion or the media.

In pre-school days we were alert to everything that surrounded us. We thought laterally. We asked unexpected questions. We had imaginations. We were mostly in the theta brain wave state.

Then after 12 years of schooling we had been conditioned to move seamlessly into the world of the linear thinkers and the security of rigid social and economic structures. Now we were in mostly the beta brain wave state. Much of our natural creative ability had been buried.

What is normal is established by those in a community bouncing off each other. But in the corporate culture this interaction is not free to flow. The flow is along pathways as set down by the rules or simply by the vibrations coming down from the top. This is the corporate feedback mechanism which corrects aberrations from the norm - and the norm may be a highly ineffective and even unethical way of doing things.

Finally - a “case study”

In 2004, NSW Health merged the 17 areas in its health service into eight. People pontificating around a big table imagined that if only they had more control, there would be less problems.

Just as in ecology, there are now problems emerging that were not predicted. The consensus is that the public health situation in the state has got significantly worse since 2004. This should be no surprise. Much of the underlying network in each of the original 17 areas established by the interaction of systems of people in the preceding 20 years was destroyed by the mergers.

The public health system has a complexity beyond anybody’s understanding. Will the holistic approach based on natural rather than imposed and distorted feedback mechanisms be allowed into the administration of NSW Health? Not likely. We plebs will continue to watch passively while the people at the top lead the service into a bigger mess; a service which already sucks off 27 per cent of the state budget.