Three Cultures of Management: The Key to Organizational Learning in the 21st Century
Edgar H. Schein
MIT Sloan School of Management
Table of Contents
Abstract
1. The Predicament: Organizations Don't Learn, Innovations
Don't Last
or Diffuse
2. The Concept of Culture and Occupational Communities
3. Cultures and Sub-Cultures
4. Three Cultures of Management
5. The Engineering Culture
6. The Executive Culture
7. Dysfunctional Interactions Among the Three Cultures
8. Implications
9. The Dilemma of 21st Century Learning
References
Table 1
The purpose of this article is to provide some possible
explanations
for the failure of organizational innovations to occur in the first place, or
to survive and proliferate. In other words, why do organizations fail to
learn how to learn and therefore remain competitively marginal. The
typical explanations revolve around vague concepts of "resistance to change,"
or "human nature," or failures of "leadership." I will propose a more
fundamental reason for such learning failures deriving from the fact that in
every organization there exist among its sub-cultures three particular
cultures, two of which have their roots outside the organization and are
therefore more fundamentally entrenched in their particular sets of
assumptions. Every organization develops an internal culture based on its
operational success, what I will call the "operator culture." But every
organization also has in its various functions the designers and technocrats
who drive the core technologies of the organization. I will call this the
"engineering culture" and note that their fundamental reference group is their
world wide occupational community. Every organization also has its executive
management, the CEO and his or her immediate subordinates, what I will call the
"executive culture." CEO's because of the nature of their jobs and the
structure of the capital markets also constitute a world wide occupational
community in the sense that they have common problems that are unique to the
CEO role.
These three cultures are often out of alignment with each other, and it is
this lack of alignment that causes the failures of organizational learning as
the below examples will show. This will raise thi question of whether we have
misconceived the initial problem by focusing on organizational learning
when, in fact, it is the executive and engineering communities that must
begin their own learning process if 21st century challenges are to be met.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
The Predicament: Organizations Don't Learn, Innovations Don't
Last or
Diffuse
The ability to create new organizational forms and processes, to
innovate both in the technical and organizational arenas, is crucial to
remaining competitive in an increasingly turbulent world. But this kind of
organizational learning requires not only the invention of new forms, but their
adoption and their diffusion to the other relevant parts of the organization
and to other organizations in a given industry. Organizations still have not
learned how to manage that process. The examples of successful organizational
learning we have seen either tend to be short-run adaptive learning, doing
better at what we are already doing, or, if they are genuine innovations, they
tend to be isolated and eventually subverted and abandoned.
Example 1. A new product development team in a large auto company
worked with the MIT Organizational Learning Center to develop their capacity
for learning. By using various techniques derived from "action science"
(Argyris, et al, 1985), systems dynamics (Senge, 1990), and organization
development (Beckhard & Harris, 1987) high levels of openness between
hierarchical levels and increased communication and trust among members of the
teams were created. This openness and trust permitted team members to reveal
engineering design problems as they arose instead of waiting until they had
solutions, as prior traditions in this company had dictated (OLC Learning
History, 1995).
Early identification of those problems was crucial in order to avoid later
interactive effects that would require costly and complex redesigns. For
example, changing the chassis design might increase weight which might require
a different tire design which, in turn, might cause more internal noise, and so
on. By revealing such problems early, the team could view the whole car more
systemically and re-design could therefore be speeded up.
However, the pile-up of early problems caused higher management to make a
false attribution. They considered the team to be "out of control" and ordered
it to get itself back under control. The team realized that higher management
did not understand the value of early problem identification and continued to
use its new learning, assuming that the ultimate results would speak for
themselves. The team was able to complete the design well ahead of schedule
and with considerably lower costs, but, contrary to expectations, higher
management never understood the reasons for these notable results nor gave the
team credit for having learned a new way of solving problems. Instead, higher
management gave itself credit for having gotten the team "under
control." The team was not considered to be particularly innovative and was
disbanded. Several of its members and leaders were subsequently encouraged to
take early retirement as part of a general downsizing program in the company.
Example 2. An insurance company decided to move toward the paperless
office (Roth, 1993). Top management hired a key manager to implement the new
system, mandated a schedule, and provided whatever resources the manager needed
to accomplish the task. In order to use the new system, employees had to learn
a complex new set of computer routines to replace their familiar work with
paper. Because the company was also under financial pressure, it had
instituted a number of productivity programs that caused line managers to be
very insistent that all the daily work continue to be performed even while the
learning of the new system was supposed to take place. The new manager was
equally insistent that the system be implemented on schedule causing employees
to short-circuit certain routines, to learn only the rudiments of the new
system, and even to misrepresent the degree to which they were now working
without paper.
The new manager, based on partial and incorrect information, declared that
the
system was implemented "on schedule" and was given public credit for this
achievement. However, the end result was that the employees did not learn the
new system well enough to make it more productive than the old paper system.
In fact, productivity was lower with the new system because it was so
imperfectly implemented.
Example 3. A company decided to introduce automatic machine tools into
their production process (Thomas, 1994). The idea originated with the
engineers who saw an opportunity to do some "real engineering." The engineers
and the vendors developed a proposal based on technical elegance but found that
middle management would not push the proposal up to executive management unless
it was rewritten to show how it would reduce costs by cutting labor. No
accurate figures were available so the team more or less invented a set of
numbers to justify the purchase of the expensive new machines.
As the proposal worked its way up the hierarchy, the union got wind of the
project and insisted that they would not go along unless management guaranteed
that no jobs would be lost and that all the present operators would be
retrained. This not only delayed the project but, when the machines were
finally installed, the production process proved to be much less effective and
much more costly than had been promised in the proposal. The engineers were
highly disappointed that their elegant solution had, from their point of view,
been subverted and that all the operators that were to have been replaced had
merely been retrained and kept on jobs that the engineers considered
superfluous.
Beyond these three specific cases the history of organizational development,
change, innovation and learning shows over and over again that certain lessons
seem not to take hold. As early as the Hawthorne studies of the 1920's it was
recognized that employee involvement increased both productivity and
motivation. Lewin, Argyris, McGregor, Likert, and many others showed how
managers who treated people as adults, who involved them appropriately in the
tasks that they were accountable for, who created conditions that allowed
employees to obtain good feedback so that they could monitor their own
performance were more effective than those who did not.
Programs such as the National Training Labs' sensitivity training groups
(Schein & Bennis, 1965) and Blake's Managerial Grid (Blake, Mouton, and
McCanse, 1989) were for several decades touted as providing the solution to all
our productivity problems, just as the human relations and participatory
management programs of the 40's had promised. Yet these and other similar
programs have come and gone, and it is not at all clear what organizations
learned from them or why these innovations have disappeared only to be
re-invented again under new labels such as empowerment, self-managed groups,
and servant leadership.
The lesson of these and similar cases is complicated. On the one hand, one
can say that this is just normal life in organizations. It is just politics or
just human nature. Or one can say that these projects and programs were
mismanaged, either by the project teams or the executive managements above
them. Or one can say that all of these human relations oriented programs were
misguided in the first place. However, I have begun to see a deeper set of
phenomena at work here.
The deeper issue is that we have in most organizations three different major
occupational cultures that do not really understand each other very well and
that often work at cross-purposes with each other. These cultures cut across
organizations and are based on what have been described as "occupational
communities" (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984).
[Back to the Table of Contents]
The Concept of Culture and Occupational Communities
A culture is a set of basic tacit assumptions about how the world is and
ought
to be that is shared by a set of people and determines their
perceptions, thoughts, feelings and, to some degree, their overt behavior
(Schein, 1992). Culture manifests itself at three levels, the level of the
deep tacit assumptions that are the essence of the culture, the level of
espoused values which often reflect what a group wishes to be ideally and the
way it wants to present itself publicly , and the day to day behavior which
represents a complex compromise between the espoused values, the deeper
assumptions and the immediate requirements of the situation. Overt behavior
alone cannot be used to decipher culture because situational contingencies
often make us behave in a manner inconsistent with our deeper values and
assumptions. It is for this reason that one often sees "inconsistencies" or
"conflicts" in overt behavior or between behavior and espoused values. To get
at the basic elements of culture one must either observe behavior over a very
long period of time or get directly at the underlying values and assumptions
that drive the perceptions and thoughts of the group members.
For example, many organizations espouse "team work" and "cooperation," but
the
behavior that is rewarded and encouraged by the incentive and control systems
of the organization is based more on a shared tacit assumption that only
individuals can be accountable and that the best results will come from a
system of individual competition and rewards. If the external situation
demands teamwork the group will develop some behavior that looks on the surface
like teamwork by conducting meetings and seeking consensus, but members will
continue to share the belief that one gets ahead by individual effort and will
act accordingly when rewards are given out. I have heard many executives tell
their subordinates that they expect them to act as a team but remind them in
the same sentence that they are all competing for the boss's job!
[Back to the Table of Contents]
Cultures and Sub-Cultures
Cultures in this sense arise within
organizations based on their own histories and experiences. Starting
with the founders, those members of the organization who have shared in the
successful growth of an organization will have developed a set of assumptions
about the world and how to succeed in it, and will have taught those
assumptions to new members of the organization (Schein, 1983). Thus IBM, HP,
Ford, and any other company that has had several decades of success will have
an organizational culture that drives how its members think, feel, and act.
Shared assumptions also typically form around the functional units of
the organization. They are often based on a similarity of educational
background in the members or a similarity of organizational experience, what we
often end up calling "stove pipes" or "silos." We all know that getting
cross-functional project teams to work well together is difficult because the
members bring their functional cultures into the project and, as a consequence,
have difficulty communicating with each other, reaching consensus, and
implementing decisions in an effective manner. The difficulty of communication
across these boundaries arise not only from the fact that the functional groups
have different goals, but from the more fundamental issue that the very meaning
of the words they use will differ. The word "marketing" will mean product
development to the engineer, studying customers through market research to the
product manager, merchandising to the salesman, and constant change in design
to the manufacturing manager. When they try to work together they will often
attribute disagreement to personalities and fail to notice the deeper shared
assumptions that color how each function thinks.
Another kind of sub-culture, less often acknowledged, reflects the common
experiences of given levels within a hierarchy. Culture arises through
shared experiences of success. If first line supervisors discover ways of
managing their subordinates that are consistently successful, they will
gradually build up a set of shared assumptions about how to do their job that
can be thought of as the "culture of first line supervision." In the same way
middle management and higher levels will develop their own shared assumptions,
and, at each level, those assumptions will be taught to newcomers as they get
promoted into that level. It is these hierarchically based cultures that
create the communication problems associated with "selling senior management on
a new way of doing things," or "getting budget approval for a new piece of
equipment," or "getting a personnel requisition through." As each cultural
boundary is crossed, the proposal has to be put into the appropriate language
for the next higher level, and has to reflect the values and assumptions of
that higher level. Or, from the point of view of the higher levels, decisions
have to be put into a form that lower levels can understand, often resulting in
"translations" that actually distort and sometimes even subvert what the higher
levels wanted.
So far I have focused on the cultures that arise within organizations
from the unique experiences of the members of a given organization. But
"occupational communities" also generate cultures that cut across organizations
(Van Maanen & Barley, 1984). For example, fishermen around the world
develop similar world views, as do miners, and, as do the members of a
particular industry based on a particular technology. In these cases the
shared assumptions derive from a common educational background, the
requirements of a given occupation such as the licenses that have to be
obtained to practice, and the shared contact with others in the occupation.
The various functional cultures that we see in organizations are, in fact,
partly the result of membership in broader cross-organizational occupational
communities. Salesmen the world over, accountants, assembly line workers and,
most importantly, engineers, share some tacit assumptions about the nature of
their work regardless of who their particular employer is at any given time.
We are also increasingly discovering that such similar outlooks across
organizations apply to executive managers, particularly CEO's. CEO's face
similar kinds of problems across all organizations and in all industries
throughout the world, and because executives are likely to have somewhere in
their history some common education and indoctrination, they form a common
world view, a common set of assumptions about the nature of business and what
it takes to run a business successfully.
The learning problems that I have identified above can be directly related to
the lack of alignment between three cultures, two of which are based on
occupational communities--1) the culture of engineering, 2) the culture of
CEO's, and 3) the culture of operators--the shared assumptions that arise in
the "line units" of a given organization as it attempts to operate efficiently
and safely. In order to understand how these three cultures interact, let us
examine their shared assumptions.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
Three Cultures of Management
The Operator Culture. The culture of operators is shown in
Table 1. This culture is the most difficult to describe because it evolves
locally in organizations and within operational units. Thus one can identify
an operator culture in the nuclear plant, in the chemical complex, in the auto
manufacturing plant, in the cockpit, and in the office, but it is not clear
what elements make this culture broader than the local unit. To get at this
issue we must consider that the operations in different industries reflect the
broad technological trends in those industries. At some fundamental level, how
one does things in a given industry reflects the core technologies that created
that industry. And as those core technologies themselves evolve, the nature of
operations changes. For example, as Zuboff (1988) has persuasively argued,
information technology has made manual labor obsolete in many industries and
replaced it with conceptual tasks. In a chemical plant the worker no longer
walks around observing, smelling, touching and manipulating. Instead he or she
sits in a control room and infers the conditions in the plant from the various
indexes that come up on the computer screen.
The operator culture is based on human interaction and most line units learn
that high levels of communication, trust and teamwork are essential to getting
the work done efficiently. Operators also learn that no matter how clearly the
rules are specified of what is supposed to be done under different operational
conditions, the world is to some degree unpredictable and one must be prepared
to use one's own innovative skills to deal with them. If the operations are
complex as in a nuclear plant, operators learn that they are highly
interdependent and that they must work together as a team especially when
unanticipated events have to be dealt with. Rules and hierarchy often get in
the way under unpredicted conditions. Operators become highly sensitive to the
degree to which the production process is a system of interdependent functions
all of which must work together in order to be efficient and effective. These
points apply to all kinds of "production processes" whether we are talking
about a sales function, a clerical group, a cockpit, or a service unit.
The tragedy of most organizations is that the operators know that to get the
job done effectively they must adhere to the assumptions stated above, but
neither the incentive system nor the day to day management system may support
those assumptions. Operators thus learn to subvert what they know to be true
and "work to rule," or use their learning ability to thwart management's
efforts to improve productivity. In order to understand why this happens we
must examine how two other major cultures operate in organizations.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
The Engineering Culture.
In all organizations there is a group that
represents the basic design elements of the technology underlying the work of
the organization and has the knowledge of how that technology is to be
utilized. This occupational community cuts across nations and industries and
can best be labeled the "engineering culture" (Kunda, 1992). A colleague to
whom I mentioned this recently works for a company driven by the engineering
culture. He told me that in the parking lot of this organization are signs
that say "Maximum Speed Limit--5.8 Miles Per Hour." Though this culture is
most visible in traditional engineering functions one can see it in operation
equally in the designers and implementers of all kinds of
technologies--information technology, market research, financial systems, and
so on. The shared assumption of this community are based on common education,
work experience, and the requirements of their job and are shown in Table 2.
Engineers and technocrats of all persuasions are attracted to engineering in
the first place because it is abstract and impersonal. Their education
reinforces the view that problems have abstract solutions and those solutions
can, in principle, be implemented in the real world with products and systems
that are free of human foibles and errors. Engineers, and I am using this
terms in the broadest sense, are designers of products and systems that have
utility, elegance, permanence, efficiency, safety, and maybe, as in the case of
architecture, even aesthetic appeal, but they are basically designed to require
standard responses from their human operators, or, ideally, to have no human
operators at all.
In the design of complex systems such as jet aircraft or nuclear plants, the
engineer prefers a technical routine to insure safety rather than relying on a
human team to manage the contingencies that might arise. Engineers recognize
the human factor and design for it, but their preference is to make things as
automatic as possible. Safety is built into the designs themselves. I once
asked an Egyptian Airlines pilot whether he preferred the Russian or U.S.
planes. He answered immediately that he preferred the U.S. planes and gave as
his reason that the Russian planes have only one or two back-up systems, while
the U.S. planes have three back-up systems. In a similar vein I
overheard two engineers saying to each other during a landing at the Seattle
airport that the cockpit crew was totally unnecessary. The plane could easily
be flown and landed by computer.
In other words, one of the key themes in the culture of engineering is the
pre-occupation with designing humans out of the systems rather than into them.
Recall that the San Francisco Bay Transit Authority known as BART has totally
automated trains. In this case it was not the operators but the customers who
objected to this degree of automation forcing management to put human operators
onto each train even though they had nothing to do except to reassure people by
their presence.
In Thomas's study, the engineers were very disappointed that the operations
of
the elegant machine they were purchasing would be constrained by the presence
of more operators than were needed, by a costly retraining program, and by
management imposed policies that had nothing to do with "real engineering." In
my own research on information technology I found that the engineers
fundamentally wanted the operators to adjust to the language and
characteristics of the particular computer system that was being implemented
and were quite impatient with the "resistance to change" that the operators
were exhibiting. From the point of view of the users, the operators, not only
was the language arcane, but the systems were not considered useful for solving
the operational problems (Schein, 1992).
Both the operators and the engineers often find themselves out of alignment
with a third critical culture, the culture of executives.
[Back to the Table of Contents] The third culture of management to be explored
is the "executive culture," the set of shared tacit assumptions that CEO's and
their immediate subordinates share world wide. This executive world view is
built around the necessity to maintain the financial health of the organization
and is fed by the pre-occupations of boards, of investors, and of the capital
markets. Whatever other pre-occupations executives may have, they cannot get
away from having to worry about and manage the financial issues of the survival
and growth of their organization (Donaldson & Lorsch, 1983). The essence
of this executive culture is described in Table 3.
What I am identifying as the executive culture applies particularly to CEO's
who have risen through the ranks and have been promoted to their jobs.
Founders of organizations or family members who have been appointed to these
levels exhibit different kinds of assumptions and often can maintain a broader
focus (Schein, 1983). It is especially the promoted CEO who adopts the
exclusively financial point of view because of the nature of the executive
career. As managers rise higher and higher in the hierarchy, as their level of
responsibility and accountability grows, they not only have to become more
pre-occupied with financial matters, but they also discover that it becomes
harder and harder to observe and influence the basic work of the organization.
They discover that they have to manage at a distance, and that discovery
inevitably forces them to think in terms of control systems and routines which
become increasingly impersonal. Because accountability is always centralized
and flows to the tops of organizations, executives feel an increasing need to
know what is going on while recognizing that it is harder and harder to get
reliable information. That need for information and control drives them to
develop elaborate information systems alongside the control systems and to feel
increasingly alone in their position atop the hierarchy.
Paradoxically, throughout their career managers have to deal with people and
surely recognize intellectually that it is people who ultimately make the
organization run. First line supervisors, especially, know very well how
dependent they are on people. However, as managers rise in the hierarchy, two
factors cause them to become more "impersonal." First, they become
increasingly aware that they are no longer managing operators, but other
managers who think like they do, thus making it not only possible but likely
that their thought patterns and world view will increasingly diverge from the
world view of the operators. Second, as they rise, the units they manage grow
larger and larger until it becomes impossible to know everyone personally who
works for them. At some point they recognize that they cannot manage all the
people directly and, therefore, have to develop systems, routines, and rules to
manage "the organization." People increasingly come to be viewed as "human
resources" and are treated as a cost rather than a capital investment.
The executive culture thus has in common with the engineering culture a
predilection to see people as impersonal resources that generate problems
rather than solutions. Or, another way to put this point is to note that both
the executive culture and the engineering culture view people and relationships
as means to the end of efficiency and productivity, not as ends in themselves.
If one must have human operators, so be it, but let's minimize their possible
impact on the operations and their cost to the enterprise.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
Dysfunctional Interactions Among the Three Cultures
In many industries there is enough initial alignment between the needs of the
task as defined by the operators, the needs of the engineers for reliable and
efficient operations, and the needs of the executives for minimizing costs and
maximizing profits so we do not observe any problems. It is when organizations
attempt to learn in a generative way, when they attempt to reinvent themselves
because the technologies and environmental conditions have changed drastically
that these three cultures collide and we observe frustration, low productivity,
and the failure of innovations to survive and diffuse.
For example, in their research on nuclear plants, Carroll and Perin (1995)
found that operators in the plants understood very well the inter-dependencies
and interactions of all the systems. They lived in an environment that had its
own ecology in which inter-dependence was visible and in which the management
of inter-dependencies through teamwork was crucial to safety and productivity.
But one or two levels above the plant, management only saw specific technical
and financial issues, driven very much by the outside forces of the Nuclear
Regulatory Agency and their own world view as executives, a world view that
could best be described as a "machine bureaucracy," while the world view of the
operators could better be described as a "socio-technical system."
The plants were different in how they operated but each developed its own
concept of how to improve its operations. Such improvement plans often
required additional allocations of money for training and redesign of the
plant, and also often required a bending of some of the formal rules and
procedures mandated by the industry and the government. When such requirements
were articulated the engineering community focused primarily on finding
standard solutions to problems, preferably solutions free of human
intervention, and executive management focused primarily on money and cost
control. The lack of alignment between the three cultures often led to
inaction and the continuation of practices that were viewed as less efficient
or effective.
In some situations like airplane cockpits the executive and operator cultures
can collide in a drastically dysfunctional way, as illustrated by Blake's
research (Blake, Mouton, and McCanse, 1989). There is considerable evidence
that some airline crashes are due to communication failures in the cockpit
resulting from obsession with rank and hierarchy. For example, in one crash a
few miles short of the runway, the flight recorder revealed that the flight
engineer had been shouting for several minutes that they were running out of
gas while the pilot functioning as the CEO continued to circle and tried to fix
a problem with the landing gear. When this situation was run in the simulator,
the same phenomenon occurred--the pilot was so busy with his operational task
and so comfortable in his hierarchical executive position that he literally did
not hear critical information that was shouted at him. Only when the person
doing the shouting was a fellow pilot of equal or higher rank did the pilot pay
attention to the information. In other words, the hierarchy actually got in
the way of solving the problem. It was also found that the engineering
solution of providing more warning lights or sounds would not solve the problem
because those could easily be rationalized away as computer or signal
malfunctions.
At the boundary between the engineering and executive cultures other
conflicts
and problems of communication arise. I saw this clearly in my research on
executive views of information technology (IT) as contrasted with the view of
the IT specialists who clearly had an engineering mentality (Schein, 1992a,
1992b, 1994). Whereas the IT specialists saw information as discrete,
packageable, and electronically transmittable, executives saw information as
holistic, complex, imprecise, and dynamic. Whereas the IT specialist saw
networking as a way of eliminating hierarchy, executives saw hierarchy as
intrinsic to organizational control and coordination. Whereas IT specialists
saw the computer and expert systems as the way to improve management decision
making, executives saw the computer as limiting and distorting thinking by
focusing only on those kinds of information that can be packaged and
electronically transmitted. And if executives did buy into IT implementations
for reasons of cost reduction and productivity, they often mandated it in a way
that made it difficult for the operators to learn to use the systems
effectively because insufficient time and resources were devoted to the
relearning process itself as the above Example 2 showed.
The way in which technology is used is, of course, influenced by the values
and goals imposed by the executive culture as some of the above examples have
shown. And those values are sometimes more stable than the technological
possibilities, causing technologies like information technology to be
underutilized from the point of view of the engineering culture (Thurow, 1995).
In Thomas's research the engineers were thwarted by the executive culture and
the final solution which resulted from union pressure reflected the short run
financial fears of the executives.
The lack of alignment between the executive, the engineering and the operator
culture can be seen in other industries such as health care where the needs of
the primary care physicians (the operators) to do health maintenance and
illness prevention runs both into the engineering desire to save life at all
costs and the executive desire to minimize costs no matter how this might
constrain either the engineers or the operators.
In the educational world we see the same conflict between teachers who value
the human interaction with students and the proponents of sophisticated
computerized educational systems on the one hand and the cost constraints
imposed by school administrators on the other hand. If the engineers win,
money is spent on computers and technologically sophisticated classrooms. If
the administrators win, classes become larger and undermine the classroom
climate. In either case, the operators, the teachers lose out and human
innovations in learning are lost.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
Implications
Several important points need to be noted about these three cultures.
Two of them, the executive and engineering cultures are world wide occupational
communities that have developed a common world view based on their education,
their shared common technology and their work experience. What this means is
that even if in a given organization the executives and/or the engineers learn
to think like operators and becomes more aligned with the operator culture,
their replacement will most probably push the organization back to where it
was. The field of organization development is replete with examples of
innovative new programs that did not survive executive succession. In other
words, for the executive or the engineer, the reference group is often outside
the organization in his or her peer group whose definition of "best practice"
may differ sharply from what is accepted inside the organization. Executives
and engineers learn from each other more than from their subordinates.
Second, it is important to note that each of the three cultures is from its
point of view "valid," in the sense of doing what it is supposed to do.
Executives are supposed to worry about the financial health of their
organization and engineers are supposed to innovate toward the most creative
people free solutions. To create alignment between these three cultures, then,
is not a case of deciding which one has the right point of view, but of
creating enough mutual understanding between them to evolve solutions that will
be understood and implemented. Too often in today's organizational world
either the operators assume that the executives and engineers don't understand
so they resist and covertly do things their own way, or executives and/or
engineers assume that the operators need to be controlled more tightly and be
forced to follow policies and manuals of procedure. In either case
effectiveness and efficiency will suffer because there is no common plan that
everyone can understand and commit to.
A third point to note is that both the executive and engineering culture are
primarily task focused and operate on the implicit assumption that
people are the problem, either as costs or as sources of error. In the case of
the engineering culture the assumption is already implicit in their education
and training. The ultimately elegant solution is one that always works and
works automatically, in other words, without human intervention. In the case
of the executive culture the situation is more complex. Executives either have
come from the engineering culture where people were not important in the first
place or learned as they rose and began to feel responsible for hundreds and
thousands of people that they had to think in terms of systems, routines,
rules, and abstract processes for organizing, motivating, and controlling. And
as they become chief executives accountable to the financial markets and their
stockholders they learn to focus more and more on the financial aspects
of the organization. The gradual depersonalization of the organization and the
perception that employees are mostly a cost instead of a capital investment is
thus a learned occupational response.
It is not accidental that chief executives tend to band together and form a
culture of their own because they come to believe that no one except another
chief executive really understands the lonely warrior role that they come to
experience. With that sense of aloneness come related assumptions about the
difficulty of obtaining valid information, the difficulty of insuring that
subordinates down the line will understand and implement what they are asked to
do, leading ultimately to fantasies of having to spy on their own organizations
reminiscent of the tale of the Caliph of Baghdad donning beggar's clothes to
mingle among the people and find out what they were really thinking. Even
though the immediate subordinates of the chief executive are humans,
increasingly they are seen as part of a larger system that must be managed
impersonally by systems and rules. Norms about not fraternizing with
subordinates are often felt strongly at this level because if the organization
gets into trouble those subordinates are often the first to be sacrificed as
evidence of "fixing" things.
Fourth, the engineering and executive cultures may agree on the assumption
that people are a problem, but they disagree completely on how to make
organizations work more effectively. Executives recognize that their world is
one of imperfect information, of constant change, and of short-run coping while
attempting to maintain a strategic focus. Engineers seek elegant permanent
solutions that are guaranteed to work and be safe under all circumstances, and,
therefore, typically produce solutions that cost much more than the executives
believe they can afford. So the executives and the engineers are in a constant
battle of how good is good enough and how to keep costs down enough to remain
competitive.
What is most problematic in this kind of scenario is that we have come to
accept the conflict between engineering and management as "normal," leading
members of each culture to devalue the concerns of the other culture rather
than looking for integrative solutions that will benefit both. A few creative
companies have found devices such as sending more engineers to talk to
customers directly to acquaint them with business realities and customer needs.
And those executives who realize this dilemma tend to involve themselves from
time to time in operations and in product development so that they do not lose
touch with the realities and strengths of the other cultures. But this kind of
remedy deals only with the organizational level. The dilemma of 21st century
learning is broader.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
The Dilemma of 21st Century Learning
To recapitulate, I believe that organizations will not learn effectively
until
we recognize and confront the implications of the three occupational cultures I
have emphasized. Until executives, engineers, and operators discover that they
use different languages, make different assumptions about what is important,
and until they learn to treat the other cultures as valid and normal, we will
continue to see failures in organizational learning efforts. We will see
powerful innovations at the operator level that are ignored, subverted or
actually punished, we will see technologies that are grossly under-utilized, we
will see angry employees railing against the impersonal programs of
re-engineering and down-sizing, we will see frustrated executives who know what
they want to accomplish but feel impotent in pushing their ideas through
complex human systems, and we will see frustrated academics wondering why
certain ideas like employee involvement, socio-technical systems analyses, high
commitment organizations, and concepts of social responsibility continue to be
ignored, only to be reinvented under some other label a few decades later.
First, we must take the concept of culture more seriously than we have.
Instead of fooling around with superficial notions of manipulating a few
priorities and calling that "culture change," we must recognize and accept how
deeply embedded the shared tacit assumptions of executives, engineers, and
employees really are. After all, we have lived in this industrial system for a
century or more and have evolved these assumptions as an effective way for
dealing with our problems. Each of these cultures can justify itself
historically, and each has contributed to the success of the industrial system
we have evolved.
Second, we must acknowledge that one of the main consequences of
technological
complexity, globalism, and universal transparency is that some of the old
assumptions no longer work. Neither the executives, nor the engineers alone
can solve the problems that a complex socio-technical system like a nuclear
plant generates. We will have to find ways of communicating across the
cultural boundaries, first, by establishing some communication that stimulates
mutual understanding rather than mutual blame.
Third, we must learn how to create such communication by learning how to
conduct cross-cultural "dialogues." The concept of "dialogue" has in recent
years substantially improved our understanding of human thought and
communication, and promises to make it possible to gain some understanding
across cultural boundaries (Isaacs, 1993; Schein, 1993). If we can get people
from the different cultures into the room together, which is hard enough, we
must get them to reflectively listen to themselves and to each other which is
even harder. Fortunately, the understanding of what it takes to create
effective dialogues is itself coming to be better understood.
The engineering and executive cultures I have described are not news. We
have
known about them all along. What is news is that the operator culture in all
industries has become much more complex and inter-dependent, and that has
thrown it more out of alignment with the other two cultures. The implication
is that each of these communities will have to learn how to learn and
evolve some new assumptions. Our efforts have been directed primarily at the
operational levels of organizations. The executive and engineering cultures
have been viewed as problems or obstructions, partly because they do not
sufficiently consider the human factor. Yet these cultures have evolved and
survived and have strengths as well as weaknesses.
It may well be that the key to organizational learning is for us to help
executives and engineers learn how to learn, how to analyze their own cultures,
and how to evolve those cultures around their strengths. It may well be that
these communities learn in different ways, and we will have to develop
appropriate learning tools for each community. Learning may have to be
structured along industry lines through consortia of learners rather than along
individual organizational lines (Schein, 1995). And business and engineering
education itself will have to examine whether the assumptions of academics in
these fields are evolving at a sufficient rate to deal with the realities of
the current world.
We are a long way from having solved the problems of organizational learning,
but I am convinced that thinking about occupational communities and the
cultures of management will begin to structure these problems in a way that
solutions for the 21st Century will become visible.
[Back to the Table of Contents]
References
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II. The Engineering Culture (Global Community)
III. The Executive Culture (Global Community)
TABLE 1
The Operator Culture