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March 02, 2005
vertically integrated organizations
One quick thought on Watts’ description of the Toyota crisis in chapter 9. In describing how all the companies involved possessed a common understanding of how problems should be approached and solved, Watts is describing an integrated organization – which has been an overused catch phrase in management and leadership courses for years. The goal for a lot of these management/process egg heads is to design and implement self-healing systems at all levels of an organization. These designs attempt to link all components of the organization (as integrated system) in such a way as to operate as a single entity – exactly what Watts described.
The problem, however, is that the goal of the self-healing system is rarely reached because the integration emphasizes coordination through “agreements” among components of the organization. Which makes me wonder a bit about the role culture plays in the network. Was Toyota able to heal itself because of a particular corporate culture?
I got systems on the brain... so you'll have to forgive me.
Posted by mfrascie at March 2, 2005 10:16 PM
Comments
Your question is intriguing, one I see Watts trying to explore in his chapter but not really fully explicating. He does say that the culture involved charing personnel, ideas, intellectual property, and the like without formal agreements or contracts. That part is pretty important, it seems to me, because one major stumbling block to recovery is the specialized knowledge problem.
But then he goes on to review (p 258) how all the companies had a "common understanding of how problems should be approached and solved." This is a big key - because there didn't need to be a lot of the recovery time spent in trying to agree how to proceed. This is a cultural issue. If there is a common understanding of how things are done, it kicks to the next level rather quickly. When the idea of cooperating is not unfamiliar, or when the reward system is built on cooperation rather than competition, it allows for a more effective collective. Watt also mentions understanding and trust - also key components that have to have been built within the system in order to truly exist.
This passage made me think of Gramsci, the organic intellectual, and notions of popular common sense. Even in the blogosphere, we individual participants tend to seek out others who think like us, share our interests, or if they don't think like us we need them to be the Other for what we do think. But we don't have a systemic understanding of how to solve problems. What we do have, and what I have found so interesting and am still unable to post a coherent thought about, is the nature of collective knowledge that blogging seems to help facilitate. The construction of group knowledge, public knowledge, rather than individual specialized knowledge seems to be one of the potential benefits of blogging. But still, we academic bloggers are working against the reward system we strive for in opening up in that space.
I'm going to lose track of my point here, so I'll stop. The answer to your question, I think, is definitely yes. It is something systemic, something built into the very ethos of the company, that allows for this kind of self-healing action.
Posted by: Chris Geyer at March 7, 2005 08:47 AM