Strategies, Effective and Ineffective

[Tl;Dr: The effectiveness of any organisation is a function of the alignment between folks’ collective beliefs and assumptions about business, and the realities of the entities we call “organisations”.]

I’m not sure this post is going to tell you anything new, but I did hear recently someone appear to misunderstand one of the the basic premises of the Marshall Model. So, for the benefit of clarity…

The Marshall Model – Recap

The Marshall Model asserts that there are four basic collective mindsets in organisations. Any given organisation will conform to one, and only one, of these four. For ease of reference, the model labels these collective mindsets, in order of increasing effectiveness: Ad-hoc, Analytic, Synergistic and Chaordic.

These various collective mindsets – and by “collective” I mean shared, more or less, by everyone within a given organisation – dictate the strategies in use in that organisation. And by “strategies in use” I mean, when making every kind of decision, from the most senior manager to the lowliest worker, the approaches used to make or inform those decisions.

Put another way, in any organisation, a multitude of decisions come up every day:

• Which and what kind of business opportunities to pursue.
• Who to please (and who to ignore or disappoint).
• Which market segments to focus on.
• How to serve those markets.
• How to finance the business.
• What kinds of people to hire (and fire).
• Which trading partners to work with (and which to compete against).
• HR policies.
• Management policies.
• Sales methods.
• Engineering approaches.
• Budgets.
• And on and on.

How to decide? Folks will approach making these decisions within the frame of their existing beliefs and assumptions. Existing beliefs and assumptions which have become the basis for their more or less automatic responses. Kahneman calls these “fast” or “system 1” responses.

And various psychological pressures conspire to ensure any one person’s beliefs and assumptions remain “congruent” with the collective assumptions and beliefs of the organisation as a whole (for example, nobody wants to be seen as an outsider). (See also: Organisational Cognitive Dissonance).

The Effectiveness Lever

Any organisations where people work together is, by its nature, a complex adaptive system.

The Marshall Model implies that relative organisational effectiveness is a direct function of how closely the prevailing collective mindset matches the reality of “organisations”. If the prevailing collective mindset enables decision-makers to choose approaches and strategies well-suited to the realities of complex adaptive systems, those decisions will be more likely to be effective. If the prevailing collective mindset constrains decision-makers to approaches less well-suited to the realities of complex adaptive systems, those decisions will be more likely to be ineffective. Both individual decisions, and in aggregate.

So, it’s not the organisations that are Ad-hoc, Analytic (a.k.a. mechanistic), Synergistic or Chaordic systems. The labels apply to the collective thinking of the people within those organisations. The organisations themselves are always complex adaptive systems. And, for the clients I work with, collaborative knowledge work systems, too.

I hope this post has served to clarify. Would you be willing to let me know whether it’s achieved that aim? And for the sake of further clarity, I’m happy to address any and all questions that this post might bring to mind.

– Bob

Further Reading

Thinking, Fast and Slow ~ Daniel Kahneman

On Espoused Theory, Theory-in-Use, and “Effective Theory” ~ Mark Federman (blog post)