The Organization Animal

People often personalize organizations; they think a company or a school can have feelings, preferences, thinking and decision making processes similar to those of individual people. That is a misconception. I find it useful to think of an organization as a very large animal, like a behemoth in which we all live, but none of us can see the whole thing. As a whole, it is only partially self-aware, although it has many intelligent parts. The organization does have its logic; it operates and changes according to some rules and certain clock, but those do not resemble anything like you and I operate as individuals or as small groups. Certain practices that may appear as absurd, stupid and even evil, in fact may be artifacts of the internal logic of the organization animal. This is not to say that absurd, stupid or evil things do not exist; they are just much rarer than some people imagine.

An example may help to illustrate my point. Just a couple of weeks ago we discovered that the proposal for the new practicum pay developed late last Spring actually has no funding attached to it. Implementing it fully would put the School some two hundred thousand dollars in the red. We cannot allow this by law; RIC’s budget must balance. Why the fiscal analysis was not done at the time? Very simply, the organizations did not have a clear rule on who and when would check the cost of such a policy change. Several people involved were all assuming that other parties are responsible for checking and as a result, no one did. It’s like an animal without the sense of smell cannot be blamed for missing a stinky warning. Of course now after this experience, it will grow a nose for the future. Just as an aside, adding more organs does not necessarily improve the beast’s agility. Too many checks and balances can be as bad as too few. Simplicity of operations has its own value and its own cost.

Now, the proposal was approved, so department chairs have done the incredibly complex work load assignments under the new set of rules. Then the new Dean came in, and he is a bit jittery. Understandably, he does not want to screw things up in his first year, so he starts running some spreadsheets, and discovers the lack of funds. Here we have a typical organizational dilemma: on one side, there is a legitimate (and mostly fair) decision, on the other side, it is impossible to implement. The easiest thing to do would be to find money to honor what was agreed on. However, the organization has its cycles and rhythms, which, I remind you, are nothing like the human clock. The new budget year has begun, and to increase one unit’s budget would mean literally cutting someone else’s budgets. It could be done with advanced warning, but doing it in a matter of a week is impossible. It is like expecting an elephant to climb trees: perhaps an elephant would like to, but it is not an issue of will.

The solution we finally found is neither perfect, nor is it generous, nor inexpensive. It is a compromise, which still carries a considerable risk of overspending our budget. If you just see it, it may make little sense. For example, we had to take into consideration the exact title of the course as it shows in the catalog. Titles have little to do with the amount of work and therefore, with the expected compensation. Yet the animal has a set of organs related to the contractual obligations. Just think of it as high pitch sound; you cannot hear it, but your dog can. So, your dog’s behavior may make little sense to you, but the dog knows what it’s doing.

I am not writing this to somehow ridicule organizations and this organization in particular. To the contrary, I grew to respect the organization animal. Some are more evolved than others, but in the end, they remain a species profoundly different from their human creators. Our ancestors had to learn to cope with their natural and social environments; sometimes they tried to curse or bribe rain or sun, but it usually did not work. Adapting worked better. For example, living in a desert with a small band of hunters and gatherers is very different than living in a traditional village or a city; you just need to know how those settings work. Organizations are an important part of our environment, too. If you want to improve them, you need to understand how they work, where their strengths and limits are, and what kinds of things they can and cannot deliver. I am not calling for passivity or accepting things as they are. There is no great mystery to an organization. This was just a case against the anthropomorphic bias. Don’t like how your organization works? Don’t get mad, figure out how it can work better.