Like the Web, companies are people systems. And people systems are shaped by people constantly making changes to the system. Speaking specifically about corporations, Vaill writes
Some of these changes are official, meaning that they go through a careful design review process and are incorporated at least somewhat planfully into the system (although designs and plans are no guarantee that changes will not create major disturbances). But just as many changes are informal—shortcuts, innovations, Band-Aids of one sort or another that individuals and groups apply to the system flow to solve the local problems they experience. These spontaneous innovations create a lot of unanticipated permanent white water for others upstream or downstream in the system. Valuable innovations are the positive result of this age of individual “empowerment” that we live in, but the cost is likely to be continuing system disturbances owing to members’ nonstop tinkering. However, because the tinkering can be seen as members’ way to cope with the stresses and contradictions they experience in the system’s operation, we have to permit as much local innovation as we can. For if members and users of the system do not do well in coping with stress and change, the macrosystem (dependent on their will and judgment) will degrade, even to the point of collapse. (8-9)
Clamping down on the people who manage the chaos is counterproductive. First Vaill explains why attempting to address chaos through process doesn’t work. His description is amusing and readily recognizable to anyone who’s had to endure this response (for example when people have a big idea but later can’t understand the outcomes of the activities they’ve mandated).
Faced with these conditions, it is understandable that some systems designers should introduce more controls on innovation, more reports to fill out, and more committees to clear before a modification can be adopted. Their impulse to control works against innovation at the operational level, of course, and is experienced by those with their hands on the equipment as a proliferation of red tape: in effect, an increase in the permanent white water. Thus, at any moment, the system is drawing out of both its operators and its nominal designers / controllers behavior that increases the complexity and fragility of the system, and just as importantly, frays people’s nerves and punishes their efforts to make the system run smoothly. (9)
Another equally frustrating approach is also described by Vaill: automating the process. Automation cuts human creativity out of the equation. Of course it’s not only a bad idea to jettison the benefits of creativity, it’s rarely even possible since humans are creative enough to identify new channels through which they can inflict their will on a system.
Another strategy system designers and controllers use to defend against degradation is to remove the human component by automating the system. This, however, can never be more than a local and sharply circumscribed solution. There will always be a larger sociotechnical macrosystem containing the automated component, and in this larger system, human will and judgment will continue to be decisive. We cannot escape the consequences of human suffering and ineptitude in the permanent white water of our systems. (9)
So rather than process or automation, Vaill proposes an existential strategy, “learning as a way of being.” On the one hand, it is a “consciousness and skill” (10) that seems to be pretty much the same as the “learning as a way of being” advocated at liberal arts colleges. On the other hand, Vaill is engaging an audience with a pressing need for results.
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