OUCH! The Misfit Between Theory and Experience in Organizations – Introduction

A little background

As an excited and enthusiastic newly promoted production supervisor I arrived at my very first budget meeting. It was late in the year and snow was deep outside but inside the ice cream factory we were planning for the New Year. Not quite knowing what to expect at this meeting I only came armed with my experiences of running a piece of ice cream making machinery for the last couple of years. I was prepared to mostly listen and learn and I remember how cool I thought it was to now be part of planning what would transpire over the next year.

The numbers! Oh geez, the numbers! How many numbers could it actually take to figure out how this place was supposed to run! It seemed like it was an endless amount! But what did I know. My ears perked up when I heard the projected numbers for production of ice cream since that was MY area and I knew what those numbers meant. I also knew that if the weather was hot in the spring you needed a lot of ice cream and if it was cold you needed less. And spring weather seemed to affect the whole year. After all, I had been asked to work a lot of overtime running that machine last year because of a hot spring. The year before it was cold and not much overtime was to be had.

So as I saw the projected production numbers it didn’t take long to figure out the expectation was for a hot spring. Hmmmm, don’t new supervisors get into trouble if they don’t meet production numbers I thought?

So I asked a question. “Why don’t we create two budgets; one for a hot spring and another for a cold spring and then whatever we get we can go by that budget?”

Lucky for me it seems new supervisors ask a lot of these crazy questions so I was not chastised; just more or less ignored and we ended up with a budget for a hot spring. Well it wasn’t hot and through that spring, summer and fall there was an awful lot of angst in our plant.

That was over 30 years ago and I really don’t think much has changed in organizations; not just ice cream factories but all organizations.

We want certainty in our organizations, and we want individuals with power to deliver this certainty.

OUCH!

This is not our experience of actually being in organizations.  We don’t experience certainty and no one, no matter how much power, delivers it. But it is what we say we want, it is how we design the processes of our organizations, it is how we measure success and it is how we value our own contributions. It is how we typically understand organizations and it seems, no matter how much misfit there is between this and our real experience of actually being in organizations, we continue to do the same things.

It’s like we have a very bad fitting pair of shoes and every day we just put them on again and suffer the consequences.

A really, really big OUCH!

So now, after quite a long time of being in, and thinking about organizations I am convinced that most of what we formally do in organizations and how we formally understand them is deeply, deeply flawed.

I also am convinced that this is a flaw in expectation and intent, not one of content.  By this I mean the expectations and intent of certainty, and power delivering that certainty, are the flaw and it is this flaw upon which most of what we formally do in organizations is based. I do not think the actual content; the conversations and interactions we have within those formal activities are flawed, it is the expectations and intentions we have for them that is.

It is this mismatch, this OUCH! that causes much of what we say we most dislike about organizations. And it seems we do not have, or don’t want to have other ways of understanding and being in our organizations.

This is what OUCH! The Misfit Between Theory and Experience in Organizations is about. Finding different ways to understand and be in the organizations in which we work. At very fundamental levels. In ways that make much of what we formally do now in organizations irrelevant, at least from an expectation and intention perspective. Not from an interaction perspective.

So as we participate here, as we interact together, let’s really question everything about organizations.  Maybe the OUCH’s! can have less impact.

Discussion and comment points for this post:

1. What is your biggest OUCH! in your organization?

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