Reference:Evolution of socio-technical systems/Developments in whole organization systems

Very early on in socio-technical studies it became evident that innovations in work organization based on principles different from those on which conventional bureaucratic organizations were founded were not likely to survive for long unless the organization as a whole changed in the new direction. Joint optimization involves a different principle from following the technical imperative. The group-centered primary work systems which are evolving in relation to it are radically different from the one-man-one-job units upon which conventional organizations have built their top-down hierarchies.

The basic difference constitutes what Emery and Trist (1973; Emery, 1967) have called a design principle. There are two basic organizational design principles, both of which display 'redundancy' in the systems theoretic sense. In the first, the redundancy is of parts and is mechanistic. The parts are broken down so that the ultimate elements are as simple and inexpensive as possible, as with the unskilled worker in a narrow job who is cheap to replace and who takes little time to train. The technocratic bureaucracy is founded on this type of design. In the second design principle, the redundancy is of functions and is organic. Any component system has a repertoire which can be put to many uses, so that increased adaptive flexibility is acquired. While this is true at the biological level, as for example in the human body, it becomes far greater at the organizational level where the components - individual humans and groups of humans - are themselves purposeful systems. Humans have the capacity for self-regulation so that control may become internal rather than external. Only organizations based on the redundancy of functions have the flexibility and innovative potential to give the possibility of adaptation to a rapid change rate, increasing complexity and environmental uncertainty.

'Rational' choice between the two design principles must take the state of the wider social field into account. One is led back to the macrosocial level, the increasingly disturbed state of which was drawn to the attention of Emery and myself (1963). In action research projects with which we were concerned at that ,time, both our organizational clients and we ourselves were baffled by the extent to which the wider societal environment was moving in on their more immediate concerns, upsetting plans, preventing the achievement of operational goals and causing additional stress and severe internal conflict. The magnitude of this impact was recognized by those concerned as greater than any previously experienced. The difference seemed to us to hold theoretical significance. Accordingly, we separated this wider environment, which we called the contextual, from the more immediate transactional environment and attempted a conceptual analysis of its characteristics .

Four types of contextual environment were isolated. The first two, called the random placid and the placid clustered, need not be discussed in the present context. The third environmental type, however, called the disturbed-reactive, reflects an accelerating change rate and became increasingly salient as the industrial revolution progressed. It zenithed some time after World War II when the science-based industries rose to prominence in the wake of the knowledge and information explosions. The best chances of survival in this world went to large-scale organizations with the capacity to make formidable competitive challenge through expertise and to maximize their independent power. The organizational form they perfected was the competitive and singular technocratic bureaucracy in which the ideas of Weber and Frederick Taylor are matched and operationalized to fit the requirements of the disturbed-reactive environment.

The very success of the technocratic bureaucracy has increased the salience of another type of environment, very different from the disturbed-reactive, which is mismatched with technocratic bureaucracy. The new environment is called the turbulent field in which large competing organizations, all acting independently in diverse directions, produce unanticipated and dissonant cons~quences. These mount as the common field becomes more densely occupied. The result is a kind of contextual commotion which makes it seem as if 'the ground' were moving as well as the organizational actors. This is what is meant by turbulence. Subjectively, it is experienced as 'a loss of the stable state' (Schon, 1971).

As compared with the disturbed-reactive environment, the turbulent field is characterized by a higher level of interdependence among the 'causal strands' (Chein, 1954) and a higher level of complexity as regards heterogeneity. Together these generate a much higher level of uncertainty. The turbulent field has the characteristics of a richly joined environment in Ashby's (1960) sense. He did not think the brain, as an ultra-stable system, could cope with such an environment. While this may be true in other species, the human brain, through its unusual capacity for abstraction from the concrete (Goldstein, 1939), is able to think in terms of 'possible worlds'. This enables man to be 'ideal seeking', which Ackoff and Emery (1972) regard as the distinctively human attribute. The importance of ideals is that they can never be reached but provide continuous 'guiding fictions' (Allport, 1937) in the pursuit of changing objectives and goals. Ideals are basic to value formation, and when common values are shared by large numbers of people they become able to undertake congruent courses of action. They can move in the same direction on the basis of 'shared appreciations' (Vickers, 1965). These are independent of particular social structures. The adaptability imparted would appear to be basic for the capacity to cope with environmental turbulence. The most recent analysis of this is by Emery (1976).

The higher levels of interdependence, complexity and uncertainty now to be found in the world environment pass the limits within which technocratic bureaucracies were designed to cope. Given its solely independent purposes, its primarily competitive relations, its mechanistic authoritarian control structure and its tendency to debase human resources, this organizational form cannot absorb environmental turbulence, far less reduce it. But such absorption and reduction are a necessary condition for opening the way to a viable human future.

In Sartre's sense, the technocratic bureaucracy has been 'depassed' in the historical process. Though Galbraith (1967) has referred to it, and the disturbed-reactive environment to which it is linked, as the 'new industrial state', these are both better seen, McLuhan-wise, through the rear-view mirror, as the old industrial state. Once one has become freed from past fixations in this regard, one is able to proceed with the evolution of values, cognitive orientations and organizational modalities capable of matching up to the precarious state of affairs now looming in the contextual environment.

Emergent organizational forms likely to have adaptive potential in this situation must be able to cope with the new levels of interdependence, complexity and uncertainty.

New plants

A major problem for socio-technical research now arose - the identification of an organizational model which would offer an alternative to that of the conventional technocratic and bureaucratic types of organization. Theoretically, one could expect to found it on the second design principle of the redundancy of functions. The hypothesis was made that the most likely place to find examples of an emergent alternative would be among new plants in the science-based industries. Accordingly, opportunities were sought for action-research engagements with companies bringing such plants on stream and willing to explore alternative designs with the help of social scientists.

In the latter part of the 1960s, a number of new plants of this kind came into existence in different countries. Projects in which social scientists were involved included a fertilizer plant in Norway, a refinery in the U.K., an aluminum fabrication plant in Canada, a consumer products and pet food plant in the U. S.^[1]

Given well developed primary work systems, these plants had fewer levels, functions and numbers of management personnel than conventional plants. The numbers in the workforce were also loweroften a third lower. Payment was for knowledge, not for what a person did at a particular time, so that individuals could evolve progressive work roles no longer confined by job classifications which rigidly defined wage differentials and statuses. Foremen were either nonexistent or became facilitators, trainers and forward planners. Information was shared for the purpose of problem-solving, which became the task of everyone, not only of management. This principle gave an underlying logic to management's adopting a participant style.

Performance levels were usually above those of conventional plants with which they could be compared. Moreover, these levels improved through time. The plants were learning systems. Employees, who tended to be volunteers and who were carefully selected, preferred them to conventional plants. A number of others preferred to stay where they were.

In the last two or three years, the number of new plants developed on these lines has increased very considerably, especially in the United States. In the latest versions, the social aspect has been considered much earlier so that the ideal of joint socio-technical design is being more closely approached.

Another socio-technical design principle that has begun to affect practice is 'minimum critical specification' (Herbst, 1974). Only the essentials are decided a priori; as much as possible is left' open to be decided at later stages, even when the plant is already in operation. The principle allows the progressive involvement of those concerned - at all levels. The barriers between planners and implementors are reduced. Design and operations are seen as a continuous process.

Socio-technical design has now come to include a large number of factors of context, sanction, stakeholder inclusion and processes of implementation as well as joint optimization of the social and technical systems. A set of principles based on these factors has been put forward by Cherns (1976) and Davis (1977).

New and old organizational paradigms

These plants exemplify the model which new installations are likely to emulate during the eighties. Beyond that, they may be hypothesized as foreshadowing a new organizational paradigm which, as time goes on, will displace the old paradigm of the technocratic bureaucracy. This displacement will come about because the new form has the flexibility and the resilience to cope with turbulent environment fields, whereas the old form lacks these capabilities. It will use less resources in so doing; it will be efficient as well as effective (Trist, 1979b). Table 2-3 sets out the key features of the new organizational paradigm which can potentially lead to a high QWL for all members of the enterprise. They contrast strongly with those of the old organizational paradigm, set out on the left, which has been instrumental in constraining most employees to a low QWL.

Our traditional organizations follow the technological imperative which regards man simply as an extension of the machine and therefore as an expendable spare part. By contrast, the emergent paradigm is founded on the principle of joint optimization, which regards man as complementary to the machine and values his unique capabilities for appreciative and evaluative judgment. He is a resource to be developed for his own sake rather than to be degraded and cast aside. As my former Tavistock colleague Phil Herbst (1975) has aptly observed, 'the product of work is people,' as well as goods or services. A society is no better than the quality of the people it produces.

Traditional organizations are also characterized by maximum work breakdown, which leads to circumscribed job descriptions and single skills - the narrower the better. Workers in such roles are often unable to manage the uncertainty, or variance, that characterizes their immediate environment. They therefore require strict external controls. Layer upon layer of supervision comes into existence supported by a wide variety of specialist staffs and formal procedures. A tall pyramidic organization results, which is autocratically managed throughout, even if the paternalism is benign. By contrast, the new paradigm is based on optimum task grouping, which encourages multiple broad skills. Workers in such a role system (as opposed to a job system) become capable of a much higher degree of internal control, having flexible group resources to meet a greater degree of environmental variance. This leads to a flat organization characterized by as much lateral as vertical communication. A participative management style emerges with the various levels mutually articulated (c.f. Parsons, 1960) rather than arranged in a simple hierarchy.

In the traditional organization each member has first of all to compete with and defend himself against everyone else, whether as an individual or as a member of a functional group - maintenance versus production, staff versus line. Rewards such as promotion and privilege go to those who, in the metaphor introduced by Michael Maccoby (1976), are 'gamesmen' -those who excel in playing the political game of the organization. Cooperation, though formally required wherever tasks are interdependent, takes second place as a value. The new paradigm, by contrast, gives first place to coping with the manifold interdependencies that arise in complex organizations. It values collaboration between groups and collegiality within groups. It encourages the establishment of a negotiated order in which multiple and mutually agreed tradeoffs are continuously arrived at.

Traditional organizations serve only their own ends. They are, and indeed are supposed to be, selfish. The new paradigm imposes the additional task on them of aligning their own purposes with the purposes of the wider society and also with the purposes of their members. By so doing, organizations become both 'environmentalized' and 'humanized' (Ackoff, 1974) - and thus more truly purposeful- rather than remaining impersonal and mindless forces that increase environmental turbulence.

A change in all these regards from the old paradigm to the new brings into being conditions that allow commitment to grow and alienation to decrease. Equally important is the replacement of a climate of low risk-taking with one of innovation. This implies high trust and openness in relations. All these qualities are mandatory if we are to transform traditional technocratic bureaucracies into continuous adaptive learning systems.

This transformation is imperative for survival in a fast-changing environment. It involves nothing less than the working out of a new organizational philosophy.

I use the term philosophy advisedly to indicate that far more is involved than methods or techniques. These, of course, have their place, but a philosophy involves questions of basic values and assumptions. Those of the new paradigm are radically different from those of the old. The old is based on technocratic and bureaucratic principles, the new on socio-ecological and participative principles. Each subsystem has a wide repertoire of response capability. It can thus better meet uncertainty and contain turbulence. This is one of the most important features of self-regulating systems - both autonomous work groups and open, mutually-articulated organizational levels. The old is geared to the requirements and characteristics of industrial societies as these have been fashioned historically. The new is geared to the requirements and characteristics of the emerging post-industrial order. At present, we are in a transition channel between the two. A transition channel is always an uncomfortable place to be, full as it is of incompatibilities and mirages. Is there wonder that we have lost the stable state?

Innovative projects in new plants take advantage of privileged circumstances to demonstrate the reality of paths into the future which would otherwise remain no more than untested possibilities. They represent the fullest embodiment of the new model so far attained.

Established work organizations

In established plants one has to deal with those already there, among whom are those who don't want to change or whose limitations of ability or forms of character prevent them from changing. The accumulated practices of the past are present along with an array of vested interests. If the plant is unionized, there will be fear on management's part of surrendering prerogatives and on the workers' of compromising the union's independence. Yet there has to be some·agreed sharing of power if success is to be attained. Sharing of power is a basic principle of the new model.

In established plants, progress has been at best slow; at worst the change effort has had to be abandoned. New methods of process consultation seem required, Ketchum (1975) has evolved a practice of uncovering what Argyris and Schon (1974) would call 'theories in use' as distinct from 'espoused theories'. He attempts to unprogram key participants from deep implicit attachments to the 'traditional system' before anything new is proposed. But to cover a whole organizational population in this manner poses problems as yet unsolved in change efforts with social aggregates. Yet whole organizational populations are what one must deal with at this system level.

A dilemma now arises. The way forward would seem to lie in what is being developed in new innovative work establishments. These innovations, however, are resisted in many if not most conventional establishments. Even where they are welcome, substantial change cannot be introduced across the board. Yet where such change is left only in one section of a plant or only in one plant in a corporation, more often than not it fades out or is actively stopped. In most of the plants mentioned earlier, so great were external pressures to conformity that sooner or later they underwent some regression toward the conventional mode (Hill, 1971; Walton, 1975b). For the most part, their example was rejected by other units in their own corporations, though they received large numbers of visitors from other organizations who not infrequently adapted some of what they saw to their own purposes. Whatever the course of diffusion, it is not linear.

Change strategies

Given the increasing salience of turbulent environmental conditions likely in the eighties, there is need to hasten the transformation of established organizations towards the new paradigm. To discover how this may be better attempted constitutes a priority for sociotechnical research.

Below is a sketch of how far my own thinking has progressed in this matter. It is based on a theory of the appreciation-planning-implementation process which I am working out with my Wharton colleague, Howard Perlmutter, in a book we are at present struggling with.

The first step is to secure an appreciation (Vickers, 1965) of the issues at the highest level of the corporation or agency (the institutional level, as Parsons (1960) called it - the level of governance as distinct from 'management'), the level at which normative planning (Ozbekhan, 1969) takes place. At this level, critical choices concern organizational values and philosophy. A methodology which has been evolved for working at this level is the 'search conference' (Emery and Emery, 1978). The board, the president and the vicepresidents (the overlap is important) go off-site for two or three days to scan the wider environment in a futures perspective, to review the present state of the organization in relation to this perspective, then to discover how far they can create a shared image of a desirable organizational future and finally to consider action steps towards this. having regard to the constraints. The Tavistock project with Shell (U.K.) began in this way. A 'philosophy document' -based on a working draft jointly produced by the internal and external research teams, was sanctioned at a top management retreat and then checked out at residential conferences - held with all levels, including the shop floor. An organizational population of 6,000 employees was reached in this way. Many varieties of this type of procedure are likely to be tried.

The next step, at the strategic level of management, is concerned with a process which I have called 'selective development' (Trist, 1979b). Since change cannot take place at all points at the same time, the plants or other self-standing establishments where sociotechnical change is most needed and most likely to be accepted have to be identified. To do this is a vice-presidential function, but the vice-presidents need to do it collectively with the president. If they have not participated in the normative meetings, they will not 'appreciate' what is required.

A third step consists of selecting concrete project sites within plants or other self-standing work establishments. The plant manager (if he has bought into the philosophy) would now consult with a crosssection of his managers at all levels. As early as possible he would include the union. If there is no union, some way has to be found of involving the work force. Procedures at this operational level would tend to be more idiomatic, given the great variety of circumstances.

Ultimately, what Emery (1976) has called a 'deep slice' (a task force of workers, foremen, specialists) may be selected to carry out an investigation and make recommendations on what might best be done at a given project site in consultation with those directly involved _ who would have to 'own' the project or nothing much would happen.

At the operational level, joint labor-management steering committees have a key function in deciding on, assisting and evaluating project sites. In the U.S. they have been developing in the socio-technical field, though with many vicissitudes, since the beginning of the program of the then National Commission on Productivity and Work Quality in 1973.

One or two firms such as General Motors have now included the union in strategic and normative level conferences. This is a pointer to the future. The union may indeed initiate the whole process in its own interest as a union, as the U.A.W. did with G.M. in introducing humanization of work clauses into the 1973 agreement.

The process described above derives from a theory of change based on the idea of stakeholder participation. Those interest groups who have a stake in what is being decided are represented at every step (in overlapping sets much as in Likert's (1961) linking-pin theory) down, up-and across. There is scope for 'experimentation' in involving the social aggregate in open meetings at shop floor levelthe micro-societies of primary work systems; combinations of such systems; even the entire plant population.^[1] Foremen and junior staffs may require their own aggregate meetings. In the future, various levels within management are likely to formalize their own reference groups. They have already done so in several European countries. The kinds of people inside and outside the organization claiming stakeholder status are likely to increase.

It is further hypothesized that this type of process would not be embarked upon unless those concerned had come to believe that socio~ technical change in the direction of the new paradigm was a longterm process contributing to enhanced organizational capability relevant to coping with rising contextual turbulence. The ultimate motivation is survival.

Change of this type, which involves the discontinuity of a paradigm shift, is an emotional as well as an intellectual experience for those undergoing it. Prolonged opportunities need to be given for 'working through' the difficulties and issues that arise at many levels - conscious and unconscious. The structure and culture of organizations have evolved as an adaptation to the prevailing societal environment. People have learned to make this adaptation with considerable effort. Many of their ego defenses are projected into the existing structure and culture (Trist and Bamforth, 1951; Jaques, 1953; Menzies, 1960). They have formed their occupational identities in relation to them. They now find themselves faced with having to give up what it has taken a long time to learn and to become. Whatever its shortcomings, the status quo is familiar and has been internalized. Change involves loss (Marris, 1975). Room must be left for mourning in both its depressive and angry phases. To face the novel (which may not work) stirs up deep anxieties which easily evoke paranoid phantasies.

Such a situation of loss and threat may be expected to induce regressive behavior in the members of organizations undergoing radical change. This manifests itself at the group level by an increase in the frequency with which the primitive emotional cultures associated with what Bion (1961) has called 'the basic assumption' group intrude into the behavior of what he has called the 'sophisticated' group. These intrusions are unconscious. They obstruct the sophisticated group in carrying out its primary task - the work it was brought into existence to perform. Such a concept of work is wider than paid employment. It refers to the transactions which any group has to carry out to maintain a steady state in relation to its environment. These transactions are necessary because the group has only an incomplete control over this environment whose resources it needs to achieve its ends. A transactional concept of work is analogous to the psychoanalytic concept of the ego as the institution in the personality mediating between the internal and external worlds.

Change which involves discontinuity, as a paradigm shift does, requires deutero-Iearning in Bateson's (1972) sense. This, as he says, is frustrating. The pain of this frustration is a cause of the resistance which Bion has referred to as 'the hatred of learning through experience.' The new patterns can only be discovered by the individual and the group members when they undergo an experience through which they themselves can establish the validity of the patterns. Intellectual presentations are valuable in hindsight. They permit rational understanding of what has transpired. They are of small avail as reasons for undertaking the initial steps. The work of Bateson and Bion on these questions has recently been extended to the field of organizational change by Pava (1980).

A vision of a possible alternative mode is a necessary condition for bringing about substantial change. Hence the importance of articulating a new philosophy which embodies the vision. But the vision and the philosophy make little sense to most of those concerned until the process of enactment begins (Weick, 1979).

In the early Tavistock work in the socio-technical field, the task and process orientations were unified. Later they became separated. This has led to negative results. Members of middle management have perhaps exhibited the most solid forms of resistance. This became apparent during the Norwegian Industrial Democracy project when an attempt was made to diffuse socio-technical change throughout the largest enterprise in the country (Norshydro). Some 500 middle managers, sensing all loss and no gain so far as they were concerned, said no. More thorough-going process intervention might have helped this group to work through their problems at an earlier stage.

The recent trend in the United States to fuse the socio-technical and organizational development traditions is welcome. The ecology of work meetings conducted by the National Training Laboratories are being attended by increasingly large numbers of people. Emphasis has been placed on process sl\ills as well as work analysis skills in the national workshops conducted to train QWL facilitators sponsored by the Canadian Department of Labor.

The traditional skills of organizational development have had little success with organized labor. The trust level is usually too low and the political understanding of the facilitators too inconsequential. The conflicts between management and labor are of a different character than those within management and require different methods of conflict resolution. Facilitators tend to be ignorant of labor relations and trade union history. This ignorance is not forgiven.

The new fields opening up in organizational change are conveying the message that established notions of the change-agent are outmoded. He needs to unlearn the role of being an expert and to learn the role of being a contributor to a process of co-learning. In this process all stakeholders make their resources available without claiming special privileges of role or ~tatus. This was learned many years ago in therapeutic communities by their originator, Maxwell Jones (I968, 1976), who has recently attempted to unify process theory for the clinical and non-clinical worlds.

The reunification of the task and process aspects of socio-technical projects is a central task for future research and practice. It needs to be undertaken in terms of the emerging concept of a learning society. If the paradigm for alternative organizations - those capable of surviving environmental turbulence and eventually reducing it - requires their democratization, it also requires the democratization of the relations of those concerned with organizational change. This will entail breaking down the barriers between the changers and the to-be-changed. The ideal is pentecostal- that all parties speak with tongues.

Notes