Thought & Organisation Building

“First comes thought, then the organisation of that thought into ideas and plans. Then transformation of those plans into reality.” Napoleon Hill

On the surface this looks a pretty obvious statement. Thought does comes first. In reality nothing ever happens without thought. Whether conscious or unconscious, all action begins in the mind. For that reason the transformation of plans into reality also requires thought. Perhaps then this statement is not as clever it first appears and is in fact typical of traditional management thinking, that regards “the plan” as paramount. 

Perhaps, in traditional command and control structures, a plan was generally enough (assuming it was an appropriate plan to begin with) because people could be relied upon to do what was expected of them. If their actions resulted in a reality different to that which was expected, then the pace of business was such that deficiencies in the plan could be identified and responded to by management over time, without undue risk, and fresh instructions issued to the employees responsible for carrying them out. Ultimately people were paid to do what they were told and not to think for themselves.

The change of pace with its concomitant increase in risk has changed this and nowadays people are required to be able to think for themselves. Of course, this has been widely recognised, and new knowledge management initiatives introduced to try to cater for it. Yet even so, such efforts still tend to fall short, perhaps because they reinforce Hill’s thinking and fail to close the loop.

This shortcoming has been clearly revealed over the past few days with the chaos on the British railway network through engineering work not being completed on schedule over the holiday period. Particularly damning was the response of Network Rail Management which explained that the overrun was due to a shortage of engineering staff over the holiday. They compounded this by saying that this shortage was exacerbated by the fact that many engineers had been entitled to their leave as they had worked over Christmas for several of the past years! Surely the engineers who apparently insisted on taking their leave would have been happy to forego it for bonuses that would have been just a fraction of the potential fines the company is facing?

If the situation wasn’t so serious that response would almost be funny. Not only do I not consider management’s response any kind of justification at all, but in my opinion it simply shows them to be incompetent. Not only does it point to poor traditional management with both inferior initial plans and an inability to oversee their execution, but in addition it shows that there was no thinking or organisational teamwork anyway in the process. There is no way that the overrun could not have been anticipated long before commuters tried to return to work on January 2nd but clearly there was neither a contingency position nor the ability to create an alternative plan during the process, and no communication during the holidays while the work was being carried out. Not only was the plan deficient, but it appears there was no thinking at all afterwards!

It will be interesting to see what the consequences will be, but the threat to the organisation of million pound fines is clearly little threat at all. It will:
•    Not affect managers in any tangible way;
•    Hurt the shareholders;
•    Exacerbate the organisation’s financial position;
•    Delay future capital and maintenance expenditure;
•    Increase the likelihood of such problems recurring in the future.
Even worse, the whole situation demonstrates complete lack of consideration for the ultimate consumer, and, for an organisation that has already had more than its fair share of problems and bad publicity, it makes it even less likely to be a place that decent, self-respecting people would want to work.

The saddest thing of all though, is that this is by no means unique, but simply a different manifestation of the problems recently experienced by HMRCE, and their infamous missing records. Clearly if we want to turn around service, in public and commercial sectors alike, we have to find ways to involve everyone in the organisation and get them all thinking.