In an earlier post on this blog, July 10, I discussed Open Method of Coordination (OMC) as a manifestation of MIFO (multi-directional iterative feedback organization/s). In this post, I want to explore the connection more closely, specifically OMC as a kind of elementary sub-form of MIFO. OMC, we’ll see, is a form of MIFO, but a form that is significantly limited in its dynamism. This is not a criticism, nor even a shortcoming. For its intended purposes, these limitations provide benefits. However, OMC only hints at what is possible and actual in the more dynamic forms of MIFO. Understanding OMC serves then as a useful introduction to the more expansive superior category of which it is a sub-form. As we’ll see, OMC is based upon periodic and routine iterative feedback, while MIFO, in the most expansive version, is based upon constant and meta-routine iterative feedback. This latter claim will require some explanation, of course, but first let’s review the nature and function of OMC.
In the earlier post, I introduced OMC as a MIFO development that has been most saliently explored in the public sector, at least by that name, and I briefly discuss the example of the Chicago School system that is drawn upon by Charles Sabel in one of his many discussions of this topic. In getting a conceptual handle on OMC, we might think of it as a kind of laboratory clearinghouse. To quickly reiterate, in that example, the individual schools and the board of education collaborate to establish agreed upon, realistic, basic, very broad outcome goals. Then each individual school is free to pursue those goals by whatever means its members/stakeholders see fit – abiding, of course, by understood ethical standards to prevent harm. The board continues to play a role in providing advice, resources or even training where necessary. After all, the schools now have responsibilities for which they may have no prior experience. In the absence of any threat of harm to anyone under the board’s responsibility, the schools are provided extreme latitude in finding their own way toward the designated goals. In the process, then, each individual school becomes a separate laboratory of organizational innovation.
The schools, or the local unit in whatever application, have specific responsibilities, which include a thorough documentation of what they did, how and why they did it, along with measurements of their performance and results. At the end of a pre-stipulated period, in the case of the Chicago school system it was three years, the central body comes back to the front of the stage: the central office gathers, audits, evaluates and, most importantly, makes available through a user-friendly medium, the information and experience produced from this broad scale series of experiments. The fruition of this process is an ambitious collaborative internal benchmarking in which all participating units are able to review and assess what worked, where, how, and under what conditions. In this way, the board – or central agency, in any application of the practice – acts as a clearinghouse for the findings produced by all the individual laboratories: in our example, the individual schools.
As one of the underlying motives for this approach is the understanding that distinct local circumstances mitigate the effectiveness of centrally imposed systems, there is no movement from here to a centrally enforced regime based on the resulting best practices. Rather, each individual school studies the most successful practices for ideas of how they can improve their own practice. If their circumstances permit a wholesale implementation, all for the best, but, if not, there is still the opportunity to discern what elements of others’ practices – identified as best or not – that they might retrofit to their own local needs. With the learning benefits absorbed, the process resumes. Each individual unit tries to apply lessons learned to improve their performance over the subsequent period, until the assessment and learning phase starts again. And so on.
In the earlier post, I developed these ideas to highlight how OMC constituted a genuine transcending of the now obsolete rhetoric of centralism-decentralism as a zero-sum game. Here, instead, I want to emphasize the process. As mentioned above, we have a multi-directional (as, via the centre, the schools all communicate with each other, in a vast geometry of channels, about what has resulted) iterative (in that it is done repeatedly, every three years) feedback (in that after every designated period each school gets to see again how its innovations stack up in light of those taken elsewhere, creating further opportunity to learn) organization/s. This integral marriage of best practices, benchmarking, continuous improvement and organizational learning, therefore, does create a MIFO. However, it is periodic, in that it is only every three years, and it is routine, as it is a very set process, with a precise series of steps, as delineated above.
To repeat, this is not a criticism. The periodic delimitation makes sense in that the schools need time to implement any intended changes and to see and measure how those changes play out. Patience for results pays dividends if they provide an appropriate horizon to assess the trajectory of the experiments and innovations. Likewise, the exceedingly large numbers of partners in the process (in Chicago, some 550 schools) and the generally conservative mindset of public institutions, who have to answer to vastly more “shareholders” (i.e., taxpayers) than even the largest private organizations, makes the use of highly delineated, thoroughly documented and painstakingly transparent routines both inevitable and probably necessary. And, of course, a focus upon routine encourages standardized periodic scales.
However, for all that, OMC is considerably constrained in the degree of its dynamism. To fully grasp the potential of MIFO and recognize just how radically it is reinventing modern organizational life, we have to use this sketch of OMC as a jumping off point, from which we do move on beyond it to the richer dynamism of MIFO experimentalism. Sketching a history of MIFO, something I am working on, is complicated and subject to regular revision as scholars reconsider what had been previously taken for granted as vertically integrated, hierarchical and/or bureaucratic processes. For instance, for a long time, the story was that MIFO first began to emerge in the 1970s, in Japanese automaking and U.S. computer enterprise. However, research has since shown that in fact many of the core ingredients of MIFO were already activated in the U.S. auto industry of the 1920s, in some instances lasting right through to WWII. So, there’s no easy sketch or definition to be drawn from history.
At a theoretical level, too, diversity militates against conceptual conviviality: Charles Sabel, Lynn Applegate, John Paul MacDuffie, Jonathan Zeitlin, Charles Heckscher, Susan Helper, Gilles Paquet and Keith Sawyer are just some of the scholars whose differing approaches, methodologies and conceptualizations have all funnelled into my understanding of MIFO. I don’t claim that the model that I sketch below would be consistent with all their analyses, nor, depending upon one’s chronologic framing, does my rough ideal type provide a guide to charting the permutations of organizational history. Still, the discussion has to begin somewhere, so I provide below, as I say, a kind of rough draft ideal type. Ultimately, understanding its practice, theory and history is the object of my long term research project.
The most radical expression of MIFO is found in those organizations that find themselves in need of, either, rapid adaptation or continual innovation. Hierarchies are designed to best ensure the fulfilment of established routines. They are good at mobilizing effort in established, standard methods, which is why they have been so prevalent in the era of mass standardized production under relatively stable social, economic and technological conditions: the long term amortization required to make economic the high fixed costs of such production suited such organizational processes. However, when condition become less stable and, either, rapid adaptation or continual innovation is required, hierarchies are not so affective. The very stability and repeatability that they institute under more stable, often monopolist market conditions, impede adaptation and innovation, and the economics of long term amortization no longer work. Additionally, rapid adaptation’s and constant innovation’s requirement for a far more complex knowledge space, created specifically to allow an option diversity that is anathema to hierarchies’ command and control methods, defy the capacity to be thoroughly grasped and comprehensively managed by a handful of top executives.
The only way for this approach to work is by bringing together those with the appropriate knowledge, to work, directly, together. This creates opportunities and challenges. The opportunities lie in the unprecedented synergy made possible through the direct collaboration of aficionados of multiple disciplines. That too, alas, is also the challenge. On the one hand, a new level of creative dynamism is made possible, but, on the other hand, achieving that creative dynamism requires finding a way of negotiating the insular vocabularies, assumptions and even cultures of such diverse disciplines. Under these conditions, managers have to learn how to make the transition from that of being delegators of tasks to that of facilitators of dialogue. One of the most famous examples of such processes is the relationship between “original equipment manufacturers” (OEM) and their partner component builders. At various times in history, including and especially now, demands for adaptation or innovation have required high levels of collaboration between such partners. These collaborative processes, such as iterative design and simultaneous engineering, require high levels of information sharing and mutual teaching.
It is by these means that the various disciplines can mesh without need of a parsing and delegating authority. However, the professionalism of the disciplines, combined with safeguards for assurance about the effectiveness of such meshing, has also entailed the use of a variety of methods that – as unthinkable as it may seem to the traditional hierarchical organization – actually undermine routines. The meshing of these different disciplines and knowledges require a spirit of invention and experimentation which does not settle for mundane implementation of the fruits of such efforts. Indeed, much of the old hierarchical separation of conception and execution is eclipsed under these new MIFO regimes. Among the key practices to take note of here are benchmarking, error detection and reduction and just in time production flows. All of these are means by which existing routine practices can be challenged for their degree of excellence in meeting state of the art performance. So, both the actual dialogue of creation between the disciplines and the practical implementation of the resulting work are marked by processes that routinely challenge the existing state of routine in the organizational practice.
Such processes then are multi-directional (the disciplines are in constant dialogue amongst themselves, as they mutually adapt to each others’ innovations, while interacting with design and production teams and processes, all responding to the findings from routine challenges in the products and their production) iterative (in that all these processes are repeated constantly in dialogue about implementing the newest state of the art knowledge in products and production, as well as testing of their effectiveness) feedback (as the dialogue among the disciplines are always incrementing new insights back to each other about how designs can be better engineered, and the results of routine-challenging design and production processes provide further gist for the mill of collaborative design and engineering) organization/s. However, unlike the OMC, these MIFO are starkly different in the level of their dynamism precisely because, rather than being routine, they are meta-routine. The only routines which are not subject to challenge in these MIFO are those routines that constantly challenge the taken for granted routines of design, engineering and production. There are no fixed processes or schedules that exceed the bounds of creative challenge. And, in this way, too, these MIFO are not, like OMC, periodic in their operation, but rather operate in a realm of constant challenging and reinventing.
There are still elements of OMC at work in many of these more dynamic organizations. For instance, the benchmarking, which is so important to the meta-routine processes for both design and production, are often based upon information from industry or sector associations or institutes, through which individual organizations that agree to share their own performance specs are able to gain access to those of all other such organizations, who have agreed to the same arrangement. In this way, such institutes or associations play a clearinghouse role not dissimilar to that played by the school board in the example above.
However, for the most part, we can say that while OMC provides an illuminating entrance into understanding the basic elements and mechanisms of MIFO, to fully grasp the dynamic potential in these increasingly important and influential organizational forms and practices, we have to look beyond those practices that are restricted to routine operations under a periodic schedule. We have to grapple with trying to understand the complex dynamics and emergent results of these far more dynamic, boundary-eroding, organizational manifestations of the MIFO phenomenon. We have to go beyond OMC, into the MIFO age.
April 21st, 2010 at 5:42 am
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