In the event that someone, who hadn’t a clue as to what the thematic title of this blog refers, happened to stumble by, I wouldn’t want to be an inhospitable host, so I thought best to start with a posting that provided some kind of overview of the topic. MIFO is a term that I’ve coined to try and capture the material reality of emerging organizational practices. The acronym stands for Multi-directional Iterative Feedback Organizations. It may seem a bit of a mouthful, but it’s a lot easier to verbally wield than the concept to which it refers. MIFO are organizations that entail collaborative and experimental processes, based upon fluid, contingent negotiation of the terms of those processes, which are embedded in larger, repeated, trial and error invention, across a host of boundaries – inter- and intra-organizational.
MIFO is a term that tries to capture worldwide developments in organizational dynamics that are more horizontal than vertical; more networked and kinetic; more nuanced and nimble; more communications and solidarity-based; and at their best don’t merely restate or re-jig, but actually transcend the old centralist/decentralist debate (with a new reality I call “transcentralism”). MIFO open opportunities for new kinds of dialogue, breathing life into deliberative spaces. They create the opportunity for better crisis-response, problem solving and innovation through dynamic self-renewal. They build upon and take advantage of our increasing appreciation of the benefits in networks and complex adaptive systems. At their best, they employ a rich range of practices – all too often haphazardly or narrow-mindedly misapplied and misunderstood – such as benchmarking, performance measurement, organizational learning, flexible contracts and continuous error reduction, in a synergetic whole that dramatically re-invents organizational potential.
Though these developments have been most famously noted in certain sectors of commercial corporate endeavours – particularly the computer, automobile and aeronautic industries – MIFO are in fact slowly remaking the entire face of human organizational life. In the public sector, the long rollback of direct state delivered services, in the face of the fiscal crisis of the welfare state, has created new urgency for MIFO-style reinvention, largely pursued under the code word of “governance.” Possibly, our last hope for maintaining some kind of social provision of services lies in a successful implementation of the MIFO agenda. An abject failure of the MIFO agenda could well propel us back into the conditions of an 19th or early 20th century minimalist state, where social needs must be serviced by the churches and benevolent societies – whose original failure to address the perceived requirements of growing democratic, equitable, liberal societies, occasioned the rise of the welfare state in the first place. Likewise in civil society, NGOs increasingly look in the direction of MIFO organizational principles as they need to partner, perform at cost-recovery levels, and innovate. Labour organizations that have grown to recognize how traditional union practices have become archaic in the new context look to new networked forms of coordination and delivery of service to members. Even protesters, over the last decade, have increasingly applied the MIFO lessons of transcentalism from Seattle to Tehran.
Einstein observed that once we had invented the means for splitting the atom, it could never be uninvented; the knowledge, once gained, was never going away. We might say much the same thing about MIFO. One shouldn’t be Panglossian about the situation. Their contribution to social disruption and dislocation continues unabated. Career security has been made a shambles; economic security has become more tenuous for many, many people; those with authority, prestige or wealth invested in the older models must resist them; well entrenched cultures, psychologies and routines stand obstinately in their way; questions persist as to how such organizations accommodate a democratic ethos. And yet, for all their challenges and setbacks, the many faces of the MIFO march on. In the end, I suppose, the question becomes, if MIFO continue to provide for better products and services, enable more adaptive and innovative institutions, create more satisfying work, coordinate more effective actions, and provide better solutions to previously intractable problems, at some point does resistance become simply an unsustainable competitive disadvantage in life?
In any event, these are the issues that intrigue me and they are the theme for this blog. I hope readers find it of interest, informative and maybe at times a little entertaining.
April 20th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
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May 19th, 2010 at 9:17 am
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