Chet Richards

Ford, which just ended 76 years as the second largest US automaker, and GM, whose market share has dropped by more than 50% since the early 1980s, illustrate what can happen to organizations whose orientations fail to trigger, via the Implicit Guidance and Control Link, actions that will be effective in influencing the course of events.

This effect is well known and obvious in armed conflict, where the primary mechanisms for “influencing events” are cheng / ch’i maneuvers that aim for abrupt, jarring, and unexpected changes — transients — between the cheng and the ch’i. These fast transients permit the perpetrator to (Patterns, 132):

• Employ a variety of measures that interweave menace-uncertainty-mistrust with tangles of ambiguity-deception-novelty as basis to sever adversary’s moral ties and disorient …

• Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

That is, the effects of disorientation are immediate and disastrous: loss of the capacity for independent action, inability to survive on our own terms, or the inability to survive at all.

As Ford and GM are showing, and Chrysler has already shown, the most common symptom of commercial disorientation is a long string of products that fail to catch on in the marketplace. The end results for businesses are the same as for military forces, although the effect is usually drawn out over a longer period.

What can keep orientation from being effective? First, it should be pointed out that there is no absolute standard. You can be really bad and still prosper if your opponents are worse (or if you’re a monopoly and don’t have any opponents). Of course, you’re betting your future that your incompetence won’t tempt smarter competitors into the fray.

Be that as it may, there are two generic classes of diseases that infect orientation:

1. The first is sometimes called “entropy,” in analogy with thermodynamics because there’s lots of energy but few successful products or services rolling out. Most of the activity is wasted in internally focused actions, such as enforcing the understanding of and adherence to policies and procedures. Here’s a great description from former NBC correspondent John Hockenberry:

Finding such comparisons was how I kept from slipping into a coma during dozens of NBC employee training sessions where we were told not to march in political demonstrations of any kind, not to take gifts from anyone, and not to give gifts to anyone. At mandatory, hours-long “ethics training” meetings we would watch in-house videos that brought all the drama and depth of a driver’s-education film to stories of smiling, swaggering employees (bad) who bought cases of wine for business associates on their expense accounts, while the thoughtful, cautious employees (good) never picked up a check, but volunteered to stay at the Red Roof Inn in pursuit of “shareholder value.” [Jan-Feb 2008 Technology Review]

2. The other broad category is sometimes called “fixations,” attachments to appearances, conclusions, institutional positions, dogmas, ideologies — pretty much anything that keeps the people inside the organization from recognizing that the world is changing or being changed by competitors.

In the first, the organization may have a relatively accurate picture of the world, but is just unable to do anything about it, at least in time to have much of an effect. In the second, its concept of the world is warped by its attachments, and such organizations often set up mechanisms to ensure that these attachments are not challenged (e.g., emperor’s new clothes / shoot the messenger stuff).

So how do we fix orientation or even detect that it is getting out of harmony with the universe? For now, let me end this blog entry with something that doesn’t work: detailed examination of the organization by the people in the organization. This is just more of problem 1 and can lead to more of 2 as people’s internal positions harden in self defense. As Boyd put it, you can’t determine the character or nature of a system within itself, and attempts to do so will lead to confusion and disorder. Or as the old saying goes, the eye does not see the eye.