systems thinking – The Conservation Leader

Targets only motivate people to meet the target (not to do good conservation work)

Simon Black –

The reasons for employing people are:

1) to do the work (produce output, product, service), and

2) to improve the work.

If the person is clear about the purpose of their work, then 1 and 2 should be easy to deliver if they have the right resources, skills, and understanding of users’ (e.g. customers) needs.

But managers rarely leave it at that…

Traditionally, managers get people to do ‘better’ in their work by what John Seddon tags as ‘sweating the labour’ – getting the people to work harder or faster. The idea is that you get more output for the same hours work – essentially more for the cost (efficiency).

Of course the idea of the sweatshop is morally uncomfortable – exploitation to achieve a profit motive. Yet we still stick to the idea by setting targets: ‘You produced 100 widgets last month, let’s have you aim for 110 widgets this month‘.

It seems plausible – motivational even! What possibly could be the harm in setting a target?

Well, the widgets are being created for a purpose – presumably the purpose for which the customer buys them. And that purpose is associated with the design and quality if production in the widget that is produced.

If you create arbitrary targets (and measures of performance) you will create a de facto purpose in people’s mind which is to deliver those targets. This is different from actually delivering the purpose of the work.

Your worker will work to produce 110 widgets BUT not necessarily a widget that meets the customer needs, nor a widget that could be produced faster or at lower cost whilst still meeting the customers needs, other than by cutting corners (lowering quality or increasing risk). The worker is busy but has got his eye off the ball. This produces errors and lowers the quality of work – which will probably have to be redone – at greater cost.

Targets are not motivational. They might make people move, but that is not motivation. A dog that moves is just one looking to avoid the next kick. It is not a motivated, free thinking, creative, proactive animal. Why would we exect people to operate any differently?

Reading

Herzberg, F. (1968) “One more time: how do you motivate employees?”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 53–62

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.

Insights taken from an Understanding of Variation: (i) stability versus change

Simon Black –

As scientists we are used to data analyses providing information, but it is less common to see data analysis directly informing management decision-making. Experience of using and developing control charts which has been established over the past eighty years, can provide methods which will help the conservation manager to build a more complete understanding and therefore make better decisions. An example suggested by Black (2015) shows how the increasing trend in manatee deaths, although potentially attributed to a growing manatee population, can also be identified to occur in three separate stages. The stabilisation of counts at each stage indicate a new ‘status quo’ has been established. In this case the introduction of watercraft speed limits established a new ‘status quo’.

In other words, increases in manatee mortality are not inevitable if management decisions can be made which stabilise and improve the system – for example can other waterway management measures be implemented?

Reading:

Black S.A. (2015) System behaviour charts inform an understanding of biodiversity recovery. International Journal of Ecology, 2015 (787925): pp6 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/787925

Systems Thinking for Conservation Leaders

Simon Black –

In recent years we have started talking about the suitability of systems thinking in relation to conservation management. The approach is non-hierarchical (so is not reliant on a political or cultural norm) – it is a way of managing that cuts through the necessity of a hierarchy. If you do have hierarchical leaders, they just need to start asking different questions. Systems thinking (e.g. the team are a system, they operate in a work system, the organisation is part of a larger system) clearly fits with the notion of ecosystems and complexity which is at the core of conservation.

Knowledge is at the core of systems thinking, optimisation of the system is critical and anything which undermines this is to be avoided. Simplicity of intervention is paramount, and taking different approaches to managing ‘exceptions’ and ‘the norm’ is importnat.

Many of these things are obvious but the ways in which we tackle them ARE OFTEN COUNTER-INTUITIVE. For example:

to increase motivation do not attempt to ‘motivate’ people,
incentives do not incentivise what we want to be done,
re-training is not the best way to improve worker capability,
standardisation of work causes increased failure,
targets are counterproductive,
a focus on cost reduction will not reduce costs,The list goes on…

Some principles of system thinking include:

Managing improvement is about understanding predictability of the system. Predictability is based on an understanding of either:
(i) data over time or (ii) cause and effect.
The start point in working in a complex environment is to study it (not plan) and to understand how it currently supports the conservation purpose, and how (through flow of processes and systems). If the purpose of the system is understood, then measures to examine the system can be put in place and then methods for improving the system versus measures and purpose can be experimented with, thereby further informing the understanding of the system.
When you want to make a change the only plan you need is how to study the system – all the work thereafter follows. In ecosystems we are unlikely to know all of the complexity of processes, but by continual experimentation and learning we understand what has a positive impact (and what does not) for the species of concern.
The ‘demand’ (defined as species and ecosystems’ needs including threats) is the biggest lever for change – so it must be understood. It can be understood by the people doing the work (or affecting the system) only through their study of and understanding of the realities and patterns of those demands.
An understanding of ‘demand’ drives the leader to consider which bits of the system need to be learned about and for which improvement could be focused.
Cooperation is a consequence of the design of the work system – the system governs people’s behaviours, not the other way around. This is important in working with teams, communities, businesses.

Note that the only standardisation that occurs in this approach is to develop measures of purpose. All else needs to developed in the context of the species and ecosystems of concern. With the measures in place, all work will follow the measures to drive improvement.

Reading

Black, S.A. (2015) A Clear Purpose is the Start Point for Conservation Leadership. Conservation Letters. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12203

Scholtes, P. R. (1998) The Leader’s Handbook: A guide to inspiring your people and managing the daily workflow, New York: McGraw-Hill

Good performers will fail in a bad system

Simon Black –

Examples of failing systems are numerous, although often the finger of blame is pointed at the people who are at the sharp end.

In a blame culture managers will identify the problem as being the people at the sharp end. Blame is both self-fulfilling and self-deluding: it does not help us to understand what has gone wrong and why, because we are basing our judgement on a misplaced assumption ‘people are the problem‘.

There is a neat way to define the power of the system, versus the expectations placed on people, in a quote attributed to Geary Rummler:

“Put a good performer in a bad system
and the system wins every time”

So should we blame the manager? Well, simply, yes, because their job is to manage the system (and to improve it). In fact, that is pretty much all that their job should involve. As a coservation leader you must set up the goals, roles and work for your teams so that they are able to deliver the purpose of the conservation programme – and so that they know whether they are achieving this or not.

Tell me: what’s your purpose?

Simon Black –

To be clear about our work, who (or what) we are serving, how to do the work, how to change, what improvement looks like – we need to be clear about one thing:

WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE?

Peter Scholtes was one of the clearest writers on this concept; for him, like Deming before, everything starts with purpose; “Without a purpose there is no system”.

Until we have clarity of purpose, all we are doing is completing sets of tasks. ‘Purpose’ should be embedded in our thinking about work, people and organisations. We should be focused on the needs of the sepcies and ecosystems of concern. If not our goals can easily drag us off-track.

Scholtes offers a very clear analogy to illustrate the importance of purpose:

“Cleaning a table cannot be a system until the purpose of the clean table is made clear. A table clean enough to eat on requires one system of cleaning. Clean enough to dance on requires another. Clean enough to perform surgery on requires yet another. Everything starts with purpose.

“What is your purpose?” is the most useful question one can be asked.

When thinking this way, conservation work is transformed from being seen as tasks to carry out, to become a reason to do something which adds real value; a framework for making decisions and seeking ways to improve.

Black, S.A. & Copsey, J.A. (2014). Purpose, Process, Knowledge and Dignity in Interdisciplinary projects. Conservation Biology. 28 (5): 1139-1141. DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12344

Deming, W. E. (1993) The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, second edition. MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Scholtes, P. R. (1998) The Leader’s Handbook: A guide to inspiring your people and managing the daily workflow, New York: McGraw-Hill

Scholtes P.R. (1999) The New Competencies of Leadership, Total Quality Management, 10: 4&5, S704-S710.

Systems Thinking – the oldest ‘new idea’ for conservation?

Simon Black –

If we are working in conservation that is because we want things to get ‘better’ for species or ecosystems or at least (if circumstances move the goalposts) ‘different’ and ‘sustainable’. It could be really difficult to find the best way to manage – the path of management learning over the past 40 years is littered with passing fads and trends which have only delivered disappointment, but a few ideas outlast these comings-and-goings.

Nearly thirty years ago I first encountered the work of Dr W Edwards Deming whilst I sat in an undergraduate management lecture in the late 1980s. I have had the opportunity over the intervening decades to apply, test, avoid, seek alternatives or attempt enhancements to Deming’s ideas (and those of many other management practitioners and theorists). Some of my work has been in small departments or projects, others in very large organisations; some in conservation, others in industrial, commercial, or educational contexts. My own thinking has emerged from a growth in understanding.

The forces along the top rob people of innovation and applied science. We must replace these forces with management that will restore the power of the individual (adapted from Deming 1994) — Fig 1. “The forces along the top rob people of innovation and applied science…replace these forces with management that will restore the power of the individual” (Deming 1994)

A freshly edited book which pulls together his collected papers was published in 2013. His illustration (Figure 1) of how a person’s motivation withers over their lifetime under “forces of destructive management thinking” rings as true today as in previous decades.Whislt grading systems and merit awards are less familiar in a conservation setting (although we should be aware of the impact of financial incentives on community partners and land-users), competition, goals, variation and suboptimisation of work are all very relevant. How many times do project budgets get unevenly distributed to the detriment of the work being undertaken for species or ecosystems. The Po’ouli is just one example of this (Black et al 2011).

Deming’s books draw on his teaching conducted over 60 years ago in industrial recovery of Japan, ideas which arose from concepts developed by his professional mentor Walter Shewhart at Bell Telephone Laboratories over 80 years ago. Shewhart’s own book published in 1931 is a classic, (its style perhaps less accessible to present-day readers). The observations and principles identified by Shewhart and Deming early in the 20th Century still stand up to scrutiny and practice. Their centenary approaches…

… much more than can be said for many management ideas since.