| The Bruch/Ghosal Focus-Energy Matrix
In the February 2002 Harvard Business Review, Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghosal presented an article entitled Beware the Busy Manager. In this article, they show us a "Focus-Energy Matrix" as follows:
Their studies have shown that groups of managers tend to fall into these four kinds of archetypal attitude categories about their job. We can develop these insights.
The Purposeful:
These managers are only one-in-ten (10%), which is very unfortunate, for they are the thoughtful and creatively active managers who can learn and teach. They are the ones who really recognize problems honestly and want to find the right method of problem-solving. They are also those managers who really care about the viability of the organization as to whether it succeeds in fulfilling constructive purposes. The 'purposefulness' of these managers is not a selfish, twisted, clever and manipulating pursuit of a hidden agenda; it is honest, harmonious and seeks the best result for the good of all. In an ideal world, all our managers, members of parliament, administrators of public institutions, and so on, would fall into this category.
The Disengaged:
These managers (or administrators or members of parliament) are two-in-ten (20%), but because their focus is high, they share the lead with the Purposeful Thoughtful managers, whom they out-number 2-to-1. They are not engaged with the good of the organization as such, but only with their own hidden agenda. They are the ones who deny the real problems and lead all the others into destruction, even on purpose. The Enron type scams of Senior Managers and Government Officials in America and Europe, are good examples of the kind of corruption and damage these Disengaged High Focus, Low Energy people can do. They are dishonest and manipulating. They are always willing to sacrifice the organization and the people below them for their own selfish gain. They are the biggest abusers of power, and they are the predominant category in leadership positions. They are liars.
They, more than others, fit the profile of what Christ Argyris calls 'Model One Behaviour' which breaks down as:
1- They design and manage the organization unilaterally for their own purpose.
2- They are turf-guarding, anal-territorial mentalities who always strive to be 'top dog' and protect their own agenda from scrutiny. They are not team players.
3- They maintain a facade of charm, smiles and goodwill. They are adept politicians. Wearing false faces of pseudo-goodwill and care for all, they lead the sheep over the cliff. They, in fact, are the ones who most promote 'political correctness' that wants everyone to blindly stick to a questionable strategy or policy these Disengaged leaders or managers are demanding and promoting. They have 'thought it all out' and we lesser mortals should fall into line. If we start questioning what it is really about, they put on a look of caring responsibility and say, "Trust me."
4- They are out of touch with their own deeper feelings and sense of conscience. They do not want to connect with the real truth of the destructiveness and self-destructiveness of their position, which they endlessly rationalize. They also lack abilities of genuine lateral thinking or good intuition, but pride themselves on their 'objectivity' as linear, left-brained and overly analytic so called 'thinkers'. They imagine that their mental arrogance and accumulated knowledge over the years are indications of high intelligence. They are opinionated, dogmatic and authoritarian. They will not question themselves or allow themselves to be questioned.
The Procrastinators:
These people are three out of every ten (30%) managers, administrators or members of parliament. Their problem is that they are unhappy and confused. They are always wavering in their decisions and find it hard to make up their minds on any problem or issue. Basically, they just want some trusted authority or leader to tell them what to do, to give them some blind rule to try to follow. Yet, even when they try to follow the rules blindly, they are unaware, unalert and ineffectual.
These managers do not manage well and require an awful lot of help, explanations and personal counselling to keep them going. They are like blackholes, in that whatever is done to improve their performance mysteriously fails to work, and whatever is done to help them think more comprehensively is itself never comprehended. And it is not that these people are innately stupid, but they like to play stupid to avoid responsibility. These are the draining and useless managers, or members of parliament, we would all mostly just like to fire or be rid off, but there are always reasons why we cannot. For instance, they have been elected. In other cases, there are employee protection laws that make us have to accept incompetence. Finally, there is the simple operational fact that we will always have this proportion of Procrastinators or incompetents who will fill in the vacancies of those who have either left or been got rid of. Occasionally, these people are kept on out of compassion or emotional attachment to them, perhaps of some sponsor figure in the organization liking them.
The main thing about these people is that you can put them through any number of training programs or highly facilitated thinking and decision-making sessions, yet nothing will happen, for these people are always then confused about these thoughtful things in addition to the things that already confuse them.
The Distracted:
These are the Busy Managers, who are the biggest single subgroup. They comprise one-in-four (40%). They are always on the go and confuse their activity with thoughtful, constructive and usefully purposive action. They are getting so much done, that it seems to justify their existence, even if what they are accomplishing is counter-productive or not to the point.
These people form the energetic version of the Argyris Model One behavioural profile:
1- They each pursue a blinkered, self-enclosed purpose, which though honest enough, is blind to the big picture of the overall situation. If they are not responsible for any given area, they do not have to think about it, for that is not within their remit. Only what they can personally control is relevant to them.
2- They are not team players, because that would require sharing an overall model of their shared overall situation, such as in good System Thinking.
3- They are always politically correct and wear the false face of pseudo-friendliness and care, though not in the all-out manner of the Disengaged manipulators. The friendliness is always in passing quickly out of sight on the way to the next thing on their overly full schedule. They would love to talk about X, Y or Z with you, so "maybe next week sometime". You have to make an appointment with them to discuss the possibility of meeting with them. If you press them too hard, they lose the mask of friendliness real fast and give you a quick lecture on how screwed up everything is and that they are far too practical to have to go into some new philosophy of management.
4- They are so left-brained and linear/rational in their thinking, that they do not think at all, because actual thoughtful planning in coordination with other people would be "just another time-consuming and useless meeting." If we do give them some group facilitation toward shared mental models, they will attend if forced to. They will then grimace, gripe or stonewall the whole thing in various ways until the ordeal is over, and then throw in the bin whatever agreed products they were forced to mentally create with others. Their follow-up will be to just carry on with whatever they have come to believe over time is their job.
These people do not want to be told that they are hyperactive, distracted resistors of all learning, creative thinking and good change, though that is indeed their actual state. They will tell you whatever they think you want to here and then carry on as always. For them, there is always a huge gap between their Espoused Theory of the organizational situation and their actual Theory In Use.
What Is To Be Done With Our One-In-Ten
Thoughtfully Purposeful Managers?
The best way to get the most good yield out of our rare, one-in-ten thoughtfully purposeful members of our organization is to find a way for them to properly identify themselves together so that they can be a self-referencing group who can be empowered to meet together in the manner of an informal 'Community of Practice' across organizational boundaries. They would form a usefully powerful and creative Network of Constructive Strategic Intelligence, so to speak, who would keep the organization on the right track and continuously solve and re-solve the real problems.
In terms of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, these people when organized perform the offices of a healthy System Two. They become the right internal facilitators who encourage the dishonest Disengaged managers to convert to a more honest and constructive approach, who help the Distracted busy managers to appreciate a thoughtful pause together now and then to recalibrate and coordinate their efforts with one another that is actually not too time-consuming, but produces practical results they can all appreciate, and who are able to help the Procrastinators get up to speed occasionally by tackling incompetence issues in a whole new way.
The Prerequisite For Organization Viability
The viability of any organization, whether it be a company, a public institution or a nation-state sovereign government, depends more than anything else on how well organized its one-in-ten constructively thoughtful Purposeful Managers are in terms of the ability to introduce to them new, indispensable cognitive and interpersonal skills. They must form a Community of Strategic Learning within the organization. Unfortunately, only one-in-ten of Senior Managers or Board Members will want to hear this and understand it. It is therefore only when the Prime Minister, Chairman or CEO, the actual leader of the organization, actually hears and understands all this, that he will then take the necessary system action and bring in the right facilitators and coaches for his new self-recognizing and self-referring internal network of truly bright and constructive people on various levels across organizational boundaries.
Our thoughtful, constructively purposeful leader will also have to learn better how this principle applies to consultancies and facilitators as well, for only one-in-ten consultants is genuinely competent and rightly motivated as a consultant or facilitator. Two others of them will be senior consultants who will want to rip-off the company or public institution for all its worth. Three others of them will be rather confused and fumbling about what they are supposed to be doing with the client. Four others of them will be able to do a reasonably good job along some pre-set lower level areas of engagement, but will not be able to adjust to emergent cognitive or interpersonal contingencies that arise as the real problems or organizational dilemmas begin to surface, which means these busy and distracted consultants will just grind away on a group of your managers in some inappropriate and rather rushed way that will turn your managers off even if they are themselves reasonably intelligent and constructively purposeful. In fact, they will be turned off because they are truly intelligent and flexible in their thinking, planning and decision-making. Intelligent and constructive people want yet more intelligent and more constructive facilitative consultants to coach them into higher levels of personal and group functioning. If we send nothing but trained robots to these good people, we will spoil the whole action of the new, urgently vital Community of Strategic Learning.
CEO Simulation
Let's think very deeply and carefully about all this as to immediate application to a Board of Directors and see what happens.
I am a CEO. I am reasonably intelligent, good-willed, competent and rightly balanced between thoughtful planning and effective personal action. Nine other people, directors on my board, are sitting at the big table with me.
Two of these people have a strong presence, but they are somehow disengaged, dishonest and not to be trusted. They think I am "too nice of a guy" and have their own hidden agendas. They are always hinting in various ways to everyone that they and not I should be CEO. I have to watch them like a hawk. I also know that wherever they smile and agree, it is just for show, that they will continue to pursue their own agendas, that they are not ever going to be team players.
Three of these people are doing almost OK in their areas, but they always need a lot of explanation and never seem to be able to get it together and really accomplish something. They always have mysterious problems going on in their areas that delay everything.. I often suspect that they themselves are the actual mysterious problems, but I am never quite able to put my finger right on it. And, besides, they are reasonably friendly and want to cooperate. They seem to genuinely appreciate my help whenever I give it to them, but it would be even better if they could make real use of the help.
Finally, I have four very practical get-it-done guys who will pretty much carry out whatever I ask of them, but each of course in his own way in accord with his understanding. These four can get things done that they understand, but they are always in such a hurry to avoid meeting with me to discuss the big picture. They are impatient with coordinated strategy and want to get back to their areas as soon as possible, because it seems everything will collapse if they are away for more than half-an-hour. They are always complaining that I want too much thinking and discussion, too many board meetings. I also suspect that my two conniving Disengaged directors have two or three of these Distracted directors on board with some wrong agendas I do not know about. There is always this little smell of mutiny in the background that I have to worry about.
I suspect that other CEO's go through similar situations. Sometimes some of us get together and discuss these organizational problems in the light of recent good theories, but always we reach a consensus that there is not a whole lot that can be done that has not already been tried under one theoretical notion or another.
My real problem is to get past this infernal Bruch/Ghosal Focus-Energy Matrix on my board! The damn thing is sitting there staring at me all around my own table! How could I replace all nine of these people with some real directors of constructive and intelligent good purpose where we all genuinely want the right thing and to do it in the right way? What a fine fix we are in! I want rid of them and they want rid of me! Maybe I should take an early retirement. Maybe I should become a consultant. Maybe I should fiddle the financial position myself and go bad, just get enough money to not have to think about this company anymore. Maybe I should get myself a good therapist to help me cope better with these people. Maybe I should get mean, become more forceful, and just fight these people to the death to get them on board for real.
The Mystery Deepens
We are now looking into the very core of the problem. It is this:
No matter how well we can see a problem, such seeing is not automatically the ability to solve it.
The solution to any problem is always on a higher level of consciousness than the level of consciousness on which we perceive the problem. All real solutions boil down fundamentally to a consciousness raising exercise.
How then are we to raise our level of consciousness toward a problematic situation? Our usual internal position toward any problem field is always itself part of the problem, even though we believe we are objective toward it. This means that we have to recognize this fact without trying to defend our internal position. We cannot shift into a higher gear of our internal vehicle if we believe we are already in the best gear or even in the only gear. We have to somehow identify a higher cognitive function in our consciousness and shift into it. This also means that we will happily receive anyone or anything that helps us to do this.
The first step, then, is to suspend our usual thinking and reaction to the organizational problem. We have to totally mistrust and reject the usual kind of solution. We need something new and better to happen from a higher level of awareness and thinking.
Now, if we have really been listening to all this, we have the peculiar feeling that something very elusive but incredibly significant is starting to dawn in our state of mind. We will no longer look away from the fourfold causal texture of any group of responsible people accountable in their Focus-Energy box. We will see it so clearly, so deeply, that we will no longer seek a solution on its level. We will be in the situation, but no longer of the situation. This does not imply what is called 'disengagement' in the sense of self-isolating dishonesty. It is, rather, the adding of a higher dimension or perspective to our constructive presence. And everything depends on our doing this, both personally and in network with others on our level of authority who are also doing it.
Scotland, April 2003
©2003
Gary Chicoine
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