|
|
|
The
viability of any organization depends on the quality
of its causal texture. The
best way to make this clear is to create a fictional
organization as an analogy that can be applied
to your own organization in question. We will therefore create a company called
Nation State Telecom. This
company was originally the simple telephone service
for some country. It was not there to generate vast profit,
but was a government controlled and regulated national
service. People in the nation needed to communicate
with one another, so as a nation they agreed to
have a national telephone service. It
was designed to be an efficient non-profit organization
providing a service to the people and for the people. But,
one fine day the false capitalists of the Far Right
got into power to fulfil two nasty and wrong agendas: 1.
To create a denationalized Telecom company that
would be a privatized monopoly for decreasing the
quality of service and increasing the cost of the
telephone service to the people. 2. To utilize the Telecom company as a
police-state surveillance instrument for spying
on the people to make sure their political views
were adhering to the takeover of the nation by
the Far Right, so that anyone questioning the new,
ugly system of excess government and privatization
economics could be suppressed. So,
Nation State Telecom came into being with the implicit
design of ripping off its customers and oppressing
the people as a secret police state organ of the
government. That
this program is stupid and self-destructive for
the government itself, for the nation and its people
and for the world at large was not registered in
the ignorant, wrongly
motivated minds of the leaders of the greedy and
secretive members of the Far Right. That
such a system has no viable future was not understood
by these leaders and is still not understood. Any government that slowly and stealthily
destroys its own people is destroying its own foundation,
its own world. But people of the Far Right are unbalanced,
selfish and criminoid mentalities who are ever
seeking to cover up their ill will, greed and arrogant
stupidity. Naturally,
only a foolish and gullible people of a nation
state would support such a Far Right government
and allow themselves to be manipulated by government
and corporate lies, propaganda, disinformation
and brain-numbing technologies. Keeping all this in
mind as a sane and clear perspective, lets look
at the terrible causal texture of Nation State
Telecom and see what alert and wise managers of
harmonious and ethical intentions could do to make
both Nation State Telecom and their own nation
as a people more viable, more healthy and harmonious. A. The Reliable Causal Texture of Nation
State Telecom. Nation State Telecom
has only one but dubious competence: technology. The Far Right is very good at funding
the development of technology useful to surveillance
to be used against the people. So
Nation State Telecom has a wonderful Research and
Development program for spying equipment and even
the development of microchip implants to try and
put inside people's bodies in the future to spy
directly on their thoughts and control their behaviour. Through advances in technology, the Far
Right wants to be like the Borg and
turn the people of the nation and the world into
robotic slaves of the Far Right Elite. How will Nation
State Telecom get viability if this trend continues? Its
middle managers and employees all throughout the
company should question what is really happening
to themselves and their families as human beings
working in and around this nefarious system. They
should ask themselves if the on-going abuse of
technology, such as putting environmentally polluting
microwave towers near homes, schools and factories
should be allowed. They
should question the development and use of technology
as to its appropriateness for the needs and well-being
of the people of the nation. They
should question what the future will be like if
the present Far Right plans of
increasing surveillance, greed, corruption and
outright incompetence in providing a communication
service to the nation at a reasonable cost, which
was the original real meaning of the service to
be provided, continues. The
middle managers and employees and their families
should question what is happening, where they are
being led by the company and government coalition
of abuse of technology. They
should teach themselves Scenario Planning, System
Science and Ethics in order to return the development
of technology to its proper purposes. The Causal Texture of Nation
State Telecom is reliable in technology, but this
competence is presently nefarious and non-viable. B. The Ambiguous
Causal Texture of Nation State Telecom The ambiguity here,
as in any privatized monopoly, is the ongoing extraordinary
incompetence and waste that take place. So
it is that sometimes Nation State Telecom will
rightly cut costs of extravagant and useless programs,
which often have to do with purchases of IT systems
and related equipment. Also, it could stabilize or reduce salaries
of upper managers who are overpaid for their incompetence
and corruption, but of course that would require
a change of heart on their part. But, the one place where they need to
spend: areas
of investment in its own people in terms of training,
facilitated planning processes and areas of organization
development and better management, are usually
where they will cut back and reduce budgets. The
idea is that they will treat the brain cells of
the company as if they are fat cells. Instead
of putting itself on an IT diet, the company gives
itself a lobotomy. So
it tells its best outside consultants and its most
competent planners and human resources people that
they are all nothing but "extravagant waste". To get viability in
this ambiguous causal texture is simple. Invest
in people and stop extravagantly wasteful investment
in wrong or useless IT systems, equipment and facilities. This
means that management must question budgetary policies,
priorities and processes in a constant whistle-blowing
state of mind so that senior management will have
to adjust their policies, priorities and processes
for the real good of the company and its future. As
things are, the truly competent and ethical managers
and employees know that Nation State Telecom is
a rotten machine of corruption and inefficiency
that eats people, so they as individuals want to
leave the company as soon as possible for a more
happy and straightforward working environment. But
if enough managers and employees would awaken to
what is really happening to them in the company,
their first step would be to organize themselves
into informal Communities of Practice and eventually
find ways to get the company to invest in and support
these entities by helping senior managers wake
up to what they are doing to themselves and their
families and the future of the world. Ambiguous causal texture in
any organization means that there are always some
things we are doing right part of the time and
some things we are doing wrong part of the time. At Nation State Telecom, cost-cutting
is sometimes right but all too often wrong. Through
organizational self- C. The Murky, Indeterminate
Causal Texture of Nation State Telecom Since the company is
a privatized monopoly, and since it is pervaded
by a background drive of being instrumental to
government secrecy and surveillance, its way of
relating with itself is schizophrenic. What
one leading manger promises to a supplier or to
some department or project will be cancelled or
mangled by yet some other leading manager. So
the organization as a whole has no consistent,
reliable communication of intent with itself or
other stakeholders associated with it. Nation State Telecom is so hierarchical,
so pyramidical, that its managers and employees
are disempowered from getting things done properly. In
terms of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, System
Four, which is responsible for planning the future
of the organization, is in a "fallen" state
and System Two, which is responsible for coordination
of mental models, management decision-making and
actual operations, is virtually non-existent. So the organization is fragmented,
uncoordinated, inefficient and wasteful in more
ways that anyone can keep track of. The solution to all this is
to empower people through honest disclosures of
the real reasons for various policies and what
are called "strategies" (which are usually
a real laugher), plus working at facilitation of
management thinking and employee problem-solving. But,
yet again, this would require an investment in
organization learning, which is investment in people,
but any company of the Far Right as a privatized
monopoly is going to resist anything but minor,
cosmetic investment in its people, which is done
for show to "keep them happy". And,
as we have seen, even these minor, cosmetic investments
are easily cut in a panic when senior managers
become slightly worried about their competence. D. The Unreliable
and Outright Nefarious Causal Texture of Viability
of Nation State Telecom. As we now know, Nation
State Telecom is extremely nasty, wrongly motivated
and incompetent at the top, and this filters down
into an ongoing series of self-destructive policies
and activities of the company, which spells an
almost deliberate non-viability as the provider
of a service to a people. Here are some of
the obviously very bad things: 1- The company
and its technological development being employed
as an instrument of government police-state surveillance
of its own people as a drive toward an Orwell situation. 2- Enron type corruption
for abuse of shareholders through artificial manipulations
and "cooking the books" coupled with
the encouragement of dishonesty and falsification
of financial reports in all sectors of the organization. Corporate budgeting at Nation State Telecom
is a wrong process. Everybody
is encouraged to create false financial appearances
as a way of life. 3- Overcharging
the costumers, generating excess profits that are
then in turn invested in new ventures or outright
stock market gambling, which ventures and gambling
lose vast sums of company money out of shared stupidity
and greed of senior managers. 4- Refusal to understand
System Science, Viability, Scenario Planning or
Casual Texture that would reveal the futility and
self-defeating nature of the political and economic
theories of Police State and Privatization, which
are not the right corrective for Police State and
Communism of the old Soviet and Chinese Far Left. Totalitarianism
and Corporate Greed are functions of stupidity,
of failure of adult education. These things destroy middle management,
employees, families, the people of the nation,
the people of the world and the biological environment
of the planet. We could name even other
areas and go into more detail, but if anyone will
look squarely at this unreliable and nefarious
causal texture of viability, it should be obvious
that the factors of anti-viability at Nation State
Telecom are horribly entrenched and getting worse
year by year as the government utilizes "terrorism" incidents
to press for greater police state measures and
global privatization schemes for creating corrupt
monopolies that will concentrate more and more
wealth into fewer and fewer hands until the whole
of humanity is destroyed and the survivors reduced
to implanted slaves on a virtual Borg planet. How to correct this? Self-questioning from
the bottom up to the top as a ground swell of
self-awakening of intelligence and ethical conscience. As
human beings, we do not have to stupidly succumb
to our own government oppressing our natural
humanity and well-being of ourselves, our families
and our peoples, nor do we have to accept living
in a nation state of criminal economics. We can work together consciously and harmoniously
for responsible social democracy and healthy
economic business competition. We
can even learn to visualize the creation of parallel
national services in transportation, telecommunications
and all the rest of it. We
do not have to allow the present dark New World
Order of Police State and Privatization to destroy
our future. We
can turn off our televisions and turn on our
brains and hearts. We can learn how to learn together
and share the real truth of what is happening
to us. We
can redesign our companies and our governments
for a truly balanced and humane system. We
can have real viability of our organization and
our planet if we want it. WE
can personally and collectively evolve. |
Gary Chicoine October 2003 |
©2003,2004
Gary Chicoine |