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All Those Missing Cognitive Skills That Are Available
There are many different kinds of useful cognitive skills available to the decision-making brain, which, if employed, would improve the quality of planning and action of business organisations. These include:
1- Multiple Scenario Thinking for planning the Future.
2- Multiple Reality Thinking for optimum evaluation of the Present.
3- Goal-Oriented Problem-Solving for reaching difficult to achieve goals or rapid resolution of crisis.
4- Causal Loop Thinking about the dynamics of the system in question so as to avoid self-defeating action or unintended bad side-effects of on-going action.
5- Dilemma Resolution Thinking to reduce organisational conflicts and misunderstandings.
6- Resonate Options Mapping to coordinate and harmonize the on-going flow of decisions, planning and action of the overall organisation.
7- Process Quality Matrix Thinking to target business process improvements to get them up to speed to achieve new strategies through optimum implementation.
This list does not exhaust all the kinds of thinking that do indeed help when groups of managers are facilitated to activate these in their own heads, both individually and together. There is a much bigger list, but in the present management atmosphere, it would not be registered, for even the seven basic cognitive skills given above seem to be coming from Outer Space for most busy managers, though occasionally there is some engagement with one or two of the methodologies almost in opposition to the others, as if the other missing kinds of decision-improvement are competing belief-systems to the one kind that has been bought into. People often become adherents of Scenario Planning, for instance, but will not take up something viable which is used successfully elsewhere, and vice versa. Or they have decided they can solve all their problems with System Dynamics, but do not have to do Scenario Planning, thus confusing organisational problems with strategic problems. It also so happens that consultancies often specialize in one or another of the specific types of cognitive skill and make a living on promoting it as a panacea for all situations where other kinds of group facilitated thinking would be more appropriate and effective.
All this confusion and pettiness about missing cognitive skills in decision-making is a huge barrier to the acquisition of a requisite variety of the skills. A spectre of unacknowledged incompetence thus hangs over companies large and small. Bad decisions continue to be made and bad results prove over and over again that bad decisions have actually been made, but inevitably all this gets accepted as somehow inevitable, unavoidable and even necessary as a group psychological exercise.
From the standpoint of potential improvement of thought, decision-making and action in business organisations, one would think that the present state of affairs would be alarming and in need of enthusiastic remedial action, yet there remains an intra-organizational ambience of thoughtless busyness and organised incompetence. Why is this? That is what we need to think about right now. To get started on this, we should look at the changing context of the economic environment that is having a huge affect on internal management environments.
The Nature Of The Beast
Reality on our planet is not what it used to be. As a subset of this, the prevailing global economic environment is not what it used to be. Big changes are at work as America goes about conquering the world not just through military technology, but through promoting off-shore cheap labour for Western companies, encouraging runaway megamergers and monopolies, and, through the IMF and World Bank, pushing for Privatisation everywhere. This entire economic push is designed to destroy free enterprise capitalism of parallel competition and embed all work, production and services in collusional cartels, multinational monopolies and foreign-owned privatised service monopolies within nation-states.
What is management life like in a privatised service provider or a multinational monopoly or a cartel participating entity?
The first thing we notice is that customer service is no longer important. People are treated like shit because they have no other choice. So we do not need to improve management thinking to improve customer service.
What else happens in a monopoly? We do not have to creatively invent or design wonderful new products or services because we have no competitors offering their creatively designed stuff. Creative thinking is not necessary when we do not have to create anything. In fact, we see an increase in lack of alternative products and services as the New World Order continues its civilisation destroying drive toward pervasive monopolies and privatisations. A diminishing variety of goods and services with insistence on an increasingly uniform, dead and meaningless culture of personal life is predictable.
What about Quality? Obviously, how well things are built or how good the services provided will diminish in this new anti-customer environment. We have to pay more and more for less and less, for governments, armies, police and the new laws of the land do not protect the people any longer from monopolies and privatised services. Anyone wanting genuine free enterprise capitalism and democracy will be increasingly treated as an "enemy of the state".
What happens to Wealth? Since people are paying more and more for less and less, money gets concentrated in fewer and fewer bank-accounts and increasing numbers of people in what used to be a developed nation are pushed into poverty and illiteracy. Their average IQ and level of education goes down, as in America and Britain in particular, and there is thus less and less cognitive ability to question the political and economic system that is wreaking havoc on the future. In the world of management, corporate budgeting is increasingly about cheating with the figures and whole companies cheat their shareholders with Enron type scams. The big service providers within European nation-states also follow this pattern of over-charging customers to make fat profits they can invest in stock-market gambling and other get-rich-schemes for upper management. When these obscene companies find themselves with "record losses", it is not from losses in some competitive marketplace, for they will all have their customers anyway. Are we going to rip out our phones or turn off our electricity because we are overcharged and the service company senior management is trying to get rich in hair-brained, shorted-sighted stupid investments and gambling?
In the present corrupt and stupid false capitalism that the previously developed nations are indulging in, management thinking and improvement inside their companies is virtually unnecessary. In a monopoly, the only kind of "thinking" that would be encouraged is how to keep the big machine working just well enough to keep ticking over somehow while the populace is being ripped-off by it. There will thus be less and less "budget" for real improvement of thinking, sharing of mental models, creativity or any improvement of any kind. And Strategy will not need improved thinking either, for there is no "strategy" as such in monopolies and privatised services other than to get away with increasing destruction of the value chain and keep learning to politically cover-up what is really going on. We only need a strategy when there is a competitive arena of many different companies striving on things like variety, quality and speed of service to capture market share. We only need strategic thinking skills when governments are all in agreement to foster free enterprise and healthy business competition.
Picture a World of Free Enterprise and Parallel Competition of Services
According to John Pilger in his book, The New Rulers of the World, "In Bolivia's third largest city, Cochachamba, ordinary people took back their water from a corporate conglomerate, after the World Bank had pressurised the Bolivian government into privatising the public water supply. Having refused credit to the public water company, the bank demanded that a monopoly be given to Aguas del Tunari, part of International Water Limited, a British-based company half-owned by the American engineering giant Bechtel.
"Granted a forty-year concession, the company immediately raised the price of water. In a country where the minimum wage is less than 100 dollars a month, people faced increases in their water bills of 20 dollars a month--more than water users pay each month in the wealthy suburbs of Washington, home to many World Bank economists. In Cochachamba, even collecting rainwater without a permit was now illegal.
"So they organised: young and old, activists and those who, as Marecela Lopez Levy wrote, had previously been 'too busy surviving to get involved'. She spoke to Marcelo Rojas, who became one of the leaders. 'I had never taken an interest in politics before.' he said. 'My father is a politician, and I thought it was all about cutting deals. But to see people fighting for their water, their rights, made me realise there was a common good to defend, that the country can't be left in the hands of the politicians.' He was arrested and tortured by the police, as were many young people who built barricades and protected the old when the authorities attacked. They took over the city and they won. The government tore up the contract, and the company cleared its desk."
Unfortunately, eliminating the foreign owned water monopoly does not really solve the problem. In a world of true capitalism, the city would be required to build three or four parallel services (in the same ditches as a joint venture) and service contracts would be given to competing water companies, each with their own pipes. They would then compete on price, service and each maintaining their own pipe-system in good repair. Any customer would be free to switch water service at any time. Once every two or three years, the contract for the worst performing water-supplier would be given to a new company who would be in the entrepreneurial mood to compete in the water service business.
Think about it. Even in the water service businesses in Cochabamba, there would be a big take-up of improving management creativity, thinking, planning and action-projects. Healthy business competition would do this.
What Kind of Thinking is Left to Do In A Monopoly?
In a monopoly, like say, a one only telephone service company within a European nation-state, such as Dutch Telecom, which recently registered record "losses" for a European company, the people of Holland still need their telephones, their telecommunication facilities for their businesses and so on, so there will still be managers managing various things to some degree in Dutch Telecom. But will they need to learn better thinking and decision-making? They do not have to be thinking creatively. The customers do not matter, but will just have to take whatever they get when they can get it occasionally if not indefinitely postponed. All they have to do is keep this big money-squandering telecommunications monopoly cranking along, overcharging the customers to get money for the senior management to lose in its gambling episodes.
In this kind of management atmosphere, the manager is to never question what the big machine is really doing to people and the nation. That would be politically incorrect. In a privatised monopoly of this kind, it is more like serving in the army. Orders are to be blindly followed without complaint and without questioning the quality of long-range planning or short-range implementation. Everyone would have to say, "There is the right way, the wrong way and the company way. Here we do it the company way." So to be a Euro Telecom middle manager is basically boring and tense. It is tense because everybody is supposed to be doing their job the company way, which is sometimes a stupid way, and so all sorts of people are unhappy and dead-ended in their routine jobs. All creative thinking is about life off the job: how to make money, how to succeed in love affairs, and so on.
Now, these Euro Telecom managers and supervisors on various levels do have to coordinate their efforts and think together well enough to do just enough group thinking to carry out the company's latest policy, drive, plan, or what even might erroneously be called a "strategy" (which will probably have to do with some acquisition of some speculative venture company or the like in order to lose more money). And, if I am a Senior Manager of Euro Telecom, I too am fundamentally bored with the whole thing. The only place I can get any interesting action is precisely in ways to share in schemes to personally profit from the excess profits we get from overcharging our customers. It is the only area where I wrack my brain to do some unusual thinking. It is the only practical thinking area left, for we are running a monopoly here and the customers do not matter, the actual marketplace of our service we provide does not matter. It is just the usual machine that has to somehow keep running. All "strategy" has to do with interesting speculative ventures and finding ways to go up in the world politically so one can be even more important and have an even bigger wine-cellar. I do not think of myself and my peer-group as people helping to destroy Western Civilization in favour of an American-led global New World Order police state. We are just doing the best we can within the system the way it actually works. We do not, after all, make the rules. One either profits from the situation or one is out there with the riff-raff. There is no alternative, even if one still has a slight ethical philosophy tendency left from way back when we were in university and thought about such things.
Thus it is that there is still a slight need for organisational conformity group thinking and planning for carrying out the things that have been decreed to keep the service organisation running. Of course, the government needs greater and greater control of the citizenry and the European telecom will have to help sell the technology to the customers that will help this government effort. So, something almost resembling a marketing strategy will have to be developed, yet since there are no competitors in said marketplace, it boils down more to assisting with a kind of mass propaganda effort. The customers have to be persuaded that they are getting more and a wonderful bargain in going for the new technology. The actual quality of service will continue to deteriorate and over-charging will get even worse, but the customer must believe something cosmically wonderful is happening. Only thinking and planning along these lines is needed. Anything else is irrelevant. And since such thinking only barely resembles actual generative thinking, most of the real group problems will be those that come with having to work and personally survive in a bureaucracy. This requires more of a group psychology facilitation so that the "feel good" factor can be strengthened in the management while we go about the process of destroying Free Enterprise Capitalism and Western Civilisation as we once knew it.
There Are Still Managers Who Would Like To Indulge in Real Thinking and Improvement
There are still managers who would like to indulge in real thinking and improvement. Sometimes they are given a little bit of begrudging budget for such things if the big name consultancies have not come in and tipped-off senior management that a fire of dangerously good management is starting up in their monopoly. Every big monopoly is always threatened by a groundswell of real competence and creative intelligence surging up from within their middle management. It almost resembles an insurrection. Too much awareness and improved thinking in the lower ranks is dangerous, so wherever possible it is best to say, "It sounds like you guys have come up with a wonderful new program there, but there is no budget for it right now. We lost the budget for improvement on the stock market. You can all learn to do better thinking and decision-making on your own at home by reading books on it or taking courses at your own expense. In fact, when you do that, it impresses us and makes us want to promote you a little closer to our level. But we are not in the improvement business here. We do understand this, don't we? "
In any monopoly, improvement is a luxury item and better thinking is about leisure time reading of books on philosophy. In any monopoly, better decision-making is politically incorrect. The only creative thinking allowed is how to make the machine a little more effective in implementation of something that has to be implemented. How to motivate the troops is in many ways the big issue of management in a monopoly. Leadership training thus becomes a big deal. In a deteriorating economy, patriotism and leadership become the big areas where more and more is needed to help get the sheep over the cliff faster and faster in greater and greater numbers. Monopolies and privatisation are the militarization of the economy and the economic corruption of the military.
Scotland, March 2003
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