Managing by Command & Control:

Effective Managing requires all three styles of Management i.e. Art, Science & Craft, they need not exist in perfect balance but they do have to reinforce each other. Too much focus and obsession with any one of these styles can lead to negative styles like –

• Obsession with Art leads Narcissistic or Commanding style, namely art for its own sake and Winning at any cost becomes the only priority.
• Obsession with Science leads to Calculating or Controlling style with relationships that can become dehumanized.
• Obsession with Craft leads to Monotonous style i.e. driven by mental models that are programmed by assumptions of past success, where Manager may develop skilled incompetence and never venture beyond his/her experience.

The Narcissistic or Command Leaders at the pole of Art obsessed with Winning at any cost, don’t accept failures. They want to avoid mistakes, risks & conflicts and as a result the teams also end up playing safe, hiding mistakes and not raising valid questions. The narcissistic style forces the leaders to pretend to be commanding all the time; they always want to look good. They are passionate only about their Vision & not the shared Vision which many times increases the Gap between the current reality and organization Vision. The overemphasis on competition makes looking good more important than being good.  Pretending to display best faces in public, pressure to beat the competition and the compulsion of winning at any cost adds up to manipulating information, numbers, position & relationships etc. They work on competitive strategies focused on Win or Lose game and look at competition as threats & enemies, taking them too far outside the core capabilities of Knowledge creation and Value creation in a Collaborative Community. Unlike war and sports, business is not about winning and losing, Companies can succeed spectacularly without requiring others to fail.

Calculating or Control Leaders at the pole of Science tend to be paralyzed with analysis. The linear models of Analysis, Standardization, Specialization, problem solving etc worked very well in the industrial age has been given us success after success for the last two centuries. At the pole of Science, standardization brings lot of policies & processes which is good if used as an enabler to business but process which only stands for controls, compliance & metrics brings rigidity. Similarly, functions that are organized based on specialization works well if every team is connected to the big picture but if they turn out to be silo’s with no integration, it can slow down the entire organization. Command & Control style worked successfully when both means and end were known; like an assembly line where the input and output were clearly defined & agreed. In today’s multi-polar world of globalization, where the ends are confused and conflicting, there is yet no problem to solve. This conflict of ends, uncertain & unique situations cannot be resolved by using these standard analytical techniques. The phenomenon of complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict do not fit in to our analytical models.

Monotonous Leaders at the pole of Craft caught up with assumption of past Success. The problem is our Managers still continue to apply the command & control model of industrial age and the win-lose strategy of military operation.  The past success of 200 years has programmed our mental models to behave and look at everything through the lens of winning and problem solving. Past success of our Leaders gives them the authority to command & control and hence makes the team to just follow the rules with no scope for inquiry and creativity. Listening to others ideas, feedback, & criticism and Learning from mistakes, risks & conflicts has very little room when the teams are used to conform &  just following instructions. In fact, many times it’s the people who follow the rules & instructions without challenging or asking any questions are the ones who get rewarded. It’s 100% conformity, whether its process compliance or performance metrics, survey ratings etc, 100% catches everybody’s attention and the team is naturally motivated to hide mistakes, suppresses discontent, avoid risks, conflicts and showoff only the Wins. When we hide the problems and don’t accept the mistakes, there is no problem to solve and very little to Learn. Prof. Chris Argyris calls this "skilled incompetence," skillful at protecting ourselves from the threat and pain that come with learning, but also remaining incompetent and blinded to our incompetence.

Command & Control model breeds bureaucracy & Win-lose strategies encourage manipulation, once these are ingrained in our way of doing business, we often do not recognize it and even if we are aware we rationalize it by saying that’s the way of life. Bureaucratic mindset is elusive and always makes us to believe that other people are the problem and pushes us not to take the responsibility. The need for winning, to be perfect, to grow, to achieve economies of scale, to impress our stock holders work against the spirit of openness, trust, risk taking and innovation. The ladder of inference always picks the data points that only fit into our beliefs & assumptions and ignore the rest, we don’t even realize this. The contexts we are in, our assumptions, and our values channel how we jump up the ladder, we are so skilled at thinking that we jump up the ladder without knowing it.

The dominant context here is one that fuels Fear & Fault, giving shape to a culture which is seized on eliminating Fear & solving Problems. Robert Fritz said “Problem solving is taking action to have something go away –the problem. Creating is taking action to have something come into being –the Creation”.

In this Knowledge Era, the rules of business games have changed; indeed the game itself has changed. Unlike the command & control model of industrial era or competitive war games, business is not about working under the fear of winning and losing, nor is it about fault finding or fitting in & following instructions. Companies can succeed spectacularly without requiring others to fail. In a very real sense, management is about life itself. When managers create Open Space for creative ideas & undiscuassables and breakdown the barriers of defensiveness caught under the mental model of fear & faults, they face life in all its complexity to Create New Possibilities.

Above all else, management is a practice, where art, science, and craft meet and reinforce each other without getting stuck in any one style.

Copyright Sunil P Rangreji