Designing for Problem Prevention

Participative systems design has, in the past, been seen as a positive group process of thinking through needs and problems and arriving at solutions for making the situation better. This improved situation then continues until new technology or new solutions provide an opportunity for making the situation better still. So far this book has concentrated on how to make the best use of the positive factors assisting change, especially change that involves the introduction and use of technology. It has described the importance of getting a clear understanding of the change problem and its complexity, of developing effective strategies to address this complexity, and of the creation of structures, often organizational, to facilitate the subsequent use of the new system. This last requires always keeping in mind the need to meet the dual objectives of achieving operating efficiency and a good quality of working life. This is often described as job satisfaction. Most of all there has been a continual stress on the importance of participation. This involves sharing the design tasks with those who will be affected by them and taking account of their opinions in design decisions. This chapter addresses the reverse of this positive objective. It considers the negative factors in a change situation which are likely to cause problems and to threaten the success of the change programme and of the new system. There are very many of these kinds of problems and it is only possible to discuss a few here. The ones I have selected are criminal threats which affect the future viability of the company, technical problems which reduce efficiency, unpleasant and stressful work that threatens employee health, and problems of morale which affect the individual’s happiness in the workplace. A consideration of negative factors brings us into the challenging areas of uncertainty and risk. Uncertainty is when we do not know what is going to happen and often contains an element of surprise. This is especially true today when so many decisions depend on forecasts of the future. A contributing factor here can be an overemphasis on the present as a means of forecasting the future. Uncertainty is also often a result of the behaviour of others rather than of events. This is hard to predict. Experts tell us that today we are living in a risk society (Beck, 1992). Complex design problems can have a high degree of uncertainty and easily become risks. They often have a subjective element, for what one person considers a problem or a risk, another will see as an opportunity. Complex problems also require information for their solution and this may be difficult to find. It requires the ability to search for, analyse and synthesise, relevant intelligence and relate it to past, current and future events. Threats to important institutions from terrorists are of a different nature and scale to those that have been experienced before. Many will take us completely by surprise. Bernstein (1996) suggests that the essence of risk management lies in maximising the areas which we have some control over while minimising those areas where we have no control over the outcome and the linkage between cause and effect is hidden. When we take a risk we are making a bet that a particular outcome will result from the decision we have made although we have no certainty that this will happen. Risk management usually starts with risk analysis, which attempts to establish and rank the most serious risks to be avoided so far as these are known. Here many companies attempt to achieve a balance between the benefits of greater security and the costs involved. Too high a level of security, while providing good protection, can result in a system that is both difficult to use and expensive to operate (Mumford, 1999). Risk analysis next moves on to risk assessment. This is an analysis of the seriousness of different risks by determining the probability and potential damage of each one. For example, major risks can come from a large concentration of data in one place that is accessed by many different people, not all of whom are known. There can be relationships between risks. Clifford Stoll’s (1990) book The Cuckoo’s Egg shows how the ability of a German hacker to enter a university laboratory computer made it possible for him to later enter into the computers of United States military bases. Risk analysis identifies the risks; risk assessment tries to estimate how likely they are to happen and how serious the consequences will be. Risk priorisation recognises that all companies cannot be protected from all risks and choices must be made. Risk impact is the likely magnitude of the loss if a system break-in, fraud or other serious problem occurs. Risk control involves further actions to reduce the risk and to trigger further defensive actions if a very serious problem occurs. Risk control also covers the monitoring of risk on a regular basis to check that existing protection is still effective. This can lead to risk reassessment. Very serious risks such as those coming from terrorist attack or criminal activity require monitoring. This, together with the detailed documentation of any problems or illegal activities when they occur, is essential to avoid complacency. An effective system must both prevent problems and detect when they have occurred. All of these activities to design security into a system require human vigilance if they are to be effective. All employees should accept some responsibility for checking that the system they work with continues to maintain its integrity and security. This chapter will place its main focus on protective problem solving and design directed at avoiding or minimising very serious risks. Today, it is unwise for managers to neglect this. Because of its growth in recent years and its prevalence today criminal activity will be examined first in some detail. Particular attention will be paid to how the involvement of employees in problem solving can play a part in reducing or avoiding this.

Designing for an Uncertain Future

The philosophy of this book is that problem solving and the management of change will be facilitated by participation. By participation is meant that all those affected by change, or their representatives, will be able to play some part in its definition, in agreeing strategies for its implementation and in evaluating its success. Most of the case studies discussed have been concerned with the positive aspects of change involving systems redesign. The stimulus here was usually the introduction of a new technical system. Early projects used participation as a means for assisting the introduction of a specific new system into a single or small number of departments. Later ones were larger and had more dramatic effects. All employees would now be involved, either from a particular function or from the company as a whole and, on occasion, from its environment. My objective has been to try and assist the creation of work systems which are both efficient and meet human needs for acceptable, stimulating and satisfying work environments. As well as user involvement, these systems will aim to have certain other desirable characteristics, namely, suitability, flexibility, complementarity and sustainability. Suitability requires them to provide a good fit with the technical and social needs of the work situation. In other words they do a good job in production and human terms. They are also flexible and able to cope easily with subsequent technical and organizational change. They complement existing systems and connect easily with these, and because they have these characteristics, they are sustainable and endure into the future. Their complementarity feature will also extend into the external environment so that industrial and clerical systems will mesh easily with environmental systems and create harmonious work, community and physical environments. But, most important, they are also democratic. All except the first enabled the people who would work with or be affected by them to have a role in their design, development and implementation.

Designing an Expert System

This chapter and case study address two important design problems. The first is the challenge presented by the task of developing systems that affect a major part of company activities—either by covering a widely dispersed function or a number of different functions. The second is the role of the group facilitator or project manager in relation to large systems design.

Company-Wide Participation in Air Products

Most socio-technical system design has been used to create participative, high quality, people-friendly systems for specific projects or parts of the work environment. This was true of the early coal mine experiments when a number of experimental working faces were redesigned for multiskilled groups. It was also true of the redesign of the car-assembly shop floor in Sweden and of most of my own socio-technical design efforts. Even the Digital Equipment XSEL project, which affected the entire US company, was restricted to the configuring activity of members of the sales force. Frank Heller tells us that this narrow focus was never intended by the socio-technical pioneers. They had a much wider vision. Eric Trist, the originator of the approach, envisaged a top-down model which looked at the environment in which an organization operated, then at the design of the organization as a whole, and only then considered the primary work system (Emery & Trist, 1965). Some of the early exponents of the approach were able to put this broad philosophy into practice. Einer Thorsrud, the Norwegian chairman of the International Quality of Working Life Group, made one of his research interests the Norwegian shipping industry. Professor Lou Davis, director of the Quality of Working Life Program at the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, and a visiting fellow at the Tavistock Institute in London, had as one of his early projects the socio-technical design of a greenfield site for a new US company, and at a later date, the Digital Equipment Corporation in Boston used a similar philosophy for one of its new plants (Davis, 1971). Socio-technical design has also always rested on two essential premises. The first is that in all organizations there are multiple combined social and technical systems in operation. Men, and women, have to relate with each other and carry out sets of tasks within an organized work situation that usually contains some kind of technology. In most of industry, the social cannot work without the technical and vice versa. Technical is defined here as sets of tasks as well as machines. The second premise is that every socio-technical system is embedded in an environment. This environment is greatly influenced by culture and values and provides both constraints and opportunities. To understand a work system or an organization or a technology, one must also understand the environmental forces that operate on it (Davis, 1971). The earlier researchers saw the environment as acting on and constraining the lower-level systems—the company and the workplace. It was not seen as something that socio-technical principles could influence (Heller, 1997). But socio-technical design has never stood still. While its boom period was the seventies and early eighties, with economic pressures causing its decline in the early nineties, it is now back and accelerating forward on two fronts. The first is the involvement of large numbers of employees in helping to create a total organization redesign. This is usually directed at large systems change that has to be introduced quickly. This kind of approach to change goes under a number of different names, for example, high-performance work systems, sustainable production, shared purpose organizations, the conference model and many others. The second is ensuring that any environment affected by technology is both people-friendly and capable of performing the functions desired of it. This does not yet have a name. Frank Heller (1997) suggests socio-technology to cover the required characteristics of joint optimisation, socio-technology and oecology (ecology).

Involving Employees in Design

This chapter moves away from a concentration on the “what” to do and focuses on the “how” to do it. An important strategic decision at the start of any change project is how it is to be managed. The options here range from letting the technical suppliers assume a management role. This is often done with software venders when the purchasers have a poor understanding of the new technology, but it can be a high-risk strategy. Another option is to let specialist groups or management take responsibility for bringing in the new system. This can often result in a system that works well for management but less well for other groups. The approach I recommend is the democratic one of giving a large degree of responsibility for the organizational design and implementation of the new system to the future users. The case studies which come next will show how this can be done.

Considering Structure

The last two case studies showed the importance of understanding a problem before embarking on its solution and the need to develop an appropriate strategy before making any change. Here it was suggested that it was good policy to take account of two things. These were relevant strategic thinking, such as that developed by the Tavistock Institute, and how to use this for particular problems and appropriate industries. The next step in problem solving for change is structure. Choosing an appropriate organizational structure to accompany and accommodate change is always difficult. There will be many constraints, including the skills and availability of labour, the requirements of technology and the knowledge of management. Despite these problems, there will usually be a number of different options available. The excellent manager will have the ability to distinguish good organizational design from bad. Sometimes this has to be a result of trial and error, but as the last chapter suggested, a useful first strategy is to investigate what other companies have done and evaluate the different organizational options they have used.

Work Design in the Coal Industry

Once you have obtained a reasonably good understanding of the problem to be tackled, the next step is to decide what to do and how to do it. This requires developing a strategy for action. Ideally strategies should be simple rather than complex and should be capable of being implemented without too much difficulty and stress. They should also fit with the culture of an organization as well as with its problems. Participative design can play a useful part here, both by getting ideas from groups with different roles and responsibilities and by ensuring that there is general agreement on what is to be changed before this change takes place. This will enable the change to take place in a favourable environment. However with major decisions that affect the running of a company, it is usually desirable that top management makes the final decision. Strategy also needs to be continually reviewed as it can easily lose its relevance if the environment changes or if a closer acquaintance with the problem leads to greater understanding of the problem situation. Increasing knowledge will help identify those factors in the change situation which will be easiest to reform and those which are likely to prove more difficult (Markides, 2001). It must also be recognised that while change is desirable it is also disruptive. This fact will influence the “how” factor. How can this change be introduced without impeding normal production activities and without disturbances that lower morale? Strategy should also take account of the future as well as the present. What kinds of circumstances are like to alter and may require a total rethink of strategy. Once again, I suggest that this case study is very relevant for students and practitioners working in areas such as information technology where human factors are sometimes neglected by those responsible for change. As this book is focusing on organizational problems, many of which arrive through the introduction of new technology, it is often wise to start the learning process by considering solutions that have already been tried and proved successful in similar situations. One of these might work again in the new situation, although it must be recognised that every change environment is different, modifications will almost certainly be needed and failure is always a possibility. The next case study incorporates a review of previous strategies. Looking at the past will also bring a recognition that the new situation differs in important aspects from the old and that a different approach is required. This, in itself, is an important lesson.

The Problems of Managing Change

Managing change of any kind requires effective problem solving. This is especially the case when the change involves designing and implementing new work systems or rethinking current organizational structures. We know that problem solving is a difficult and complex process, yet too often it seems to be limited to a fast decision to do something followed by a series of actions which intuition suggests will achieve the desired result. This is very similar to shooting in the dark. There is no way of knowing that the proposed actions will lead to a solution or even that the problem can be solved. The alternative, whenever possible, is to create a well thought-out, logical path to a desired result. Effective problem solving requires the control of “entropy.” Entropy is a term used by physicists to describe energy that exists but is unavailable for productive use. When applied to problem solving it can be described as energy that is time-wasting because it is not being used to good effect. The word covers inappropriate strategies and actions that make little or no contribution to solving the problem. Energy of this kind can lead to chaos. The problem becomes increasingly confused and insoluble and ideas on how to deal with it become more and more clouded and uncertain (Mumford, 1999). The first message of this book is that effective problem solving requires an avoidance of inappropriate or redundant activity and its replacement by efficient and ethical strategies so that appropriate goals are both set and met (Mumford, 1999).

Quality and Environmental Issues in Shell International

Shell provides an excellent example of an international group that for many years has used socio-technical values and approaches to help the introduction of major change into both its internal structures and its external projects. Shell was one of the first of the multinationals. It has an Anglo-Dutch ownership and is one of the very few companies which divides effective control between two or more different nationalities. Its size and the fact that its products are vital to society mean that it has been able to exert considerable influence on governments (Molitor, 2001). However, today, its future in terms of products and markets is uncertain. Oil industry experts predict that petrol reserves will run dry around 2050. Shell itself has forecast that more than 50% of energy will be from renewable sources by this date, while OPEC foresees supplies lasting until 2080. Other forecasts calculate a 42- to 50-year remaining supply. These estimates may not be correct but it is undeniable that fossil fuel supplies are finite and world supplies are steadily diminishing, although new sources of oil are being discovered. It seems certain that petroleum and natural gas supplies will soon no longer be burned as fuel. This makes companies such as Shell International fascinating subjects for study. We need to ask What are their plans for the future? A recent chairman of Shell has said, “The only sure thing about the future of the energy industry is that it will be very different from today.” Leading oil corporations like Shell have now declared themselves to be “poly-energetic.” They have major investment plans in alternative sources of energy such as sun, wind and hydrogen (Bracho, 2000). This means that they must be more expert than most international companies in managing major change. Shell today is certainly not standing still. It recognises that the oil era may be coming to an end and that it now needs to be very aware of alternate sources of energy. Shell’s future investment plans include gas, sun, wind and hydrogen. This is not only because of exhaustion of the oil fields but because the countries of the world are demanding alternative renewable and cleaner forms of energy (Bracho, 2000). Shell management says that its businesses exist to meet the energy needs of society in ways that are economically, socially and environmentally viable. It maintains, “All of our businesses are united by common goals: to make the most of our existing business, to gain new business and to break new ground.” For many years and in different ways it has also sought to be an efficient and ethical employer and supplier. This has meant that it must be continually aware of what society expects and needs from it. To achieve this in recent times, throughout the late nineties Shell International held conversations with many different groups to try and discover both today’s expectations of multinational companies and how the general public in different countries saw Shell and its activities. This, called Shell’s Transformation, involved 7,500 members of the general public in 10 countries and 1,300 opinion leaders in 25 countries. Six hundred Shell employees in 55 different countries were also interviewed. The picture that emerged was both good and bad. Half of the general public and opinion leaders had a favourable view of Shell, while 40% were neutral and 10% unfavourable This last group saw Shell as negligent in its care of the environment and human rights (The Shell Report, 1998). Shell decided that it must again make it clear to the world and to its customers that, while its primary responsibility was the economic one of running a successful company, it fully accepted a responsibility to ensure that it ran its businesses in a way that was ethically acceptable to the rest of the world. In 1976 it had produced a Statement of General Business Principles to provide an ethical code of conduct which would take account of changes in society and in worldviews. In 1997 there was major revision of these, involving both internal and external consultation. Shell now had nine principles which would influence all its activities and relationships. There were key new commitments to human rights and to a contribution to sustainable development and a stronger “no bribes” clause.

Senior Management, Decision-Making and Design

One very important group we have not discussed in detail before is senior management. It is they who take the important company decisions on what to do, how to do it, and what they intend the consequences of their decisions to be. Their role is critical to successful change. It is their definition of business objectives that will shape the change programme, and it is they who will have the final say in how to manage this. Decisions on whether to take a participative approach will depend on their personal values and on whether they believe the democratic involvement of their staff will increase the likelihood of success. This does not mean that they will necessarily be the initiators of participative design. In my experience, this initiative often came from senior members of the systems group who saw it as leading to more successful systems design with a higher level of acceptance. But they always had to give their approval to this approach and ideally some would become part of the project steering group. The companies I worked with all had senior managers who were willing to involve their staff in design, but they often defined “involvement” in different ways. The Swedish automobile company Volvo redesigned its work structures to make production work more multiskilled and more satisfying for employees, and this decision came initially from the most senior management, although agreement to the approach was sought from everyone in the company. Senior management also approved the approach in the bank and in Rolls Royce, where an excellent and very helpful steering group was formed. Surprisingly the one firm where there were problems was Digital. Digital from its inception was very democratic as this was the personal philosophy of Ken Olsen, its founder. However, it did not succeed in getting senior sales management involved in the XSEL project. The reasons for this were interesting. Although the operational members of the sales force were a very powerful group and enthusiastic about their new role in design, senior sales managers were not a part of the XSEL design process. They had little technical knowledge and did not really understand what was taking place, and their primary interest was always an increase in sales figures. This was especially true of the sales directors, and Bruce strove for a long time to get a senior sales sponsor for the project. When he eventually did so, he found that this individual had little understanding of what was taking place and unrealistically asked for immediate results in a software design process that required a considerable amount of time to complete. This was an example of senior management that never fully understood the nature of the problems that their subordinates were trying to solve. The IT developments of the nineties brought with them many new decisions and difficulties for senior management, some of which were quite new. This knowledge gap led to many unanticipated consequences of change, and these could easily become risks. A group particularly affected by risk was, of course, senior management itself, who had to protect the firm from the results of what were often earlier errors of judgment. Ulrich Beck (1992), the German sociologist, tells us that we are now living in a risk society. We must be aware of this and able to respond effectively to it. Another very serious problem for Digital senior sales management was the eventual rejection of the XSEL expert system by the Digital sales force because it was too complex and time-consuming. This meant that the large financial savings that had originally been forecast were never achieved. However this was not a total loss as the company had learned a great deal about the participative design of large systems, and this now became company policy for all major projects.