DNA Wales Faq

DNA Wales is a collaborative group of critical management researchers or a ‘think tank’ who question and research management and leadership thinking and practice and whom want to make organisations sustainable, innovative and democratic. In simple terms getting organisation to be better!

There was simply a ‘gap’ in management thinking and academic support. The gap was a strange difference in management practice and theory, which few people were questioning. DNA Wales fills that gap by providing a ‘safe’ place for academics and industrialists to come together and talk about the issues of management, leadership and politics. Dr. Paul Thomas started the process of what is now ‘DNA Wales’ in 1999.

Yes. And Germany, and India. Dr. Paul Thomas met Ricardo Semler the founder of DNA Brazil in London in 2000. Ricardo Semler gave a breath taking talk on SEMCO and not managing. Coupled with the work of Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly at the London School of Economics (LSE), this changed Dr. Thomas’s philosophy and perspective of management virtually overnight. In 2006, Ricardo Semler came to Glamorgan University and DEIN (formally WDA, now DE&T) and the links between DNA Brazil and DNA Wales have grown stronger ever since. When in Wales Ricardo Semler said his reason for coming to Wales was simple. He said “I like the Welsh – lets make this happen”.

Asking ‘why’ is how it starts! It all starts with changing how we think about how we work and how we view management. We need to move beyond focussing on targets and measures of effectiveness, move away from performance management and instead focus on values and boundaries that really matter for organisational sustainability which is people focused, more so individually maintained. Values and boundaries that inspire innovativeness, creativity and support natural human-system. We need to change our thinking and then our behaviour will change. The starting point of all this is ‘managers’, ‘CEO’s’ and anyone who will block the removal of power from the top and disperse throughout the organisation.

Leadership for DNA revolves around individual vision, ideas, direction, and has more to do with inspiring and influencing people as to direction and values than with day-to-day implementation that is best left to the experts – the staff. The democratic leaders are capable of influencing other people to do things without actually sitting on top of them with a checklist. But this requires trust, openness and creativity, which are founded on the leaders being from within the social network of the organisation. DNA Wales sees Leaders within and throughout the organisation and resultant democratic processes as inspiring confidence in others and ourselves and as a result, we become more relaxed, communicative and successful.

There are almost as many definitions of leadership and management as there are persons who have attempted to define the concepts. It is quite a futile exercise of semantics, with many attempts grounded in an old ‘military’, mechanistic perspective … ‘that we lead the ‘robots’ or cogs in the organisation who don’t think and have to be told what to do.’

DNA Wales adopts a simpler perspective, ‘we are both and none of the above at anyone time’, where in leadership is a process in which one person, anyone within the organisation, inspires a purpose or direction for one or more other persons and gets them to move along together with them and with each other in a direction with passion, pride and full commitment. One employee stated that being the leader was like the Abominable Snowman, the footprints are everywhere but s/he never seen.

It is nothing personal. It is about how we think about what management and managers are, and about how we act and behave in our role as manager.

Managers cause so much unhappiness in organisations through a focus on targets and measurement, control, organising others with an absence of critical thinking skills. This is in part due to the growing standardisation in MBA programs and the trend toward measurement, regulation and command in vain attempts to avoid uncertainty. There are exceptions, but these managers/leaders are rare and usually eventually ‘conform’ from the ‘critical thinking’ democratic leader to the world of mechanics, targets and measurement.

The world of mechanistic, machine like metaphors is founded on generalised tools and techniques, which treat individuals in an organisation as employees who are identical in every way. This destroys the natural DNA fabric of human creativity, innovativeness, trust, openness, ownership, inspiration and leadership. We are simply different, each one of us are individuals with our own ways of thinking and doing. DNA attempts to realise this in our work and the development of an organisational arcitecture that accepts direction is needed in the organisation without causing harm to the people within.

Absolutely NO! Servant leadership is an approach to leadership coined and defined by Robert Greenleaf. However, the concept is thousands of years older than this. Chanakya or Kautilya, the famous thinker from India, wrote about servant leadership in his 4th century book Arthashastra, the role of leaders as servants to the needs of others.

Without a doubt leaders in an organisation better motivate others by serving their needs, be it staff or management. DNA Wales sees leaders as influencing the direction with the individuals who ‘voted them in’ executing it and at the same time being influenced. In allowing new directions to emerge and evolve will often require leaders to inspire a direction that may be contrary to the needs of the minority in a team and thus requires the nurturing, respect and valuing of staff. The leaders-as-servant is not a problematic concept as leaders will at some stage do this, but leaders cannot really be servants for they are focused on influencing and achieving the collective aim.

A critical difference here is that serving people, for a servant, is an end in itself, not a way to achieve or inspire other goals.

It all starts with changing how we think about how we work and how we view management. We need to change our thinking and then our behaviour will change. So where do we start?

We start with CEO’s and senior management. To change the organisation we need to start at the very top and inspire the view that there is a better way to ‘manage’ for all of us. To inspire democratic leadership and to empower a workforce, you need management to be 100% involved and champions of change as the biggest impact will be on them, otherwise it could result in sabotage of change, resulting in further worker frustration. So management first.

Then it’s about changing the mindset of the workforce. From one of subservience to ownership; from a blaming culture to one of responsibility; from the individual to the networked. For employees to take increased ownership and personal responsibility for moving the organisation forward, employees require support, respect, trust, open communication, and opportunities. They have to network and communicate far more than is currently realised.

Only with the participative involvement of management, and the ownership of the workforce, will change commence to unfold. However with change, comes risk and uncertainty and the biggest challenge is the acceptance that uncertainty is a natural part of the process.

Slowly! We are not joking here.

If the architecture of Complexity is introduced without full understanding and support, it will result in confusion, frustration and chaos (as defined below). It is about starting with small changes. For example, inspiring frontline staff to choose their staff uniforms, or arrange shift-patterns, or order equipment, gradually increasing responsibility. Naturally, self-organisation and self-management will start to unfold as other questions will begin to be raised. Questions such as, ‘why can’t they see the income and expenditure sheets’? However, this will also lead to questions about the value of management, ‘what do you add to their role as managers’!

Once set upon this path, it cannot be undone. To do so will cause increased frustration (normally seen in organisations as absenteeism or rule breaking). So it requires long-term commitment and trust of those within the organisation.

People often assume they have to be ‘managed’ to produce something. Yet Tom Peters in the 1980’s stated quite nicely that people are ‘passionate, loyal, honest, trust-worthy, intelligent, committed and happy, except for the 8 hours they work for you’. Therein rules and procedures become restrictors rather than drivers of people’s actions. As opposed to rules, we refer to the creation of natural boundaries in which people operate. Boundaries have to be explained, and in doing so they co-evolve, or change as they are explained to the individuals. One boundary such as a budget will be different for the production staff as to the marketing team, but each will need to see the other perspectives in order to understand the bigger picture.



Figure 1: The ‘boiling point’ of organisational direction

While chaos theory helps businesses understand how markets change, organisations need to consider "complexity theory" to manage effectively in a tumultuous environment. Using the analogy of ‘boiling water’, the water being the organisation, molecules the people, and the heat the management; CES thinking views that if a company is too tightly structured, it can not move, thereby stagnation occurs; learning stops and controls implemented by management restricts further until the organisation ceases to operate. If it is too chaotic, too much energy, has poorly defined boundaries or vision then the organisation ‘boils’ in all sorts of directions until each molecule (individual) eventually escapes (Figure 1)   the liquid (organisation) in pursuit of individual direction and the organisation dies.

These are points called the 'edge of chaos' or ‘boundaries’ where companies can move in between, exploring the space of possibilities (seen here in Figure 1 as the surface of the water and the container). At that each point, a company needs enough structure to hold people and processes together, yet enough flexibility to allow innovation and adaptation.   The democratic leaders need to utilise the inherent uncertainty to engender the creative environment that ensure complacency (stagnation) does not occur, equally ensuring the elements of uncertainty that can be removed through the optimisation of processes and interconnectivity between agents are done so that the heat/energy introduced does not induce ‘boiling point’ which also causes the particles (people) do not explode outward of the organisation. Canon (1999) highlights, perhaps unintentional, the concept of the zig-zag organisation(see Chaos). One in which the people move within the boundaries of the organisation from certainty to uncertainty. Semler Ltd in Brazil for example uses the notional boundary for their organisation as ‘do anything’ so long as you achieve minimum of 15% profit (one boundary) and be first in the market for quality (second boundary) (Gribbin 2005).

Yes, that is the most exciting part. We speak and research what we actually do in business built on human-networks, human-relationships, natural systems of communication and exchange. At DNA Wales, we are about ‘what we do’ in natural human-systems. As opposed to that promoted in traditional management thinking were we often ‘say we do one thing, yet actually in practice do another’.

Nothing guarantees success. This is an important point. Complexity or DNA Wales does not claim to improve profits, market share or success with your organisation. There are far too many factors to make this claim.

However our philosophy is simple. We encourage companies to support the natural network of interaction within their organisation (or wider network) that is reflective of a complex adaptive system. Drawing on the analogy of a flock of birds, this approach sees that there is not just one pair of eyes (the manager) focused on the market and competition, i.e. customers and rivals, it see that there are in fact a thousand pairs of eyes (all employees) inspired to working in the same direction for the same purpose, organisational sustainability.

This is a difficult question to answer without getting very theoretical, academic and therefore boring for most…… so here goes! Complexity is not new, it has been around for decades, and centuries for areas such as Social Science, Maths, Biology, Chemistry, Physics etc. But it is new to business.

Complex Evolving Systems (CES) are all around us. Most things we take for granted are complex evolving systems, and the agents in every system exist and behave in total ignorance of the concept but that does not impede their contribution to the system. Complex Evolving Systems are a model or we prefer architecture for thinking about the world around us not a model for predicting what will happen.

Complexity in simple terms deals with the messy or human side of organisations. It accepts that when humans interact, there is a ‘new’ emergence of thinking, behaviour and action. Complexity presents the formulation of laws of nature. In contextualising this, Prigogine (1997) considers complexity as " the domain in which human existence actually takes place", adding further that "mankind is at a turning point, the beginning of a new rationality in which science is no longer identified with certitude and probability with ignorance".

The belief in Complexity thinking provides us with a framework (Mitleton-Kelly 2002) to enable leaders to interact with individuals who hopefully hold a wide diversity of ideological and theoretical perspectives, whether realised or not, in a way that nurtures creativity, innovation, adaptability and flexibility which provides organisational momentum. Complexity is seen by many as a new way of reflecting the realities of the world in which the laws of nature are not seen to be universal or deterministic.

Complexity theory is not the same as chaos theory. Chaos theory is derived from mathematics. It was brought to popular understanding by author James Glick and is based in molecular biology, mathematics and chemistry. Nevertheless chaos does have a place in complexity theory in that systems exist on a spectrum ranging from equilibrium to chaos ( see Figure 1 below)
 


Figure 1: Systems exist on a spectrum ranging from equilibrium to chaos

A system in equilibrium (indicated in business by burecratic style or structure) does not have the internal dynamics to enable it to respond to its environment, to innovate, be creative and change. As a result it will slowly (or quickly) die.

A system in chaos also ceases to function effectively as a natural system and therefore disappears (again seen in organisations with low morale, high absenteeism and staff turnover).

The most productive state to be in is at the edge of chaos where there is maximum variety and creativity, leading to new possibilities, but without total chaos. In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behaviour of certain nonlinear dynamical systems (people) that under specific conditions exhibit dynamics that are sensitive to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behaviour of chaotic systems appears to be random, because of an exponential growth of errors in the initial conditions. This happens even though these systems have a pattern or direction in the sense that their future dynamics are well defined by their initial conditions, and there are no random elements involved, we just cannot see it until we reflect (hence why strategy is easy as its based in historical understanding not present).

Complex is that we are able to see the overall pattern, but not the detail or methods by which it happens. Think Weather system, although we know the details of the system, we still have no idea what really happens to cause the weather above our heads….especially here in Wales!

Complicated, in contrast, focus on details being understood, but their role or fit into the overall system is not. Think financial accounting (sorry accountants!), accountants know with incredible depth the financial details but have difficulty seeing how they fit into the larger picture. So complicated, is about details but not the overall pattern.

Absolutely NO. We will provide help and advice, so long as we get access to your company for our research. We do offer consultants who specialise in Systems Thinking or Complexity, but this is only indirect help. We hope to change the way Wales Inc. do and think about management, organisation and innovation. As we do this we are recording the ‘how’s, why’s, when’s, and what’s’ as part of the development in critical management thinking. We will help anyone, just ask!

We ask for donations only to cover costs directly incurred by the team. These are of course negotiated before research, action begins. Cost can range from £200 to £20,000 depending on size, issues and team numbers needed. However, we would stress here that you are accessing a highly qualified team of researchers including, Professors and Doctors all looking to change the way we work in organisations and leadership. We also don’t do ‘quick-fixes’ if we agree to be involved then we seek long term relationship and intervention.

Easy – Just Ask! We will come and speak with you and see if you are able, ready and willing to undergo a major transformation.

Yes, several. In-company, here at Waterton or in the various Universities. These include Bites (short courses), MSc programmes validated by Glamorgan and Doctorates (PhD level). The Wales Quality Centre is also a major partner in our research and training programmes. Please contact them if you wish further details.