Going with the Flow

On Saturday I wrote, "Effective managers know better than to try to freeze the world into a state they can examine." However, using some of my personal experience as a reality check, I realize that I may have been waxing over an ideal conception of an effective manager. In particular I was reminded of the extent to which quarterly reports constitute an instance of freezing the world into a state for scrupulous examination by a variety of agents, including, among others, senior managers within the business and external auditors. I once proposed to a friend of mine at Accenture that such "snapshots" are analogous to what is called “taking the history of the patient” in medicine. I then proposed that I could prepare a talk for him on the value of using the practice of health maintenance (disregarding the contamination of that process by business interests) as a better metaphor for business operations than curing disease. The former is actually more consistent with artifacts such as those quarterly reports; but my friend warned that such an analogy might be too “radical” for his colleagues!

My point is that, in health maintenance, we take snapshots as a way to think about the transitions between the states. More specifically, we want to know if the “flow of body processes” is “running smoothly” or if there are indications of “malfunctioning behavior.” My guess is that, in finance, one does this without thinking consciously about it; but I fear that the real danger of “IT thinking” is that we end up abstracting away some of the most important parts of what we do unconsciously in the interests of system implementation. This is the basis for my Cassandra-like passions about our debilitating fixation with state; and I seem to be reminded of the dangers I fear just about every day in at least one of my business interactions!