Problems with yes, but!

To my great frustration, we have run out of band width again, so a choke has been applied. It appears that youngest has an infinite capacity to download!

Some time ago I began a series on this blog just pointing to examples of failures in public policy and public administration linking this to modern management approaches. My feeling was that if I piled example onto example I might actually get somewhere in convincing people that we needed to look at new approaches.

Finally, the project really foundered on the "yes, but" syndrome. We all do this, of course, me included. Yes means that we understand what you say, but means that I don't agree or that this is an exception.

Sometimes  yes, but is inevitable. My wife gets very angry with me because she wants me to answer a very specific question and I keep on giving a qualified response.

My problem in these cases is often that I don't think the question is especially relevant and may even be misleading. I also can see the logic tree she is trying to build and know where a simple answer is going to lead. We are going to end up in a discussion that, from my perspective, has very little to do with the issues I consider to be important.

Philosophy I including logic has a lot to answer for. It's not just my wife who gets infuriated by this habit of mine of wanting to put arguments. A lot of my friends and work colleagues do as well.

Accepting that I, too, am guilty of "yes, but", one of the big problems with the phrase in both management and especially public policy is that it locks you in to simplistic solutions that don't actually work.

Conversations go like this. Yes, I accept that there are problems with this approach, but we must do something.

The difficulties become especially acute when answers are based on underlying logic structures that are, of themselves, suspect but sit there hidden and unchallenged. People want to deal with the immediate problem and dislike intensely discussions that seem abstract and unrelated. Why are you bothering to talk about this when we should be acting?

The most  acute difficulties of all arise where you have different logic structures. The conversation then appears to deal with resolution of an immediate problem, but there can in fact be no meeting of minds since the underlying questions and assumptions are so different.

I have a reasonably good track record in forecasting what won't work. My track record in suggesting what might work is not as good, but is still not bad. My track record in making some of my suggestions stick for long enough to get results is much worse.

Back at the end of the last century and the first part of this century, my then consulting group developed what we called new ways of working.

The basic logic structure was simple enough. The relationship between employer and employee had changed. We spelt those changes out. We then suggested that organisations had to change the way they managed people to get best results. Again, we spelt this out. We also trialed the new approach in my own work and in our broader consulting in practical areas like statements of HR policy, training, employment contracts. This seemed to work.

Yet our ability to get the message accross proved quite difficult because organisations simply wouldn't accept the logic structures that flowed from their own new approaches and from the response of people to those approaches.

Let me take a simple example to illustrate.

We all know that the concept of permanent employment is dead for the majority of the Australian workforce. We have told people that they must take personal responsibility for themselves, that they must be flexible and prepared to move in new directions. This requires fundamental changes in the way work is organised. Yet organisations, public and private, are in fact still organised around the idea of a permanent workforce even though the reality is different.

I am, by nature, something of a reformer. I am also, and this may not be apparent from my writing, someone who has spent a fair bit of time dealing with the practical and apparently mundane - charts of accounts, information systems, recruitment strategies, marketing strategies, HR policies.

When I was younger I would accept a fair degree of crap because that was simply part of the price paid as you moved forward. Now, and this is part of the fundamental change that we called new ways of working, I am less and less able to accept crap when I know it's not going to work.

As an older worker, I have to judge my performance in terms of what I achieve now. The contribution that my patience might make to my longer term career plans ceases to be relevant when those plans don't actually exist!

In all the abstract arguments about older workers and the need to keep them in the workplace, no-one really talks about just what this actually means.

It's not just older workers, of course. I talked about my daughters' generation in Saturday Morning Musings - kids, jobs & education. Maybe another campaign?