resigned fatalism faced with the observation that what is happening is neither wanted nor decided by anybody whatsoever, it is simply there.
On the other hand, the inspector has a very positive relationship with the actors who participate in the organization of his private life, who allow him to choose his way of life, like those who negotiate his benefits for him. It would not even be necessary to push the analysis any further in order to understand, at least in general terms that do not enter into the detail of the mechanisms, that the less interest the company, in its real method of functioningand not in its statements or its intentions, is able to take in the professional life of its officers, the more they take refuge in their private lives, to which they pay almost exclusive attention. Starting from a symptom, that inspectors do not stay with customers in a difficult situation and reduce such relations to a minimum in a normal situation, we are not far from having understood the problem, simply by looking at the relevant universe in which they evolveand which is a long way from their theoretical and hierarchical context of action.
goods (long-haul transport licences), through to “welfare” conditions of transport (driving hours, rest periods, and so on), not forgetting the fixing of prices (for a long time there was a compulsory pricing system for road transport in France that set a top and bottom price for every product carried). Lastly, we find European legislation on top of domes- tic legislation.
Continuing their reasoning, the civil servants in charge add that sta- tistics show that fraud leads to accidents (falling asleep at the wheel or driving an overloaded vehicle), and that reducing it is therefore a meas- ure of public safety. By this means, they manage to convince the Minister to take action. This is in fact a sensitive sector which demon- strates regularly (1992, 1997) and everywhere (for example, Chile) its ability to paralyse economic activity. The Minister takes a pragmatic view of this and only attempts to tackle the problem if he thinks there is a visible benefit to voters – for example, a significant reduction in road traffic accidents.
But where does one start with this problem? This is where linear reasoning comes into play – refusing to acknowledge complexity. If truck drivers are evading the law, slipping through the net, that means the net is too slack. So all one has to do is tighten it – in other words reinforce the legislation directly controlling the activity of drivers (penalty points system in 1992) and multiply the checks without which legislation can have no effect on actors who a prioritake hardly any notice, for reasons that civil servants can only understand in terms of morality. Although this presentation is caricaturized, it helps to understand how, in the eyes of the state’s representative, the “transport” that we are about to analyse as a complex system is reduced to a single activity – conveyance by vehicle – and a single actor – the lorry driver (but only until he breaks the law). And yet you only have to read the actual results of this strategy with its proliferation of rules and inspections to be gripped by despair – fraud is rampant, requiring ever more rules, until the whole system explodes when the vicious circle has become so tight that it has to be broken.
Is there an alternative to this vision which seems both oversimplified and inefficient? Yes, but with two conditions – accepting complexity (which here means not reducing the problem of fraud simply to the truck driver’s behaviour) and agreeing to stand back from the actual situation and stop monitoring it too closely, that is, stop trying to understand “how it works”. In illustration of this: if there are goods in a lorry, this is because someone (the consignor) has products that need moving. This consignor can directly approach a carrier, generally a “big carrier”– we will be returning to this definition – or a middleman, From Symptom to Problem 145
known in the trade as a freight coordinator-consolidator-contractor- forwarder who is really specialized in the regulations (knows all the ins and outs) as well as able to match supply and demand, making it possible to complete a load or avoid an empty return.
In this business, subcontracting is common practice. The “big carrier”
will therefore be able to transfer a contract to a smaller (and therefore less busy?) carrier, in the same way that a coordinator will be able to choose their subcontractor, depending on the type of work required.
Let’s stop here for a moment: having started from a simple vision with a single actor – the lorry driver – here we are now in the presence of at least four actors – the consignor, the coordinator, the big carrier and the small carrier. And in order to cover every aspect, maybe we should add SNCF (French railways), the country’s leading road haulier, the various police forces that carry out checks, and the different administrative authorities – Highway Maintenance, Works, and so on – which draw up rules, distribute documents, and sometimes carry out checks.
Let us now take another step towards complexity thanks to two obser- vations. First of all, pressure on prices. Back when there was the com- pulsory pricing system, most transactions took place at the bottom price, even, unofficially, below it. Since then, it is still almost the same situation. This gives a clear indication that here it is freight that is scarce but not transport. Whoever is in control of this scarcity – this uncertainty – holds the power. In this case, it can be the consignor, or the coordinator, or the big carrier using subcontractors – all these actors having one thing in common in that they do not drive the lorries and are therefore not directly concerned by regulations.10This is a particu- lar paradox of linear reasoning which places the “fault” on the least powerful actor in the system, simply because this actor is “visible” and, at the end of the day, does not know who holds the real power. The
“real falsehood” is this – the confusion between appearance and reality.
The second observation is a question – in a country that has always made the middleman liable for its misfortunes, one might have expected that the consignor would organize its own transport; however, it makes use of a shipping company. Why? To understand this, one has to look at the consignor’s logic – it has to manage a constraint upstream at the same time as downstream. Upstream, it is pressurized by a production environment that is increasingly oriented towards a pull production sys- tem (“just in time”), which leads to “responding” to demand and deliv- ering at the last moment. Downstream, it is faced with its customer who, here again, wants to avoid stocks and to only have the goods at the moment of putting them on the shelves. If, to this twofold constraint,
one adds those resulting from transport regulations, it is rapidly going to become impossible for the same actor to reconcile all aspects. Quite nat- urally, the consignor is going to focus on its own particular problem – the relationship with its customer – and outsource what is involved in this activity to the specialist – the carrier or the coordinator. Crudely speaking, it will be asking for flexibility, that is, fraud, or the boss of the shipping company will be asking for it from “its employee”, which boils down to the same thing. Does this mean that everything is just fraud?
No, of course not, but if the consignor only calls for this “flexibility” in 1 per cent of cases, the customer’s loyalty will, at that moment, depend upon the positive reply from the carrier – in an environment in which we should remember that what is scarce is the freight.
Let us continue the voyage in “real life”. Suppose that the consignor’s requirement is particularly difficult to satisfy, involving a high level of non-compliance with the rules and, at the same time, a low level of remuneration. The big carrier on which the requirement falls has the possibility of accepting – we have seen why – without running the risk of actually doing it itself. It will in turn subcontract to someone further down the ladder, to the “small carrier” for which we are now in a posi- tion to understand the characteristics – which have nothing to do with the number of lorries owned by the business. The small carrier is the one who drives his own lorry – or one of his lorries – and, because of this, has no availability for sales or marketing, depending entirely on others to find freight. This will be given to him straight from the coordinator or subcontracted from the big carrier – who does not do any driving, doesn’t really “have his backside in the driving seat” (as they say in the busi- ness). What he is given, it is understood, is fraud, and the less free he is, the more likely he is to accept, including when this is accompanied by a remuneration from which everyone has already taken their tithe.
What can we say? That, seen from the system, fraud is not a problem but a solution, and therefore a symptom. It is what marketing special- ists call a “differential advantage” in a world in which one must above all get hold of the freight. In such a context, increasing the regulations on the least powerful actors only restricts a little more their room for manoeuvre, and therefore their real possibility of choice. In July 1992, the weakest of these – drivers or craftsmen – brought the country to a standstill in order to denounce such constraints by simply announcing that they were unable to drive less fast.11
Let us add another point. If one wants to understand the concept of
“transport system” – Crozier and Friedberg’s concrete action system – as opposed to the simplistic vision of conveyance by vehicle, one has to From Symptom to Problem 147
look at the question of cost. Everything revolves around cheating the system (also regulating it, according to the sociologist) but at a cost – that of an accident. What next? We are now in the presence of a new actor, whose existence and importance have not as yet been mentioned by anyone – the insurance company which does not pick out, in its own accounts, a specific risk for heavy goods vehicles. It becomes the instru- ment through which the extra cost generated by fraud – as a method of regulating the system of land transport – is externalized onto the whole automobile system.
As a result, change might be reasoned in a systemic rather than linear fashion. For example, when an accident involving the responsibility of a heavy goods vehicle leads to material consequences, why not involve the whole instructing party chain, instead of just the lorry driver? This is what happens now as a result of the action in 1992. Why not spread the heavy goods vehicle risk, as in the English model, that is, reinter- nalize the cost of its own operation into the system, thereby allowing it to function differently, at a lower cost, therefore less fraudulently? As a paradox of complexity, the formal logic might find itself turned upside down to the profit of a reasoning that may well be less “simple” in its formulation, but oh so very much more concrete in its perception of reality – instead of the false common sense that tells us “Since fraud pro- duces the accident, let us reduce fraud and we will thus reduce the acci- dent”, one can substitute the following approach: “It is by making the cost of the accident insupportable to the whole land transport system that one can succeed in reducing fraud, which is of course the cause of this additional cost.” In brief, once reality has been understood, let us reduce the accident in order to reduce fraud!
The need to switch from the symptom to the problem has therefore taken us a long way from consideration of the complexity of organiza- tions and human systems. It has allowed us to take a look at what is meant by concretesince it is the problem that is concrete even where it is the symptom that sounds the alarm. We have therefore been led to reassess even concepts that are accepted by the great majority of people, because these make it possible to avoid facing up to such complexity – the concept, for example, of the organization and its environment, what is “inside” it and what is “around” it. However, the very idea of the system is contradictory to this approach, because it starts from the actors, listens to them, in the sense that we keep giving to this term – the reconstitution of their reality and not just the simple consideration of the theoretical environment in which the organization chart places them. We have finally understood that the organization chart is, to the
system, what the symptom is to the problem – the appearance but not the true reality. This is what we call methodological realism in order to emphasize that, in the everyday procedures of organizations in general and with regard to change in particular, it is indeed this realism which is so sadly lacking.
We are going to add a final case study to this chapter which will act as a practical application of this approach, this distinction between symptoms and problems, while at the same time excavating some of the methodological aspects covered in the preceding chapter by means of the strategic analysis grid.