This has major consequences in terms of change, and in the first place on what listening really means. Taken in its first meaning, listening sim- ply means asking actors their opinion on such and such a question, or their hopes and expectations. This can be applied to a company’s
employees as well as its customers, and the methods used will then be those of a survey, attitude studies or “corporate barometers”. The implicit postulate is that what actors have to say on reality, including their own reality, is a true reflection of this reality in all its complexity.
Replies which are then made will be “linear”, that is, they will corre- spond point by point with remarks made by actors, customers or employees.
Experience shows that such an approach can lead to catastrophic results, completely the opposite of those looked for. What actors expect, when they talk to those who are there to listen to them, is that they will help them to understand what is going on, why they do not feel at ease or why things are not as they would like them to be. Of course, every- body has explanations that are more or less well founded, supportive and compartmentalized, and seeks to promote them. But if one comes back towards the actors, merely returning to them what they have said in a more or less ordered fashion, they will have the feeling that they have not been listened to, even that one is trying to use their words as a pretext. To summarize this into a formula, listening is not asking people what they want, it’s telling them.
There is, of course, nothing manipulative in this way of saying things.
It simply takes account of the fact that actors have an initial perception of reality, which is not enough to take into account the complexity of the situation, which is not an item of information that is understood.
In the transport company mentioned earlier in this volume, we caused a surprise reaction from one of the managers in the following circum- stances: when questioning him at length on the inspectors, he used an insulting term to speak of them, emphasizing just how much he con- sidered this category of staff to be unreliable, even dishonest in their behaviour towards the company. We queried the harsh severity of his judgement and he then explained how unfair it seemed to him for these people to use any pretext whatsoever in order to always ask for more … and to always be prepared to go back on strike once these additional advantages had been granted to them. We pointed out that such behav- iour was in fact, to the contrary, a very clear sign and, when he showed his extreme surprise, we suggested that obtaining additional material advantages was no doubt not the problem, but much more a symptom.
In a way, these officers had done their work by going on strike, and it was now up to him to do his work in understanding why. The true need is there and this is why knowledge is frightening to start with.
Symptoms, these misunderstood pieces of information, show themselves in various ways. They are the organization’s events. Sometimes they are
From Symptom to Problem 137 technical and involve breakdowns, delays or a sudden increase in the costs of non-quality; at other times they may be financial and show themselves in a drop in profits, a fall in turnover or a loss of market share; in human terms, they may take the form of high absenteeism, repeated strikes, or employee claims that are never satisfied. And the one-off or sequential response has little chance of sorting things out – in fact, quite the opposite.
For actors have a partisan interpretation, in the strategic rather than polemic sense of the term, of the symptoms which show themselves. It is for this reason too that the absence of in-depth work, in transforming information into knowledge, brings pointless conflict into the search for solutions.
Two examples are given below, with the interesting point that although situated in two completely different spheres of activity, they both lead to the same conclusion.
The first example is that of a French business, which has the inten- tion and no doubt the vocation of becoming a world leader in its market and which is faced with the necessity, if it wants to achieve this aim, of successfully carrying out acquisitions allowing it to diversify – not only geographically but also in terms of complementary activities. It there- fore sought to invest – particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world (United States and United Kingdom) – but was rapidly confronted with a latent revolt from its new acquisitions, in particular senior managers, who reproached it for according only marginal importance to economic per- formance and its measurement. Debate was therefore engaged between them, major benchmarking efforts were initiated, a “project” extending over several years and involving a high number of actors was launched, intended to reach completion with a vast convention during which drastic decisions were expected to be announced that would be likely to profoundly change this company’s “culture”.
At the same time, while we were working on the organizational diag- nosis requested by this company’s CEO, one of the French managers pointed out to us, with no little surprise, that it was precisely those countries that were most vehement in demanding that performance should be taken into account almost exclusively for appraising people and units which performed the least well.
That so very pertinent remark alerted the observer – this contradic- tion, like all the others, is probably only an appearance. It is more than likely that such a focus on performance is merely a symptom, which, we must point out, does not mean that it is any less legitimate. But the real problem, as one might say, must be something else.
Diagnosis will reveal this: for many years, the company has had a lot of difficulty consolidating its acquisitions although, as we have said, this is one of its key strategies for success. This produces cycles of
“investment/disinvestment” which lead some people to think that such transactions follow a logic of “dancers around the CEO” rather than a real strategy. In everyday life, this difficulty in absorbing new units is marked by the almost exclusive presence in the higher echelons of the hierarchy, that is, in the best jobs, of French people belonging to the company’s predominant “business” or at least having been noticed there, and representing a very specific sociological profile in terms of socio-cultural origins and training.
The selection mechanisms used for this are therefore de factomecha- nisms. They do not result from any stated intention, nor from any deci- sive policy – in fact they give rise to questioning and sometimes gloom from managers who are not far distant from envisaging “quota” systems in order to face up to the situation. What is actually involved is not the conscious and intentional action of individuals, but the informal mech- anisms that nobody can control which, at the end of the day, produce the elitist result that we have already shown. When the “careers com- mittee” meets to review the best applicants for promotion to a better job, it “notes” the uniformity of profiles, but that’s the way things are.
Seen from the outside, such mechanisms are as frustrating as they are implicit, difficult to identify and therefore impossible to describe accurately – something that, in a world of engineers, becomes prohibitive.
Everybody understands that, in order to succeed in this organization, one must, in the broadest of lines, have been born somewhere, have been raised in a certain way and have attended certain specific schools.
These are things that are built while you are young and if you are “not part of this system” then you will accumulate handicaps that are diffi- cult to make up for. This explains why this system seems so terribly unfair to “outsiders” who feel that they are the main victims. They crit- icize it for favouring social performance (the good fortune of belonging to networks and the ability to move around in them comfortably) to the detriment of economic performance. Hence the trenchant judgements bitterly emphasizing that, in this business, there is little hesitation in promoting mediocre people – people who have not shown any particu- lar ability in terms of business results.
Consequently, enthusiastically seeking the measurement of economic performance means seeking justice and fairness, which are indeed the essential conditions for a good consolidation of acquisitions ... The loop has come full circle! By agreeing to focus the debate on this issue – that
of economic performance – the company has, in a way, mistaken the problem. It is in fact not the smallest of paradoxes to note that its atten- tion may have been drawn by the fact that it is, indeed, a company that performs well, or at least if one compares it with its competitors. That does not mean that it hasn’t got a long way to go on the matter, although the torrent of figures, the fascination for what is seen and can be easily described, the assimilation – at the first level and without analysis – of what actors are saying, have probably made it even more difficult to distinguish between symptoms and therefore, at the end of the day, relatively unacceptable. Finally, from having heard too much of the actors, nobody was listening to them.
The second example takes place in a completely different business milieu: during a survey carried out a few years ago on establishments tak- ing in mentally or physically handicapped children, researchers were moved and impressed by the devotion of all the people working in such establishments, in emotionally difficult conditions, bearing in mind the serious handicaps that were being dealt with. At the same time, a persist- ent problem marked the life of such institutions, generated by the virtual impossibility of personnel to develop a collective “establishment proj- ect”. And yet they were all in agreement: the interests of the children, especially those who were handicapped, must not be affected by political in-fighting and should be the subject of an easily obtainable consensus.
When looking closely, however, it seemed that each person realized all at once that the children’s needs were not always sufficiently taken into account (the symptom), and gave, to the defence of the interests of these young inmates, a definition which, if it had been applied, would have ensured the pre-eminence of their profession over the others within the establishment. The doctors gave priority to treatment, the educators to teaching, the psychologists to individual monitoring, and so on. Their good intentions were never at cause, it was simply that they only had access to partial and biased information, which did not help them to reach agreement on the true nature of the problem to be dealt with, that is, the extreme complexity of the situation of these children, which would have required from them a very constrictive cooperation com- pared with the segmentation and specialization of their jobs, to which they had become accustomed and for which they had been trained.