You may use the work for your own, non-commercial, and personal use; any other use of the work is strictly prohibited. Many of the most important domestic disputes are about matters that defy mathematical estimation.
THE RAND KNOWLEDGE BASE
This image of the powerful organization emerges from real research on real organizations conducted by R AND Corporation, the Santa Monica-based think tank that has produced thousands of studies over the past 50 years directly or indirectly related to improving organizational performance. . As RAND explains on its website, “over the years RAND has earned a reputation for answering a different question than the one the client originally asked—and this has led to some of the institution's best-known successes .".
PLAN OF THE BOOK
The third chapter, "The Four Pillars of High Performance," asks what RAND has learned about the four underpinnings of high performance identified in the winning process. The chapter begins with a brief definition of what I call the robust organization, and then examines the four pillars of robustness in detail.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
Uncertainty was the dominant theme of RAND's work for the Air Force in the 1940s, its research on urban development, national health insurance, and welfare reform in the 1960s and 1970s, and almost everything it does today. However, if the probability of discarding a basket has become very low, then increasing the number of bins provides useful insurance against the unfortunate event that a bin is discarded.…In the case of fuel conservation, this can be interpreted as allocating storage provide significant insurance benefits only when the expected percentage of survival has increased to a satisfactory level.”3.
STUDIES IN VULNERABILITY
At the same time, the industry itself has scaled back, spun off or completely eliminated much of its own research and development capacity. For most majors, RAND reports, research, and development are limited to short-term, installation, or equipment-specific troubleshooting.
Four Sources of Vulnerability
Many of his organizations worked hard to cut costs, streamline operations and sharpen product lines. Many organizations do not pay attention to long-range threats and opportunities (ignorance), create the ability to move quickly to hedge against vulnerabilities or exploit new markets (inflexibility), invest in the research and development needed to bring new products to life scale (indifference), or to align the organization to move as a whole towards a hoped-for future (inconsistency).
Ignorance
Although the French were clearly aware of the German threat, especially in the wake of the Polish conquest, they were prepared for any scenario except that which took place. Despite its smaller size and perceived weakness, the German army overwhelmed the French within weeks.
Inflexibility
By the end of the war, the army had stockpiled 65 days worth of ammunition in Saudi Arabia, most of which had to be sent back home. Attacked on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in early 1992 as a "black hole" of wasted research, the company was clearly in need of an overhaul.
Improving Performance at Dupont
See the study team's summary chart on DuPont's change strategy for the list of interventions.). After being labeled an "environmental laggard" in Fortune's inventory of corporate citizens in 1993, the 2003 award demonstrated DuPont's rise as a national leader in proactive environmental management, a point echoed later in this book.16 .
Indifference
The Russian military learned the hard way about urban combat in the streets of the Chechen capital Grozny. Although the Russians eventually succeeded in taking control of the city, the learning curve was steep, and the cost high.”
Inconsistency
We knew we had to invest to get out of the recession,” Intel CEO Craig Barrett said in 2004. Unfortunately, steel, internal combustion engines, and gasoline weren't necessarily part of the high-mileage future.
Improving Performance at Procter & Gamble
We are now in the 20 percent range, compared to 10 percent three or four years ago. The merger of Astra and Zeneca also reflected a desire for greater agility, albeit in the form of increased research and development spending.
THE NEW UNCERTAINTY
RAND has also seen similar turnarounds in federal agencies, whether at the Food and Drug Administration, where a new drug review has cut approval times in half, the Veterans Health Administration, where new performance measures have improved patient care, or the Customs Service, where modernization has improved customer satisfaction and revenue collection simultaneously.
Puzzles and Mysteries
Like the uncertainty in the world, mysteries are sometimes unsolvable, even when vast amounts of information are available. In wartime, the models begin to change, if only because there is a marked change in the state of the world.
Sources of Uncertainty
Rather, the question is whether uncertainty has risen to such an extent that it warrants particular attention in organizational design. For example, if the level and mix of uncertainty has remained relatively constant over the past fifty years, organizations may occasionally accept vulnerabilities based on ignorance, inflexibility, indifference, and inconsistency as a normal cost of doing business.
What to Do About Deep Uncertainty
The enemy was not uncertain; it was the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union. The threat was not ambiguous; it was the very survival of the nation under the shadow of a massive nuclear attack.
The Six Revolutions
Taken as a whole, the revolution in materials and manufacturing can have at least four impacts. The Revolution in Global Trade Globalization remains a major driver of uncertainty in the state of the world, whether in the form of infectious diseases or great innovation.
Key Elements of Swarming
The successful use of netwars by other organizations also indicates two significant consequences for the goals. Communications systems must be both hardened and redundant, tools to deceive the adversary are essential, authority must be highly decentralized, yet all nodes of the network must be able to work together under central command to create the swarm.
Planning on Uncertainty
As the study shows, network warriors can exert strong pressure on government and private institutions without resorting to violence.
Testing Assumptions
RAND began by exploring the Army's future vision, then constructed one scenario each for the failure of the four most significant, underlying assumptions that underpinned the vision. One of the scenarios was built around the military's long-standing assumption that the Soviet Union would remain the military's adversary well into the future.
Exploring Scenarios
Seasoned human decision makers, especially those who lead large organizations, often understand very well the limitations of forecasting and then acting,” they write. While prediction and action analysis often generates only one hopeful future, robust decision making produces hundreds, even thousands of possible futures, then measures the strengths and weaknesses of competing plans before choosing one that performs best in the entire world. range of possibilities.
CONCLUSION
4 There is so much RAND literature cited in this report that I decided it would be better to provide a bibliographical inventory at the end of the book rather than cluttering each page with footnote after footnote. 12 Scott McMurray, “Changing a culture: DuPont tries to put its research wizardry at the service of the end result,” Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1992, p. 13 The DuPont, Intel, Monsanto, and Xerox study was conducted by Susan A. Pinto and is cited in the bibliography at the end of the book.
LOST IN CHANGE
Therefore, RAND recommended a new type of bank built around a network of geographically dispersed organizations that follow the same protocols covering all aspects of the process. As the RAND team notes, all existing banks follow at least some of the best practices, but none follow all 52.
Designing Organizations
While five of the six (FDA being the exception) spread continuous innovation throughout the organization, only three (DuPont, Marriott, and Procter & Gamble) monitored employee attitudes and morale, only three (Customs, DuPont, and Procter & Gamble) ) added resources to pay for innovation, and only three (FDA, Procter & Gamble, and VHA) used promotion to reward star performers. Finally, while five of the six (excluding FDA only) created incentives to motivate employees, only two (Marriott and Procter & Gamble) used internal competition to drive organization-wide improvement, and only one (Marriott) used integrated screening, training, and mentoring to retain non-traditional employees who are difficult to recruit.
RAND Preferences
But when pressed to identify the most important characteristic of leadership, 66 percent said leaders of high-performing organizations should be honest and trusting, and 21 percent said they should be decisive. 9 percent said they should be innovative, and only 4 percent said they should be charismatic.
A WINNOWING STRATEGY
76 percent had few levels of management between the top and bottom of the organization. Before turning to the results, readers should note that some features have been left out of the competition.
The First Round of Winnowing
Such a characteristic would be useless unless it were broken down across levels of the organization—for example, the board, top management, middle managers, middle-level employees, and front-line workers—and it would had added great length to an already formidable study. . Additionally, workforce quality is indirectly covered through a number of other characteristics, including delegation of authority; barriers between units; leadership style; access to information, training and technology; and incentives for high performance, all of which measure how the workforce is managed regardless of where it starts.
Strong Associations with Performance
It is almost as if the traces of the real evidence of the failure are no longer available. It is clear in the experimental work that you can learn a lot by looking at what did not work.
The Second Round of Winnowing
Although growth was positively correlated with high performance in the first round and emerged as a strong contender in the second, growth may be more a consequence of high performance than a cause of it. Given the ambiguity of the relationship, it is better to disqualify the attribute and keep the hints clean.
Strong Predictive Relationships with Performance
One, if there is a war and you destroy this fighter, you will die. And if you don't, it will be canceled and you won't get a new flight."
The Third Round of Winnowing
Although avoiding shocks and crises did not win out as a predictor of high performance, RAND's own work on change management suggests that shocks and crises, whether real or imagined, are essential to creating urgency for change. Second, Defense leadership went to the services and said, 'You're not going to get another plane if you don't get this thing together.
Strongest Predictive Relationships with Performance
It is entirely possible, for example, that the measurement results have picked up much of the predictive power built into the customer survey. It is also possible that devolution has reduced the barrier-reducing effect between units, and that promoting open communication and ensuring access to information have worked together to erode participatory governance and information technology.
The Organizational Infrastructure of High Performance
The Four Pillars of High Performance
LESSONS FROM THE WINNOWING
At least in my reading of the winning results and the RAND knowledge base, high performance is not always accidental and does not require charisma or a special organizational structure. They also believe that high performance is worthless unless there is an important mission to serve.
Ten Lessons on Organizational Design
Poor Performance Is Not Always Accidental
In the economic system, organizations are generally designed by participants who want them to succeed. In the political system, public bureaucracies are designed in no small measure by participants who expressly want them to fail.”17.
The Consequences of Coup-Proofing
High Performance Is Not Always Neat
Asked how long it takes him to determine whether an organization is working well, Camm said, “It takes me a long time. It must be awful in here.” Actually, that's a good thing because again it's a pull instead of a push.
High Performance Is Not Always Efficient
In other words, some waste and inefficiency may be essential to the fault tolerance required if an organization is to survive and thrive. No two highly successful organizations are the same, and managers must tailor solutions based on the individuals, the environment and the mission to be achieved.”
Measuring High Performance
High Performance Does Not Reside in Hierarchy (or the Lack Thereof)
RAND does not believe in an ideal organizational form, whether flat or long, wide or thin, centralized or decentralized. In military health care, for example, Susan Hosek and Gary Cecchine of RAND find that a relatively flat organizational structure provides better performance than a highly centralized pyramid.
Comparing Organizational Structures
High Performance Does Not Require Charisma
I think you can be influential in this world without having an attractive personality, but it's easier if people automatically want to listen to you because you're charismatic. They are the kind of people who can pick up and carry an organization, but I have never seen that kind of work in logistics.
High Performance Requires
When you go in there and talk to the cops like that, they say, "Well, I don't want to think strategically." Then the question becomes whether the leader is smart enough or disciplined enough to set the right set of goals and lead the organization in the right direction.” John Birkler echoes this: “I don't believe that leadership has to be charismatic.
Minimal Viability”
High Performance Requires at Least Minimal Competition
The competition emerged from the winning process from the first round, mainly because it disciplined all organizations equally. organizations operating in a competitive environment were rated as exemplary or very good performers, compared to roughly half of organizations operating in a non-competitive environment. Approximately one-sixth of organizations operating in a competitive environment were rated as mediocre or poor performers, compared to more than one-third of organizations operating in a non-competitive environment.
Advantages of Partnerships
High Performance Thrives on Information
Barely half of the vulnerable elderly receive the recommended health care they need in general, and less than a third receive the recommended care for geriatric conditions such as malnutrition, pressure ulcers, dementia and end-of-life situations. It hardly makes sense to invest in new drugs if doctors don't know when or how to use them, which is one of the reasons Pfizer asked RAND to assess the quality of care in the first place.24.
High Performance Thrives on Delegation
They also receive only half the medications they need, in part because medical schools may not provide the training needed to diagnose and treat geriatric conditions, and in part because physicians may be concerned about drug overdoses and the cost of prescription drugs.23. The program was designed to address the enormous pressure on doctors to keep office visits short, which limits the diagnosis and care of the one in five patients who show symptoms of depression.
High Performance Starts and Ends with Mission
12 The survivors of the second round were identified through nine separate ordinary least squares regressions of the 29 characteristics surviving from the first round. The 13 survivors of the third round were identified through a single ordinary least squares regression of the 13 characteristics surviving from the second round.
Innovation at Marriott
However, the initiative was not designed to brand Marriott as a place to invest. As part of the effort, it offers a variety of training opportunities, both voluntary and mandatory.
DEFINING ROBUSTNESS
As such, robust organizations are certainly resilient, as Gary Hamel and Liisa Välikangas define the term.5 "A goal is a strategy that is forever changing, always adapting to emerging opportunities and emerging trends," they argue. Finally, take the idea that companies falter when they invest too much in "what is" and not enough in "what could be." Strong organizations do this as well, but they also create internal structures and processes that are themselves flexible.
THE FOUR PILLARS OF ROBUSTNESS
What has long been emerging in business is now becoming evident in the organizational structures of cyberwar actors.”. In short, terrorist organizations have become some of the most successful organizations in the world, largely by drawing strength from all four pillars of resilience described below.
Alertness
Ronfeldt states, “virtual or networked organizations are heralded as effective alternatives to bureaucracies – as in the case of Eastman Chemical Company and the Shell-Sarnia Plant – because of their inherent flexibility, adaptability and ability to capitalize on the talents of all members of the organization . While the all-channel network is the most difficult to build and maintain, if only because each unit must have some contact with the others, it is also the most powerful for the kind of pulses Arquilla and Ronfeldt describe in their study of swarm.
Essentials of Measurement
My experience is that if they can't answer those questions quickly or haven't done that work already, they're just not functional." Reflecting on his own experience as a baseball and football coach, Dertouzos argues that winning and losing often have nothing to do with ability: “You know when you're a good coach.
Selecting Measures
As much as they love measuring, RAND researchers also share a uniform skepticism about potential measurement abuse. I think the progress we've made in quality measurement over the past two to three decades is really about getting the metrics right, and really being much clearer about how we measure things, and how we even choose the standards how we measure things. .
Agility
Air forces that were designed for a world with only two theaters—Western Europe and Northeast Asia—increasingly operate in areas with no main operating bases and few, if any, temporary locations. As a recent report states, “The Air Force goal of deploying a nominal expeditionary package (a 36-ship mixed fighter squadron with air defense suppression, air superiority, and attack aircraft) within 48 hours to an unprepared bare base cannot be achieved with today's support processes.
Adaptability
Third, high-performing units were aligned around a common goal: “The biggest, biggest characteristic was the common approach to the problem that the units took—commanders had trained their units to react the same way in different situations before training. . At least in these cases, suitability depended on the type of organization that RAND researchers seem to like best—the innovative, entrepreneurial organization led by an honest, reliable, but decisive leader.
Alignment
At its peak, the program served only 680 of the 7,600 children it originally intended to reach. While the program was a "noble bet," as the RAND research team calls it, the administrative structure governing the program was a nightmare.
RAND TRANSFORMED
We would be smaller, profitable and therefore able to sustain our existence," says Rich, "but we would have to give up a lot of the work we had developed on social and economic policy." We felt that losing the work that we would have to sell would be detrimental to carrying out our mission,” Rich said of the first family of options.
Rand’s New Business Strategy for 1996 and Beyond
Instead, we concluded that the keys to RAND's success lay in its core values and mission.” According to RAND's unofficial "rules of the road," as senior leadership calls them, the contract was simply too restrictive.
BENCHMARKS OF ROBUSTNESS
Seen as such, resilience is a form of organizational capital—it lies in the ability to act. In the short term, powerful organizations may be at a disadvantage against their competitors, if only because they hold at least some of their capital in reserve to guard against surprise.
The Scaffolding of Innovation
It may be easiest of all to tell organizations to regularly survey their customers and clients, but much harder to ensure that they ask the right questions, invest in the best ideas, and use the results to calibrate strong incentives. 12 The discussion is part of a larger volume on accountability, edited by Brian Stecher and Kirby, cited in the bibliography.
Running Robust
THINK IN FUTURES TENSE (ALERTNESS)
Thinking in Futures Tense
Explore the Landscape of Futures
Instead of considering a range of possible futures, they often rush to define the most likely future. In the second case, the military will need a much smaller force, advanced non-lethal weapons, and more training for policing and peacekeeping.
The Value of Alternative Futures
Just because there's no rain in the forecast, to use the picnic analogy of James Dewar, director of RAND's Center for Long-Term Global Policy and Future Human Conditions, doesn't mean rain is impossible. As mentioned earlier, indicators reveal a significant change in the validity or vulnerability of a key assumption about the future.
Expect Surprise
In this way, the Paraguayans' swarm tactics soon disrupted the Bolivian offensive, not least because the former avoided a classic decisive battle in favor of disrupting key nodes of the extensive Bolivian logistics chain. The Bolivians fought with great courage, but despite their greater numbers, they fought most battles at a numerical disadvantage: they were defeated in detail.
Challenge Assumptions
Assumption-based planning is best done when decision makers can compare their vision of the future to alternative worlds. Finally, it works better when plans are reviewed at the highest level of the organization where resource decisions are made.
Reduce Regret
Additionally, assumption-based planning works better when plans are more detailed than loose, primarily because the underlying assumptions are more easily described. It is not the deductive, fact-based process that we rightly regard as one of the glories of human civilization.
Reducing Regret
There's the wonderful deep literature on the strengths and weaknesses of human decision-making that says taxi drivers can basically tell you all the things that people do wrong. Dewar believes that "the best approach in an uncertain planning environment is to do what needs to be done now and watch out for changes that will address the uncertainty in the future." As.
Focus on Effects
In 2001, for example, R AND released an informal effects-based evaluation of the California Wellness Foundation's $60-million Violence Prevention Initiative (CPI). However, the most important contribution of the evaluation was not in the specific data.
ORGANIZE FOR LIGHTNING (AGILITY)
As the California Wellness Foundation notes in the foreword to RAND's final report, “given the relatively modest size of our grants, a host of other concurrent interventions, and a thriving state economy, it would take real hubris to claim that VPI should get the credit.” .As the foundation notes, the initiative's ultimate success depends on creating a social movement of the kind seen in RAND's case studies of network organizations.
Organizing for Lightning
Simply put, the study found that smarter soldiers hit more enemy aircraft, thereby missing fewer missiles. As the study concludes, soldiers learn key skills on the job, most importantly if and when they must engage aircraft.
Recruit in Futures Tense
Like the other soldiers of the future, cyber soldiers must come from the top of the job market, not the bottom. The question, therefore, is what the military can do to compete with private organizations and non-profit organizations for its share of the talent.
Train for Agility
As the R AND research team reports: "Even the newest mechanics and operators have some insight into the machines, processes and practices based on their day-to-day experience. Written and spoken English language skills came last on the list, just before knowledge of international affairs and management training and experience .
The Changing Workforce
Training for Agility
Although the term microworld has been around for the better part of 30 years and was introduced in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook as one of many tools to promote learning, there has been little research into how such simulators might actually work in developing the necessary skills.13 Therefore, RAND is working to build and test an actual micro-world simulation of supply distribution on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. As a RAND study of 75 international organizations shows, just spending money on training is not enough.
Set Just-Beyond-Possible Goals
In the military, you have a unit that is going to be on call at some point to deploy and perform its function—it could be a battlefield function, combat function, etc. be. On the other hand, let's move back to peacetime, which is a good 95 percent of the time a person is in the military, or if you think of a large organization, it's mostly not in ultimate crisis mode where survival is at stake.
Provide Authority to Act
Part of the difference is that charter schools often lack the expertise to take advantage of funding opportunities. RAND found greater parental involvement in their sample of charter schools than in the matched public schools.
Think Lean
It could take current light forces like the 82ndAirborne, and give them better and heavier equipment, including its own precision weapons that could be brought to bear against heavier opponents. Using simulations of light forces pitted against the type of heavier forces they faced in the 1991 Gulf War, RAND found that the current generation of light forces simply cannot hold their own against a powerful adversary. armor that decides to fight.
CHALLENGE THE PREVAILING WISDOM (ADAPTABILITY)
In the early 2000s, Xerox also asked General Electric Capital to overhaul its billing process, which had fallen out of favor due to administrative consolidation. The secret, if we can describe it as such, is to create an organizational capacity to adapt by rewarding learning and imagination, pooling expertise, unbalancing indicators of traditional financial and non-financial measures, and adopting the concept of command as a form of delegation and participation.
Challenging the Prevailing Wisdom
As mentioned earlier, organizations do not need to adapt in all circumstances – sometimes they will decide that their path is safe even in the face of new realities. But they must be able to adapt when necessary, either by adopting entirely new strategies and products or by changing direction slightly to keep up with the future they face.
Create the Freedom to Learn
Part of the challenge lies in the tyranny of project research, which rarely allows time for reflection. Part of the challenge comes from the internal labor market, which allows senior researchers to move from project to project in search of the most interesting work.
Create the Freedom to Imagine
This is also what R AND has learned from its recent research into the housing sector. You must have a receptive organizational climate that (1) fosters a continually refined vision of how war can change, and (2) encourages vigorous debate about the future of the organization.
Aggregate Expertise
The Navy's decision to embrace aircraft carriers, even though doing so made its battleships highly vulnerable and virtually useless. Second, organizations must be willing to embrace revolutions started elsewhere, which requires a willingness to learn and adapt.
Managing Cross-Functional Teams
And that's the joy that we all get from working here, and the fact that you don't punch a clock. We hypothesized that a purely centralized top-down intervention would be unsuccessful,” the researchers argue, largely because local doctors would be less likely to accept advice from above.
Unbalance the Scorecard
On the other hand, the researchers expected local teams to be more successful, mainly by "taking advantage of local practices and thus in designing sustainable programs." Army-wide teams were responsible for designing the overall reform, while site improvement teams were responsible for adapting current implementation.
Unbalancing the Scoreboard
It was therefore no surprise that Olin would use value addition as the fundamental goal of environmental remediation, whether in the form of cost avoidance, cost savings or cost recovery. In addition to encouraging organizations to find a set of simple, actionable metrics, my interpretation of the R OG knowledge base suggests five principles for creating high-performance measurement: measure in future tension, collect the right dots, avoid overreliance on any measure of performance, keep the measures relatively simple and give room for intuition.
