ICA As Management System

This is a brief excerpt from one page of a remarkable 886-page book by Richard Greene, a member of the Order during the years in which he describes it here. Richard has served as a faculty member at various universities, including the University of Chicago; he currently lives and teaches in Japan.

I'm not aware of many attempts to describe our operations from the perspective of an academic discipline in the way this one does. The book was published in 1993.

---

Beyond sociotechnical quality. Strangely, the largest step beyond sociotechnical design was taken 20 years ago by an organization in the United States that is well-known in Japan and parts of Europe and almost completely unknown here-the Institute of Cultural Affairs (lCA). Where current consultant organizations offer 40-year-old sociotechnical design principles enhanced with modem ubiquitous computing technology, this is like coating a sociotechnical core with information appliances. It does not represent an in-depth working out of the computational potential for influencing social activity and social activity's potential for influencing the computation. A new academic discipline called organizational computing (first conferences offered in 1991) works this out. That new field has not yet recognized the powerful theorizing and application in this area performed 20 years ago by the Institute of Cultural Affairs in Chicago. In Chapter Twenty-Seven's discussion of monastic management, I describe some of the management systems of the Institute of Cultural Affairs. Here, I present the paradigm that produced the particulars mentioned there.

For example, consider an organization in which:

1.All employees meet one month a year in mass workshops redesigning the organization's processes and tuning its mission.

2.12,000 people are mobilized by it as a part-time weekly worldwide research network doing such things as abstracting 180,000+ books and building a process model from them.

3.One department studies all problems reported monthly, investigates with the local people the root causes of those problems, consults experts worldwide, and leads workshops with the local people to design solutions and implementations of solutions.

4.All work is based on specific cognitive methods, mastery of which is the critical promotion determinant.

5.Each year a sample of all the organization's customers are brough in to lead a week-long workshop of company personnel on improvements in the company's products and services.

6.All days are divided into three subdays--prework, work, and postwork--with each employee having a different job in each setting. Prework is three hours from 6 to 9 A.M. in a large group setting of 200 per department. Work is usual work and jobs as we know them. Postwork is from 6 to 9 P.M. in an informal avocation setting of units of 30 people each.

7.Cascades of workshops across all geographic units, down all organizational levels, across all functional subunits, between all customers of the organization and the organization continually take place as major venues in which work gets done.

8.Managers are chosen for all positions based on mastery of particular skill sets for the position proven by having the manager teach a series of seminars on that skill set till judged a master teacher in it.

– from p. 102, Richard Tabor Greene, Global Quality: A Synthesis of the World’s Best Management Methods, ASQC Quality Press, Milwaukee, WI, 1993

-- GordonHarper - 01 Jul 2009