The problem with management

I keep asking myself why major organisations keep making elementary errors which often defy belief.  For example

• The present e-conveyancing initiative which proposes that all legal conveyancing documents be held centrally and digitally signed.  Clearly impractical and has no chance of ever flying.
• Bandwidth companies such as BT believing that they should be content companies.  I was part of the ASL trial and attended a meeting where it became apparent that they wanted to be a content provider no matter what we said to them.  Clearly doomed.
• Do you remember SET?  Obviously impractical (I said to at the time this is not hindsight) yet the banks poured millions into it.
• WAP was obviously not going to be any use to anyone except in very specific situations - yet over-hyped to the point where it became a running joke.

It gets more serious when we go to war in the most volatile part of the world with (it now seems) no clear idea as to how that volatility was to be contained.

Why do we do it?

I think it is because there are type A people and type B people:

• Type A people are good at detail and tactics but not very good at seeing the big picture
• Type B people see the big picture but get bored with detail.

Any management text will tell you that Type B people make the best managers because they provide the guidance to the organisation and they need to see the wood and not be confused by the trees.

However there is a design flaw in all this.  Type A people tend to defer to Type B people even if they are talking rubbish.  Good managers want their ideas to be critisised if there is something wrong with them. They understand that they have not gone into the detail and need someone to audit anything they come up with.   However few Type A people want to put their head above the parapet when their boss is presenting his/her ideas. 

Put this together with the phenomenon of groupthink and we have a recipe for disaster.

Type B people seem to think that in using certain words they actually understand the concepts behind them.  So for example the people who put together the early  e-conveyancing reports in the government use the term Digital Signature when in fact they mean Certificate.  Clearly they had only a vague understanding of the technology. 

Type B people will often make assumptions about concepts or assume that technical details can be resolved later.  Type A people will tend to defer to the Type B person and once a few people start nodding their heads, Groupthink kicks in and soon the whole organisation is taking it for granted that a particular course of action is in fact practical and the emporer is wearing cloths. 

How do we solve this?  I think it is an issue of management style.  But I believe that we should always be vigilant.