Replying to LO27527 --
Malcolm I'm not sure if audit has technical meanings to you which it
doesn't to me. However, there is one communications and knowledge-sharing
implication of an audit process of primary concern to me: namely that it
is pervasive in its organisational influence, the way it requires all
people to contribute through its measurement or systemised process, the
way it drives people's behaviours (what they areewarded or penalised for),
what performance is thought to be and what the overall culture etc does,
the way it effectively over-trumps any learning or knowledge process that
isn't approved as an audit..
Given this is what an audit does (assuming we're agreed it has this
impact) its monstrous that we don't have an audit (1) that conditions the
right things to happen as might be defined by people who are interested in
how the intangible or human relationships aspects of an organisation work.
These people may include:
-learning organisation
-system effects
-communities of practice
-market-knowledge systems (by which I primarily mean information driven
by the outside of the organisation (eg customers) which people inside the
organisation act on
-communal trust and good relationship behaviours respecting both sides
etc
Dimensions of monstrosity are the following:
-its this relationship stuff which now has far more impact on the value
productivity or decline of an organisation than anything the traditional
accountancy audit measures the operands of this relationship stuff are
mathematically as opposite to traditional accountancy as relativity is to
newtonian mechanics. They include:
relationships not transactions
connectivity instead of accountant's separability
non-linear interactions rather than accountant's linear extrapolations
different time scales
When I start to develop the maths for this (and I am a maths graduate) I
can quickly see that traditional accountants are - due to their system's
ideologies - the profession I would least want to involve first in
constructing an audit of human relationships geared to learning
organisation, productivity, social capital or trust. I'm not sure if
that's something we're in agreement on or disagreement on. But the
fundamental point is why should accountants whose traditional audit may do
some things well (cashflow?) have all the audit power over organisations?
When the way they audit is counter-productive to the behaviours we would
want to condition if you were to make people accountable to good learning
organisation behaviours.
It seems that on this monopolisation on the power of an audit - if that's
what your mails continue to support - you and I will always be on exact
opposite sides of the debate
chris macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
researcher of intangibles audits
audit (1) powers:
-concentrates the mind of the boardroom
-cascades down the culture of the organisation and every person who has
to comply with its logic as well as completing its measurement data
-forms the over-arching mental model and common language of the business
> On November 11, Chris Macrae wrote, in part,
>
> > 3) It's time people started measuring the other 85% , even if it means
> > forming standards as we go. A relevant example is the Baldrige movement.
> > Which formed a standard for what it meant by quality over years of
> > evolving/negotiating the standard
Malcolm Buron wrote in part
I believe (as do others on the list, I think) that "assessment" of the
value
of an activity or state of organizational being, in order to determine
whether it's worthwhile, can be accomplished in a variety of ways. My
first
choice in assessment approaches would certainly not be by auditing, since
to
me this presupposes an accountancy model that doesn't match the intent of
organizational learning very well.
--"chris macrae" <wcbn007@easynet.co.uk>
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