One evening few weeks ago, my wife Hudi, representing a non-profit agency
that she works with, met with a volunteer committee of another agency to
talk about an event that the two agencies were going to do together. She
came back babbling about the inefficiency of the committee. It took, she
said, two hours to do 15 minutes of work because the people went off on
tangents and gossiped.
As we talked about it, however, we realized that, in this case, and
probably in many others, "efficiently reaching business results" are not
what's important to the volunteers. What's more important is the process
of getting those results. They get their "pay" in the activity itself,
the social interaction of the committee, in the role they play on the
committee, and in the friendships that come from their work. The
"business results" are secondary to those (very informal, poorly
structured) processes.
In the July-August 1997 issue of _Harvard Business Review_, INSEAD
professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne wrote an article entitled,
"Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy." They describe with
convincing logic and anecdotes that, "Outcomes matter, but no more than
the fairness of the processes that produce them." If fact, they assert
that, even in business, the process is more important than the result.
"Without fair processes," they say, "even outcomes that employees might
favor can be difficult to achieve."
Kim and Mauborgne say that a fair process follows three principles:
1. Engagement, which "means involving individuals in the decisions that
affect them by asking for their input and allowing them to refute the
merits of one another's ideas and assumptions."
2. Explanation, which "means that everyone involved and affected should
understand why final decisions are made as they are."
3. Expectation clarity, which "requires that once a decision is made,
managers state clearly the new rules of the game," even (especially) if
they are rules that people may not like.
Fair process is not consensus, nor is it employee rule, nor is it majority
rule. The keys to fair process are involvement, openness, and clarity
within the existing workplace governance structure, whatever it is. In
fact, one of the weaknesses of the article, in my opinion, is that it
accepts the traditional status of "managers" and "employees" as two highly
distinct groups. But t many advanced organizations are doing all they can
to blur these artificial role distinctions through dramatically flatten
hierarchical structures and by empowering people in all jobs at all
levels.
Interestingly, power structures are implied but not explicitly discussed
in the article, except at the very end. But, the authors talk about three
forms of "justice" that can exist in organizations. (Can there be
"justice" without "power"?) The first is "retributive justice," where, in
the absence of a perceived fair process, the "employees" not only "want
fair process restored (but) also seek to visit punishment and vengeance
upon those who have violated it ..."
Next is "distributive justice" where the managers fulfill their promises,
and the employees fulfill theirs, but neither goes beyond the explicitly
stated specifications. Distributive justice exists in a world of nothing
but rules and compliance.
The authors, however, recommend striving for "procedural justice," where
"fair process builds trust and commitment, trust and commitment produce
voluntary cooperation, and voluntary cooperation drives performance,
leading people to go beyond the call of duty by sharing their knowledge
and applying their creativity."
This all sounds both appealing and relatively straightforward. But the
authors say that fair process and procedural justice are rare because most
people confuse fair process with fair outcomes. They say that "the few
managers who focus on process (at all) might (use) only one of the fair
process principles (usually the engagement/involvement principle)."
At the end of the article, Kim and Mauborgne claim that there are two
fundamental reasons for the scarcity of fair process. The first is that
managers continue to want to retain power and do so by withholding
necessary information and by maintaining organizational, social, and
intellectual distance between them and their employees.
The second reason offered is that the authors believe that we all have
grown up with the "largely unconscious economic assumption ... that people
are concerned only with what's best for themselves. But," the authors
assert, "there is ample evidence to show that when the process is
perceived to be fair, most people will accept outcomes that are not wholly
in their favor."
Well, maybe. I guess that if the balance of power is such that we are
going to be hurt in any case, we prefer being hurt in a fair process
rather than an unfair one. But what happens if there is a perception of
power parity?
Shortly after I read the fair process article, I happened upon an op-ed
piece in the September 5, 1997 edition of The Wall St. Journal. Written
by political scientist Irving Kristol, the column is entitled, "Conflicts
that Can't Be Resolved." Kristol talks about processes that occur between
groups where each claims at least equal if not superior power.
The process, as you may have guessed, is the ever-popular "peace process."
Kristol lists some the places where versions of the process are being
pursued, such as Cyprus, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Korea, and, of course,
the Middle East. As Kristol says, "So many 'peace processes' and so
little peace! What's going on?"
Further in the column, Kristol continues, "...it is hard to find a peace
process that has accomplished anything anywhere. That is because
'conflict resolution' is itself a ... theory with a very skimpy,
simple-minded psychological basis. The axiom of this theory is that
harmony among human beings is more natural than conflict... and that if we
can only get the parties in conflict to talk to one another, the level of
'mistrust' will decline and mutual understanding will increase, until at
some point the conflict itself will subside."
Kristol feels that applying this theory to "statecraft or to any conflict
between collective entities, is an extreme case of academic hubris. When
collective entities clash, it is usually because their interests are at
odds... The reason that the 'peace process' gets nowhere ... is that no
mediator can envisage an end situation (realistically) satisfactory to
both parties."
Kristol is a little harsh, almost cynical. Endless rounds of peace
processes, even if punctuated by terrorism, are better than all out war,
if those are the only alternatives. But the peace process is an extreme
example of where results don't automatically come from even the fairest of
processes.
Closer to home is the example of Total Quality Control. When we at
Hewlett-Packard first embraced this concept in the early 1980s, we adopted
a model that called for getting the "approach," the process, right, and
the model assumed that good business results would follow. We built our
first Quality Maturity System (QMS) reviews around this premise. By 1990,
we recognized a problem. Some of our fastest growing, most successful
divisions had apparently chaotic processes, while what appeared to be some
of our most process-focused organizations were not nearly as successful.
In the next version of QMS, we looked for results first. If the results
were obvious amidst a process desert, we tried to tease-out the
underlying, often latent processes. And, if the results weren't there but
processes looked good, we searched for the underlying, often latent flaws
in the processes.
Processes are powerful tools. They can be means to ends and ends unto
themselves. They are ways of coordinating activities toward economic,
technological, and social purposes. And, like all else, they are subject
to the subject evaluation of us mere mortals. As with most things,
processes are more subject to the vague rules of economics and sociology
than to the determinism of physics.
How have you seen processes used well? How have you seen them misused?
What guidelines might you suggest for assuring that processes improve and
not thwart our humanity?