Frederick Kwesi Great Agboletey
Sweden.
Integrated Open Loop Decision Making (Social Arrangements
Around Technology and Machinery)
The notion of
open-loop being suggested here simply implies that within the formal decision
and responsibility hierarchy of formal organisational structures the decision
making process be conceived as an all encompassing participative engagement,
rather than being a uni-linear transfer of directives from upper to lower
levels or from management to operations.
The notion of
organisations as socio-technical systems has been an organisational awareness
since the 1950's and it is a relevant awareness. The workplace is a social
setting where value aggregates around socially mediated states. The technology
is a given and the personnel assigned to the jobs are barely self-selective
other than as per pre-specified background requirements for the task in
question. The nature of exchange relationships that evolves between the
personnel may be task based to significant extents, but there is a cogent
social dimension to exchange relationships at the workplace that determines the
quality of work and the employees’ satisfaction with their work setting.
One important
consideration of management is how to gain appreciation of the expectations of
employees, their aspirations as they expect it to be fulfilled in the
organisation, how their values as regard work and life merge with the employing
organisation's ´work philosophy, and how informal group norms and norms
deriving from workplace interaction support or undermine organisational goals.
The organisation thus has to be able to ascertain these various states of the
employee through “mutually engaged” management techniques, which integrates the
employee with the organisation’s decision making process. Obvious as this is,
many organisational problems result from discordances that arise from an
organisation’s management impositions. The suggestion being made here is that
under normal circumstances, individuals who enter into employment at any
workplace should be seen and treated as much as part owners as those who have
invested financial resources to set up the organisation and need to be seen in
that light as part owners who must be actively engaged in mutual establishment
of the organisational system state that make the organisation and its employees
collective winners in the value creation effort of resource processing.
Clearly, whatever an
individual's view of reality before joining an organisation, those views and
cultivated norms are capable of being influenced and positively changed to the
benefit of the organisation under the appropriate conditions. (On the reverse,
employees can be subtly influenced correctly or incorrectly by informal group
viewpoints to interpret the organisation along any of variety of assumptions
that work contrary to organisation’s expectations).
Clearly, there is
preponderant evidence that the employee's capacities, preferences and
expectations cannot be taken as a given, but these are factor variables that
are influenced by the organisational context and are capable of being
influenced decisively by management practices and the contingencies of the
working environment and its provisional state, positively or negatively.
The immediate
implication of this is that the organisation must design primary job functions
with the intention of positively influencing its employees and structure the
work groups into an organisational system structure that is responsive to the
employees needs and make employees sensitive to organisation system
expectation, creating interfaces where these two major organisational forces
can interact with reduced friction.
Thus this awareness
of the organisation being an open, socio-technical system, enables management
to constantly pose the guiding question in organisational system design and the
adjustment thereof in response to changing circumstances, and the inevitable
pressures for general system adjustment in response to internal and external
pressures for adjustment; "what combination of technology, management
influenced employee attitude and conformed organisational structures would
enable the most effective state of organisation framework around which
individuals and groups interact to realise their required tasks?
The intention of this
guiding question will enable an organisation's management to ascertain how the
influence of varied, sector informational inputs encompassing employee
perspectives with reference to specified tasks, the organisations available
resources set against existing technological developments and acquired
technological level of a particular organisation could be employed in
determining what best fit could be enabled in any particular task configuration
set into total organisational system.
These considerations
among others enable the configuration of the most appropriate work methods that
under desirable considerations would allow technology and machinery to be
responsive to the social needs of humans grouped around tasks. Allowing these
groupings to be integrated into supervisory and management supportive systems
to define the most appropriate organisational social system that would support
the organisation structure designated to interlink persons in various positions
of responsibilities in the organisation.
The basic
consideration in realising the desired organisational social milieu that is
both supportive of the social needs of employees and capable of generating
management production targets within the circumscriptions of the existing
organisational conditions can best be facilitated by bringing employees at all
levels in the organisation into primary task decision making and discussing
ways of facilitating the appropriate working environment within the limitations
of existing organisational resources.
Open loop
decision-making will encourage employees to express their opinions in active
task management processes. - There is no best way to manage but there are
well-tested approaches that have consistently yielded desired employee reaction
in terms of attitude to work and the employer. - Management practices are based
on individual management philosophies as to the best way to manage integrated
into formal assumptions of what is currently deemed appropriate and best, as
well as analysis of total organisational system, which situational state might
suggest what is most appropriate in terms of management orientation, as well as
external environment information about what pertains in other similar
organisations. These serve as input analysis to derive an assumed state of
effective mode of management conduct. Which in turn determines how tasks are
organised, employees allotted to the tasks designated and the control and
supervision system set in place to gird employee activities. The decision loop
is opened in that these management conclusions are then open to work groups to
confirm as suitable and task supportive, both at individual task realisation
level and at potential group norm influencing capability. The organisation in
seeking for employee input, by default, must create meaningful decision influencing
room for work group input.
Open loop enables
flexibility for employee determination of optimum states for effective
productivity within an expectation framework emanating from an organisation's
final decision-making body.
While an organisation's
management are positioned to have overview knowledge of overall system and the
various external environments monitored by an organisation and aggregate these
information for decision making, micro-management of work groups are best
enabled when the work group itself within the supportive framework of
management expectancies is made to appreciate effectiveness in particular
management decisions as related to a particular work group, rather than being
left outside the loop. This awareness must be mutually acknowledged and
considered an aspect of the organisation's management strategy, a means for
overall system stability and optimum productivity to be conceived in terms of
management attempting to cultivate a sense of collective ownership and mutual
engagement among its employees and facilitating the conditions under which
management knowledge and organisational awareness state enables work groups to
make the best decisions, with regards to their peculiar needs in the light of
organisational expectations and resources available.
Aspects of an
existing production process may have, at times, to be slightly adjusted to
enable the best human-machinery fit. Where these involve the initial outlay of
capital, an organisation's management may have to decide whether short term
savings due to unwillingness to invest scarce monetary resources to adapt
machinery, technology or basic infra-structural provisions to yield adequate
employee/task group needs weigh favourably against the long term undetermined
consequences of employee dissatisfaction because of management lack of
consideration for employee needs.
It is within that
context that the open-loop decision making approach is recommended since it
enables a point of interaction that narrows relevant information to self-selected
points of implementation reference, where the situational awareness capacities
of the organisation interact at the narrow perspectives of work
groups/employees to facilitate the corroborative optimum implementation states
for task execution, enabling the development of self evolving socially
supportive work setting, as a congruent state of dynamically negotiated outcome
state of management-employee (most likely, task group mediated) interaction at
a common interface for mutually desirable end states, with the resources of the
one giving relevance to the needs of the other.
The fundamental
precept under which management employs its vast resources for overall
organisational system-environment monitoring is partly for operational level
decisions which must be varied in response to noticed variations in external as
well as internal organisational states. While management has better oversight
and insight as regards the appropriate choice of action to promote the
organisation’s well-being, there is an intrinsic element of task performance
that in adaptive change implementation predisposes management as an external
knowledge and advisory content providing an analytical framework for effective
structuring of organisational situational state for effective implementation.
It is within that construct that a need for open loop decision-making is
recommended as an effective tool of adaptive change management processes.
