An Organization Is a Community with a Mission
Summary: An organization is a community with a mission. Each has its own distinctive set of participants, practices, statuses, choice principles, language and world, which together make up the specific organization and distinguish it from others.
NOTE: This paper was written to be read carefully and thoughtfully – more like a book chapter than a web article. You may find skimming it frustrating.
What makes a community an organization is its shared mission. Most of us already appreciate the central role of mission in organizations, so let’s concentrate on the part with which we are probably less familiar: the organization as community.
Warning: I am not using the word “community” here in its most common usage. Typically we think of a community as where we live, with schools and parks and taxes and garbage-collection; that is not what I mean when I say an organization is a community with a mission. Instead, I am using “community” in its more fundamental sense (a usage common in behavioral sciences) to refer to a group of people who share some very important things.
A community is a group of people who share a distinctive view of the world. This distinctive view includes their view of their own individual places in that world, along with characteristic patterns of interacting and talking, and shared understanding of how “one of us” acts and talks.
Those “very important things” which distinguish a community can be broken down into:
Participants: An organization consists, fundamentally, of people: people doing things; people getting other people to do things; people using machines and technology to get things done; people using numbers to measure things; people participating in core processes; people getting results, including bottom line results. This one fact is so obvious and so important that we often overlook it.
But we’re not talking about just any people; we are talking about the participants in your organization. These are people who see themselves as part of your organization; who are seen by others, both inside and outside, as part of your organization; who are bound together by common understandings and practices and, indeed, by a common ethic determined by your mission. The results your organization achieves are the results of what the participants in your organization do. Your organization will not change unless you change what your organization’s participants do (and how they do it.)
Practices: Work occurs through the actions of individuals (often working in teams). But no action in an organization occurs in isolation; action is always part of a larger pattern of actions, which provide both structure and meaning for each particular action. We will refer to these larger patterns of action as “practices”. Practices define and largely determine what results you can get from your people.
Example: Bob and Susan each received voicemail asking them to stop by the Boss’s office after close of business on Friday. Susan was delighted, Bob started to sweat. Why? Susan works for a consulting firm, where being invited to stop by after work is initiation into the informal bull sessions where the real planning is done. At Bob’s high-tech company, being invited to stop by after work usually means you are going to be fired on the spot. Same action, different practices; entirely different meanings and results.
Statuses: Top sergeants run the army; supervisors run manufacturing plants. Newly-graduated engineers like Jason find out quickly that paper authority is one thing, while real authority usually comes with 20+ years on the shop floor. “Tony, I’m responsible for the design of this new part. But half the time when I send the machine shop a new drawing for a prototype they change something – they say what I sent them won’t work! How can I get them to just do what I tell them?”
Jason’s “role” as defined by his job description was clear. He had the authority and responsibility to get what he wanted – on paper. But Jason was running up against the fact that organizational roles, as defined on paper, often vary from the actual statuses in the organization – and those statuses determine who actually gets to do what.
A status is a specific place within the practices of an organization. Think of it as a bundle of permissions and eligibilities – a person occupying a particular status has organizational eligibility to do and decide certain things. For example, technical groups often have “technical gurus” who everyone turns to for help with what new technology is adopted and how it is best used. You won’t find “technical guru” on anybody’s job description, but the status and its power are nonetheless very real.
(By the way, Jason eventually figured out how to work the status structure of his organization to get what he needed done.)
Choice Principles: Organizational life is filled with choices. Where should we concentrate our efforts? Which projects should be funded, and which cut? How exactly will we carry out this new product development effort? Who gets what resources? Who gets which assignment? What should I do now? Our decisions on these matters and many others reflect the choice principles of our organization.
Tara is a fast-track team leader for a well-known systems integrator. She knows exactly how to make important choices: always do whatever it takes to get the job done, on time, for the customer. Tara’s choices are consistently rewarded with bonuses and promotion. Marian works for another equally well-known consulting firm, and has been equally well-rewarded for her choices, which are based on consistently maximizing her own and her people’s billings. Tara’s choices would brand her as a maverick in Marian’s firm; Marian’s choices would get her shunted off the management track in Tara’s company. Different organizations; different choice principles; different choices and results.
We need to be very clear about something here: “choice principles” is not just another way of saying “values”. “Values” statements hang on the wall in many offices along with the Framed Mission; when you look carefully at the methods used to come up with those values, you realize they are statements about how we want or intend things to be. Values are the “official story” about how things should be; choice principles are what we use in reality to decide among possible courses of action. We would like values and choice principles – the official story and the actual reality – to be the same. They seldom are. Here’s a simple choice principle for creating value in organizations: Always focus on what is real.
Language: I recently had a remarkable day. I spent the morning with a group of heavy-equipment operators, helping them design an upcoming meeting, then spent the afternoon and early evening facilitating a strategic planning retreat for a university Information Sciences department. At the end of the day, I was fairly certain that both groups had been speaking English, but I would have been hard pressed to name any other common element in their language.
Language, as much as any other factor, distinguishes one organization from another. I want to highlight a subtle but powerful aspect of language: how your organization uses language. If your immediate thought is: “Why, we use language to communicate, of course” then either (1) you are very fortunate in the organization you work for, or (2) you will benefit greatly from taking a more careful look at this issue of language use.
One quick example: Two well-known organizations call the people who work for them “Associates”. One organization uses the word to convey the central role these people play in serving customers, determining operational procedure, and sharing in exceptional financial results; these are no mere “employees”, and the word “associate” accurately captures their standing in the organization. In the second organization, “associate” is code for “interchangeable minimum-wage cog in our machine that we hope to keep from unionizing by calling them associates.” These organizations are using language differently, one to say as accurately as possible what we can expect from each other, the other to divert attention from their real intentions. Guess which organization moves nimbly and quickly whenever needed, and which couldn’t change the ketchup in the corporate dining room without a court order?
World: We come back to our anchoring concept: each community has its own distinctive, shared view of the world. People generally do not distinguish between their view of the world and the world itself (regardless of how sophisticated our relativistic talk may be, we all live within the comfortable assumption that our view of reality is reality). We may as well push it just a bit further, then, and say that each community lives in its own, distinct world – which it takes to be the world.
But what happens when two distinct communities try to interact? If they are careful or lucky, things can work out. But when these communities both exist within the same organization, and when both are certain their view of the organization is the organization – well then, watch out, because that’s when worlds collide. (Ever seen engineers and marketers in a product-launch meeting? Or finance folk doing budgets with manufacturing supervisors? You can truly get into “the war of the worlds”.)
