Abstract
This chapter aims to explore the possibilities of visualising work-integrated competence networks—here referred to as relatonics—and contribute to the understanding of how to support efforts of organising change. The competence-generating processes of an organisation are problematic in that they are largely hidden in the midst of everyday practice. If not receiving adequate attention, there is the risk of conducting too frequent, disruptive, and unhealthy reorganisations. This strengthens the reason why visualisations of relatonics are of value. The demarcation line between what is hidden, and what is not, is relocated through the use of visualisations of relatonics. A conclusion is that images representing relatonics can be utilised to support informed change decisions.
TopIntroduction
The issue of how to understand and lead change in organisations has frequently been addressed both in practice and in research literature (e.g. Beer et al., 1990; By, 2005; Kotter, 1996; Seo et al., 2004). Organisational changes are usually done with the intention to improve some aspects of the organisation, for instance to make the organisation better at performing its core tasks. Such changes can be crucial for the ability to compete in the market, but previous research indicates that a major part of organisational change efforts does not bring the intended improvements (Balogun, 2006; Beer et al., 1990; Brunsson, 2006). There are identified problems both with too frequent and disruptive reorganisations (Brunsson, 2006; Döös, 2007) and with implementing everyday incremental change (Beer et al., 2005). The outcome of organisational changes may actually be the opposite and lead to decreased organisational performance. How come? An explanation put forward here is that people’s ability to adequately conduct the core tasks of an organisation is highly dependent on the many times hidden relationships of work, the relatonics (Backström & Döös, 2008; Döös, 2007). Since these relationships of work are hidden, it is easy to overlook them when conducting organisational changes, e.g., restructuring the organisation by moving people to a new department. An unintended consequence of change may thus be that the established relatonics are disrupted. This is a problem, because beyond individually gained knowledge and skills, people’s competence at work is carried in the competence-bearing relationships that form relatonics. Relatonics emerge around certain core tasks and disrupted relatonics lead to decreased competence to perform the work task (Backström & Döös, 2008; Döös, 2007).
Against this background, we argue that uncovering the hidden relationships of work is critical for managers to be able to make informed decisions of what kind of change to impose on their organisation. This chapter suggests visualisation of relatonics as a pre-step before making decisions about or starting an organisational change effort; a pre-step intended to understand the already existing competencies of the organisation and its relatonics. The demarcation line between what is hidden, and what is not, may be relocated through the use of visualisations of relatonics.
Furthermore, a basic assumption in this chapter is that people – managers and staff – act according to their understanding and conceptions of the world (Hmelo et al., 2000; Sandberg & Targama, 2007). This implies that providing new visualisations and images of organisation may aid decisions and actions and improve ways of working. Conceptions of the world are grounded in understanding and largely dependent on experiences, and in certain images coupled to one’s understanding. The importance of images has been acknowledged in, for example, organisational ethnography (Cornelissen et al., 2008; Hatch & Yanow, 2008; Ybema et al., 2009). The main focus of earlier research was to verbalise, i.e., to capture images in words, either in metaphors or in articulation, whereby knowledge is made more explicit or usable to others. For example, Weick et al. (2005) describe the “image of sensemaking” as an “activity that talks events and organizations into existence” (p. 413).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Relatonic: Work-integrated competence networks embedded in the on-going carrying out of work tasks, what we refer to as relatonics ( Backström & Döös, 2008 ). A key determinant differentiating relatonics from social structures in general, is the fact that relatonics emerges in relation to a certain work task, and comprises the competence bearing relationships one is using to perform the task; thus, there are multiple relatonics in an organisation. A relatonic may crisscross between several organisational units and, also, cross the boundary of the organisation to include external partner organisations.
Competence-Bearing Relationship: Competence is not only an individual phenomenon, it also exists in relationships between people through cooperative processes conceptualised as competence-bearing relationships ( Döös, 2007 ).
Organigraph: Mintzberg and Van der Heyden (1999) identified and drew four organigraphs on grounds of principle for managerial work: set, chain, hub and web, and with an interest to depict how companies really work. The idea was to reflect the ways people organise themselves at work. They stated that organigraphs are more than pictures; they are maps that give overview. “Unlike the org chart with its strict rules of arrangement, an organigraph requires managers to create a customized picture of their company, something that involves imagination and an open mind” (p. 90).
Human Interaction Dynamics (HID): HID is based on information theory and its focus is to understand how interactions between individuals give rise to structures at a collective level, and how these structures influence the behavior of the individuals ( Hazy & Backström, 2013 ).
Competence: Basically competence is defined as a situation and context appropriate ability to act ( Döös, 2007 ). We suggest that competence is based on three main premises: a) it is an emergent task-related quality of an individual, team or network of interacting people; b) there is openness to the boundaries of competence (both within and beyond the formal organisation structure); and c) diversity in crucial competence is spread out and circulate across the many, not the few.
Learning Learning: Is here thought of as the experiential process ( Kolb & Kolb, 2010 ; Kolb, 1984 ) that generates competence. Learning among the members of an organisation take place as integrated with the execution of work tasks, which points to the fact that work tasks, problems and situations at work afford on-going opportunities for the development of competence.
Distributed Leadership: Distributed leadership indicates that leadership is viewed as an activity that is spread out between the members of a group or organisation ( Bolden, 2011 ). Leadership may be seen as emerging informally ( Lichtenstein et al., 2006 ) and its existence may be identified as the situations in the work of a team where direction, co-orientation and action space are created ( Crevani et al., 2010 ).