Organisations get sick too
Brain chemistry notwithstanding, the sign of a healthy human psyche is a well-integrated, balanced set of memes that lead to a way of viewing the world that is not too far from reality (or, at least, what most people think 'reality' is). We also looked at what happens when memes become unbalanced in societies, usually in single party systems.
The same can be applied to the memes that organisations run - wait a second, I need to expand on this: I used to be of the opinion that organisations hold memes in process manuals and computer code but that they don’t run them. I’m now sure that organisations do run memes, but not quite in the same way that people do.
We talk here about people running many memes, some of them incompatible, and of subscribing to memes with a certain ‘strength’. Once you aggregate these people together into nations or organisations, you have to talk about populations of memes and of subscription to them in terms of a probability distribution. But the key tests for memes are copy fidelity and imitation, and organisations can pass those tests: people come and go but the organisation and its memes are perpetuated. So provided that we remember that organisations consist of many brains running the same memes at different strengths, I think it is valid to talk of organisations as meme carriers in their own right.
Now, where were we?
I think that meme imbalances and meme clashes are a major cause of corporate malaise. Let’s look at the most common types of problem.
Strategic memes
Strategic memes too weak: It’s easy to spot when an organisation's strategic memes are too weak. There is no common cause to rally round, defeatism and cynicism are rampant, people place their own needs above those of the organisation, and the main occupation of the management becomes inter-organisational politics. You’ve worked there, right?
Strategic memes too strong: On the other hand, organisations that are dominated by a single strategic meme are obsessed - the balance of the needs of stakeholders is forgotten and the management trample over everything (usually the employees) in order to achieve its aims. I have also seen boards gamble the existence of their business on new technologies or new ideas, and this ends badly more often than it ends well.
So where is the strategic ‘sweet spot’? How strong should an organisation’s strategic memes be? Should they be relatively weak, allowing the organisation to evolve for good or ill, or should they be strong and inflexible?
As I’ve said, I believe that ‘making money’ is not sufficient reason for an organisation to exist. Corporate health, for me, relies on having an objective beyond the perpetuation of the organisation, but one that allows for diversity and mutation.
So it should come as no surprise that I believe the strategic ‘sweet spot’ is to have a reasonably strong set of strategic memes.
Tactical memes
Fortunately, it’s even easier to spot organisations with an unbalanced set of tactical memes.
An inadequate or inappropriate set of memes results in an organisation that is out of control, where the management either does not know what is going on or cannot control its day-to-day operation (and I bet you’ve worked there too). Another certain indicator of inadequate or inappropriate tactical memes is poor process or product quality.
At the other extreme, organisations with too many or too strong tactical memes are strangled by bureaucracy and high management costs as subservience to the process gets in the way of the objective.
Since I was raised in England (the relevance of that can be found here), I have an aversion to bureaucracy and a natural inclination to a relatively loose set of tactical memes. This preference will of course vary from society to society: cultures with large power differences and intolerance of ambiguity will tend to favour stronger sets of tactical memes. It will also vary from organisation to organisation within a culture - even I would agree that nuclear power stations need strong control!
Organisations need to keep their tactical memes in balance - if they are too weak, the organisation lacks direction and control; if they are too strong, the organisation is obsessive and bureaucratic.
Corporate sickness from meme clashes
Most good leaders can spot a bad meme; far fewer can create a good meme, and very few can diagnose and fix memetic diseases. And I’ve never worked in an organisation that wasn’t riddled with imbalance and meme clashes.
At the risk of triggering the heresy meme of my friends who work in business schools, I would like to propose the following:
Successful organisations are not those that are best managed, but those that maintain the most consistent set of memes.
The most dangerous, and frequently least common, types of meme clash are ‘strategic versus strategic’. These occur when an organisation wants to do two incompatible things, or when its vision cannot be achieved without contravening its core values. If the memes are living in the brains of the workers (rather than just vision statements written by management consultants), this type of clash spells death for any organisation - it simply will not survive the internal wars that will arise.
But we frequently see these internal riven organisations, usually arising from merger activity, which we will look at in more detail in a memetic explanation for why mergers happen. As an example, however, I once worked in a strategy consultancy that was taken over by a software house, and we were told that the purpose of a strategy assignment was now to steer the client towards an outsourcing deal with our new parent company - this is such a contravention of the value set of a consultancy that it could even be described as corrupt. You won’t be surprised to hear that the merger didn’t end well.
‘Tactical versus strategic’ meme clashes are common and easier to spot. They occur when the working methods of an organisation get in the way of its intentions, causing a form of cognitive dissonance. An example would be a strong set of values emphasising customer service coupled with an appraisal system that punishes employees who spend too long on the phone with customers (I’ve worked there, too).
The main symptom of this type of t-vs-s clash is intense frustration among the staff and customers, and a good leader will quickly find these clashes and kill them off. But if the organisation had good leadership, these wouldn’t have arisen in the first place. I can think of several organisations where ‘quality improvement’ is a shibboleth but pointing out the flaws that cause the quality failures is seen as disloyal.
‘Tactical versus tactical’ meme clashes occur in almost all organisations. The cost reduction programme that requires additional effort, shadow organisation structures, ‘lean manufacturing’ combined with large emergency stockholdings, phoney corporate social responsibility programmes masking gouging behaviours, internal costing systems that make it impossible to save money - the list is nearly endless.
Fortunately, these can all be overcome by asking, ‘Does this meme help deliver the vision and support the core values?’ Since most tactical memes don’t, there is a simple solution - sweep them away!
The meme, but not the whole meme
A final kind of meme clash occurs when an organisation only partially adopts a complex memeplex.
Consider a very popular concept in modern business circles, ‘six sigma’. This was developed by Motorola in the 1980s, and they (and some other organisations such as GE) have reported significant savings from it. A whole industry grew up around the implantation of the six sigma memeset.
At its heart, six sigma consists of plan-do-test-react cycles used to improve an existing business process or to build defect-free performance into new products. It can virtually eliminate defects, but Fortune magazine famously reported in 2006 that ‘of 58 large companies that have announced Six Sigma programs, 91% have trailed the S&P 500 since’.
If six sigma is so good, how could that be true? Because six sigma is difficult.
It requires a complete change of mindset throughout an organisation and hence a lot of expensive training - the existing tactical memes and their carriers fight this new idea. If it is to work, six sigma has to be at the heart of what the business does, not some fad that is bolted on for a while. It requires people to unlearn the way they have always done things, and I suspect that in many of the large companies the infection with six sigma was superficial and inconsistent with most of the memes that were run (autonomy, efficiency, etc.). The resulting meme would clash, disrupt the organisation, and could account for the high failure rate. A cynical little corner of me would just like to say that this is in complete contrast to ‘corporate social responsibility (CSR)’, which works best when it is superficially adopted: appearing to have a strong CSR programme, while actually doing very little, would appear to be a survival trait for business in most industrialised countries.