Lessons learned from collective ignorance

摘要

When a Swedish telecommunications firm introduced organizational changes, emphasis on the new ways of working centered on more autonomy through a self-managed work-team structure. Finding itself in a tough and complex environment, future strategy would depend on normal business being done without prolonged involvement of higher management. The traditional, hierarchical organization structure was abandoned, resulting in very open description of tasks, no supervisory control, and priority setting executed at workplace level. Most business decisions were to be made at the operational level and the actual work, executed in projects, would be to a large extent self-managed and self-organized. So far, so good. The problem was that top management's expectations of huge benefits following on from the "new thinking" and "new doing" they had facilitated (or thought they had facilitated) came to little. Work continued much as it had done before. Middle managers were disappointed to realize that workers - having left a bureaucracy for a self-management situation - were not taking the initiative, as had been expected. Many workers held fast to the view that problems were not there for them to solve, but to pass higher up the chain of command. After all were not managers there to intervene when those below them hit a problem? Were they not there to solve the problems?