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Structure and communications in the process of organisational change:

Eastern European experience and its general relevance

Chapter · January 1997

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35348-7_4

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4
Structure and communications in the
process of organisational change:
Eastern European experience and its
general relevance

P.C. Humphreys
London School of Economics & Political Science
Houghton Street, London WC2 2AE, UK
Tel +441719557711, Fax +441719557565
e-mail [email protected]

E. L. Nappelbaum
Russian Institute for Systems Analysis
9 Pr 60 Let Octabryja, Moscow 117312, Russia
TeVFax +7095 282 4275
e-mail [email protected]
Abstract

Every organisational change creates some organisational stress and makes personnel
both winners and losers within the organization. To a large degree this is a result
of the inevitable change of the organization perspective as well as ensuing
organisational restructuring. In this paper we investigate the organisational
perspectives generally adopted by top management. and explore the consequential
stresses generated in the attempt to implement the ensuing prescriptions for change.
We stipulate that middle management will feel themselves the most
threatened by processes of organisational change instigated from above. We
demonstrate how they transfer this feeling further down the hierarchical ladder. A
major factor here is a virtual break in communication within the organization
resulting from the radical change of the communication context. We illustrate how
situation is further aggravated by middle management assuming the role of
interpreters of top management's intentions and of the sole guardian of the power of
the organisational unit they manage and hence of the protector of its personnel. In
this way the previous organisational structure becomes an infrastructure for the
pockets of tacit resistance to organisational change that may frustrate its purposes
in the long run.
On the basis of the model for problem formulation and choice developed by
Nappelbaum, this situation is examined and is related to the issue of

P. Humphreys et al. (eds.), Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1997
40 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

implementation design for a strategic decision taken by the upper management. It

is stipulated that team building is an inherent part of this process and should
involve not only those who instigate the change and prepare corresponding
decisions but also every echelon of the organisational management.
This understanding imparts a new flavour to the notion of participative
management and imposes new requirements on organisational communications aID
on computer support for organisational change. In this respect the concept of
variable precision modelling of knowledge about local enactment processes
(developed within SASOS by Humphreys and Berkeley) becomes especially
relevant. Within this framework, however, the notion of zooming is to be
rethought from aggregation/disaggregation to reflection and analytic reinterpretation
and creative synthesis.
Theoretical ideas to be presented here are illustrated by the recent experience of
attempts at organisational transfonnation and business development within the
Hungarian refonn process and Russian perestroika. We consider that the experiences
reported here are quite relevant to organisations in general, wherever in the world
they are located.

Keywords
Organisational change, decision conferencing,participative management, Eastern
Europe, business practice.

I INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEXT OF ORGANISATIONAL

TRANSmON IN EASTERN EUROPE

Today, after nearly a decade from the beginning of the new era in Eastern Europe
which started in the mid 1980's at the time of perestroika in Russia, one may
justifiably regard the processes that are taking place there as (among many other and
probably much more significant things) a huge and most comprehensive study in
social and organizational change. True, many people , both from the right and the
left of the political spectrum, claim that many of the changes are very shallow and
superficial in their nature. This, however, is simply a debate over the depth of the
changes implemented and over their lasting values and desirability. The scope of the
changes and especially of attempts to instigate some change is clearly evident.
These processes of change - how a change was conceived, planned, prepared for,
implemented, fought against, perceived, and evaluated - if deeply, carefully, aID
objectively studied, might offer an incredible wealth of material for both theoretical
and practical analysis. However, this is rarely properly done or properly
documented and for several very good reasons. The most important of those is
political sensitivity of the very issues involved as any statement about a change at
any level and especially assessment of its desirability, planned nature etc. would be
immediately exploited by one political side and as swiftly challenged by an
opposite one. But, from a methodological viewpoint, it is probably even more
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 41

important that any "obje.ctive" assessment should inevitably involve a common

"frame of reference", Most of the material that follows argues implicitly that any
change is first and foremost is a change in the frcl1ne of reference and hence should
be judged on its own merits.
Nonetheless several illuminating conclusions can be made even at the level of
pure "unequipped" observations, especially if they are made at "embedded
observation" basis. These conclusions may be especially emblematic as they cover
a wide spectrum of change stakeholders and their attitude towards this change.
Indeed, it is equally interesting to observe what changes top management of various
enterprises see fit to introduce in response to the ever-changing business
environment and how it goes about it or how people at the grassroots level adapt to
the changes and assess them.
One of our more interesting o~servations is that rarely does implemented change
result in the state of affairs that was the objective of the change. Moreover in many
cases the result of a change is totally counterproductive with respect to the
underlying intentions. It would be easy and tempting to explain this discrepancy by
either a deficient planning of the change or by hypocrisy of top managers who
proclaim one thing but perform something totally different. The reality, however,
is in many cases much more complicated. Time and again it became obvious that
managers planning to enact a change failed to understand that each major change
involves also a drastic change of perspective of all the actors involved, of their
frame of reference, as well as of an infrastructure stability of which quite often is a
major precondition of the success of the change instigated. Moreover, an obvious
complexity of the social texture where the change is being enacted very often
results in appearance of "emergent" effects that are very difficult to attribute to
tangible causes and even more difficult to forecast and to allow for.
Not surprisingly, given the above observations, the reform processes in most
countries in Eastern Europe have been accompanied by a decline in industrial
production. Initially, the underlying severity of this process was masked by a low
level of apparent profitability. This was sustained on what were increasingly loss
making operations by using up assets and resources. As such accumulated resources
become exhausted, the pressure for organisational transformation and new business
successes comes ever more to the fore as an essential survival strategy. Now this
in evinced even in the pressure from some quarters for a "re-transformation" to
earlier organisational forms, remembered with nostalgia after the failure of interim
attempts at transformation.
This apparent nostalgia stems from the way in which people at large assess the
results of a change even when they shared the underlying values in terms of which
the change was considered desirable. If the enacted change was successful these
values become a stable feature of the everyday environment, and in human
consciousness transfer themselves to the realm of the behaviour infrastructure
which is generally taken for granted and does not enter in an assessment pattern.
The change induces a totally different frame of references, in which comparison
42 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

with the previous state of affairs .plays a crucial role. This state is often assessed in
a highly idealised way by disregarding the features that were the most distressing
and hence led to the change and by overestimating the features that cause distress
now.
The interim attempts at transformation have been generally characterised by the
decomposition of inherited, overcentralised organization structures. However the
idea of organisational hierarchy. with rigid distinctions between top management,
middle management and workforce has, at the same time, been reinforced. Mirroring
the contemporary political struggles founded on a competition to the death between
stereotyped political forms, the appropriate design for an organization has usually
been perceived as an outcome of a struggle between various organisational forms,
in which the management-workforce control hierarchy, with strict accountability
between levels (Jaques, 1989), has generally assumed hegemony.
Some interesting observations can be made, in this respect. concerning the
attitudes and behaviour of top management of various enterprises. The most evident
feature of those is a very strong resistance to changes in their own enterprises even
if they are dictated by the changed business environment. In principle, old guard
longs for the changes that are purely cosmetic and increases only their own freedom
of manoeuvre and their benefits leaving the rest of the business environment intact
and predictable. Surprisingly, such an attitude finds an unexpected support in the
inner dynamics of change itself. Indeed, such changes create transient business
environments in which it is exceedingly difficult to orient and to operate. In this
kind of environment, perhaps the only factor of lasting value is the previously
established personal relationships that allows the directors of the emergent
enterprise to recreate, to a large extent, many salient features of the old distribution
system. This serves to promote and maintain the myth that the old "directors' club"
are the only people capable of managing large-scale industrial enterprises. This, in
turn, has led to the temporary revival of seemingly rejected political doctrines, as
can be publicly witnessed at election time in most Eastern European countries.
This process has also been accompanied by decentralisation of production aOO
services, and the formation of new kinds of alliances and ventures under the rubric
of "privatisation". For example, we frequently find short-sighted behaviour on the
part the management of those plants that outsource an enterprise that acts as a main
breadwinner. They may raise the prices for the outsourced material they supply in
an attempt to benefit inordinately from their firm's monopoly position: dealing
with the main enterprise very much in the same way as they were previously
dealing with the state. Such practices have brought leading enterprises to the brink
of uncompetitiveness, potentially distorting the very source of their own financing.
By the same token, in forming their partnership relations with Western
companies, Russian large-scale enterprises prefer to establish them with very large-
scale partners (sometimes clearly in disadvantage to their own good) which they try
to deal with in much the same way they were accustomed to deal with the previous
State owned enterprises.
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 43

Quite a different style of business behaviour is demonstrated by younger people

in setting up their new and generally small businesses, especially if they build from
scratch and build them up gradually, employing (especially in the beginning)
people who are fully aware of what they are employed to build. These small
businesses are usually intended, by those who set them up, to thrive on the rapidly
changing, transient business environment. When they are formed as joint ventures,
the local directors characteristically find fault and express disappointment with the
behaviour of their Western partners, whose minds are tuned to a much more stable
and less opportunistic economic climate.
The entire organisational str;ucture emerging as a result of these attempts,
however, has proved typically to be highly unstable and prone to serious
calamities. The resulting very high degree of failure (both explicit and latent)
among the newly created organisations is a good indicator that there is much which
is fundamentally wrong with the current attitude to organisational transformation
amongst managers operating in Eastern Europe, and probably elsewhere too.

1.1 The negative inheritance

To some extent, the roots of these failures can be traced to a heavy negative
inheritance from past systems and in the lack of much attempt to understanding this
inheritance (rather than trying to wipe it out of memory) and of its influences on
the organisational future. Key issues from the past with negative carry-over to the
present are:

• Within the "first economy" there were generally negative incentives for good,
innovative management: Failures were attributed personally but success were
attributed collectively; project management was limited to technical
development rather than to managing all aspects of innovative projects, viewed
as socio-technical and human activity systems. Risk analysis techniques were
highly developed but only on an informal, not on a formal basis. Moreover the
focus was on the analysis of political risk rather than business risk.

• Within the "second economy" there were, of course, economic rewards to be

gained form the personal exercise of initiative and innovation, but such efforts
were generally limited to commerce and were often clandestine. Within this
sector, the mechanisms of production, where they were existed, were highly
distorted and were generally parasitic on operations located within the first
economy. Associated with the clandestine nature of these activities was the
importance of private knowledge. Knowledge about "how to" was a commodity
best kept in shortage, rather than to be shared publicly.

In general, very little pre-competitive infrastructure existed within the second

economies flourishing in Eastern Europe, and that which existed within the first
economy died with it. Its death throes were, for the reasons outlined above,
44 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

accompanied by the subversion for the basis of trust within any organisational
forms which would newly emerge, whatever their nature.

1.2 Importation of Western business practice ideas

The reasons for failures in organisational transformation and business development

should not, however, be sought solely in the past. No less important reasons can
be identified in shortcomings of the new ways of doing things in organisations, arxl
of doing business in Eastern Europe. Prescriptions and the rationale of originating
in Western business practice were, and continue to be, imported completely out of
context. Scant attention is given to the differences in infrastructure on which
business, private and even political life is based in the particular national context,
compared with the context in which the imported prescriptions originated.
The pressure and the agency for this process of importation and re-
implementation of perceived successful "Western" business techniques lies,
increasingly, with those personnel who assume the "top management" of the
emergent organisational units, even if they did not occupy such positions before.
These are, typically, people having the agency and financial backing to perform
"management buy-outs"; to liaise with venture capitalists and interpret their
wishes; to form "joint ventures" with western partners, and so on. It is our
experience (supported by Paprika and Zoltay, 1994) that, when help is sought by
such people for professional experts, analysts and consultants in decision arxl
management support, their first priorities are for support in regard of:

• Innovative marketing solutions, rather than market research;

• Brainstorming on new ventures;
• Negotiations with potential partners, banks, etc.;
• Techniques for increasing workforce efficiency while maintaining morale
within a climate off staff cut backs.

The conjunction of these four priorities stems from a general belief that because the
organization has, in the past, been successful in operational terms (provision of a
specific type of product, service, etc.), the aim must now be to maintain and even
enhance the success of the old, continuing, "operational core" in the newly
emerging economic, social and political context.
What is not addressed in this view is the need for an understanding of why the
organization was successful in the past, not just in operational terms, but
considering all the kinds of resources in its constituent human activity system.
Only then is it possible to understand how the resources currently surviving in the
organization can, collectively, form the basis for its future success. Such an
understanding involves a completely different conception of what is the "core" of an
organization. This is something ~hich we will explore further in section 3.
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 45

1.3 The split between organization and workforce

The priorities discussed in the previous section also reflect the concerns of top
management within a perspective on their business which enshrines a fundamental
split between organisational structures, which appear as autonomous with a life of
their own, and human practices within organisations which appear as apart: thrown
off centre from the decision making process. This perspective also promotes
management-centrism: Management makes decisions; Management transforms the
organization (Merkle, 1980). Attempts may be made to use participative techniques
like Kaizen (Masaaki, 1989) among groups of workers and front line managers to
boost morale, within a perspective which dissociates subjectivity from
organisational tasks. Thus it seems to be a surprise to top management when such
activities fall apart. in terms of their stated aims, when their own view that "the
bottom line is to reduce staff costs" becomes common knowledge amongst the
participants.
This is not to say that we are witnessing a return to "scientific management"
according to the theories of F. W. Taylor (c.f. Taylor, 1947; Nelson, 1980). In the
post-modern world, Taylorism is discredited in both Eastern and Western European
management practices, being blamed for the development of distorted, fragmented
and inhumane work methods of work practice during the period of modernist
excesses in productive enterprises in both Western Europe (Morgan, 1986) am
Eastern Europe (Beissinger, 1988), as well as in the United States (Wrege am
Greenwood, 1991). Currently, in both West and East Europe, the impetus is on
the replacement of the remains of Taylorism with the "Human Relations" approach
which seeks to:

" reshape the internal world of the organization so as to release the

autonomous subjectivity of the worker in such a way that is aligned with
the aspirations of the enterprise, now construed in terms of innovation.
flexibility and competitiveness" (Rose, 1989).

We hear from top management, everywhere in Eastern Europe. a growing tendency

to insist that development and transformation of their organisations should be nude
in the service of "increasing innovation and competitiveness," but the divorce of
their workforce from the concept of their "organization" still remains in the
discourse and practice of this level of management. Thus subjectivity is dissociated
from organisational settings. The result is that the managers and their
organisational analysts are located in professional roles, external to, and alienated
from, the organisational process itself (Humphreys, Berkeley and 10vchelovitch,
1996).
46 Decision Support in OrganiZlllional Transformation

2 TOP MANAGEMENT'S DESIRES FOR DECISION SUPPORT

A decade ago (Humphreys, 1984) we identified an almost complete absence in

practical applications at top management level of interactive computer-based
systems based on traditional DSS and IS design methodologies (Lederer and Sethi,
1988), a situation which continues today. We stated then that

"the problem here is not simply a failure of decision support systems at

higher levels. It may not be wise to attempt to formalise scenario generation
techniques and problem structuring languages into automated decision
support systems....Decision makers' scenarios need to be explored rather
than be fitted into formal structures.. .It is better to develop techniques for
the psychological validation of the decision makers' own problem
structuring language than to try to invent a universal problem structuring
language that will have to be taught from scratch to high level decision
makers." (Humphreys, 1984, p. 20)

Phillips (1989) identified two approaches to GDSS for top management which were
then beginning to emerge as a. result of the failure of the traditional DSSIIS
approach. The first followed from the view that "the most fundamental activity of
group decision making is interpersonal communication and the primary purpose of
a GDSS is to improve group communication activities" (DeSanctis and Dickson
1987), and sought to provide a computer-based workbench environment with the
intention of facilitating group communication. Phillips claimed that this approach
was inferior to the second approach which "provides a problem solving
environment that is group centred and is primarily intended to help managers
consider uncertainty, form preferences, make judgements and take decisions".
The latter approach, usually implemented at top management level in the form
of "decision conferencing" (Phillips, 1992), has increasingly become the preferred
approach to import from the West in the service of East European top
management's desire for support in their efforts at organisational transformation
(Fekete-Szucs, 1991; Vari, Rohrbaugh and Baaklini, 1992). Part of the reason for
this preference is the recognition the particular validity in the context of the
problems facing Eastern Europe of Phillips' (I989) claim that "concentrating only
on the technology, computers, software and networks will not reveal the full
potential of GDSS".
Phillips' criticism has generally been taken as a reason to dismiss the first
approach on a wholesale basis but, in our opinion, this is unfair. The criticism
only applies to a particular implementation strategy which is more appropriate in
the cultural and economic context of Texas than of Hungary or Russia, and we will
return, later in this paper, to the fundamental importance of improving group
communication activities. FirSt, though, we examine in more details the
consequences of the hegemony of top management, following the second, approach
for implementation of organisational transformation.
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 47

2.1 Consequences of planning organisational transformation through

top management decision conferencing.

In decision conferences focused on organisational transformation, the participating

top managers usually tirst plan the restructuring of the organization, reaching
agreement on goals, strategies and future scenarios within which the chosen
strategy appears to unfold successfully, and then calculate staff losses,
redeployments, etc. (Bannon, 1997) Finally, agreement is reached on action. This
usually means allocating and confirming responsibilities among the individuals
present on the prescriptions each should issue to his or her subordinate managers in
order to initiate the implementation process which, it is believed, will secure the
desired changes (Fekete-Szucs, 1991; Phillips, 1992). The implementation process
itself is usually not considered in any detail in the conference, as the necessary
expertise is located at lower levels within the organisational process, split off from
the experience and management concerns of the participants in the decision
conference.
Our experience is that this agenda for decision conferencing tends to have the
following unfortunate concomitants:

• Failure within the implementation scenarios to identify properly and provide

for handling side effects of the main, intended, effect;
• "Throwing the baby out with the bath water" through focusing on the rolling
back of initial scenarios without the opportunity to create innovative pathways
to goals, as they lie off the roll-back route;
• Missing of opportunities and creation of problems for change implementation
management;
• Underestimation of the value of (or even the existence of) local skilled
knowledge in place within the organization.

These drawbacks are omnipresent not only in formal decision conferencing but also
in the very formal and informal activities that enact a change and hence are very
central in understanding some failures to implement a change and in improving the
efficiency of the change management in general. They are as well as many other
drawbacks are intimately related to a "linear mode of thinking about change" that
remain prevailing in our theory and practice and in the final analysis of a linear
model of choice and problem solving limitations of which were exposed in an old
but still quite topical paper that is not very well known and which is published
for the first time in this volume (Nappelbaum, 1997).
The main flaw of the linear way of thinking about change lays in its
"measurement paradigm", a contention that the problem to be solved to enact a
change and hence a change itself is some how "given", objectively present in the
48 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

existing problem environment (or "problematique" to use a term popular in

systems research) and that the problem of the management is to recognise it and to
find the efficient way of its implementation.
This model of thinking does not recognise that the problem environment itself
is nothing but a very subjective and very limited perception of a much more
complex and much less manageable environment. Moreover this perception is not a
mere partial mapping of this reality into a manageable representation but a result of
a purposeful creative design effort involving complicated manipulation of the
available data and establishment of powerful restrictions one of the major objectives
of which is to make the representation manageable.
Nothing in this representation is "given": nor the way in which we describe the
states we want to change as well as the state space boundaries, nor the frame of
reference to be used in assessing whether a change is desirable or not, nor the scope
and the content and efficiency of actions we are willing to allow in order to enact a
change.
The mere fact that this representation exists and looks "natural" and unique is a
good indication of its stability and previous success and there is a good chance that
the desire for change is a manifestation of such a tum of the affairs that made this
same representation suspect and not nearly as successful as it was in the past.
Obviously any attempts to find the remedy within the framework of such a
representation is doomed to failure and may eventually jeopardise the very idea of a
change. It is in this sense we have alluded several times above that a real change
(rather than a mere dynamics) involves always and foremost a change of the frame
of references and even of a perception of the "objective" reality.
Another reason why the original representation appears to be an "obvious" one
and a unique one is its holistic, robust nature. In (Nappelbaum, 1997) this is
explained by an inner balance between its various components achieved during the
original design of this representations, by its "cognitive closeness" requiring people
who share this perception to reinforce in their thinking and their behaviour the
validity of this perception very much in the same way in which "organizational
closure", as described by Maturana and Varela (1979) is preserved. It is this inner
holism and closeness of a perception that is responsible for a well-known effect of
incomparability and irreconcilability of different personal attitudes with which every
decision conferencing has to deal at some time.
Recognising a positive value of the difference in personal perceptions and at
least on the face of it paying a special attention to a deviate opinion current
conferencing techniques deal with the plurality of personal perceptions in a most
negligent and cavalier manner. The only way in which the existing methodology
knows how to enrich a perception consists of a mechanical merger of the attributes
belonging to different cognitive closures and in looking for trade-offs between
different assessments. In doings so, however, we destroy underlying tightly knitted
structures of the merged perceptions and replace them with their flattened and hence
placid projections, losing on the way some extremely rich semantic information.
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 49

Moreover, expanded perception cannot be balanced by definition and hence a

superficial representation that we are trying to use for the search of a viable strategy
lacks the very vitality, integrity and persuasive power so much needed if we want
the designed strategy of change to be successful. We have argued (Humphreys am
Nappelbaum, 1989, Nappelbaum, 1997) that a genuine approach to expansion of
the perception of a problem environment can be only achieved through designing
for the same objective reality as many competing and mutually incomparable
representations as possible and to transfer a choice between various options to the
choice between various perceptions each of which suggest an obvious solution of a
problem it is expressing.

• In other words, a problem can be considered as "properly fonnulated" only if

we know (or believe, probably erroneously) how to solve it and what is this
solution.
• The issue, however, is to chose or more precisely to design, a problem we
believe we need to solve.
• This choice, in its own tum, require involving perception of a higher level
which may call for the rethinking of the very principles that the enterprise is
built upon.

Thus, if we are to avoid the third and fourth "unfortunate concomitants of decision
conferencing", described above (i.e., missing of opportunities and creation of
problems for change implementation management; underestimation of the value of
local skilled knowledge in place within the organization), this calls, first of all, for
a profound analysis of the existing system of values constituting the very inter-
organizational culture and checking its consistency with the value systems attached
to every particular solution and its underlying perception.
This is a very important and an often neglected feature of organization of
knowledge needed for planning and implementing a change. Each action which is
going to be taken to implement a change, however small, brings with itself its
own "native" perception involving its own frame of reference, its own system of
values, its own set of instrumental intentions etc. And all this components
belonging to perceptions of different levels should be innerly consistent. Their
intrinsic inconsistency may result in emergent side effects that in the final analysis
may jeopardise the very intentions for which the change was enacted.
That is why a detailed implementation plan - the implementation definition
cycle - to add to the original problem definition and situation definition cycles -
should be an indispensable part of any change management scenario. Such a cycle
should not only to check whether we are dealing with a case of a "collective
fantasy" (Humphreys and Berkeley, 1986, Humphreys, 1989) or the suggested
solution is actually implementable but also to check the price of this
implementation and not only in terms of the resources allocated but also in terms
of the values compromised.
50 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

Consideration of the implementation definition cycle reveals also yet another

extremely important dimension of the change management - an issue of
stakeholders (Mitroff, 1983). Usually decision conferencing takes notice of the
personal differences of a very limited circle of stakeholders - comprising mostly
those who plan and manage the change process. In organizational setting, however,
a real set of stakeholders are much larger and encompass both the actors and the
"consumers" of the change and each of them brings into the process its own
perception of that part of the overall reality that is relevant to them. Inconsistency
of the· "organizational" and individual perceptions and especially of its value
components may destroy the manageability of the change process and compromise
the entire endeavour.
Implementability of any change process and even its relevance is a very
provisional thing strongly dependent on the existence and stability of the
underlying infrastructure. In terms of the circular logic of choice (Nappelbaum,
1997) this infrastructure can be defined as those features of perception that are taken
for granted and whose stability should not be affected by the planned change. It is
precisely because of this uncontested nature of our beliefs about the existence ani
stability of the relevant infrastructure that makes its analysis so difficult and so
rare. Design and analysis of alternative perceptions besides one that is used for the
purpose of change management and planning can be instrumental in finding what is
assumed to already exist or to happen by itself, what are the foundation for such
believes and what external factor may affect the validity of such assumptions. In
section In section 3, we will discuss how this may be done, taking into account the
knowledge and subjectivities of all the participants involved in the transformation
process.

2.2 Neglect by top management of situation and implementation

definition cycles

We have shown above how unfortunate concomitants of decision conferencing

follow from the usual practice of considering only the problem definition cycle
within the three cycle scheme identified by Nappelbaum (1997) as essential for
effective utilisation of the full range of relevant information and expertise existing
in the organization in the planning, managing and implementation of the
organisational transformation process. The neglect of the other two cycles in the
scheme stems from the hegemony of top management's desires for change at the
core of the planning for organisational transformation.
The situation definition cycle is neglected because handling information about
the organization within this cycle means keeping aware of the recent history of
processes and participants at all levels in the organization: something which senior
management usually (and incorrectly) seek to identify as the core of the negative
inheritance which is responsible for their current dis-ease.
The implementation project definition cycle is neglected as a consequence of
splitting off the notion of the organization and its transformation from the
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 51

subjectivity of those members of the organization who actually implement the

transformation through the collective changes in their communications and work
practice. Hence implementation project managers and their teams perceive the
outputs of top management's decision making as requirements for changes cnJ
deliverabies: They must analyse these requirements and implement the processes
which will result in the deliverables within constraints set from above (Berkeley,
De Hoog and Humphreys, 1990), but the possibility of generation of the
requirements and possibilities for transformation is excluded at the levels in the
organization where it should actually occur, rather than just be planned arrl
prescribed.
In the following section, we examine the consequences of this neglect, focusing
particularly on how it can destroy the participation of middle management in
developing any kind of effective organic transformation process.

2.3 The problems of middle management

It is well known that adoption of a new policy generally entails structural changes;
also the existing structure significantly constrains the type of strategy that an
organization is willing and capable of adopting (Chandler, 1969). The latter is
most heavily related to a mismatch between the top-level management of the
organisational perspective and lower-level ones that may emerge at the stage of
development and implementation of a new organisational strategy. We will refer to
that issue as to the problem of vertical or structural implementability. The need to
consider this implementability dimension stems from the fact that organization
stakeholders and actors are by no means obliged to take new organisational
objectives and policies, prescribed from above, in their stride. Rather, they tend to
consider these as annoying constraints in their efforts to keep performing those
activities which they know best how to perform and to change only the appearance
rather than the gist of the change as conceived from above.
The vertical implementability issue can be further aggravated by structural
stability which is built into every viable organization (Espejo, 1989). In principle,
a change of the policy that inevitably involves a change of perspective and implies
a change of the organization structure, unavoidably leaves some of the members of
that organization worse off. More or less by definition, the most unfavourably
affected and endangered strata of these members are middle management (Keen,
1986).
Indeed, top managers in an organization undergoing a change of structure,
following the "preferred approach to decision making we identified in section 2.1,
are likely to be more flexible in their capabilities, and better prepared for the
changes which are planned to take place as they tend to be the owners of the
transition problem. Similarly, the lower "technological" levels of the organization
tend to be the "physical" incarnation of the organization competence. Hence the
physical, technical, capabilities existing at these levels will be formulated in the
52 Decision Suppon in Organizational Transformation

course of the new policy development and, thus in principle, should be allowed for
in the planned organisational transition.
Middle management, however, tends to represent the organization structure
itself. Changes in organization strategies and the ensuing modifications in the
organization structure inevitably imply redistribution of organisational power and,
even more seriously, the functionality of various elements of organisational
structure, to which middle management may be unwilling or even unable to find an
easy answer, or any answer at all.
This situation is further aggravated by the fact that middle management
traditionally constitutes the main network through which decision made by top
management are transferred to the lower levels of the organization for
implementation (Jaques, 1976). In making this transfer, middle managers do not
merely pass the information along but also translate from the "strategic" (top
management) language in which it is received into prescriptions and instructions in
a language which they think will be understood by the "technical level" recipients
of their communications lower down the organization (Jaques, 1989). In doing so,
they must interpret this information (Cooper and Burrell, 1988; Checkland, 1994)
and, through this traditional role middle managers obtain the possibility of
distorting this information in the light that is beneficial to themselves.
In the cases of organisational transition we have studied in Hungary and Russia
(and elsewhere, for that matter), top management usually turned out to be much
more interested in finding an appropriate policy, and an appropriate set of
objectives, and perspectives, rather than in team building and in propagation of
their new vision through all the levels. right to the bottom of the organisational
ladder. A perspective developed at the top level is generally very difficult to
translate into the context that rules the behaviour of those who operate at much
lower levels in the organization. They need time and effort in order to be able to
develop an outlook that is well adjusted to the new top-level perspective (Yelton
and Crawford. 1992). Moreover the amount of time and effort required to do this at
the lower levels is usually much greater than that which was needed at the top
level. The translation and implementation process is especially difficult at lower
levels due to the lack of specialists in the highly creative business of planning
organisational transformation. Most people employed at the technical level are
much more accustomed to think in stereotypes which have been enforced by their
entire previous life in the organization. and which are now being negated by the
organization transition under way.
In such an environment of uncertainty and ensuing anxiety middle management
get the chance to rally the support of the lower. largely disaffected strata in their
organization in their efforts to resist those structural changes planned by top
management that may remove them from the power or dilute their power. In
calling for protection of the existing structural entities they lead. they portray their
activity as a natural defence of previous "traditional" values as well as of the vested
interests of the group they represent. In this way they hamper the very process of
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 53

adaptation of the lower levels of organization to the new ideas born at the upper
levels.

3. STAKEHOLDERS IN THE LIFEWORLD OF THE

ORGANIZATION IN TRANSFORMATION

Considerations of the sort discussed above give a totally different meaning to the
idea of participative management (Mumford, 1991). Now it becomes evident that,
even at the stage of the development of the new policy, focusing on DSS to
support the concerns and desires of top management is insufficient. One has to
allow for the entire plethora of the new, more focused, perceptions and local
policies that would inevitably emerge in the course of new policy implementation.
These somehow have to be consistent with the "grand plan" of the organisational
transition, conceived on the basis of larger strategic considerations applicable to the
organization as a whole. It is no longer enough just to invite some representatives
of the lower levels of management and of the workforce to take part in the
development of this grand plan.
It is equally essential to giv~ time and opportunity to all the stakeholders arxI
actors to develop their own adjusted perceptions and policies and for checking the
internal consistency of these perceptions and plans with the aggregated (rather than
prescribed) one. These stakeholders and actors may occupy not only the roles of
problem owner, decision maker, expert, i.e., those familiar to the participants in
decision conferences on organisational change (Vari and Vecsenyi, 1984), but also a
host of other roles in the organization Iifeworld, reflecting the fact that they are, in
various ways, the participants who are directly or indirectly affected by the global
and local changes inherent in the transformation process.
This is a wider trawl of participants than the organisational stakeholders than
commonly identified in "soft systems methodologies" for use by organisational
analysts (e.g., Checkland and Scholes, 1990; Jackson, 1991) as it takes into
account not only those considered to have a stake in the "transformation problem",
as first identified, but also those who would experience the results of the actions
taken in handling or "solving" the problem, and those involved in the results am
side effects of the implementation of any "solution".
As a basis for communicative action (Habermas, 1990) all participants, thus
defined, will, ideally, need to provide information about "what they know best". It
is also necessary to organise, and feed back, on a distributed basis, an enhanced
understanding of this collective knowledge, given that a suitable vehicle of
communication could be found for this purpose. The major difficulty facing this
enterprise is to elicit the knowledge participants possess in a way that
understanding can be achieved, since disparate assumptions about possibly shared
knowledge and interpretative frameworks (as commonly accepted within the
organization) are likely to flavour individual participants' discourse.
54 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

Hence any effective vehicle of communication must orient the discourse within
an interpretative framework where each participant's assumptions about what is (or
assumed to be) commonly known within the organization can surface (McCaskey,
1988). The choice of the appropriate interpretative framework is a matter of
sensitivity to local cultural and social conditions within the Iifeworld of the
organization (Habermas, 1989). It is not appropriate to presume the hegemony of
the interpretations and assumptions of any particular group or stratum, such as top
management, in this respect. .

3.1 Sensitivity to local cultural and social conditions

In searching for the appropriate interpretative framework in any particular

organisational context, the "organisational culture metaphor" is often invoked: i.e.,
the common notion that "culture is a determinant of social life in any particular
context and that, by extension, organisational culture determines the interpretative
patterning of organisational life (Handy, 1985). Essentially, "culture", itself a
metaphor taken from agriculture, is a construct, controversial at base, under which
a lot of different things may be glibly placed, explaining mainly differences
between various groups. Emphasis on differences has obscured the realisation,
fundamental to the agricultural use of the term, that culture is a process (originally
of cultivating the land).
Individual organisations, which would seem to be situated within the same
general cultural context, have their own cultures with a great deal of subcultural
variation. Morgan (1986) identifies the fundamental criterion for the existence of an
organization, in functional, process terms, to be the enactment of a shared reality. It
is this enactment process which constitutes the "organisational culture" as a set of
shared assumptions informing observation and action. It is maintained through
formal and informal interactions between the participants in the organization
processes and is expressed in human relations.
Nevertheless, organisations c~ntain subcultures; thus enactment processes may
be shared within particular groups or strata within an organization (c.f. Jaques,
1989), but not be homogeneous across them. Thus overall, organisational culture
is patterned according to local conditions. Great differences may exist between
different groups of people within the organization in terms of the expectations,
assumptions, rules, etc. to which they ascribe. The resulting clashes am
miscommunication can create problems for the organization as a whole. On the
other hand, "cultural differences" may exist between groups of individuals which are
external to the enactment process within the organisational context in which they
work (e.g., age, sex, background, education, nationality, etc.). Although these
differences can bring with them different expectations and assumptions, to the
extent that these individuals can play their part in the enactment process, they may
succeed in working together in an approximate equilibrium (Bateson, 1973).
Sensitivity to the existence of potential differences in organisational subcultures
is often not sufficient if it is expressed only in terms of what can be observed am
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 55

inferred: it must also address local enactment processes. Adopting this view means
articulating the language of action as well as the language of observation in
accessing this culture in enactment (de Zeeuw, 1993). The construction ad
maintenance of a shamI reality allows this articulation to provide a vehicle of
communication between participants who may yet have, and maintain, different
perspectives and preferences during a successful process of organisational
transformation.

3.2 Implementability and local enactment processes

According to our ideas, organisational transition (independently of the level in the

organization at which this transition takes place) differs from mere organisational
dynamics precisely through the need to design and use a new perspective, a new
outlook (Humphreys and Nappelbaum, 1989, Humphreys and Berkeley, 1995). In
respect of this outlook, some of the parameters of the organization activities that
were previously largely irrelevant become crucially important and even central. In
this sense, any movement within a pre-established state space corresponds to
system dynamics, to quantitative, purely parametric changes while organisational
transition is bound to involve changes of the state space itself which are not merely
implicate changes in the transition function but rather presupposes some changes in
the state variables themselves.
It has recently become fashionable when speaking about organisational
transition and organisational change, to emphasise the role of implementability ad
of verifying implementability as one of the main prerequisites for a full-fledged
systems analysis of the problem and its suggested solution.
In terms of the logic of problem formulation and choice (Nappelbaum, 1997)
implementability, along with the higher principles of work design (Hackman ard
Oldman, 1980) is the main factor in reducing the versatility of problem perceptions
to a sole choice to be realised in a subsequent course of actions. Curiously,
however, in the analysis of organisational choice, both the implementability of the
policy of organisational transition and the design of the problem perception itself
remain on ~ purely personal basis. Indeed, in nearly every methodology has been
proposed as suitable for importation to Eastern Europe to improve organisational
transformation (e.g. organisational strategic planning and management systems,
soft systems analysis methodology, decision conferencing, see section 2.0, above)
only one overall problem formulation and hence only one systems perspective is
sought for and the actions proposed to "solve" the problem are checked only for
their horizontal implementability, i.e. for implementability within the context
established through this perspective.
Meanwhile any organisational transition involves scores of individual and group
perspectives to be developed aDd many individual and group problems to be
fonnulated and acted upon in the process of individual and group adaptation to the
new organisational policies and structures which have been adopted by top
management, and to the new structures and styles that follow it. Implementation of
56 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

organisational transformation is thus fundamentally located at the level of local

enactment processes, and the resulting overall transformation is, for better or for
worse, a synthesis of the outputs of these processes. Kieser (1997) identifies
reasons why the authors of, and consultants on, such methodologies find this
convenient for themselves.

3.3 Some consequences

The picture we have developed above of the preferred approach to organisational

transformation in the emerging "Weslemised" climate of Eastern Europe is not a
happy one. Indeed it has engendered a very high failure rate in organisational
transformation, resulting in many bankrupt organisations, and in some cases
threatening to wipe out indigenous organisational activity in entire sectors.
However, it is extremely essential, in this context, not to despair, not to consider
that this prevalence of organisational failure should compromise the very idea of
transformation and reform in Eastern Europe. Drawing such a conclusion, arxl
acting accordingly, would be to undermine the trust between people - participants in
organisations - that generated the hope and motivation for the overall
transformation process in the first place.
If the general process of organisational, and societal, transformation is to build
upon rather than subvert this trust, then, in our opinion a radical
reconceptualisation of how this process is to be planned, analysed and implemented
is required, quite different from the current "preferred approach" which we have
reviewed above. In particular, as a result of this reconceptualisation:

• Participants in organisational processes are viewed as active change agents

(valuable resources) rather than workforce (usable and disposable
commodities). The focus is resource enhancement in cultural transformation,
rather than resource utilisation in structural transformation.

• Discourse on organisational change will involve articulation of the language of

action as well as the language of observation .

• Organisational personnel employed on productive tasks may also take up the

role of the analyst, for a while: observing, communicating and acting with the
aim of improving their own and the organization working conditions.

4.0 IMPLICAnONS FOR ORGANISAnONAL PROCESS

MODELLING AND DECISION SUPPORT

It is not necessary that all assumptions be articulated concerning local enactment

processes for a shared understanding, requisite in the context of organisational
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 57

transformation, to be reached by participants in those processes. Neither is it

possible, or desirable, to capture all relevant knowledge that exists within the
organization. For successful organisational process model development, the
fundamental issue is to discover, during moments of reflexivity, where one has
reached a satisfactory understanding to be able to proceed further (on a conditional
basis) with the analysis and synthesis of the material gained from organisational
personnel that far during the process of the investigation.(Willis, 1980).
This (conditional) analysis should not aim to produce "complete" or "final"
results. Rather, its aim is to increase the competence of the analyst to make
accessible knowledge informing the actions of the participants in a way that it can
be used as a creative resource by them in any synthesis. In order to come to
understand the inherent processes, meanings and distortions, any methods used need
to be flexible, sensitive and open, rather than prescriptive, at this level (Kersten,
1986).

4.1 Investigation, analysis and creative synthesis

The investigation process is typically considered the precursor of an analytic

process whereby the organisational structure and procedures are investigated.
However, an analytic activity which addresses all relevant aspects of an organization
and which structures this information to represent "what is" in the realm of the
participants' discourse still needs to be complemented by a synthetic activity:
putting diverse parts of this information, which should be linked in reality, back
together in various different configurations (checked for consistency and coherence)
to find out "what could be" in actual, or potential (future) reality.
It is important that any actions and plans which emerge are based on
investigation of the "real world" of the organization functioning (not on a world
which simply structures participants' discourse). The basis for the preferred actions,
the implementation route, and their potential side effects, need to be described and
explored in a language to which stakeholders have access, and which extends their
own discourse, thus offering them additional resources for communicative action
(De Zeeuw, 1993, De Zeeuw and Schuurman, 1997).
This strengthens, in any local context, the possibility of taking informed action
through Habermas' ideal process of "a forum of speakers exhibiting communicative
competence (Jackson, 1991). It also obviates the need to reduce stakeholders from
the role of active participants to that of merely "witnesses" (Ulrich, 1988) since the
additional resources extend the language which they can use, within the context of
the local conditions and culture to provide them, in practice, with the very
competence which Ulrich (prefeiring to promote local cultural hegemony of the
analyst's interpretation and language) rejected as "impractical", just as Eastern (and
Western) European top management today often reject proposals for developing and
exercising such competence within their organisations as "impractical".
58 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

4.2 Support for the analysis and synthesis of organisational systems

Two major technological developments have made it possible for this idea to be
implemented. The first one is the widespread dissemination of communications
networking. The second must is a possibility of approximate modelling with
variable degrees of precision in presentation, as well as, and independently from,
traversing (for investigating horizontal implementability) and zooming am
unzooming (for investigating vertical implementability). Few Decision Support
Systems with this kind of capability have yet succeeded in practical application
within implementation of organisational transformation according to this idea. One
exception is SASOS (Support for the Analysis and Synthesis of Organisational
Systems, c.j., Humphreys and Berkeley, 1992) and so, in the following, we
indicate some key design concepts which provided SASOS with this capability.

4.2.1 Views on organisational reality informing SASOS

Organisational reality is a complex entity, synthesised through the language am
perspectives and shared assumptions of those who experience that reality. This
"reality" is constantly transforming itself as people interact, activities are canied
out, and change is affected by the mere passage of time. Any participant in this
"reality", taking up the role of analyst for the first time, or any external,
professional analyst, inevitably discovers, if he or she takes the effort, that it takes
a considerable amount of time to come to learn about this reality and the rules
under which it functions and the elements which constitute it.
The learning process involves not only the conventional focus of organisational
analysis, i.e., observing the way that organisational activities transform resources.
It also involves being told stories about the processes and actions which, by their
very nature, are not accessible thfough observation (de Zeeuw, 1993) or being told
about it:.
This kind of information needs to be initially collected and exchanged in the
form of commentaries coming from different people, with different responsibilities,
perceptions, and experiences within the organization. Such organisational discourse
may include elements which contradict each other (even if only by virtue of the fact
that they have been voiced by different persons) which the analyst has to make
sense of. The commentaries address problems arising, the activities involved, the
results (intended or otherwise) and side effects, the characteristics of the resources
involved, or required, and so on. They often appear fragmented, difficult to integrate
at once into a conceptual model (Checkland, 1981), and yet have the potential to
provide the seeds for important lessons to be learned.
SASOS i.e. employed in organisational analysis to address the complexity of
the myriad of local enactment processes which collectively constitute an
organization in transition by encouraging its users to take partial views on this
reality according to their own local knowledge, desires and experience, to describe
their characteristics relationships and linkages. It offers support for synthesising
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 59

what has been described to enable the tracing of how problem situations may arise,
and the development of actions to transcend them.
Taking a partial view is a functional way of bringing to the fore certain aspects
of this reality and considering them in detail while paying less attention to other
aspects of it which, although important in understanding it, fall within another
domain of concern. SASOS is organised around three different views that can be
taken on organisational reality, determined by the three different types of
information an analyst requires to carry out his or her work (Berkeley, Humphreys
and Quek, 1992). Each view presents a different, although not independent, picture
of this reality, provides different types of information, and provides opportunities
for different types of usage of this information.
Each view is guided by a different motivation, it addresses a different analytic
goal or creative desire and, thus, the exit point from model development within that
view can be easily decided upon by the user himself or herself on the basis of
whether, in his or her opinion, the particular goal or desire has been achieved (even
if only tentatively), or is still to be achieved. Thus, SASOS can be experienced as
flexible and responsive to the current needs of the individual in this work as it
collectively progresses, rather than just being seen as a prescriptive device.
The three views are:

• A static entity-relationship view, which links and structures information from

participants concerning "observable "entities and their relationships which
define the organization and its function within the general environment;
• A process view, which links and structures information on the processes and
actions that are carried out within the organization and the various functions of
the organization
• A systemic view, which provides information on comments voiced and stories
told by participants about existing and potential problems in the organisational
lifeworld and about desirable future situations and potential pathways which
could improve current conditions.

While it may be convenient to start the process of organising the information

provided a participant within a particular view, care should be taken not to subsume
the analysis, as it develops, under just one view. Any single view, naturally,
presents only a fragmented pictuFe of the organisational reality orienting itself under
one particular concern. Moreover, all three views are different ways of taking a
partial look at the same organisational reality. It is only through the combined
results ofthe material elicited by taking all three views, that one can, potentially,
discover all the relevant aspects of the organization which are important in the
analysis and creative synthesis of the structures and processes which will emerge
from the organisational transformation.
60 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

4.2.2 Representation means sensitive to local cultural and social

conditions
SASOS's representation means provide a vehicle of communication for intuitive
understandings about processes in the static entity-relationship view, where they
can be only inferred intuitively, not observed. It enables them to be precised
through employing the language of action (precising relations and rules of change)
without needing to increase the formality of the (static) descriptions of the entities
involved in these processes.
These descriptions remain in the form of the narrative text from accounts given
by organisational participants, and articulates their own language. There is no need
for an analyst to interpret this text according to his or her own (local culture aId
motivation bound) assumptions in translating the language of the participants into
some kind of formal extension of his or her own observational language ' . All that
changes is how the narrative hypertext structure is cross-referenced to elements aId
regions of the process model as it is generated through the actions of an analyst
interacting with SASOS.
While SASOS offers support for process model generation at all levels of
precision from exploration of hypertext at one extreme to simulation of predicate-
transition nets (Genrich, 1987) at the other, this is not the only kind of support
which is requisite to improve the communicative competence of the analyst and the
other organisational participants involved. It is also necessary to support the
visualisation of what is being modelled. in a way that is sensitive both (i) to what
the user's (viewer's) visualisation problem is, and (ii) to the kind of visualisation
language which will promote an efficient and appropriate interpretation of what is
"seen" through its use. The latter, of course, will be highly dependent on the local
culture, the social conditions determining the use of the "views" thus provided, aId
the (un)familiarity of the participants with representation techniques which employ
particular kinds of visualisation
language.
Hence, SASOS provides for the particular visualisation language and techniques
employed in any context when working on, or viewing a process model both (i) tn
match the user's visualisation problem and (ii) to be customised to employ t.;
visualisation language which appears "natural" to the participants who view what
SASOS can show them. It is these customisation facilities, offered by SASOS,
which ensure its ability to support and guide the user in a modelling enterprise that
will effectively increase participants' communicative competence in discourse on
organisational transformation.

IThus, within the scheme described by de Zeeuw, 1993, this enables the synthesis
of extensions to participants' own language(s), I.'s, rather than utilizing some
extended language L' which may work against any such synthesis.
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 61

4.2.3. Zooming and unzooming within variable precision modelling

As well as variable precision modelling, SASOS's representation means offer
zooming (refinement) and unzooming (coarsening) facilities over the whole range of
information to which it has access, regardless of the level of precision at which this
information is represented (from hypertext to exact nets).2 The need for these
facilities is more or less obvious. Participants in different levels of the
organisational structure use different, though "nested" contexts to develop their
perceptions of the small world they have to operate within"'. and of the local
enactment processes within that world.
Exercise in the concurrent development of the entire set of these perceptions
supported by SASOS' machinery of variable precision modelling and zooming and
unzooming facilities can be instrumental in:

• facilitating the development of local perceptions on different levels of

organisational structure and hence checking the vertical implementability of
any policy developed at the top, and contributing, bottom-up, to its
construction and refinement;
• helping lower levels of the organisational structures to dispel their fears and
phobias about impeding changes and in shortening the adaptation period;
• unclogging the middle management bottleneck mentioned in section 2.2,
above;
• opening the possibility of top level policy adjustment that will allow for the
special interests of lower level stakeholders and actors and hence removing
unnecessary barriers on the implementation path for the top level policy.

2 See Richter et.al., 1987 for a detailed discussion, with examples, of the
distinction refinement and precision in organizational conceptual model
development and exploration.

Yfhe idea of "nested perceptions·", however, is by no means clear. The rules that
govern nestedness or internal compatibility of differing scale perceptions is not
only central in providing the kind of support but also for the whole concept of
cognitive closure. It is clear that approximation mentioned above in this case does
not amount solely to shedding certain details or to disaggregation of certain
aggregated variables used in a higher level perception. In supplementing these with
some other components (that may be totally foreign to the higher level perceptions)
it creates its own concepts in which "borrowed" components may be differently
interpreted and evaluated.
62 Decision Support in Organizational Transformation

There are at least two distinct cases of incompatibility that may hamper vertical
implementability of the transition policy referred to earlier:

• it may involve opposite value judgements of the same cognitive component

interpreted differently on different levels; or
• it may involve emergence of a neglected feature in a higher level perspective as
a result of aggregation of representations developed below.

It is essential also to understand that the vertical compatibility mentioned above

does not possess any monotonicity or transitivity in a sense that some lower level
perception that is perfectly compatible with its immediate predecessor may prove to
be incompatible with some higher perception even if it is fully compatible with its
immediate predecessor4
At the same time, within the organisational framework, these issues deserve
special attention and should allow also for the specific social climate of a particular
organization, its scale, its built-in culture and cultural differences between various
levels and communication problems that exist and can be both alleviated aOO
aggravated by the emergence of the instrument of a kind we have just suggested.
Decision support systems that would develop (among others) the capabilities we
have been trying to focus upon may deserve the name of organization transition
support systems.

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper we have traced the high failure rate of attempts at organisational
transformation in Eastern Europe, in part at least, to the desire of top management
to import, and employ, techniques for analysing the conditions of their organization
and formulating prescriptions for change in which subjectivity, while recognised, is
divorced from organisational setting. This serves to reinforce the domestication of
the productive participants in their organization and to undervalue to the knowledge
they possess about local enactment processes, and how they might be improved.
We have proposed an alternative approach in which the process of creative
transformation of organisations can be brought to centre field, and have shown how

4.The issue of vertical compatibility and implementability Qutlined earlier may

appear to relate only to decision making of strategic purport within an
organisational framework. However, we believe that it is equally important for
purely personal decisions, because thinking about implementation of personal
decisions also involves focusing and defocusing, framing and reframing and
zooming and unzooming.
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 63

support may be provided to organisational personnel at all levels (not just top
management) in this process of creative transformation, promoting, rather than
restricting, analysts' and management's abilities to be sensitive to local cultural
and socia] conditions.
We have explored the implications of this understanding for organisational
process modelling, starting from the need to discover. not to assume, what to
observe and to articulate the language of action as well as the language of
observation in accessing the culture in enactment. The aim is to support not only
organisational analysis but also creative synthesis
of possibilities for organisational change and transformation. We believe that the
need to defocus on this aim is an urgent priority in order to arrest and reverse the
general process of organisational decline which we are currently witnessing not
only in Eastern Europe, but also in many other parts of the industrialised world.

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7 BIOGRAPHY

Patrick Humphreys is a founding member of IFIP working group 8.3. He is

Professor of Social Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political
Science, where he convenes graduate courses on Organisational Social Psychology,
Decision Making and Decision Support Systems and the Social Psychology of the
Media. He led the LSE teams on CEC ESPRIT projects on Functional Analysis of
Organisational Requirements and on Project Integrated Management Systems and
directed the CEC TEMPUS project BEAMS - Business Economics tnl
Management Support and many other projects on decision making, organisational
process modelling, networking and communication support. His books include
How Voters Decide, Analysing Ond Aiding Decision Processes, Effective Decision
Support Systems, Exploring Human Decision Making and Software Development
Project Management: Process and Support.
Eric L. Nappelbaum is Vice Chancellor at the Moscow School for Business of
Political Science and Law and Research Director at the Moscow Institute of
System Analysis, faculty of Operational Research. He studied Physics and
Computer Sciences at the Moscow State University and did his PhD on Control
 Structure and communications in the process of organisational change 67

Problems at the Moscow Physical Technical Institute. Dr Eric L. Nappelbaum is

member of All Russian Academy of Science , Department of Operational Research
and IT Strategy. Dr Eric NappeJbaum has published more than 40 international
papers. He is Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political
Science and at the International Management Centre in Budapest. The research
interests of Dr Nappelbaum include Organisational Transformation, System
Analysis and System Logic.

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