Toward managerial artistry: Appreciating and designing organizations for the future

This article suggest that change be taken seriously; that we accept environmental change as ubiquitous, as more differentially defined perceptually. A classification of contextual changes is offered which, since it includes discontinuous change, goes beyond conventional thinking. For each type of contextual change the associated archetypical organizational forms and thematic managerial concerns and competencies are outlined. We suggest that organizations in the future should be configurations of forms because of multiple contextual circumstances, and that such configurations will require a mix of managerial competencies and the meta-competency be termed managerial artistry.

In general, the human mind is conservative. Long after an assumption is outmoded, people tend to apply it to novel situations. ---Daniel J. Isenberg

One should never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity. ---Neil Simon, Biloxi Blues

Change is thematic in the contemporary literature on organizing and management. This literature is anything if not prolific about the management of change. Until quite recently, research and advice about the management of organizations has reflected an ideology of gradualism. Effective organizational change was seen to proceed by small, incremental adjustments. The environments of organizations was presumed to be stable or growing. Lately, supposedly having entered what Drucker⁽¹⁾ termed the “age of discontinuity,” organizational change is seen as requiring managers to choose between organizational extinction or immediate and radical transformation.⁽²⁾ These two theses, incrementalism and transformation, however, no doubt oversimplify the circumstances facing contemporary and future managers. A somewhat more refined and encompassing model of change and its concomitants is surely needed so that more appropriate organizations are created and more responsive managerial competencies are developed.

We will not detail either the nature or the extent of change in the modern world for this has been done by so many others.^(3,4,5,6,7) Everything is supposedly changing more or less--globally, nationally, industries and organizations, people, everything! And as if that weren’t enough, we also hear repeatedly that the absolute rate of change in our world is likewise increasing. Of course, reflecting all of this change, the tasks and responsibilities of managers everywhere are also changing. For many of us, the constant drum beat of change, change, change has a numbing quality and it becomes difficult to retain the idea of change in our minds. For others of us the change refrain proves overwhelming and we retreat to the relative comfort of simplifying images and slogans. A certain amount of loose metaphorical talk prevails about “catching and riding the wave of change”⁽⁸⁾ or about having to cope with conditions of “permanent whitewater”⁽⁹⁾ or even “thriving on chaos” .⁽¹⁰⁾ Somehow the presumptions of stability has jump-shifted to quantum, revolutionary change.

What if we took change seriously? What if we believed that managing change really was at the core of management? These are the aims of this essay. We will argue that the simple, bipolar conceptions of environmental change are inadequate; that the environmental conditions in which organizations find themselves discontinuous change, and that they are neither homogenous nor absolutely objectively real. We will also argue that management's proclivity to believe there is a one best way to manage, once we know what we are up against, is even more fallacious than before, and that there are new as well as old ways of bundling managing. To take change seriously thus promotes managerial artistry, those competencies of appreciation and design and facilitation of appropriately refined organizational forms. Managerial artistry thus brings proactive choice to the forefront as executive become more aware of the possibilities in organizational environments and their associated structures and competencies.

This essay will proceed in four sections. In the first we will sketch the range and nature of four alternative organizational environments. Second, we will outline the organizational designs associated with each type of environmental circumstance. The third section then examines designs and the managerial competencies and concerns that seem to be needed for each environmental alternative. Last we will comment on the implications of what has been outlined for the managerial artistry of the future.