29th April 2021. Migration | Business
Misunderstanding migration; wrestling with complexity in business
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#1: Misunderstanding migration
The American writer Sonia Shah has won awards for her book The Next Great Migration, and deservedly so, because it represents a fundamental challenge to how we think about the subject. She popped up on the Engelsberg Ideas podcast The Hedgehog and the Fox to discuss it (39 minutes).
The book challenges the dominant idea of migration—especially human migration—as being something unnatural, and turns it on its head. When we look at human history, migration is clearly at the heart of it.
As she tells it on the podcast, she had a moment of revelation in Greece, covering the wave of refugees coming into Europe in 2014. She’d asked a worker for Medecins Sans Frontieres about “the migrant crisis”. The reply was:
There’s no crisis of migrants. There’s a crisis of welcome, a crisis of reception.
Elaionas Refugee Camp, Greece, 2015. Photo, ICRC, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
This made her realise how deeply she had internalised the dominant view, even though her own family had moved from India to America. In this dominant view, migrants are vectors of disorder.
She traces this idea back to Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish zoologist who was the first to establish a taxonomy of species. Linnaeus is better known now for his taxonomies of animal and plant species, but he extended this to humans as well, creating hard taxonomic barriers between different ethnic groups.
Even at the time, in the 18th century, other scientists disagreed. But it informed a whole lot of the discourse around the eugenics discussions a century later. As Shah says in the podcast,
We continue to talk about race as if it has a scientific basis.
The conversation observes how long it took us to understand both bird and animal migration. The evidence of bird migration became clear during the second world war when flocks of birds would appear on radar screens over the ocean in the middle of the night. And the myth of the lemmings’ doomed migration—as they hurl themselves from cliffs—is still pervasive even though it is completely untrue. (Spoilers, but they disappear into burrows under the snow until the spring comes).
She picks out several of the other elements of the migration discourse. Foreigners are represented as being biologically hazardous This was an important part of the late 19th century “science” that contributed to the closing of America’s borders, but it still appears today in some of the European discussion of north African refugees.
Migration is portrayed as being all about costs for the countries to which they travel, and the benefits are never discussed, whether economic or cultural or culinary.
And the fact of movement is portrayed as odd. Shah realised that she would ask migrants why they had decided to leave, but that in doing so she had internalised a whole world view:
Whose behaviour needs to be explained here? We don’t ask people why they decided to stay still?
I could have done without the slightly portentous set-up to the conversation—it could have been half the length—but skip through that to where the conversation starts.
#2: Wresting with complexity in business
BCG has an article from late last year which argues that business complexity has increased six fold in the last 50 years, and that the effect of this on organisations has been to increase organisational complexity by a factor of 35. (Skip past the pandemic-related boilerplate at the top of the article to get to the actual story).
To manage complexity, companies typically create new organizational structures, roles, processes, and systems; ever more elaborate matrix organizations; and new metrics, KPIs, and scorecards to track progress against these multiple objectives. The paradoxical result is an explosion in organizational complicatedness.
We’ll have to skip past some of imprecise language here—there are well-established definitions of the difference between complex and complicated that the authors seem not to be using here.
But one of the reasons this underlying idea is interesting is because when people say, endlessly, that the pace of business is speeding up, when so many elements of the business environment are, objectively, slowing down, they are probably saying that they are finding it harder to deal with organisational complexity. As well as the increase in informational noise that goes with it.
(Photo by John Blower, Flickr/CC. Link here)
Complexity comes with a vast cost, so it’s worth quoting this passage at length:
It is a serious obstacle to real (genuinely value-adding) work, and as such is a major cause of stagnant productivity in many developed economies. Because managers must document information on more and more KPIs and scorecards, much of their time (we estimate about 40%) is tied up in writing reports. Because they must coordinate with more and more functions, they spend an additional 30% to 40% of their time in meetings. And because they are spending so much time managing complicatedness, they have little time to manage their teams, who often lose their sense of direction, purpose, and meaning. People disengage and, as a result, waste a significant portion of their time (between 40% and 80%, depending on the industry) on unproductive, non-value-adding activities.
David Graeber’s essay on ‘bullshit jobs’ comes to mind.
Being BCG the article comes with three extended lessons and seven steps to help leaders to get there (‘always be closing’, as I believe they say at the shiny-shoe end of the management consultancy sector).
But the lesson is simpler, I think.
Standout business innovators such as Haier and Buurtzorg have developed radical new structures which are designed to reduce complexity.
And although the BCG authors claim that crises increase complexity, this is actually exactly wrong. Crises are a form of system collapse, as Thomas Homer-Dixon and others remind us. The pandemic is a system failure that leads to a partial collapse of the system. And the way to respond to system failure and partial collapse is to simplify.
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