EMAC ASSESSMENTS, LLC
CREATE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE WITH EMAC'S LAMPE
LEADERSHIP MODEL AND OUR HALO TECHNOLOGIES.
THE HOLONOMIC MODEL
Allow us to introduce you to the backbone of the ODS and what separates it's performance from all others: The Holonomic Theory of Organizations (63, 81, 102).
The theory of the Organizational Hologram grew out of decades of research and organizational design consulting. By the mid 1980's, it became obvious to anyone who bothered to reflect on what was happening in industry that the days of classical bureaucracy as an ideal organizational form were numbered. The theory of the bureaucracy presupposed the goal of efficiency of an organization. Furthermore, there was confidence that change could be incorporated as it occurred. The idea that change could occur faster than it could be absorbed was never brought up for discussion. By the mid 1980's, this unthinkable idea began to be the normal state. Clearly, the bureaucracy was becoming obsolete in fast changing, turbulent environments.
Ken Mackenzie had an electronics client whose product life cycle was close to six months. Change was so rapid that it was not possible to have a stable bureaucracy. The time taken to find, formulate, solve, and implement new organizational changes exceeded the time taken for the problems to change. This experience stimulated the development of an entirely new approach. Once a phenomena is recognized, effort begins to understand and explain it. By 1986, it was becoming clear that organizations needed to be not only productive, but capable of change. They needed to become efficiently adaptable. It was obvious that the bureaucracy could not be simultaneously efficient, adaptable, and efficiently adaptable. In bureaucracy theory, efficiency and adaptability were trade-offs, one came at the expense of the other.
Was there a better idea? Not at first, but by 1988 it was becoming clear the essential problem was that a bureaucracy views organizations as machines whose sole purpose is administrative efficiency. this is a strange idea in a world of rapid change. Clearly, we needed a better idea. The notion of a hologram began to offer hope. The main property of a hologram is that each part contains the whole. That is, every section of a hologram contains the whole image. Two questions arose: First, could organizations be some sort of hologram? Second, what would it require to be simultaneously efficient, adaptable, and efficiently adaptable?
If every part of the hologram contains the whole, then isn't there a lot of redundancy? It did not seem plausible to have both redundancy and efficiency. This led to critical thinking about redundancy. For example. Organizations could be redundant in terms of parts in that every unit would have the same mix of people. They could be redundant in that every unit performs exactly the same tasks, such as a franchise like McDonalds or Pizza Hut. This was closer but more organizations have a wide variety of people (accountants, lawyers, engineers, IT specialists, HRM personnel, etc.) in which their expertise was pooled to support the organization. A lawyer and an accountant in every Pizza Hut seemed ridiculous if one wants efficiency or adaptability. These considerations led to a new idea: Would it be possible to have the same processes of adaptation and change throughout the organization? Even though different units might employ people of different skills and perform different functions, the organization could be hologram-like in that there would be the same processes of adaptation and change everywhere.
This led to more questions. First, what were these processes of adaptation and change? Second, if such were present would the organization be simultaneously efficient, adaptable, and efficiently adaptable? Solving these problems led to the theory of the organizational hologram which was published in 1991 under the title, The Organizational Hologram: The Effective Management of Organizational Change (63). This theory led to the third question. How could one measure the extent to which an organization is holonomic? The third question gave rise to the Leadership Practices (LPs). The next question is could a reliable technology be developed to measure these LPs. Answering the fourth question led to the Organizational Diagnostic Survey and our HALO services. HALO stands for the Holonomic Analysis of the Leadership of an Organization. Eventually, through a decade of trial and error, the Knobby Analysis Process (KAP) (85, 86) evolved into its current state. KAP serves as the basis for the results, conclusions, and recommendations contained in our ODS On-Line services.
The answer to the initial question, what are the processes of adaptation and change is the twelve Holonomic Processes. The derivation of these processes was presented in The Organizational Hologram: The Effective Management of Organizational Change. It was demonstrated that if an organization has these twelve Holonomic Processes working throughout it could obtain the following benefits:
Armed with the theory of the organizational hologram, we at EMAC Assessments, LLC began the development of practical methods for operationalizing the theory, evolving the Organizational Diagnostic Survey, and extending the reach of the theory to other important questions such as an organizational-level learning model and virtual organizations.
The theory of the organizational hologram has its roots in Mackenzie's research beginning at Berkeley in 1962. The work led to a theory of structural change and the centrality of group and organizational processes. The early work was published in a two-volume set, A Theory of Group Structures (26, 27) in 1976. Our practice of designing organizations resulted in a new theory and technology for organizational design in 1986 (Organizational Design: The Organizational Audit and Analysis Technology) (57). This was followed in 1991 by The Organizational Hologram (63), and in 1995, The Practitioner's Guide For Improving An Organization (70) and finally The Practitioner's Guide for Organizing an Organization in 2004 (102) was published. Since 1994 there have been another 30 articles published in the scientific literatures as aspects of the theory of the organizational hologram by the author and his colleagues. Just as important, the theory has been applied in consulting projects for a decade. It is reasonably solid as a theory. Its methods work well in practice.
The reader might be "put off" by the language (e.g., holograms, Holonomic Processes, dynamic congruency), which is quite understandable. One might be hesitant to try something new and poorly understood by one's colleagues. That too, is a reasonable reaction, especially as fads come and go with distressing regularity.
The language of a hologram as an organizational form is new. However, the phenomena it captures is ancient. For example, the old Roman Republic was a type of hologram in which every Roman citizen was Rome and every Roman settlement was Rome. The Roman period lasted for 2,206 years from the founding of Rome in 753BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453CE. Think of this: Rome ran an empire without telephones, electricity, computers, and MBA programs. The wonder is not that Rome eventually fell but that Rome stood for so long. Given the rapid turnover in the Fortune 500, maybe the old Romans were on to something that is relevant today. We think so. We think it is the notion of viewing an organization as a type of hologram in its processes of adaptation and change.
New theory alters one's view. It incorporates a new paradigm and reality which requires one to think a little differently. In the theory of the organizational hologram, change is considered a friend and is perfectly natural. One should embrace rather than resist change. It is more practical to start managing the processes that produce results and worry less about trying to manage the numbers representing the results. This is done by ensuring the Holonomic processes are working everywhere in the organization. By ensuring that they are, the regular task processes work better.
The theory of the organizational hologram has been used in consulting with a number of organizations. It works. Since 1990 we have been working to improve the technology for delivering this theory. The ODS On-Line is a culmination of over a decade of serious work to achieve a working technology for using the theory of the organizational hologram to diagnose organizations.
There is a hidden structure to the theory of the organizational hologram. This is called the analytical pyramid. Note that the 6 Desired Organizational Characteristics, the 12 Holonomic Processes, and the 29 Leadership Practices are in the center of this pyramid. Each of these 47 processes are described in the Glossary.
The Analytical Pyramid of the Organizational Hologram
The theory of the organizational hologram (Mackenzie, 63) contains a theoretical structure called the analytical pyramid. Resting on a base of definitions and assumptions, a set of 35 propositions are derived which state "lower" level or beginning conclusions. These are then used to produce 20 "higher" level conclusions called principles. In the 1991 work these principles led to a dozen Holonomic Processes (HPs) of adaptation and change, six Desired Organizational Characteristics (DOCs), a Holonomic cube, and four macro organizational principles. In between then and now, a group of 29 Leadership Practices (LPs) have been inserted just below the 12 Holonomic Processes.
The Leadership Practices form a set partition of the 147 items in the Organizational Diagnostic Survey instrument in the ODS On-Line System. That is, each ODS item is in one and only one KIP.
The ODS On-Line makes explicit use of this analytical pyramid. It was used to define the items on the ODS instrument. It is used to link items to LPs to HPs to DOCs in the causal-chain analysis, a core method in the HALO Technology.
The full analytical pyramid becomes:
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