Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioner's Reflections

by Luc Hoebeke

Combines theory with practice to demonstrate how organizations work. Based on a non-hierarchical model of enterprises, it offers a framework in order to recognize the dynamics for successful organizations and to improve performances by highlighting and strengthening these dynamics. Provides excellent guidance for managers, encouraging them to reflect on their own experiences to avoid the chaotic detail of constant change and to concentrate on their true strategic intentions.

Genres: Management, Philosophy

204 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1994

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meanwhile I have read Hoebeke’s work again and I am still as awed by its richness as I was when I wrote my original review. More than ever I’m struck by the tension between the book’s almost scientific rigor and the clemency and gentleness of the author’s worldview. The focus on work systems shifts the attention from faceless ‘organisations’ to the tangible human beings. Hoebeke’s aim is to make things simpler, to scale down our ambitions when intervening in human affairs. We can’t solve all problems and control all systems. Also we can’t shut out uncertainty. We have to accept existential risk. In fact, there’s relatively little we can do apart from asking good questions once in a while. The book offers a language and a framework to ask those questions. Hoebeke’s view on organisation’s resonates with James Carse’s concept of an ‘infinite game’. Finite games are those instrumental activities - from sports to politics to wars - in which the participants obey rules, recognize boundaries and announce winners and losers. But an infinite game includes any authentic interaction that changes rules, plays with boundaries and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game. Hoebeke’s pragmatic, social-constructivist approach, his focus on malleable work systems and his emphatically non-teleological conception of human behavior offer a fertile ground for a practice of ‘poiesis’ that continuously brings to life new behavioral repertoires, enhances our receptivity towards difference and variety, and increases our capacity for accommodation between these differences.

--- original review (2005) follows below

Wanting to testify how important Hoebeke's 'Making Work Systems Better' has been for my practice as a process consultant, I felt compelled to write this review. The book is both in style and content unlike any other management book I know. The terseness of the discussion - stretching to a mere 180 pages - and its obvious conceptual rigour make it at first difficult to approach. It took me a while to tunnel through to its deeper messages, but now I feel confident with the material and I find it informs many aspects of my practice as a professional in the field of strategy and organisational development.

The breakthrough in my appreciation of Hoebeke's work came when I realised how masterly it bridges the gap between the 'lived texture of organisational life' (thus Peter Checkland in his Foreword) and the elegance and power of systems science concepts. 'Never confuse a definition with the mysterious reality beneath it', is a key message very early on in the book and yet for a long time I failed to grasp its importance. I can see now why that is: as a professional it takes time to mature up to a point where one enters open and relaxed into a client organisation, without being stifled by fears of personal failure or feeling compelled to 'make a point'. Paradoxically, this groundtone of empathy with the messiness inherent in a concrete organisational reality creates a much more effective starting point for the mobilisation of disciplined conceptual thinking. It is only when this insight started to sink in that this book moved into the center of my practice.

If I want to do justice to Luc Hoebeke's fundamentally anti-bureaucratic stance, I need to be careful here with the concept of 'organisation'. As a matter of fact, in an attempt to avoid its pernicious connotations with power and ownership, the author disposes of the term right from the start. Instead he prefers the concept of 'work system' which denotes a purposeful but more or less loosely coupled and self-regulated group of people. Organisational boundaries as a rule do not coincide with those of related work systems. By looking at the reality around us as composed of myriad interacting and overlapping work systems, we see sets of meaningful and concrete 'activities' and set of 'relations' between the people performing these activities. Hence, the bulk of Hoebeke's book is devoted to a conceptual framework that allows us to identify relevant work systems, the sets of activities that constitute these volatile systems and the contributions that are made by those people engaged in the system. Again, the formal character of the language should not obscure the fact that it refers to the concrete, living reality of people burning carbohydrates in manifold ways, all in the process of jointly pursuing a shared purpose. As such, the framework and the language that goes with it constitutes a fundamental alternative to the ideological organisational templates that are populating textbooks on organisational development.

Work systems are firmly anchored in the world surrounding them by the purpose they have identified for themselves. Building on Peter Checkland's notion of 'system definition', Hoebeke characterises this purpose as an elementary transformation of a specified input into a particular output. Once there is a shared understanding of this purpose then there is a basis for studying in depth the processes or activity models that support this transformation (and thereby constitute the essence of the work system). It is here that the specifically systemic nature of Hoebeke's framework comes into play: processes can be differentiated in a recursive hierarchy of domains, stretching from the operationally oriented 'added value' domain to the spiritual domain, with the 'innovation' and 'value systems' domain in between. The recursive nature of the hierarchy comes down to the fact that the output of work systems operating at a higher recursion level are creating viability conditions for the underlying domain. Each of these recursion levels is associated with different types of activities which unfold over increasingly wide timescales as we move up the systemic hierarchy.

The bulk of the book is taken up by a detailed treatment of each domain in terms of its basic characteristics, generic transformation process, strategic dilemma and information needs. Hoebeke lightens the otherwise quite uncompromising rigour of his discussion by weaving in many examples of his own professional practice, often in quite adventurous settings. They warrant detailed study as many of them are exhilarating examples of out-of-the-box thinking. The move from the added value domain, dictated by a purely economic logic to the spiritual domain, where the struggle with one's own mortality is fought, is a captivating journey. Hoebeke approaches the latter with trepidation and his treatment of these highly personal and at the same time universally human issues is of utmost brevity. Yet the depth of insight is truly humbling. Together with a few chapters from Roger Harrison's 'Consultant's Journey' these are amongst my most cherished pages in the whole of 'management' literature.

In Chapter 8 Hoebeke starts to play around with the framework as a whole, showing how elegantly and effectively it leads us to the disclosure of all kinds of socially constructed paradoxes, tensions and controversies that continue to wreak havoc. At each of the recursion levels, Hoebeke broaches fundamental issues - such as the nature of competition in the added-value domain and of democracy in the value-systems domain - all in his characteristic, quietly iconoclastic way. It is an excellent demonstration of the framework's power as a diagnostic tool when in capable hands.

A fifteen-page synopsis, neatly summarising the key points for each of the domains, brings the book to a close.

'Making work systems better' is a wayward book. Sometimes I find the basic ideas simple, only to bump in unexpected layers of complexity the next day. Its layout is scientifically rigorous, yet at the same time the book holds on to a strangely labyrinthine quality. It gives few answers but prompts many good questions.

It is a pity that this book never had a great audience. Wiley published it as a hardback in 1994. Since it has sold about 1.500 copies. Now it has been withdrawn from the catalogue. A cheap paperback reissue, more moderately priced than the original publication, would be most welcome. I know from personal correspondence with the author that he has been considering a reissue, taking the opportunity to expand the book with a rich collection of essays written in the last five years. I advised him strongly against doing so. The book as it stands now has all it needs to become a classic in the long run. Not only in its uncompromising terseness and severe logic I would compare it to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Similar to the latter its angular facade conceals a humane and wise attempt to help us to come to terms with the world and our place in it.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seems to be another book for managers and organization experts, but it is so much more than that. As the title shows, Hoebeke emphasizes practice, the reality of what he himself has observed in his rich international career (especially as a consultant, with an engineering background). And the most important message is that in looking at organizations, the concrete work system must be the focus, not the formal organizational structure (“look at what the system does, not what it says it does"); in other words: look at the relationships between concrete people (producers, clients, owners, stakeholders, etc.). And then that view proves to lead to surprising conclusions.

For his way of looking at reality, Hoebeke mainly refers to system thinking, which was developed into a very large diversity after the Second World War: the focus there is on relationships and patterns, interactions and strange phenomena related to complexity and uncertainty; this is leading very far away from linear, positivistic thinking.

As mentioned, this book is so much more than a management or organizational study: Hoebeke pays a lot of attention to the basic domain of what he calls the 'added value' - and almost everything of what we do seems to belong to it – but he also builds domains on top of that (my apologies for the misleading language, suggesting a hierarchy) which ultimately brings him to the global, almost paradigmatic-philosophical level of the value-domain, and which gives this book an unsurpassed depth.

My main point of criticism is the structure of this book: by first presenting into detail his frame of reference, the reader is initially confronted with a very theoretical approach; Hoebeke illustrates his definitions and propositions as much as possible with practical examples (and there are delicious eye-openers in this corner), but it makes the reading of this book rather difficult. It is only in the last quarter that this book really comes to life and you see what the potential is of Hoebeke's approach. As a publisher, I would have encouraged Hoebeke to start with a few stimulating examples of that approach, so that the reader remains motivated. (rating 3.5 stars)

Those interested can find the full text of this book in pdf format via this link: https://www.ie-net.be/sites/ie-academ...