DisManaging

Last night, I dreamt about management. It was kind of weird.

Basically, I found myself trying to be the leader of a bunch of people who were pretty disorganized, and at times my organizational skills helped them along. But I noticed, unwillingly, that they didn’t like it – that there were times when I got the feeling that they’d rather be disorganized than effective; they felt that in organization they were losing something that made them effective. I could almost see that point of view. But I also thought that in being disorganized they were losing something effective, losing the ability to get returns for their efforts, and that frustrated me. At one point we were supposed to be handing out packets of information to everyone. This was important stuff, like packets of airline tickets and passports. I knew that in the past we’d get to a point where we’d think that everyone had their stuff, and then someone would say no, they were missing their ticket, or they didn’t know what the ticket was supposed to look like, or they had someone elses passport - so it was pretty important to do it carefully and precisely – here’s what you should have, do you have it, okay, next. Their feeling was that I was taking authority and, more importantly, responsibility away from people. Its their material, they’d say, if they screwed up and didn’t have the right stuff, they’d get hurt, so let them take responsibility for themselves. Yeah, I’d argue, but the downside is that if they mess up, they affect not just themselves but others too – now person one has person two’s passport, so two people are affected. At some point the costs of disorganization are too high, you need that central control. But I had to acknowledge their point too, that there are times when the costs of organization are too high, you do lose something vital. The phrase "Just Enough Management" came to my mind.

And then I woke up.