We need to get rid of management in order to adapt to the knowledge-work era.

Add my name to a growing list of writers who are convinced that management is past its sell-by date (see http://www.managementexchange.com). This is the kind of company I’m happy to keep.

Every few years, someone steps up and claims that management needs tweaking. They know just what is wrong and have a tool that will put management back in shape. In the case of re-engineering, for example, the problem was not paying enough attention to processes, as opposed to structures, and the tool of choice was the process chart. Attitudes like these have fed a steady stream of management fads in the past, but are minor compared to what we are hearing today. Now the dissatisfaction with management goes much deeper. To get some idea of how deep, read Gary Hamel’s Moon Shoots for Management in the Harvard Business Review (February 2009).

In my experience, the mindset of management is wrong. Are we seriously meant to believe that management principles and practices are universal; that running a software company in Australia is no different from managing a clothing factory in Vietnam? Management has hardly changed since it was invented for organising production lines in industrial-age factories. But work has changed completely. Where work on a production line was solitary, repetitive, regimented and largely mindless, these days most of us are knowledge workers – and knowledge work is collective, creative and complicated.

The problem is that, when you wear management lenses, you can’t tell the difference between factory work and knowledge work. To do so, you need to be ‘inside’ work – and that isn’t a manager’s view. Management is preoccupied with plans, data, budgets and deadlines. These aren’t work. They don’t get things done. Work is people ‘sharing knowledge’, interacting and talking – negotiating, deliberating, questioning, discussing and arguing. They do this to get organised. Knowledge workers network and decide, together, what to do, when, how and with whom. When they are organised, they can move on and finish the job. Knowledge work doesn’t come with a set of instructions, and organising takes agility. The people doing it – all of us – need room to manoeuvre, because we are working out what to do on the fly and have to adjust our schedules, bring in new partners, change direction and, sometimes, go back and do things over. You can’t do this when you are either saddled with structures that other people have created, or hemmed in by someone else’s rules. High-control organisations are nothing but rules, systems and structures. The structures – hierarchy and bureaucracy – create silos that prevent people sharing knowledge. And so does competition. The basis of knowledge work is cooperation.

If knowledge work and management can’t mix, there is only one thing to do. We have to get those high-control practices out of the way. Once they’ve gone and knowledge workers have ‘taken charge’ at work, they’ll be able to do their work properly.

So how does a knowledge worker take charge of work? While there are no quick and dirty solutions (like getting to grips with climate change, this is one ‘wicked problem’ that is going to take a long time to resolve), we need to start somewhere. The place to start, surprisingly, is with talk. If you think ‘changing the conversation’ sounds too tame, imagine a workplace where people don’t talk about ‘superiors and subordinates’, ‘the organisation’, ‘performance’, ‘benchmarks’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘management’. Words and stories are powerful. What people say influences how they see things, what they do and how they act. Work-talk (‘management-speak’) has everyone thinking they live and work in the industrial age. ‘Efficiency’ and ‘re-engineering’ come from physics and engineering, ‘superiors and subordinates’ from rigid and inflexible military command structures and, like ‘performance’, ‘benchmarks’ are straight out of the father of scientific management Fredrick Taylor’s playbook. Have you ever considered that there is no such thing as an organisation (can you show me one)? Yet we’re obsessed with organisations, while we ignore organising, which is real (everyone does it). We’re looking the wrong way, at the wrong things.

One of the world’s leading authorities on leadership, Ron Heifetz, calls the kind of work involved in changing the way we work ‘adaptive’. By this, he means it is all about attitudes, values, beliefs and relationships. It isn’t a technical matter, so tools aren’t useful. The hard work of changing attitudes and values relies on talk. Adaptive work is hard because, when it comes to giving up cherished values, there is always a sense of loss, so ‘success’ means people have to compromise. Management, which relies on tools, doesn’t prepare us for this kind of work. Although getting rid of management sounds radical, it isn’t. Imagine agile software methods as a model for organising all knowledge work. To find out more about taking charge at work, read Beyond Management.

Mark Addleson received his PhD from WBS in 1993 and taught at the school from 1980 to 1994. He is now on the faculty at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, Arlington, Virginia, in the US, where he teaches in the Organisation Development and Knowledge Management graduate programme. He has just published Beyond Management: Taking Charge at Work (London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan).