No, this isn’t a text on computing despite the title’s allusion to Charles Babbage’s mechanical computer prototype. This work is a contribution to the literature on the management of change. The “difference” in question is that which exists between the cultures of organisations working in alliance, a potential source of benefit if appropriately managed.
The term “partnership” is used to cover various forms of inter‐organisational co‐operation, such as joint ventures, shared research and development efforts, relationships between organisations and their suppliers, co‐operation in order to access distant markets. The authors, both practising management consultants, write that “co‐operation is ceasing to be the opposite of competition, and is becoming one of its preferred methods” as organisations tend to move away from vertical and horizontal integration as preferred strategies. They believe that “partnering relationships, both within and between organisations, will become the essence of the successful 21st‐century corporation”.
This apparently paradoxical approach to competition is presented as a manifestation of post‐modern management logic. Earlier approaches based on planning and control, linear progression towards some ideal through rational processes based on one right way to see the world are modernist, whereas the post‐modern manager accepts paradox and ambiguity, sees understanding as being context‐specific, and acknowledges that there are many valid ways of seeing the world. (In fact, this seems to reflect a very Romantic logic: “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats, 1817) “There is nothing stable in the world – uproar’s your only music” (Keats again, 1818). Perhaps advising senior managers to be more Romantic is an unattractive prospect).
Although “partnering” as described above seems to be essentially a private sector issue, the authors interpret it broadly when it comes to examining cases: they included a metropolitan district council and its relationship with trades unions, and a National Health Service trust and a civic retraining initiative in the situations they studied.
Many of the problems which arise in attempting to manage change are related to organisational culture, and culture clashes are at the heart of Dearing and Murphy’s analysis. They say that partnering “lacks a ‘thought framework’ to help diagnose and, if possible, remedy the causes of the frequent failures of partnership” – and they set out to fill this gap. Their consultancy work allowed them to identify a set of themes and issues which they shaped into a Partnering Grid, and the thinking behind this provides the substance of the text.
The grid is based on a characterisation of the partner organisations’ reasons for entering a partnership (to deal with a threat, or, in contrast, to exploit a new opportunity) and their attitudes to the difference between the partners (avoidance, tolerance or valuing difference). At one extreme of the grid are organisations where it is widely believed that difference is the source of most partnership problems. This leads to an approach which seeks to minimise differences by means of close planning, contractual specification, formulation of rules – the “Command and Control” approach as it is labelled. At the other extreme are organisations where differences are not only valued but also actively explored – the “Radically New” cell. In between are four other categories with their own characteristics, problems and weaknesses.
This is a contingency approach: the authors note that “one can never identify the best box [in the Partnership Grid] without reference to the context”. As is commonly the case with contingency theorists, this professed lack of prescriptiveness is contradicted by other signals and comments: the various cells in the grid progress and rise from bottom left (Command and Control) to top right (Radically New). One of the cells, Gridlock, is obviously not an appropriate state in any context. It is the “Radically New” situation which really excites the authors and the one which they champion as being appropriate to conditions needing adaptation, creativity and innovation.
Although they are concerned with partnering, their analysis is relevant to management within single organisations; the fact that in equal partnerships there is no boss makes apparent a condition which is affecting many businesses. Complexity and rapid change have made traditional management ineffective, but the remedy of the 1980s and 1990s – the creation and selling of a “vision” which, once internalised by the members of the organisations, provides the framework within which empowered decision making can be employed – is simply a different form of control from the top. It requires the unlikely achievement of a genuine acceptance of the vision by everyone within the organisation. In the “Radically New” relationship the role of the leader is “to create a space for different kinds of interaction”, to foster an environment in which the creative potential of difference can be realised. In this view the inadequacies of strategic planning are recognised and strategy is replaced by “a spontaneous searching process that can be characterised as the ‘exploration of common ground”’. Strategy emerges through the projects which are engaged in.
Instead of acting on the basis of a united acceptance of a single vision, groups can accept difference but operate in the identified areas of common ground. This means that they can be faster and more responsive because the effort to win hearts and minds is not a prerequisite. Whereas traditional strategic planning has been criticised for a rigidity, which discourages innovation, this deliberately uncontrolled situation ideally combines stability and instability, a combination which generates creativity and stimulates innovation.
In this new situation the importance of communication is heightened and a number of techniques to encourage genuine dialogue are suggested.
It should be apparent that these ideas can be related to existing analyses, some of which go back a long way (echoes of Burns and Stalker’s organic organisations, for example) and some of which are more recent, but the combination here is very well developed and better written than many management texts – at times eloquent and stimulating.
From a practical point of view the key question is, how relevant is this book to LIS management? Co‐operation is nothing new in library and information services and the grid might be expected to be of greater relevance to library managers than many management ideas that are founded on essentially competitive situations. Over recent years the importance of co‐operative endeavour and joint projects has been re‐emphasised from several quarters. However, it is difficult to see the intensive and norm‐changing form of partnering envisaged in this text being relevant in most LIS contexts. Disappointingly, the local authority, which is included in the sample of organisations examined by the authors, receives no real attention in the rest of the text.
Having said that, individual services may find themselves in untypical situations where the terrain bears more resemblance to that described in The Difference Engine, and anyone interested in the current development of management ideas will find this an engaging and thought‐provoking work, regardless of its immediate applicability in information services.
