In-Depth

Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 2

How the thinking of a Jesuit priest can make a difference in IT/management communication.

• By Jim McGee
• 01/25/2005

Suppose you buy the notion that management is fundamentally an oral culture (as we discussed last week) and IT a literate one. How does that influence how you manage IT? How can you take full advantage of technology?

In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell—without visual aids. Oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop. Literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.

Management understands something that those rooted in literate thinking may not. Knowing the right answer analytically has little or nothing to do with whether you can get the organization to accept that answer. What literate thinkers dismiss as “politics” is the essential work of translating and packaging an idea for acceptance and consumption in an oral culture.

The critical step in translating from a literate answer to an oral plan of action is finding a story to hang the answer on. The analysis only engages the mind; moving analysis to action must engage the whole person. Revealing this truth to the analytical minded can be discomforting. It’s equivalent to explaining to an accountant that the key to a Capital Expenditure proposal is theater, not economics. You might want to check out Steve Denning’s book, “The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations,” for some good insights into how to craft effective stories inside organizations.

In addition to helping the analytically biased see the value of creating a compelling story, you need to help them see how and why story works differently than analysis. The best stories to drive change are not complex, literary, novels. They are epic poetry; tapping into archetypes and cliché, acknowledging tradition, grounded in the particular. You need to bring them to an understanding of why repetition and “staying on message” is key to shifting an oral culture’s course, not an evil invention of marketing.

Assume you teach the literate types in your IT organization how to repackage their analyses for consumption. They've now learned how to pitch their ideas in ways that will stick in the organization. What might you learn from their literate approach to thought? Is there an opportunity if you can get more of your organization and more of your management operating with literate modes of thinking?

Being able to write things down done permits you to develop an argument that is more complex and sophisticated. On the plus side, this makes rocket science possible. On the negative side, you get lawyers.

On the other hand, if you are operating in an environment whose complexity demands a corresponding complexity in your organizational responses, then encouraging more literate thinking by more members of the organization is a good strategy.

What would such an organization look like compared to today's dominant oral design? The mere presence of e-mail and an intranet is insufficient. E-mail tends to mirror oral modes of thought, particularly among more senior executives. Intranets tend to be over-controlled and, to the extent they contain examples of literate thinking, are rooted in an organizational culture that strives to confine the literate mind to the role of well-pigeonholed expert. The presence of particular tools, then, isn't likely to be a good predictor, although their absence might be.

What of possible case examples? A few knowledge management success stories hold hints. Buckman Labs used discussion groups successfully to get greater leverage out of its staff's knowledge and expertise. Whether this success built on literate modes of thought or simply on better distribution of oral stories is less clear. The successes of some widely distributed software development teams are worth looking at from this perspective.

Although it's a bit too early to tell, the take up of blogs and wikis inside organizations may be a harbinger of management based on literate thinking skills. They offer an interesting bridge between the oral and the literate by providing a way to capture conversation in a way that makes it visible and, hence, analyzable. As a class of tools, they begin to move institutional memory out of the purely oral and into the realm of literate.