Why some organisational conflicts are produced by structures rather than people. Most failures of collaboration do not arise from major conflicts.
They arise from an email deliberately left unanswered. From a decision postponed yet again. From a request interpreted in the most restrictive way possible. From a meeting that ends with no one taking responsibility. From a business function that follows the procedure perfectly but loses sight of the purpose for which that procedure exists.
Considered individually, these episodes seem insignificant. Managers tend to interpret them as problems with an individual's character, occasional misunderstandings, poor motivation or bad leadership.
Yet when the same phenomena recur across different projects, with different people and at different moments in the organisation's life, perhaps it is worth questioning whether people are the problem.
What if certain organisational structures made the emergence of these collaborative micro-obstructions statistically probable?
Collaborative micro-obstructions: recurrent organisational behaviours that slow cooperation, manifesting themselves not as open conflicts but as imperceptible gradients. Just as a ball placed on a sloping surface tends to roll downwards, certain organisational configurations tend to produce the same frictions over and over again.
No one openly sabotages other people's work. No one declares an intention to slow a project down. There is simply a decline in the discretionary willingness that makes genuine collaboration possible.
The result takes the form of delays, escalations, additional meetings, redundant checks and growing operational complexity.
The cost of micro-obstructions
Organisations tend to measure what is visible. They measure time, costs, productivity and financial results. But it is harder to measure what might have been. The gravity of information not shared, of a problem not reported or an opportunity not put forward.
Yet a significant part of organisational efficiency depends precisely on whether these actions are taken or not.
Collaboration generates more value when people contribute beyond what their role formally prescribes. When they share information, anticipate problems, coordinate activities and take on responsibilities that interpret not the procedure but its meaning.
Micro-obstructions do exactly the opposite. They progressively reduce the willingness to collaborate. Each episode causes minimal damage, but their cumulative effects are enormous. Like working to rule on assembly lines, though without the intention: the project slows down, quality deteriorates, decisions become more cautious, innovation disappears, and even if the organisation continues to function, it does so with a friction that slows it down and makes every cog suffer.
When conflict is designed in
Many businesses address these phenomena through training, coaching, mediation and team building. But they act on behaviours while leaving unchanged the structure that generated them.
Imagine an organisation in which sales is rewarded exclusively for the volume of orders secured and operations exclusively for production efficiency. Sales will tend to promise flexibility, while operations will tend to reduce variability. Both will act rationally, and both will be right from their own point of view. But they will systematically come into conflict, more or less openly. This is tension built into the system.
Many corporate antagonisms are predictable: marketing and sales. Finance and operations. Research and development and production. Headquarters and branches. And there is little point in changing people or training them if the structure remains: the conflict reappears, and when a phenomenon survives a change of personnel, it is worth beginning to examine the architecture that produces it.
The Challenger case
The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 is often remembered as a technical error. The subsequent investigation revealed a more complex reality, since critical information existed and engineers had expressed concerns.
The problem concerned the way that information travelled through the organisational structure. Operational pressures, decision-making hierarchies and fragmented responsibilities created a configuration that made it difficult to turn a technical doubt into an organisational decision.
No one wanted to cause the disaster. And everyone also felt that cancelling the launch would be a disaster. Yet the structure made it more likely that signals would be reinterpreted as acceptable as they passed from one person to the next. As though the decision-making architecture had transformative powers. The final event was the result of many small, apparently reasonable steps.
The effects on organisational ecosystems
The consequences of micro-obstructions extend beyond the individual project. Over time, they alter collective behaviour. People learn which information is best left unshared. Which battles are not worth fighting. Which responsibilities are safer to transfer elsewhere. What I mean is that they become entrenched in an adaptive culture in which people protect themselves on the one hand and vent petty resentments on the other.
From management to prevention
The managerial implication is simple. Conflicts in collaboration are not always problems to be managed. Better, then, to prevent them. When a structure systematically generates the same frictions, the main issue is not individuals' interpersonal skills. It is organisational design.
Organisations invest enormous resources in managing symptoms; it would be worth shifting perspective and addressing the conditions that make them likely.
From psychology to architecture. From people to relationships. From behaviours to the configurations that generate them.
Naming the phenomenon
The strength of a concept lies in its ability to make visible something that previously appeared fragmented. Before they had a name, micro-obstructions appeared as isolated episodes. An ignored email. A postponed decision. A project slowing down.
Now we can look at them together, as different manifestations of the same phenomenon, arising from relational configurations that make those behaviours inevitable, and therefore predictable.
Which part of the structure, of the architecture of rules and procedures, means that we are always late with these kinds of projects, with these deliveries, that we have this issue with returns we cannot resolve, and all the other things we would like to change but cannot. They are unlikely to be resolved by intervening only at the level of people.
References
Organ, Dennis W., Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome, Lexington, 1988.
Morrison, Elizabeth Wolfe; Milliken, Frances J., “Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World”, in Academy of Management Review, vol. 25, Briarcliff Manor, 2000, pp. 706–725.
Kerr, Steven, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B”, in Academy of Management Journal, vol. 18, Briarcliff Manor, 1975, pp. 769–783.
Lawrence, Paul R.; Lorsch, Jay W., Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration, Boston, 1967.
Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, Washington, 1986.
Vaughan, Diane, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Chicago, 1996.