Mike Lehr's Blog

The Freedom-Order duality expresses a dimension of our personality involved in interpreting how we balance freedom and order. It can help us – in real time – understand, appreciate and predict better the reactions of others to such things as processes, decision-making, management, customer service, change and organization.

However, all of this is arbitrary, subjective, meaning different people are comfortable with different levels of freedom and order. To some freedom is chaos because it seems anyone can do whatever he wants. To others order is slavery because there is someone or a rule telling her what to do. Therefore, since there are no absolute states for either, you can be the benchmark as the figure shows. This allows you to assess whether people are more freedom-oriented or order-oriented than you are by the feelings and thoughts they trigger in you.

For instance, more freedom-oriented people might make you feel they are:

You might also notice they tend to use words such as these:

By contrast, more order-oriented people might make you feel they are:

Similarly, you might find them using words such as:

In our daily business lives, this means adding process and procedures to those who are more freedom-oriented than we are might stir anxious feelings about becoming nothing more than an automaton. Conversely, more flexibility and options to more order-oriented people might trigger anxious feelings about what is the right thing to do.

Once we are sensitive to this, we can better position the change by adapting immediately to what we observe in others. To the freedom-oriented people, we will need to reassure the flexibility of adding their own dimension, and to order-oriented people reassuring clear definitions of their duties will exist. In essence, we personalize our approach and words to by appreciating people and their needs better.

The article, Now You Know, in the May 28, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed a study published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville regarding the directing of children in their play. The conclusion is that prior explanation of how to play inhibits exploration and discovery.

Developmentally, businesses, through their everyday managerial practices, tend to instill a resistance to change in their people. They do this by excessively directing their people what to do. This direction not only comes via communications from managers but also procedures managers established. Consequently, employees don’t need to think; they just do as told.

As with any task, practice reduces anxiety of doing it. Uncertainty is no different. To become more accepting and adapting of change, employees need exposure to uncertainty. They need to explore and discover. Reiterated more pragmatically, they need to try and err. However, this requires time and money which is intolerable in most business cultures.

Therefore, managers need to look for tasks and projects that require thinking, exploring and discovering by their employees.  For example, assigning tasks requiring unique customer solutions would help. This could mean simply writing a letter to address a unique customer inquiry. Tasks involving working with people of different personality types work too. Creating a new process or set of procedures is good. Any task where the method or solution isn’t pre-defined or one of several works will help.

If you want to encourage your employees to have a change mentality, you need to give them experience in dealing with uncertainty. It means giving them time to explore and discover, to try and err. It means encouraging them to think for themselves rather than telling them what to do.

This past month, I conversed with a resident of a Muslim country. He commented on how many of his fellow citizens couldn’t understand why Americans thought they were free. “They have all these laws directing them. They can’t drive as fast as they want and they even need the government’s permission to drive (licenses).”

Coincidentally, the December 16^th 2010 edition of The Economist reported on driving in Iraq. It’s true, at least there, that Iraq has far fewer driving restrictions than the United States has. It doesn’t even require driving licenses. However, driving there is dangerous. In fact, “the health ministry estimates that six times as many people now die in car accidents as fall victim to political violence.”

I also ran across an article about choice in the same issue. “Too much choice, concluded Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford, is demotivating.” The article went on to suggest that this is from the anxiety people often feel when making decisions; too much freedom of choice increases anxiety.

There are people who seem to prefer less, and almost no, freedom in their work. They prefer clearly defined directions, rules, policies and procedures dictating their thinking and actions. Why? I have come to learn that this produces a different kind of freedom for some: freedom from responsibility. How can we be responsible for decisions we did not make or regulations we did not write? For some it also produces certainty; they know what the “right” decision is.

As the diagram to the right asks, “When does more freedom become chaos and uncertainty to us?” For each of us, that varies. For some of us, it restricts freedom so much that it might not even seem like freedom anymore. So, is freedom for everybody?

In his landmark book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) ponders why two Arabs can hold off a dozen Turks but a thousand Arabs cannot defeat a thousand Turks. He arrives at the realization that large scale armies need to be organized around the weakest link to tap the advantages that size and technology can offer. In other words, you can’t organize your army around a set of requirements that are impossible for a soldier to perform.

With this in mind, what might happen to a Special Forces combatant who is compelled to fight in the regular army? As the article, Imperial Grunts, conveys in the October 2005 issue of the The Atlantic, many of these combatants might not “fit” well in the regular army. This is what caused the Arabs to not fight well in large groups; they could not bridle their talents. This is very much like a talented athlete who is forced to sit on the bench or compelled to perform within a structure that does not allow him to express his talents.

In the workplace, the same can occur with an employee who feels the employer is not using his talent wisely. Since a large corporation is like a large army, it will tend to organize around the weakest link. Thus, he might not have the freedom to show what he really could do because he is being forced to work like everyone else does. When we combine this with managers and co-workers who feel threatened by his talent, you could easily see his talents suppressed, his influence marginalized or his actions disruptive. All could mean his departure.

A CEO of a 150-employee services company made this astute observation: processes reduce the need for top talent, and thus, reduce labor costs. This company requires highly talented professionals to deliver its services. Historically, management allowed them to work without defined processes because the employees knew what to do. However, as the company grew, finding such talent became harder and more expensive.

Processes become the path to training and developing in-house talent. They are analogous to painting by numbers or following recipes in cooking; they improve the output produced by individuals who don’t have a grasp on the entire work. However, just as we wouldn’t confuse painting by numbers with being an artist and following a recipe with being a chef, we shouldn’t confuse executing the steps of a process with being talented. Processes allow the breakdown of a task without necessarily needing to understand the task itself. It’s like following a series of directions; you don’t need to know your destination.

Since an employee doesn’t need to understand the whole task to follow a process, he does not need the talent that that understanding requires. Essentially, the process is making the decisions for him as embodied by its rules and procedures. As a result, the company does not have to pay a premium for that talent.