Disjoint Awareness: Systematics

When the members of a collaboration labor under inaccurate views of what each other is doing or intending to do, trouble can arise. They might unintentionally interfere with each other, which can jeopardize the collaboration's success. I call this state of confusion or ignorance about the work or plans of colleagues disjoint awareness. In recent posts I've been exploring the causes and consequences of disjoint awareness, emphasizing the nature of the work and the attributes of the collaborators. In this post, I examine possible organizational contributions to disjoint awareness that arise from policies and processes of the organization that hosts the collaboration.

Three organizational drivers of disjoint awareness come to mind immediately: performance management, organizational politics, and resource allocation.

Performance management

The imperatives of performance management systems like those used in many modern organizations have consequences — usually unintended — that include exacerbation of disjoint awareness. Most such systems include a performance appraisal process that purports to assess each individual's performance against a set of expectations defined for that individual's role. But for roles that are largely or exclusively collaborative, performance appraisal frameworks that are designed to assess individual performance have an insidious effect. They cause the assessed individuals to focus on their own individual performance, rather than — and at times to the exclusion of — the performance of the collaboration.

The individual-oriented Organizational processes and policies
can contribute to confusion and
misunderstandings amongst the members
of collaborations, and that can jeopardize
the objectives of the collaborationsperformance appraisal process gives individuals little "credit" for taking steps that mostly benefit the collaboration, and assesses significant penalties for failing to meet individualized expectations. With their attention focused on their own individual performance, members of collaborations devote too little effort to developing mutual understanding of what each other is doing or intending to do. Disjoint awareness is a direct result. In this way, the organizational system in which people find themselves influences them to make choices that tend to exacerbate disjoint awareness.

Organizational politics

Politics plays a role in exacerbating disjoint awareness. For example, some executives, managers, and project sponsors believe they weaken their political positions by letting it be known that they have plans for managing the risk of reductions in their budgets. Let's call such people Caretakers. Caretakers believe that if other decision makers knew about their contingency plans, Caretakers' budgets would become tempting targets for deeper cuts. So Caretakers keep such plans confidential, which limits information sharing across project or departmental boundaries. That makes disjoint awareness more common and limits the effectiveness of organizational responses when cuts are actually needed.

Politics drives disjoint awareness in many other ways as well. Any situation that pits one seeker of advantage against another is at risk of being treated as a zero-sum game, in which one seeker of advantage can succeed only by depriving other seekers of the advantages they seek. Example situations include reorganizations, competition for promotion, and resource allocation (see below). When a zero-sum dynamic arises, seekers might tend to succumb to the temptation of misrepresenting to each other their work and intentions, thus exacerbating disjoint awareness.

Resource allocation

One process necessary to the success of large enterprises is monitoring their business units to ensure that appropriate levels of resources are allocated to their various efforts. To accomplish this, they gather from each project, department, or business unit data that helps them make resource allocation decisions. Thus, those responsible for these entities all have goals to meet — budgets, schedules, quotas, or other measures of effectiveness. These people are required to report periodically the data on which the relevant measures are based. The primary purpose of these reports is to enable officials to take action if a pattern develops that might indicate either trouble or opportunity.

When these reports might indicate trouble, the people who must submit the reports can be tempted to "adjust" them or delay their delivery. Adjustments and delays — actions that might be termed "impression management" — can provide time to take corrective action before anyone else discovers the problem. The temptation to engage in impression management arises because correcting the problem can avert project cancellation, business unit spin-off or liquidation, or career disaster.

Impression management can create or exacerbate disjoint awareness on the part of the recipients of the reports, because conveying a misrepresentation of the real state of affairs is the end result — indeed, the goal — of impression management activities.

In this way disjoint awareness leads the recipients of the reports to make decisions that they otherwise might not have made. For instance, if there is a need to focus the organization on successful activities, and terminate troubled activities, the entity that submitted "adjusted" data — call it "Deceptor" — might be regarded as successful, when it actually is not. Disjoint awareness then causes the organization to make an inappropriate decision regarding Deceptor's future.

These are only examples of how conventional organizational policies and processes can contribute to disjoint awareness, and thus create risks for collaborations. When devising policies and processes for an organization, consider the impact on disjoint awareness within collaborations, and devise mitigations.   First issue in this series    Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

Occasionally we have the experience of belonging to a great team. Thrilling as it is, the experience is rare. In part, it's rare because we usually strive only for adequacy, not for greatness. We do this because we don't fully appreciate the returns on greatness. Not only does it feel good to be part of great team — it pays off. Check out my Great Teams Workshop to lead your team onto the path toward greatness. More info

Your comments are welcome

About Point Lookout

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, and that you'll consider recommending it to a friend.

This article in its entirety was written by a human being. No machine intelligence was involved in any way.

Point Lookout is a free weekly email newsletter. Browse the archive of past issues. Subscribe for free.

Support Point Lookout by joining the Friends of Point Lookout, as an individual or as an organization.

Do you face a complex interpersonal situation? Send it in, anonymously if you like, and I'll give you my two cents.

Related articles

More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:

Food for Thought

Most companies have employee cafeterias, with the usual not-much-better-than-high-school food service. By upgrading — and subsidizing — food service, these companies can reduce turnover and improve productivity dramatically.

How to Make Good Guesses: Tactics

Making good guesses probably does take talent to be among the first rank of those who make guesses. But being in the second rank is pretty good, too, and we can learn how to do that. Here are some tactics for guessing.

How to Deal with Holding Back

When group members voluntarily restrict their contributions to group efforts, group success is threatened and high performance becomes impossible. How can we reduce the incidence of holding back?

Brain Clutter

The capacity of the human mind is astonishing. Our ability to accomplish great things while simultaneously fretting about mountains of trivia is perhaps among the best evidence of that capacity. Just imagine what we could accomplish if we could control the fretting…

Anticipating Absence: How

Knowledge workers are professionals who "think for a living." When they suddenly become unavailable because of the pandemic, we consider substituting someone else. But substitutes need much more than skills and experience to succeed.

See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.

Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout

Coming September 4: Beating the Layoffs: I

If you work in an organization likely to conduct layoffs soon, keep in mind that exiting voluntarily before the layoffs can carry significant advantages. Here are some that relate to self-esteem, financial anxiety, and future employment. Available here and by RSS on September 4.

And on September 11: Beating the Layoffs: II

If you work in an organization likely to conduct layoffs soon, keep in mind that exiting voluntarily can carry advantages. Here are some advantages that relate to collegial relationships, future interviews, health, and severance packages. Available here and by RSS on September 11.

Coaching services

I offer email and telephone coaching at both corporate and individual rates. Contact Rick for details at rbrenyrWpTxHuyCrjZbUpner@ChacnoFNuSyWlVzCaGfooCanyon.com or (650) 787-6475, or toll-free in the continental US at (866) 378-5470.

Get the ebook!

Past issues of Point Lookout are available in six ebooks:

• Get 2001-2 in Geese Don't Land on Twigs (PDF, )
• Get 2003-4 in Why Dogs Wag (PDF, )
• Get 2005-6 in Loopy Things We Do (PDF, )
• Get 2007-8 in Things We Believe That Maybe Aren't So True (PDF, )
• Get 2009-10 in The Questions Not Asked (PDF, )
• Get all of the first twelve years (2001-2012) in The Collected Issues of Point Lookout (PDF, )

Are you a writer, editor or publisher on deadline? Are you looking for an article that will get people talking and get compliments flying your way? You can have 500-1000 words in your inbox in one hour. License any article from this Web site. More info