Maytricks

Jose Bernardo

(Reading: 2 minutes)

The nineties where interesting years in business. There was a pressure for innovation, perhaps because of the imminence of a new millennium, therefore every consultant or specialized writer was trying to sell something new. Those years left the impression that many ideas in administration were, actually, the same old things but painted in brighter colors. The Matrix concept made its debut in those years, calling for a new organizational structure. The flow of information and application of skills would not only run upside down, but horizontally as well. The flow would move in between departments, different units, other countries, and, eventually, even within independent businesses. It all sounds new, but the tensions that compose and distinguish this idea have always been known in management.

Objectives are numerical and chronological, how can we represent this tension? Every business has to please an internal and an external market, clients and beneficiaries; here also a matrix communicates the tension. Cost and quantity, quality and price, all these tensions can be represented as x and y axes of a matrix and demand the disruption of hierarchy. So, what else is new? Barlett and Ghoshal believed that Matrix management is not a structure, but a frame of mind (Harvard Business Review, 1990). They were obviously trying to explain why it is so difficult to have people working in a Matrix Structure, and pointing to re-education as a solution. In my point of view, however, the Matrix Structure is an offer of capitulation. The whole idea would be to relinquish tension management.

Tension is good; slackness is the problem. Managers always accepted the task of managing the same tensions that we see around, and worked to meet their goals by drawing an Identity Function where x = y. We can’t simply label it  as hierarchy. On the other hand, relinquishing tension management will drive the organization to slackness, to a dangerous annulment of forces. The results will be inconsistent prioritization, reduced productivity, increased complexity and bureaucracy. In order to avoid these undesirable results, it is necessary to define a few fundamental and clear directives. A set of directives, known by every agent in the organization, it will help in managing the tensions. Such directives will be a compass, guiding every effort in the same direction, allowing managers to deal with the complexity of a since ever and all around Matrix Structure.

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Jose Bernardo is the OneHope vice-president for lusophone countries. OneHope is a global agency of the Bible that has worked in 145 countries giving the Word of God to every child.