DROPPING THE TOOLS: TEAM FORMATION ON EVEREST IN 1996

Markus HällgrenUmeå School of BusinessUmeå universitywww.markushaellgren.com

A confession of a armschair climber…

• Markus Hällgren

• Master in business adm. (org. & marketing)

• Licentiate in bus.adm. (projects, uncertainty and ambiguity)

• Ph.D. in bus.adm (How deviations in projects are managed)

• Love hiking but never been to the Himalayas…

This paper deals with a special context…(as most of the papers today…)

A will to make it to the top…

Enjoying beautiful scenery

Being a member of a strong team

Hard work and passion

To stand there…

Looking down from the highest point of the world

Hard weather, harsh conditions

Survival

Fighting on ones own

Death…

“None of them suspected that by the end of that long day, every minute would

matter.”(Krakauer (1996) reflecting over the tight coupling of activities on Mt. Everest in 1996)

INTRODUCTION• Managing the unexpected is the largest challenge any

manager faces. Including project managers• To make things work there need to be continuous adaptation• Contribute to practices and disintegration of the organization• Previous studies

– Systems level (Perrow,1999)– Group level (Janis,1972)– Individual level (Reason,2000)– Multiple level of analysis (Snook,2002)

• Disasters– Inherent (sometimes)– Grand

• Fewer on – Everyday mundane activities (or in PO’s) (Schatzki,2001;Snook,2002)– Disasters as something ordinary– Importance of ”dropping the tools” (Weick,1993), and the formation of– Response teams (Engwall & Svensson,2001) holding the organization together

• The purpose of this paper is specifically to investigate and analyze organizational dynamics with focus on team formation from a loosely coupled systems perspective (Weick, 1974; Weick, 1976; Orton and Weick, 1990)

TEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS• A temporary organization is limited in the assumption that it will end at a

certain point in time (by time running out, task is fulfilled or resources runs out) (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995 – A theory of the temporary organization…)

• Bennis (1965), Bennis and Slater (1968), Goodman and Goodman (1967, 1972)

• Action orientation vs decision orientation (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995)

• End state vs process (Lundin, 2009)

• Projects are one kind of temporary organization (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Turner and Müller, 2003)

• Of course there is permanent features also in the temporary organization. – Subcontractor reoccur– Clients reoccur– Part of a industry determining practices– Part of a permanent organization– Permanent project teams– Knowledge base etc.

• Allows for local change when something occurs (it is loosely coupled)

TEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS CONT.

• Pressure– Time– Resources– Activities etc

• Re-bureaucratization• On the surface

tightly coupled – any change will have immediate and large consequences

EXPEDITIONS AS TEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS

• Projects as a core competency • Limited in time, scope, resources • Expedition leader/project manager• Team • There is an assumption that it will be terminated• Permanent organization• Fundraising• Motivation• Support functions• Competition• Earned value (where are we and where should we be?)• Clients• Make clients meet their goal• Sub-contractors• Logistics• Experts• Risk management• Plans• External pressure on success(Kayes, 2004; Tempest et al, 2007; Hällgren, 2007, 2009a,b,c;2010)• As noted in the conference call – the extreme can teach us something about the mundane

(Kayes, 2004;Hällgren, 2007)

”We have decades of experience in remote area development within the adventure industry. Our services include Project Management, Consultation and Co-ordination, Safety Auditing and Safety Plan construction.”http://www.adventureconsultants.com

LOOSELY COUPLED TEMPORARY ORGANIZATIONS

• The project (TO) is loosely coupled to the PO (Christensen and Kreiner, 1991; Kreiner, 1995; Lundin and Söderholm, 1995)

• It is open & closed, irrational & rational, stabile and flexible – at the same time

• A paradox of organizing (Clegg et al, 2002)

LOOSELY COUPLED CONT.

• Things, anythings is loosely coupled– Events– Ideas– Talk– Policies– Praxis– Time– Deviations

• And tightly coupled – at the same time• Not the event per se but ”the patterning of

coupling” that is of interest• Allows for the organization to change but still

maintain its existence and shape

• Thus, change and responding to unexpected events (e.g. crisis) is central to the loose coupling concept

DEALING WITH CRISIS

• Response teams a common way of dealing with crisis (Bigley and Robers, 2001; Engwall & Svensson, 2001;2004; Pavlak, 2004; Hällgren and Wilson, 2008)

– Task force– Swat team– Hot group– Red team– Incident command

• Part of everyday life in projects (Loosemore, 1998; Hällgren, 2009)

TEAM CHARACTERISTICSProjects/temporary

organizations

Tiger teams/pure project

organizationsCheetah teams

Explicitly sanctioned * * *

To accomplish a specific mission * * *To be dissolved * * *

Members committed on a full

time basis * *Not planned in

advance *(Engwall & Svensson, 2002:310)

DROPPING THE TOOLS

• A crisis situation demands new ways of thinking – changing practices (Hendry & Seidl, 2003)

• Mann Gulch (Weick, 1993)

– Disintegration of role structure– Breakdown of sense making

– 1) Hearing, trust, control, Psycial well being, calculation, – 2) Alternatives seems riskier, Admit failure, Social pressure

(groupthink)

– 3) Tools as a part of identity (Weick, 2007)

• “When a firefighter is told to drop his firefighting tools, he is told to forget he is a firefighter and run for his life” (p. 273); “When fire fighters are told to throw away their tools, they don’t know who they are anymore, not even what gender” (Maclean, 1992:226 quoted in Weick, 2007:2).

• Since then a metaphor for making sense of a new environment and thinking about it in a different way (e.g. Weick, 1996; Jönsson, 2006; Weick, 2007)

METHOD

• Personal accounts of the Mt. Everest 1996 events (killed nine people)

• Previous research have relied on these second hand accounts and contributed to leadership, learning, group behavior, organizational structure

• Less research on team formation, mundane activities, ordinary disasters and response teams

A PROCESS MODEL OVER EVEREST 1996

Event/activity 1-16

Event/activity 17-24

Fischer short roped

Huddle

Huddle breakup

Hall & Hansen Event/activity

25-31

TIME

Deteriorating weather Rescue

missionsCommunication

HubrisCommercialisation

Communication devices

Unclear turn around

Inexperience

MotivationGoal commitment escalation

No fixed ropes Few alternatives

Delayed gear

A MUNDANE DISASTER CREATED OUT OF MUNDANE ACTIVITIES• Nothing special about it• If everything would have been

ok, few would have paid any attention to it

• We (academics & practitioners) tend to think about disasters as something grand and frightening

This suggests a new way of thinking about disasters (or events in general)

Cheetahs on EverestProjects/temporary

organizations

Tiger teams/pure project

organizationsCheetah teams Everest

Explicitly sanctioned (by mngt)

* * * n/a

Sanctioned for survival

n/a n/a n/aTask based

decision, not rule based (do or die)

To accomplish a specific mission

* * * Survival

To be dissolved

* * * *

Members committed

on a full time basis

n/a * * *

Not planned in advance

n/a n/a * *

RESPONSE TEAM

Fischer short roped

Huddle

Hall & Hansen

•Guide continuous to lead. •Sherpas think they are on the right track•Dragging unconscious clients•Decides to stop

•Client is able to orient by starsClient takes the lead)•Leaving fallen climbers

•Finally leaving Fischer

•Hall’s duty to continue•unthinkable to leave Hansen

Huddle breakup

CHANGES GOVERNING LOGIC,FACILITATES DROP

DROPPING THE TOOLS

• From being a integrated ”tightly coupled” expedition with one alternative path to…

• The expeditions becoming disintegrated into loosely coupled units (response teams)

• Essential for survival to rethink and make the transition– Guide - client– Moral - leave people to die– Question whereabouts - Stay put– No landmark - orient by the stars

What we have learned

• It does not take a nuclear meltdown to produce a disaster– Bad weather is no surprise at Everest…– Mundane activities

• Let go of bureaucratic control whenever the governing logic is based on the task at hand

– If the task is more important that the rules, rule obedience is a hinder of tool dropping

• There is a strive to becoming integrated again – this can be used– Focus on what is intact rather than what is changed – and use it to integrate

• Nothing is unquestionable!– Dropping the tools means that everything has to be questioned– Maintaining role structure

Thank you!