Researchers help organizations respond to complexity, change and culture clash

BY DAWN LEVY AND DAVID HART

The most critical networks in an organization are not necessarily the ones carrying Internet traffic. They may be the social networks among people or groups that define an organization's process and knowledge flow. Professor Ray Levitt in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering wants to design, from the ground up, project organizations with fewer weaknesses. That means maximizing performance in the face of complexity and change while minimizing culture clash.

"We want to develop computational tools to help managers design organizations the way engineers design bridges," said Levitt, who is entering the microbehaviors of individual workers from diverse national, organizational and professional cultures into computer models that simulate the macro-outcomes of multicultural project teams. "There is so little predictive ability for organizations in this area. It's all based on managers' experience and intuition."

Levitt, academic director of Stanford's Advanced Project Management Executive Program, will receive $818,146 over two years from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for this undertaking. His project is one of eight NSF efforts that will be collectively supplemented by $4 million over two years as part of the Management of Knowledge Intensive Dynamic Systems (MKIDS) program. MKIDS researchers are using information technologies to streamline processes for organizations that must respond rapidly to incoming knowledge, dynamic situations and uncertainty. These organizations include news media, multinational projects of all kinds, global financial institutions and the intelligence community.

Stephen Barley, the Charles M. Pigott Professor in the School of Engineering, is working with Levitt as the project's ethnographer. As co-director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, he studies work practices and organizational cultures.

"The idea is to try to get a handle on the kinds of issues that arise when project teams are composed of contractors from different cultures," Barley explained. For example, cultural differences in expressing opinions may make a disagreement seem like a "big fight" to an American but "just a discussion" to a European. Or a Chinese contractor who is used to working with regularly sized bricks may be frustrated with the irregular bricks that are acceptable building materials in Sri Lanka. Or a U.S. real estate developer operating in France may not realize that in that country it is the builder -- not the architect -- who produces the detailed designs.

Barley is teaching graduate students -- Ashwin Mahalingam, Ryan Orr, John Taylor, Michael Murray and Tamaki Horii in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Carol Cheng-Cain in Medical Informatics -- the listening, interviewing and data analysis skills employed in ethnographic studies. The group also works with University of Southern California Professor Yan Jin, who provides advice on incorporating findings on microbehavior into a computational model.

Cultural differences can lead to conflict, and conflict can cost time and money. For his thesis, Orr is studying how different forms of organization affect the outcomes of global infrastructure projects. His findings may improve the efficiency of multinational projects such as the enormous Three Gorges Dam project in China. "There are over 20 companies and 20 countries involved, all with their own organizational and national cultures," Orr said. "Anytime you get such a mix of backgrounds working together, you end up with miscommunication, which can lead to conflict and ultimately affects budget, scheduling and quality." The original cost estimate of $15 billion for the Three Gorges Dam project has mushroomed fivefold to $75 billion, in part because of the types of cultural clashes Levitt's work seeks to avoid.

Mahalingam said the research is likely to improve the effectiveness of other development projects, such as rebuilding Iraq or developing infrastructure in Africa and Asia. In his native India, he has witnessed cultural problems -- "very real and very expensive" -- between foreign contractors and their local partners.

The NSF award builds on more than 15 years of work in Levitt's Virtual Design Team research group, which develops computer modeling tools to predict the performance of project organizations. "We have been quite successful in modeling and simulating the performance of 'monocultural' product development organizations -- that is, teams of U.S. engineers working on fast-track, complex product development in sectors like construction, aerospace, consumer products and high-tech product development in a single country," Levitt said.

He hopes that this research, like the group's previous work, will lead to the development of predictive tools that will enable managers of global projects to design and implement their projects more effectively. "Our formal models of organizations and the work practices that they execute create a repository of 'best practices' that can be refined and reused," Levitt said.

In April, Levitt created a new industrial affiliates program called the Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects. Focusing first on infrastructure, researchers are working with VTT, the Technical Research Center of Finland, to enhance the ability of users in developing countries to operate and maintain complex capital projects like paper mills, power plants and wireless telecommunication networks.

The new award will allow modeling and simulating of other multicultural teams engaged in diverse global projects, starting with the creation of large infrastructure (roads, dams, water supply, telecommunications) and commercial facilities (buildings, factories, etc.). The models and simulations would later extend to other types of international product development, and to even more dynamic contexts such as multinational peacekeeping operations and news gathering organizations.

"These are very dynamic projects and go way beyond the limit of things we've modeled before," Levitt said. "That is what makes this project so exciting."

David Hart is a public information officer at the National Science Foundation. Dawn Levy is a science writer for Stanford Report.