RESPONSE TO CLASS FEEDBACK OF OCTOBER 2, 2001- I redesigned the web page on SEAM, by explaining the expectations of the SEAM assignment, and by developing a presentation with as few links as possible.  Reading through just this one document, should give you an overview of SEAM and your project. I hope it also resets your EXPECTATIONS to my EXPECTATIONS, and takes you out of the FANTASY ZONE. But, no matter, that too, is itself an informative learning experience, since even in an MBA class, the Psychic Prison does its poison. If you prefer a different format to this page, try SLIDE 6 - Intro to Seam PAGE - this is a slide presentation, with a study guide on each page, instead of the lay out below. Go there if that style of learning suits you better. Stay here if you like. There are always many pathways to the same end.

How to Use this Page? - Read each paragraph, if you want to learn more, or need to learn how to do something you do not already know, then go to the page, but come right back, so you do not get lost, since each page leads to more pages, to more examples, to more worlds. Please do short excursions, and come back here, to the Mother Page.

What is SEAM?- "Socio Economic Analysis of Management." SEAM assumes that organizations are "metascripts," and that managers and owners are playwrights and authors of the scripts, but are basically, very bad script-writers. Your job as consultant is to take notes on the metascript, and suggest rewrites to the theater of organizational operation.

How Do I do SEAM? Takes copious notes.  If you get to see a spontaneous performance of people at work, then simply record the "scripts" you hear and see. If you are doing archival research, record the "scripts" an organization puts out into the world.  If you do interviews, each faction of the organization will tell you a "script" - write these down. Metascript is the differences and incongruities, when you look across owners, managers, technicians, secretaries, staff, janitors, etc. You will find the scripts are in conflict, and do not add up to a balanced whole, i.e. they are metascripts. Your job as consultant is to see and hear metascript in action, and suggest how the organization can revise its bad theater performances of the contesting and weird scripting.

How Long? Your project report is 12 to 15 pages (more if you like).  You do not have time to do more than a few field visits (or library visits for country projects). 

Are Notebooks Required? Yes. Each person is required to have their own notebook (suggest the blank "Guatemalan Ikat Fabric Blank Book Journal" with lines on each page in NMSU bookstore, but other types are acceptable; No loose-leaf notebooks or stapled pages, invest in quality, thank you). Each person should be writing not just direct field notes, but thoughts about the project, ideas, and inspirations throughout the terms.

Are All SEAMS alike? - SEAM can be used in many ways, limited only by your imagination.  Look over the SAMPLE PROJECTS of Amy, Terry & Dean (et al) and you will see they apply SEAM in different ways. Amy uses it as a general outline, Terry and Dean (et. al) have more charts, tables & graphs. SEAM is meant to be a foundation, a way to give some structure to your report. However, as I said in class, you can deviate, as you need to, in order to do what you want to do.

SAMPLE PROJECTS - See the variety:

1. Amy Carpenter Nike in Australia
2. Terry Owen - Southwest Environmental Center
3. Dean Rigg, Mike Kelley, Sam Hammond & Sergio Sotelo SEAM Analysis of Mesilla Valley Transportation

TEAM PROJECT IDEAS - Next, decide between looking at a small business or doing a brief service project. Each project should involved each person in a team getting into the field (in case of field projects like Terry or Dean, or each person getting into the basic research on a country or human situation, such as Amy's study of home workers in Australia.

1. Ideas - list of some ideas (but please feel free to pick your own). These are thought starters.
2. Options - Explains difference between a business project or a service project.

THE BASIC PROCESS OF DOING A SEAM ANALYSIS

EXPECTATIONS - You cannot learn every nuance of SEAM here. Take the MGT548 course, if your expectation is to learn it all. Here we only introduce you to the basics, and you do a 10th of a SEAM analysis that would happen in 548, just enough to get your feet wet will do nicely. So, when I show you the analyses, please keep you expectations in check. Larger groups, can split the work out and do more things, and individuals working alone will do far less- Thanks David.

1. SEAM 4 Leaf Clover Model Intro - This is a SEAM-4 Leaf Clover model. You can click on each leaf and on the center and stem (i.e. 6 places to go). Each leaf is a study guide with examples of various analyses.  Most people do the top leaf (the 6 areas of dysfunctional-social performance and related these to the bottom leaf, the hidden costs that result from these). The six areas of social performance dysfunctions are - Every organization has these, and by taking copious notes, I can tell from a 10-minute interview something informative about the six areas (but I know what to listen for, I have revised many metascripts, and you have not - so please realize, you might have to listen to people talk an hour or hang out on a service site a few times and listen to them perform their metascripts before you get as much as a trained SEAM professional who has spent 20 years deciphering stories and metascripts).  Here are the basics of social performance dysfunctions:
   • (1) working conditions (i.e. the influence area of our course such as wages, motivation, work design),
   • (2) work organization (i.e. the five narrative frames in organizing section of this course).
   • (3) 3C's - Communication, Cooperation, and Coordination - This is where most organizations have some major problems, that affect other problems.
   • (4) Time - How is time mis-managed, mis-allocated? i.e. spending too much or too little time on tasks, jobs, processes, so the organization is ineffective and inefficient.
   • (5) Training - How is training done in wrong (non-critical areas) to the wrong people (those who need it don't get it)?
   • (6) Strategic (mis) Implementation - How is the strategy wrong for the business niche? How is the advertising and promotion not helping? Ways the short term junk is swallowing up the long term thinking?
   • HIDDEN COSTS - All 6 social performance dysfunctions in any organization (business or social service) impact the accounting functions, so that managers get a false image of the firm, when reading the income statement, balance sheet, and other reports.  Why? Because the Six Areas of social performance hide revenue opportunities and hide costs.  A hidden cost analysis, tries to estimate what the organization is loosing in revenues and accruing in costs that are not readily displayed in its reports.  Dean and Terry report these, while Amy has general discussion of impact of home workers on Australia and upon the reputation of Nike.
   • There are STRUCTURE and BEHAVIOR leaves to SEAM analysis, but since the term is short most term projects steer clear of this.  Nevertheless, in interests of clarity of communication, and since you may choose to get there, I will briefly tell you what you will find.
   • STRUCTURE - Structure is a structure of the various games that people play in organizations. Organizations are schizophrenic structures. For you advanced SEAM players, the structure is also the interweave of ECONOMICS (hidden costs), SOCIAL PERFORMANCE, and PSYCHOANALYTIC (games people play). The idea is that organizations are psychic prisons, with many addicted game players, and their metascripting vibrates in the social performance areas outcomes of the economic return (hidden costs and untapped revenues). In Psycho-SEAM or P-SEAM, as I call it, we analyze the hidden theater, the structure of the back stage and front stage, the stuff between their scripted game-laying lines. At a very practical level, organizations and their people get addicted, they are process addicts, addicted to processes that form structures.  Simple example is workaholism, which is the topic of two weeks of influence in 503. Second example, is the boss who is the crazy maker and creates a structure of enablers to cover his addiction to being a jerk.  Again we are looking at structures, the inter-group level of how addictions build up structures, which we read about in the metascripts you write down in your notebooks. How do you find structures? Listen, take notes, and whenever someone says "can you stop writing, I want this off the record," know that you have arrived at the heart of a game player, about to tell you a "taboo topic."
   • BEHAVIOR - comes in many types and levels, all the way from individual, to group, team, department, section, organization, interorganizational and transorganizational. There are webs of behavior. The main concept we look at is HORIVERT. HORI for horizontal behaviors, and VERTICAL for vertical behaviors. Look for HORIZONTAL improvement opportunities in cooperation across departments (or people or organizations) that are blocked by the VERTICAL, and require management team action that opens up lines of communication, cooperation, and
     coordination (also called network leadership).  In other words, the HORIZONTAL is blocked by the VERTICAL.  Now look at the other side of HORIVERT, where the VERTICAL is blocked by a HORIZONTAL that needs to act VERTICAL.  How can people be empowered in the HORIZONTAL webs of behavior, say in autonomous teams to take on issues previously reserved for the VERTICAL players? In HORIVERT why are the teams not being autonomous and doing the scheduling, hiring, and process design? Probably the planning has been vertically separated from the horizontal doers, and as we learned in planning 101, organizations are struggling to put  plan, do, check, and act behaviors back together again, after the got broken apart in Scientific Management and in Divisions of Labor and Over-Specialization, and Over-hierarchy. Therefore, the horizontal must learn to be more vertical, and the vertical must learn to facilitate more horizontal, and the real action is re-balancing horizontal and vertical behaviors, and therefore the term HORIVERT.
2. SEAM study guide  TD Gameboard history of SEAM, stuff on its founder Henri Savall, and some pretty good figures explaining the overall SEAM approach.  For example, Figure Three: " Relationship between Social Performance, Hidden Cost and Financial Consequences" is the guts of the accounting work of SEAM.  The assumption is the Business College has artificially separated the discipline of accounting from management, and marketing from economics, and operations from finance (MAGESE is the word for this, see Figure Five). Other important figures, include Figure Four: "Three Dimensions of SEAM" looks at the overall change strategy which spirals out from the center winding and rewinding through each of the dimensions. First dimension is PROCESS OF IMPROVEMENT, beginning with SEAM-DIAGNOSIS, which is what you are attempting, but if you had time would continue to EVALUATION OF RESULTS of process improvements in the metascripts you find. Second dimension is teaching you and them basic MANAGEMENT TOOLS, beginning at center with internal and external strategic plan (SWOT and ROOT CAUSE), but over period of two or three years of change experiments, becoming skilled enough so client can renegotiate the multiple scripts or conflicting metascripts, in PERIODICALLY NEGOTIABLE ACTIVITY CONTRACT.  Third dimension is POLITICAL AND STRATEGIC DECISIONS. Unless the boss and partners buy in, the change project dies on the vine. Begins at center by helping people under stand the strategy they are playing out and the hidden costs and lost revenue of working this way. But, it takes real leaders to change the RULES OF THE GAME, and get to a place where COMMITMENT OF TOP MANAGEMENT is not one more abandoned QUEST for change. We move along to FIGURE SIX, Psychoanalytic-Socio-Economic Analysis of Management, which was discussed above.
3. SEAM SMALL BUSINESS  WEB SITE Small Business SEAM - This site contains study guides on how to do a SWOT analysis, which you should have learned to do in at least six different classes you took as an undergraduate. But, if you don't know this is where to learn. The main SEAM analysis is the ROOT CAUSE, this is where you take your notebook, highlight each of the six SOCIAL PERFORMANCE areas (I suggest different color for each) and spend some time coding them (write codes in the margin - explained below).
4. THREE SEAMS OF IMPLEMENTATION - Hidden Costs - This is the Hidden Cost leaf we reviewed above. It is here to remind you that the point of taking notes and coding them is to see how these dysfunctions affect the bottom line.  It works like this, the Dysfunctions from Socio Economic (imbalances) are:
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   1. Absenteeism - who wants to show up in psychic prison
   2. Staff turnover -because it is so crazy here
   3. Industrial injuries - people overworked and under trained make mistakes that are costly and deadly
   4. Low Quality work/product - in systemic problems
   5. Lack of productivity - of firm as a whole
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   |
   
   IN LONG TERM LEAD these five lead TO:
   6. Extra wages - why pay executive to be secretary
   7. Non production time - too many games played
   8. Overtime that does not need to be
   9. Over consumption since people do wrong jobs
   10. Non creation of potential gain $$$$$
   In sum, in Hidden Cost study guide you find some tables and examples of how to do small hidden cost experiments. You are not to do them all, just try a few, with the data you collect and observe (for some projects this is impossible, so do not fret about it).
5. HOW TO CODE YOUR SEAM PROJECT NOTES - The purpose of the codebook is to give you some idea of what to listen for when interpreting the SEAM and doing SEAM analysis.  Again, let me reassert, this is a term project, so EXPECT to do less. Each teammate keeps their own notebook, and records, highlights, and codes their own (Why, because this way each learns, each pulls their own weight).  Take field nots, then expand the field notes within an hour of your field visit (Why? because people forget 50% of the scripts they experience within 60 minutes, and 90% by the next day). I assert that in a sixty minute or even a 10 minute interview, you see the entire world, if you know what to listen for.
6. ENTRY PORT to SEAM CODING PAGE (use your ID and CODE for 503 or ID=Aggie359 CODE=adventure) Note, once class is registered, we take out the Aggie359 option, to insure confidentiality of our client database.  When you visit CODE WORLD, you will find many entries there. These are done by the 448/548 students.  Again, this is just an INTRO, so you cannot and should not be trying to do it all. If you are, it means you are the workaholic with the perfectionist script running in your head, and you are fashioning your own PSYCHIC PRISON. Please unlock your cage, and give yourself a break.

• How to create your own TEAM/INDIVIDUAL web page? if you want some extra credit, it really helps future classes to have part or all of a SEAM project on the WWW (after getting client permission, and deleting sensitive materials).  Again, not required, but certainly helpful.