Woman plus...

    "I Realized All I Wanted"

CONTENT

It was in the Moscow Government Committee of Public and Inter-regional Relations where I first heard the name: Natalia Konstantinovna Nikitina. Irina Grigorievna Leonova was talking about initiators of the Moscow Women House project, and, among other names, mentioned: ‘Then, Nikitina Natalia Konstantinovna. All brightness! She’s a professor at Phystech , and at the same time runs a research and consulting corporation of her own...’ That was enough for me.
Irina Grigorievna kept on speaking about other project leaders, but my thoughts were already on the separate course. Just to think: Phystech professor! I always admired Phystech people. As a young girl, I used to dream of becoming a student of it. Eventually I had to give up this dream — to some extent because I lacked self-confidence, but mostly because everyone kept telling me that Phystech was not for women...
A few days later I was sitting in Natalia Konstantinovna’s office and readily listened to her; and her voice was so surprisingly soft that I could not believe that it belonged to a proficient lecturer. She was telling me of her life’s turning points, of her searching and finding her unique place in this world, and a sour thought tortured my mind: How long absurd paradigms like ‘Phystech is not for women’ shall predetermine young girls’ life choice? Natalia Nikitina’s example was a clear demonstration of woman’s ability to study at Phystech, and to graduate it brilliantly, and then to develop into somewhat absolutely new... She was a woman who was at once a researcher, a professor, and a business leader. And she somehow managed to combine all three with public activities and civic spirit... To sum up, she appeared to be a woman meeting some perfect standard practically unattainable in one’s personal life...

Q. How did it happen that you became a student of Phystech?

N.N. It was in school, in seventh grade, when I happened to have read a book, Brighter than a Thousand Suns. I was astounded with romantics of fundamental technological researches: dozens of most quick-brained individuals join their efforts to solve some technical quiz of utter importance to their nation and finally achieve results of outstanding value... Moral aspect of nuclear researches didn’t bother me at all then.
Two years later I spent my last high-school summer vacations working in a construction institute as a translator of foreign patents made in English. The institute was a ‘regime’ one. So I had to turn up at 9 a.m. and to leave at 6 p.m. exactly. And I remember the shock I experienced then. I just could not get over the idea that I had to force myself to come and go whenever an alarm would ring indicating my work hours had begun or expired... I suddenly realized what a regular job was like. I saw my colleagues beating off hours, prolonging their lunch by any means, waiting for 6 p.m. to finally leave, talking of their plans for week-end from Monday on... That was when I decided that I didn’t like it and just would never surrender to such a routine. Beating-off time was not for me. My idea was and is that if you are to spent one-third of your day at work, then, however reluctant, make it fun! make it an adventure!
I always wanted to be a scientists. And of sciences I preferred physics as the most serious discipline. And Phystech offered the best education in physics. And I applied to Phystech and became its student,though I didn’t have a slightest idea of what it was like to be a professional physicist...

Q. And when did the understanding come? Was it after you had finally chosen your field of specialization in your third year at Phystech?

N.N. Initially, I specialized in nuclear magnetic resonance. But on my third year at Phystech, when I had to chose the field of my future research activities, I found that I had come to understand that for me the most interesting problems were not those studied by physicists, but rather problems of human relations and, in particular, their manifestation in organizations.
Any organization is made to oppress its members. It forces them into mechanical mode of thinking. If an individual wants to make a professional career, he or she has to concentrate on his goal and rush headlong toward it... Therefore, the organization is a limiting factor of personal development, it produces one-sided individuals. Moreover, an individual inevitably gets drawn into various internal organizational conflicts arising from unequal access to limited resources, human ambitions and vanity, and many other reasons.
Of course, I was twenty then and I could not name and analyze reasons this easily; however, my basic standpoint had already formed: organizations must serve people, help them fulfill the purpose of their lives, express themselves in what they do, and evolve as individuals; instead of oppressive, workplace environments should be facilitating and creative influence on organization’s members. My social-related interested finally took over, and at my fourth year at Phystech I wrote a conceptual study based on ‘system analysis’ (it was an obligatory pre-exam research in philosophy) and then transferred to the department where I could study system analysis and where I first read works of Dr. Spartak Petrovich Nikanorov describing his very specific theory of organization design.

Q. ‘Organization design’ sounds somewhat unusually...

N.N. The universal belief is that structure of an organization comes as a result of history of diverse influences related to organizational culture, management and employees habits and interactions, legislation, political considerations, etc. In his articles, Spartak Nikanorov offered an absolutely different approach to organizational planning. In short, his assertion is that organizations can and need be designed with application of scientific methods of conceptual modelling and system theory.
All at once I understood that this approach was just what I needed, and eventually I became a disciple of Dr. Nikanorov. I graduated from the Phystech, kept on working for Dr.Nikanorov, and only then it occurred to me out that the organization design was a field of science which practically undeveloped. To describe a properly built organization, you have to introduce models with so many equations and variables that you have to ‘dig through’ dozens of books on numerical modelling, system theory, organization planning standards, system analysis... Gradually, scores of folks which used to turn around Dr. Nikanorov dissolved, and I found myself to be one of his few consistent disciples. And that is what we are by now. We helped this theory evolve, and equipped it with practicable tools, and found ways to put into action...

Q. And what do you mean when you say ‘a properly built organization’?

N.N. There are exact laws describing organizational behavior, just like there are exact natural laws describing behavior of physical bodies. But unlike the physical world, organizations are human creation, and for this reason, given we have knowledge of these laws, we can build them in such a manner as to exclude any flaws and conflicts and thus make them perfect.

Q. But once an organization is a human product, it inevitably bears inherent flaws resulting from personal bias of the designer. Then how can it perfectly match these objective laws?

N.N. Here’s the point! Neither I, nor my colleagues believe in existence of any ‘objective’ laws. The Nature bears some regular patterns in it. And here comes a researcher with his imperfect tools and measures these regular patterns, and describes them. And then he finds or produces some model matching these regularities he has discovered, and he calls it an objective physical law. But as soon as scientists invent some new and more precise tools, it turns out that the law is outdated, and they produce other models and call them ‘laws’, and the old ‘laws’ are invalidated. The example is the quantum mechanics described with its own laws, and laws of the macrocosm are not applicable there.
That is why we have to part with the delusion that scientists ‘discover’ natural laws. What they do is inventing, testing and adopting descriptive models. The same is true to organizations. Functions of a researcher include: observation, finding regular patterns and, finally, building a model that would describe such regularities irrespectively of particular organizations’ specifics, a sort of dry residue, you know. Once such regularities are described and modelled, we may apply them to other organizations — aspect by aspect. So our job consists of producing abstract concepts or schemes of organizations as objects of system theory research, building an enormous data bank of such descriptive patterns, and then synthesizing them in a comprehensive model of organizational structure.
For example, if an organization pursues certain goals it needs a management system aligned to these goals. And the system of organizational management consists of definite blocks, functions, and connections. In other words, it is structured as described by certain laws. And hundreds options exist to align such a structure to any given goal. And if we have some additional information about the organization and its goals, we can choose the best option. In short, that is how a purposeful organization shall be built: optimum delimitation of functions; optimum organizational structure; optimum sequence of operations; job descriptions; standard forms... Finally, we come up with what we call an organization design.

Q. And what about the business of your own, I mean, MetaSynthes research and consulting corporation? Is it built in accord with your organization design theory?

N.N. The corporation was organized in 1992, and we visualized it as a kind of pilot site to test recommendations of our own.

Q. What problems in managing your corporation are most troublesome?

N.N. First of all, it is relations between myself as a corporate head and my co-workers. The problem is that my employees are at the same time my academic disciples. Therefore, I find myself in position when I cannot afford a single flaw. It results in that I’m always in search for some new and untraditional approach to personnel management. In this country, the prevalent management style was always based on pressure and fear. Now, how can you direct people not by force and fear, but rather by competence and love? So I have to change myself first. Am I not a fruit of the same tree? The second problem is: how shall we share our knowledge? how can we make our clients — and all others — how can we make them understand and adopt our recommendations? And, finally, how can I stay in good health and, at the same time, keep on evolving and hold my fingers on pulse of everything that goes on around me. Is not it a problem all in itself?
Getting back to the beginning, I am happy to say that I realized all I wanted. And my work is what make me going... Of course, I have my family, I have my home... My husband, he is my follower, by the way... Anyway, my family, my work, my hobbies, — they all fall in the singular pattern of what I call my life...

Q. Your corporation’s advertising claims that you are experts in social security, employment policies, science communities, Russian land resources management, and so on... Don’t you think that, to cover the scope of problems claimed, you must have an institute and thousands of researchers at hand? And you have twenty employees. What is the secret?

N.N. Curtains removed, all the subjects claimed are based on the same abstract patterns. We have a very definite know-how: it is a kind of scientific approach that takes years to master; but once you have mastered it, it takes you a few hours to get a deep insight in any specific problem. Generalizing, we choose areas where most problems arise from inability to formalize objectives. People use to think that a task is easily formulated, and then it takes lots of effort to solve it. And we practice an approach that is absolutely different. Most efforts are spent on working out the exact formula of a problem, and then the solution comes automatically. Now, everyone is concerned with the problem of employment. And what does it mean exactly?

Q. To my opinion, the problem is, first, to eliminate hidden unemployment, and, second, to reduce the number of officially registered unemployed...

N.N. And this is the example of aggregate approach. In real life, the problem is much more complicated. Questions are many: Where shall you employ these people? Will they like jobs you are going to offer? Will this jobs match their skills and qualifications? To obtain a comprehensive model of ‘employment problem’, we must define both people’s expectations (capacities, needs, etc.) and public or economic expectations; then we need to connect one to another with inclusion of all the relations between the relevant subjects. The task is not easy, but once a comprehensive model is built, decision-making processes on federal, regional and local levels will be facilitated dramatically. Therefore, decision-making is derivative of decision-makers’ understanding of an area they deal with. The better they understand the problem, the better are their decisions.

Q. The Government is going to approve and implement a new Program of Social Reform which suggests ‘addressed’ social privileges and compensations. As the ‘addressed aid’ concept is very popular today and your corporation has produced a concept paper on addressed social security system for the Moscow Oblast Administration, could you describe it in short, please?

N.N. In 1993, when the term ‘addressed social protection’ first emerged, nobody actually knew what it could mean. At that time I closely interacted with Mr. Laptev, Moscow Oblast Vice Governor, as we discussed problems of science communities. These communities asked for social protection so badly that when I heard the word ‘addressed’ for the first time, I immediately estimated that with our modelling potential we can make it work. And so it was, and today the model is implemented not only in science societies, but throughout the Moscow oblast.
Now I describe the approach we used. First, we introduced the definition of ‘socially vulnerable’ to designate persons unable to satisfy their basic needs. Second, we categorized socially vulnerable by ‘vulnerability groups’. That is, if we take disabled, it doesn’t mean that we blindly follow medical disability groups, but classify disabled by types of injury. The reason is that traditional disability classification does not say anything about actual needs of disabled. For example, the ‘second disability group’ includes blind, deaf, limb amputations, chronic heart diseases... All these people require absolutely different ‘addressed social aid’. That is why we had to introduce new qualitative categories of ‘vulnerability’ instead of traditional disability groups — to make social aid really effective and ‘addressed’.
By the way, we were the first to state that two types of social security existed: passive and active. Passive social security consists of mere protective measures: we provide a person with sustenance, and he asks for more. And active social security begins when we provide a vulnerable person with means of compensation for his/her vulnerability: that is enable him to provide for himself. Our civic duty is not to distribute whatever limited funds we have, that is pay each poor and disabled his fifty rubles and wash our hands, and that was the usual practice; our duty is to put them in such an environments when, despite their vulnerability, they were in position to actively live and earn.

Q. And does it work? I mean, does the social security system of the Moscow oblast adhere to your recommendations?

N.N. I’ve been following the system’s operation for four years now. And I am happy to say that it has been gradually developing all this time. Eligibility grounds has become less formal, though the reserve is far from being expended. Moscow oblast now has a good data base at its disposal, and social research teams work in most major communities... So, basically, the system works, though it lacks proper precision... And, of course, our recommendations were implemented only partially. To organize actually effective system of addressed social care, it will take form packages of social services by vulnerability groups, work out personnel qualification requirements, organize training for social security workers, fine-tune management system... But the most critical problem arise from lack of financial adequate resources and unwillingness of governmental bodies to further develop the system and make it more complicated.

Q. I suppose, it would be a good idea for MetaSynthes to calculate an optimum frequency of government officials rotation. In the past they held their position for lifetime, and today we witness the opposite extremity. As the result, policy-makers pay practically no attention to long-term programs and lack strategic thinking...

N.N. You are right. Take science communities, or ‘sciencevilles’ as we call them. I brought it to all Duma’s assemblies, to all government structures and committees, to all relevant ministries. Every time I did so, I had to find officials responsible for the problem, establish contacts, describe the matter, force them into understanding of its seriousness... and then those people were removed, and others took their office, and I had to start it all over...

Q. You are a board member of the Sciencevilles Development Union. Could you describe the organization and its mission, please?

N.N. It all started in 1991, in Zhukovsky. The community was dying: roads and buildings lied in ruins, and no funds were available for reconstruction because they were property of research institutes, and institutes completely lacked resources. Municipal budget was also miserable. Then Zhukovsky municipal council chair asked me to perform system analysis of community problems.
That was when the term ‘scienceville’ emerged. ‘Ville’ was to designate an urban community intentionally built, and ‘science’ meant the intention for which it was built. In 30s through 70s, the prevalent ideology of ‘planned socialism’ resulted in many towns built under government directions to perform some specific functions. In planned socialism environments, so it happened, the most effective way to carry out a political task was to bring all the best human and material resources together in one place and make them work on it. That is why we have so many defensevilles, tankvilles, oilvilles and so on. Unlike Moscow which is historically situated at major trade routes crossing and provides its population with diverse occupational opportunities and product exchange markets, communities built under political directives were all artificial. And once the macro system of which they were products and integral parts, I mean the centralized national economy, has ceased to be, these communities are doomed.
We modelled diverse scenarios of natural development of these communities with all possible management decisions introduced, and came to the conclusion that local governments had no levers to improve the situation. Without federal support, one-function communities have no future. On reading our report, Zhukovsky leaders were outraged. Just to think: the community that had been built to serve national political ambitions was actually disposed off as garbage as soon as national priorities changed! Municipal council head immediately summoned a meeting of heads of other Moscow region communities of this type: Dubna, Kaliningrad, Troitsk, Chernogolovka, Obninsk... The total of Moscow oblast functional communities is over twenty. Most of these communities had research centers and institutes affiliated to Phystech, and many municipal heads were its alumni of my age. So we had no problems finding common language, and soon the Russian Sciencevilles Development Union was instituted. Here is an example of how conceptual approach to a systematic problem may result in national-scale public movement. A draft law ‘On Scienceville Status’ has already passed first Duma hearings. The law is based on concepts I proposed back in 1991. And this efforts of mine have nothing to do with my research or consulting activities. Sometimes I receive some financing, sometimes not, but I do it to my best, because I believe it to be my civic duty. Some of my fellow analysts are depressed, because sometimes they cannot help seeing that neither the state, nor the communities themselves are interested in our findings. But I say to myself that we must keep on working, and, however unpleasant and sour, the knowledge we obtain must be published and disseminated to reveal some of hidden mainsprings of this world. And I believe it to be our mission!

Q. And your participation in Women’s House project, does it come from the same belief of yours?

N.N. The idea of Women’s House is to consolidate mature, dynamic, professionally consistent female leaders in variety of large-scale joint projects of high social impact. We adopted the following model. The Women’s House is an association of about twenty corporate constituent members. Association’s by-laws require that members should spent one-tenth of their work time for purposes of the House. Now we are in process of forming branches in several Moscow prefectures where the actual work will start. In these district branches, we plan to introduce new methods of public communication, test regulatory tools, and attract new members from among local female leaders and their organizations. We have already received many applications an proposals from women who are ready to participate.
What can we offer to public? Each organization member of Women’s House will make its input in form of shared professional experience. And since corporate members of the House are organizations of diverse interests, we plan to work in multiple fields: consulting, training, health, public education, etc.
As for me, I am going to offer consulting services in family business and employment. The other organization plans advanced educational programs for children and classes and consultations for problematic teenagers. The third will open a psychologist’s office. And so on. To sum up, we all hope that district premises of the Women’s House will become center-sources of love, serenity and positive problem-settling.
And getting back to your question, my motive for participation in Women’s House project is based on my intrinsic belief that it is women who are vessels of creative power required to help Russia raise from ruins.
Interview by Julia Kachalova
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