Control and Management

The proponents of CM often use the words management and control in a sloppy way, to mean about the same thing (the use of the word control is maybe more frequent, though, and the use of the word management is either accidental or interpreted as “predomination over”). The problem has recently become even more obvious with the inception of the new concept of governance (taken from the realm of geopolitics) to mean once again... about the same thing.

Part of the problem is with the rationalistic tradition of definining terms (as from scratch) instead of discriminating between them.

Let's acknowledge that there is no universal difference in the meanings. Control may be traced back to Anglo-Norman (and Latin) and there to a context of double registration of accounting data for the purpose of verification. Management on an other hand, binds to Italian and the context of handling horses.

Let's thus offer a difference: let's understand control as invasive prescription, and management as pure description. As in manage what you do opposed to do what you control.

Let's further position ourselves in recommending that you only control what you cannot manage.

Control is exclusive, whereas management is collaborative, is about sharing (share to manage, manage to share).
- The more I control, the less you control. On the contrary, the more I manage, the more you manage.
It results that control is always-already delegated, and thus requires and implies a pre-existing organization, which it will aims at enforcing. The organization will define roles or tasks, and split the work, in order to avoid conflicts.
The logic of management is the opposite: from shared knowledge will emerge competences, and the concern is to detect and resolve conflicts.

It is important to see that control feeds itself, since by splitting the activity along the predefined roles, one allows and encourages people to ignore each other, beyond what is superficially designed at the tasks boundaries. Therefore: the more you control, the less you manage.

-- MarcGirod - 01 Jan 2007