Bandit and I are now deep into the writing part of our book project, and every now and then I surface to look down on what it is we are doing.
We are trying to make sense of the unfolding relationships (plural, because there will be many) between independent/independent-minded Millennial technologists and creatives, on the one hand, and BigCo, on the other.
I now realize that, at least in the language and vocabularly of traditional organizations and traditional B-school think, what we are puzzling over is in fact Organization Design. In most instances, the notion of organizational design is approached like this or this, which is an absolute fucking joke!
Nowhere in any of these approaches will you find recognition of the fundamental disaggregation of creative labor that currently undergirds the world of corporate innovation. Big firms (P&G, Intel, Sun) that are trying to understand and leverage the values of open innovation now realize that much of the creative energy and input that will drive their innovation agendas actually reside outside of their organizations, in the talent clouds of creative and independent designers, developers, and engineers who work either on their own or in small shops of peers.
Whether it is this sort of insourcing for no-collar creative talent, or outsourcing for white-collar labor in India or Malaysia, most of these activities never show up on a company’s Organizational Chart. Organization ‘designers’ claim to inscribe a company’s strategy into a set of roles, processes and relationships which, once the switch has been turned on, set in motion the execution of stratey.
Right!
Further, they reify hierarchies that often only exist in the minds of those situated near the top, and which are ignored by those actually doing the hands-on work.
Sorry guys, this is not the way it works. There are more moving parts in a successful, innovative firm than can appear in one of your ’designed’ Org Charts. Organization Design, in a post-execution competitive world, will present a small skeletal staff of people who work at HQ, then beyond that will be an orbit of many moving parts and satellites communicating with HQ in different ways.
Now that we understand this, I want to take back all of the lectures I’ve given over the years on Organization Design. What a load of shit. Huge apologies for that!
Any organization that is flexible and adaptive enough to succeed over the next 10 years will be, in the traditional sense, undesignable. Or, at most, co-designed. But definitely not designed.
Th Butcher
ooh, I’m with you nearly all the way.
I want to add a mention of a recent HBR article (it’s at harvardbusiness.org Article #R0805) that says, amongst much else:
“Even more provocative was our finding that successful leadership in online games has less to do with the attributes of individual leaders than with the game environment, as created by the developer and enhanced by the gamers themselves.” Ecosystemic thinking comes to Harvard.
But then I got to your last paragraph. Can’t we design the undesignable? I wondered. Architects are going to have to design and build the buildings that house these organisations of the future. But then I think you’re saying that organisation design could become an emergent property of simply being an organisation. I like that.
Nice blog.
Great to hear from you! Of course, most things are in flux, and corporate orgs are no exception. Perhaps there will be cycles, where chaos eventually gets inscribed in a new generation of Org Charts, which are reified for a generation…Till another cultural revolution says..’what a load of shit that was.’ And the whole thing starts over. I think, at the least, we are in a ’starting over period’ right now. At least here in the US.
As we are documenting in our next book, ‘Manage This!’, a whole generation of Millennials isn’t even bothering with the old school approaches. They are too smart, too busy, and making too much money to be bothered. That said, architects will have a new (and fascinating) challenge in building for this. I suspect (and I am often wrong) that those architects will be old guys like me trying to build for the busy, who will come and go and not necessarily pay much attention to the ‘organizers.’
You know Sally Bibb, don’t you? Have you talked to her about the research they’ve done at talentsmoothie on Gen Y at work?