Design Organizations for Agency and Self Determination
Reflections from European Organization Desing Forum 2016
A few days ago I was in Barcelona for the latest edition of the European Organization Design Forum. It’s been my second edition so far — last year I was in Milan for the edition organized by Cocoon Projects — and I was there this year mostly because 2015 edition was hugely interesting and sparked in me a lot of reflections on the radically changing meaning and role of organizations (and institutions) in general.
Furthermore, the latest developments in the Platform Design Toolkit also brought me clearer to the topic of designing (and considering) organizations as platforms.
On one hand, networked businesses belong to a radically new form of organization with an extremely low employees-to-external-collaborators ratio and an extensive use of algorithms & data to shape the behavior of large (eco)systems. On the other hand, hierarchically managed incumbents often represent such complex social systems, with such a diversity of skills & capabilities that seeing them as-ecosystems (also including clients and partner-organizations) becomes essential for their — so much needed — transformation.
As we explained already on this blog, the two key principles of platform design according to our understanding, are essentially are the following:
- enabling entity to entity transactions (through channels)
- designing services and environments for participants’ evolution
both these principles can be perfectly put in place in existing large organizations.
While the reasons allowing the success of platform models are surely complex (and you can explore a bit in our latest White Paper) one essential driver is the impact of technology on personalization, communication and transaction cost. Today it’s essentially easy and cheap to communicate, to find each other, to exchange value among us and — as a result — to develop a unique and personal expectation on what products and services should provide us: this is the era of the long tail for this reason.
But coordination and communication cost are falling both outside and inside organizations and we can’t fool ourselves anymore and think that the platform-network model — allowing scalable learning, mass personalization and the re-humanization of experiences — is only good for short term rentals, event management or selling handmade crafts: it’s not; every context can make the best out of it.
What happens to Leadership in the Age of Platform-Organizations?
One of the recurring theme at this year’s EODF was that of leadership: I wasn’t surprised, everybody feels that the very concept of leadership nowadays is changing but … why? Again I think it’s a matter of looking at how technologies are transforming our contexts by lowering coordination/communication cost.
Platforms are essentially bureaucracies for the networked age. (Greg Satell, 4 Things You Should Know About Platforms)
As we move from the age of bureaucracies to the age of platforms, we can increasingly achieve large scale impact not by controlling and influencing resources and people by means of superimposed authorities — essentially based on fear — but by aligning many on a shared missions, motivating by exemplary experiences, sharing open frameworks for action and crafting invitations.
Think to how easy nowadays you can leverage on technologies like messaging platforms, content creation, social media, wikis: all these are new channels for sharing powerful galvanizing messages and toolkits for enabling others to action. And this relationship isn’t one-way only: technologies increasingly offer means to empathize (on a large scale) get feedback and learn how to tune our stories for maximum engagement.
While bureaucratic leadership was about getting people to increase productivity on pre-defined missions, leadership in the age of collaborative, adaptive organizations and platforms is about finding the vibe of a group, convince it that can move together in one (self identified) direction and let the best drive the herd, aligning the platform with their personal, shared incentives.
In adaptive, collaborative organization-platforms (responsive organizations as perfectly described by Aaron Dignan) leaders are often not pre-stated or pre-identified because — as my friend Stelio said at the EODF — when you’ve a really adaptive organization (that essentially tries its best to resemble reality instead of trying to forge reality to adhere the organization model) roles are muda (waste). Since low coordination cost allows us to create teams adaptively, on every single mission, why should we set things in the stone of an organizational diagram?
As stated in a recently spotted article by Ayelet Baron, leaders of the 21st century are most of all compassionate and generous storytellers: organizational shapers that have found their own motivation and work ethic in hacking organizations to help others achieve, improve, thrive and find agency.
Individuals in adaptive organizations
Living in an age where everyone is connected with everyone else has its dark side: while it’s true that when adaptive and collaborative organizations work they develop strong ties — which is somehow the same motivation that makes it terribly complicated to scale them up — large scale platform-organizations might end up in derogating too much to machines and algorithms, faking the humanization effect and eventually precipitating participants into loneliness, competition and a feeling of being left behind.
That is the essence of Organization Design & Development (ODD)as I understand it: as organization designers we need to continue the journey from collaboration to facilitation towards enabling. The role of the organization designer must be exactly that of enabling organizations towards continuous self design: allow organizations to shape themselves autonomously, from the center to the periphery, exactly where teams operate.
“We shape our organizations and our organizations shape us” Stelio told me once (in a Marshall McLuhan inspired quote I’m abusing a lot lately): by enabling people to shape the way they organize work, find meaning and learn we help them shape their own selves, we help them regain an ethic of work and transcend the bullshit jobs they could have become accustomed to.
But developing adaptive, distributed governance is definitely not a walk in the park: think of traditional superimposed management governance as the shepherd dog in a herd. If you remove the dog, sheep won’t behave coordinately and will probably roam free, in every direction looking for the best grass around. But if you really trust the heard of having potential you need to trust that sheep may all become shepherd dogs at some point — if you just give them the right tools and contexts — and eventually find the right direction, coordinated among themselves but everyone with the right amount of self trust and intuition.
For a sheep to transform into a shepherd dog may take time, hard work and an insane amount of sweat but: would you imagine what a herd of shepherd dogs may achieve?
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You can also download our newly released, creative commons licensed, Platform Design Toolkit White Paper: http://bit.ly/PDT_WP_Download
An italian version of this post is available on CheFuturo as “Dall’autorità imposta alla missione condivisa: come sta cambiando la leadership”
