Category: Organization in the Collaborative Age

As mentioned in our previous post ‘Why It Is Important to Resist Process as a Proxy‘, too much process can be bad. But not enough process can be very bad as well and actually I spend a fair chunk of my time designing processes for clients that are desperately in need of them to take proper decisions and expedite them. There is really a paradox here: a set of processes is needed but it should not become an end by itself.

One of the issues I observe in those organizations that have already processes is how they struggle to make them evolve over time. Sometimes, even projects supposed to revise the entire management system don’t produce any novelty. Actually, designing and then updating processes is tough (good for me and my company because that’s what we often do, but generally bad for organizations that don’t evolve quickly enough to respond to changes in their environment).

Two key pointers to overcome this paradox:

• Process should not remove the need for competence and experience. It is an Industrial Age illustion to believe that with the right process you can give the work to underpaid incompetent cogs workers.
• It is absolutely essential to make the effort not only to develop but only to review and redesign much more often than organizations generally do the process they use.

Process are needed but they need to be understood and very often examined for suitability to the changes in environment and business. Review your processes more often and become more nimble!

Jeff Bezos’ latest letter to shareholders is quite short and worth reading (link here). The focus of the letter is how to avoid his organization to become complacent and go down. One particular point that captured my attention was about process as proxy to client relationship.

“A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?”

And in the following of the letter Jeff Bezos makes also a few point about speed of decision which is for me also intrinsically linked to process or at least how quickly bureaucracy pervades organizations.

Process is not bad intrinsically but it can become bad if people satisfy themselves by following it (which is the essence of the bureaucratic organization). This is a neat reminder that we should keep in mind.

We have been reporting periodically in this blog experiments in a new organizational form, holacracy (see ‘How Holacracy responds to the challenges of the Fourth Revolution organization‘ in February 2014 and ‘How the Implementation of Holacracy Appears Challenging‘ in March 2015). It is now official: the experiment has been terminated as it failed.

In the Quartz paper ‘Zappos is struggling with Holacracy because humans aren’t designed to operate like software‘, the demise of the method and the negative outcomes at Zappos are described quite dramatically. The reason quoted is that the human element was excessively removed in the rigid holacracy method: “Ironically, as it seeks efficiency and attempts to eliminate human emotion, Holacracy imposes layers of bureaucracy and adds unnecessary psychological weight on to employees.”

Holacracy is too rigid and bureaucratic. It is not designed to address the challenge of complexity, which requires agility and scalability. This view is developed in the excellent post ‘Holacracy Is Fundamentally Broken‘ on Forbes.

Let’s never forget that organizations and projects are first of all a human adventure!

The Collaborative Age’s organization identifies with its network, but the network is more than that. Let’s look at it a bit more in detail.

The network is composed of all stakeholders. It is from where the organization derives its direct revenue (clients) and where it creates its permanent value (collaboration between contributors). Some participants might be at some times clients and at other times contributors. Contributors may be full time or part time, or even occasional. They may have met or they may not have met. They may stay in touch with the organization loosely for some time and suddenly become very close contributors.

The network is the value of today’s organization. The network limits are a bit fuzzy and that is perfectly fine. The network is everything, and maintaining and expanding it should be the aim of all modern organizations, irrespective of if participants are within or outside the core organization.

In the Industrial Age, the identity of an organization was very much defined by its physical location and assets. In the Collaborative Age, the identity of an organization is rather its network.

Industrial-Age organizations had definite geographical locations that belonged to it, and often linked to very large and unmovable capital investments. It allowed to define a border between what was inside and outside of the organization. It was rare and even sometimes forbidden to go back home with anything that belonged to the organization.

In the Collaborative Age, walls and geographical locations are not so important. They may exist as just the means to an end: improve collaboration, and will generally be somewhat temporary (as they are not associated with expensive capital investments). Rather the important asset of organizations is its network, both internally and externally to the organization. And it also forms it identity, because the organization is now akin to the network it fosters.