Hugh McLeod's classic cartoon may be extreme - but we laugh because we all know at some level this is true. The traditional organization trends to create a society that looks a lot like this.
Many traditional organizations become like lifeless fields with all the vitality drained from them.
What would a Natural Organization be like? I think like this.
So how do you make a Natural Organization work? Let's look again how you encourage a Natural System like a Perma Garden work for you and see if we can find our answers there.
The key is to ensure that when you start, that you get the initial conditions right.
As time goes by, if the design is a good one, the ecosystem will get stronger, more resilient and more able to resource itself.
The very opposite of the traditional organization where friction builds over time, where the drive for efficiency reduces resilience and the waste of waste demands an ever greater external supply of energy.
In a Perma Garden there are 3 things that have to be worked on by the gardener as part of the initial conditions.
- Vital healthy living soil
- Access to and the ability to husband water
- Access to enough light and also to shade when needed
So lets use this metaphor to explain the 3 main needs of humans so that they can create and sustain healthy organizations.
1. Vitality - The quality and health of the soil - No matter how healthy the plants, if the vitality of the soil is poor, or if it gets degraded, the plants will lose their vigor and in the end fail. All good gardeners and farmers know that if they get the soil healthy, the rest will follow.
You can't fake this.
If you try and do this artificially with chemicals, you will get a burst of life at first but that, like feeding a kid lots of sugar, this forcing actually builds in long term weakness and degradation.
The tragedy of agribusiness is that it is all about forcing growth. The forced process removes vitality over time from the soil.
Bureaucracies force growth too. They too also remove vitality from people. There is no life to working in a bureaucracy. Threats and rules keep it going, but over time the people become deadened, go through the motions. Many become ill or act out.
Many have said that the trouble with bureaucracies is that they don't offer enough financial incentive. Many think that money and rewards offer vitality. But like artificial fertilizer, money is only a drug hit that sets in train an arms race where there is never enough money. This type of reward is also very divisive.
So what is the true vitality that we all need as humans to thrive in an organization?
True organizational vitality, like great soil, has life in it. Rules are not life. Money is not life. Life is life. The most vital human organizations take real risks to offer life.
True vitality for organizations of people must have a purpose that is great. That determines the fate of the group.
The best goal for an organization is the life of the community itself. Where people play a real role in the real life and future of their community. The roles that institutions have largely taken away from us all today.
In the ideal purpose, the Fate of all has to lie in the actions of each member.
In a traditional tribe, the purpose was the long term survival of the group. Above all, mothers had to be protected and the young raised and taught to take the tribe onto the next generation. The "contract" was personal and public and bigger than the needs of any one individual. The fate of the future of the tribe was in the hands of each member.
Lesser purposes can hold a group for a time. But a real struggle, one that affects the present and the future of all who participate, is best. Such a purpose holds the most vitality.
2. Water is the connective that enables all in a garden to share nutrients. Conversation is the Connection All must have a voice and be heard
In traditional organizations, only those at the top have a voice. We think that this is normal. But having no voice dries us all up.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
Ozimandias must have seemed so powerful in his life. But his kingdom dried up over time.
Our nature demands that we converse. If we don't we die.
For we are Primates.
As Primates, we need to groom and to be groomed. Grooming between all in the group, up and down and across, regardless of level is the mechanism by which primate societies reduce stress and friction and increase cohesion.
Humans use an advanced kind of grooming that allows more freedom and more distance. We call this conversation.
This is how we give all a voice. For millenia, humans have sat in a circle and told and listened to each other tell stories. These stories entertained but also taught important lessons about who you were, how to behave, how to add value. Stories honored those who had served. This is how the vitality of the group was maintained and enhanced. This was how bonds were formed.
This is Grooming. Grooming, is core to all primates. We are not super beings or even supra beings. We are hairless apes. It is vital for us to remind ourselves that we have a human nature that is irrevocably tied to who we really are. Primates!
We are Primates who share all the social worries that all primates share - we worry mainly about where we fit socially. Zebras only worry about lions when the lion is hunting. Humans, Chimps and Baboons worry all time! They worry about "Am I rising or falling? "Can I protect myself by allying with that alpha male or female" "What are we going to do with the bad leader we have?" "Which sub group am I safest in".
The most feared punishment of a tribal group was expulsion or shunning. We shrivel when we are isolated. We have to be connected.
The best tool for connecting among humans is conversation. A two way dance of verbal intimacy.
So the wonder of Social Media is that it is expanding our ability again to Groom at a distance and to be more effective.
Conversation is the connective process that like water in a garden, spreads the nutrients around in a group. When we converse, all sorts of chemical reactions are set off that strengthen our immune system. When we are isolated or talked at, our immune system is degraded.
Conversation is also how we learn too. Parents who converse with their young children, are the ones who set up their kids for life. Parents who don't or worse who talk at their kids, ensure bad outcomes.
So the ideal "water supply design" socially is to design in a process where those in the group have easy access to each other so that many conversations can occur up and down and across the group.
Organizations where this is not possible are like a garden without water. Vitality and life dries up.
How do you get and keep water?
A good gardener designs her water system to fit into the reality of her place. Water cannot flow uphill. Too little water is also fatal but can be designed for. The best gardener, designs with all the constraints and variables that enable the best conversational and relational outcome. So we too have to design our social connections to fit our nature and reality.
We cannot open up and be ourselves with just anybody. To be safe, we have to converse inside a social context. The limits and the design of our social context is quite defined. But traditional organizations pay no attention to these limits and so design dysfunction into themselves.
Millions of years of living in tribal groups have hard wired humans to work best in clearly demarcated group sizes. Tribes were usually about 35 people. 8 adult men, 8 adult women and the test youth and children.
8 seems to be the building block. It is the best size for a team - balancing enough diversity with enough unity. In the military, you don't in the end die for your country. Or for your unit. You die for these 8.
144 (The Dunbar Number) appears to be the maximum number of people that we can know and have a high enough level of trust to avoid using rules to govern behavior.
The most healthy human social design will take these numbers very seriously. They of course represent the Fibonacci Numbers.
More important than the Social Media tools we are developing, are these numbers themselves.
They exist naturally. Most Guilds in online games naturally default to them. All militaries use them. But few traditional organizations use them.
A high school with 3,000 kids and no inner organization that uses these numbers - such as houses etc - will have to have bullying. Prisons have worse. If there is no supported tribal system, people will do the best they can. Those that don't fit are prey.
Most organizational dysfunction arises from ignoring these social building blocks. Ignoring them creates huge social stress that debilitates people and organizations just as the lack of water debilitates plants in a garden.
So the "water" design not only allows for conversation between all but governs the groups by using these numbers.
But then how we use the ability of thousands of people when we have big things to do and we only work with such small building blocks?
By using the network effects that are built into this design.
The slide shows you these. Most of us will have at least 4 good friends whom we love and trust a lot. If you got an email from one of these and was asked to act on it - see a film, do a favor etc - you would. For this is inside your group of 8. Now all of those have at least 4 friends who also are that close.
Here is the leverage of using trusted channels of friends rather than using money to talk to strangers:
With 8 you can reach 4,000.
With 34 you can reach 1,300,000
With 89 you can reach 62,000,000
With 144 you can reach 430,000,000
Now that is a power law in action! Traditionally to reach millions of people using the Top Down approach demanded that you use millions of dollars. Now, with the best purpose to pull a group together, you can reach millions for almost no cost.
Friends working with friends versus strangers using money as a substitute for social connection.
More on this later. For there is more to "friends" than signing up on Facebook!
Finally the last of the trinity of needs to create the ideal Trusted Space or Initial Conditions.
3. Light the vital external energy that feeds the whole system - In human terms this is Leadership.
In the end, all depends on light, the basis of life itself. So organizations depend on leadership. But not on the kind of leadership that we have become used too. The leadership that we are used too is all about the hero leader or the elite. We keep looking for the one person to make our problems go away. Or as bad we give up all our power to an elite who say that they serve us, when in reality they design system to keep us dependent on us.
The kind of leadership that I am talking about is a distributed form. This is not the kind of Kumbaya we are all leaders silliness - I am talking about real leadership where the leader knows more than the others and exercises personal power. The best example of what I mean is contained in this slide.
Yes the Centurion in the Roman Legion.
In my next post, I will go deep into the design and operational reality of the legion as one of the ideals of how Natural Organization can be deployed.
But in this post, I want to talk about leadership - the Energy of an organization - and how very different this design is from the traditional design that we think as being normal today.
The legion was designed - it had about 5,000 men and so was not small - to perform well no matter who was the official leader at the top - the legate - who was always a political appointee. Some were great, many were OK and many were not good at at all. A legion did OK with bad top leadership. Well with OK leadership and brilliantly with great leadership.
Head office of a legion was about 10 in total. Of which 7 were in effect interns. Think about any modern organization and their staff to line ratios. They not only were the best fighting machine ever put into the field but were the best construction organization ever. Many of their great works, roads, cities, aqueducts are still in use today and even in ruins form the basis of Europe.
But there was no engineering staff separate from the fighting staff of a legion. The legion was an integrated organization that could do anything. It also had organizational integrity. The 10th Legion existed for more than 400 years. Few Fortune 500 organizations last 40.
How could it do this? It was designed to have all the leadership it really needed embedded inside it.
The Glue was the Centurion. Centurions are not like modern managers. Nor was their selection and training anything like a modern manager or executive.
As we look at the Perma Flower we see that it has two hierarchies - a vertical axis that moves out from the centre and a horizontal axis that is represented by the petals and their overlap.
The Centurion was the connective force that held all of this together.
First of all he was chosen not by the legate but by a centurion who commanded his century - a group of 80 men. The centurion would take his choice to the other centurions who would advise, debate and conform or reject based on their collective experience. The trainee centurion was called an Optio - means chosen one - the one under the spotlight.
As an Optio you learned leadership on the job under the eyes of your mates and the local centurionate. You had to prove yourself. Not by taking an exam. But by being good at what you did. You did all of this in public. It would be not smart to have the centurionate confirm you if you had not the confidence of the men. In a way you were "elected". Some did come in direct from the Praetorian Guard but they too had to pass the test of competence.
So the distributed leadership of the legion was in a way "elected". Chosen by the people they served. Not by currying favor but by proving by deeds that he could be trusted. These were not comfy easy going leaders. They were highly demanding. But so then was the organizations that they served. To be demanding, they had to establish that they could do more and know more than those they asked all from.
What they did was also different. Yes they had privileges and more pay than the men. But they were working leaders. They lead from the front. They took the heavy casualties in battle. They did not hide in some office with a spreadsheet. They were in full view all the time. Above all, they knew more about everything than the men they lead.
Organizational cohesion and stability was built into this design. People knew each other at a level we can hardly comprehend today.
The term of enlistment for the legionary was 25 years. As a legionary, you shared a tent with 7 others. The key number of 8 again! You lived with same guys for the entire enlistment.
While most centurions were appointed in their first term, most if they lived, had more than 30- 40 years of direct experience. The legate relied on two senior centurions, one to run logistics the other to run the fighting capacity. Both would have had nearly 50 years of experience.
And what experience! As a centurion, you did not spend all your career in one legion. Your career was run centrally from Rome. You belonged to a club of about 3,000 men. You would be sent all over the empire to learn by doing different jobs. Building Hadrian's Wall, Fighting the German Tribes, Managing the security of the grain trade in Egypt. All along, you would meet and get close to many of the other 3,000 centurions. By the time you made Primus Pilus - the adviser to the Legate - not only had you done it all but you knew everyone and everyone knew you.
So in a legion at every point of connection both vertically and horizontally was a human connector/leader who himself was connected to the other connectors as well as his men. There were 60 of them in a 5,000 person unit. Again a tiny group compared to a modern organization.
The Centurionate of 3,000 lead a total force of 250,000. What an ROI! This is also an organization that lasted for more than 400 years. The design of the centurionate was one of the main reasons for this sustained performance.
Broad leadership on all axes. "Elected" in that if you did not impress the men or your peers, you were toast. Reputation versus accreditation. Trained by broad experience that also built cross functional connections between units.
Remnants of this kind of organization still remain in armies and in fire brigades. More on this later. But few organizations today are designed to take into account our human nature as the legions were. To take into account that the key to performance is social design.
Ironically most of the processes that we use routinely in organizations today drive people away from their nature and guarantee dysfunction.
