The theme for reboot9 this year is "Human".
Please help me as I fool around with some of my ideas. I speak better when I have had a chance to sketch out my thoughts so if you don't mind, I am going to play around with some of the ideas here.
I am going to talk about what would a human organization be like that really performed well. What would a human organization be like if it was truly Natural? I think that if there was a real natural model it would be
always replicable and it would not depend on magic. It would have a basis in math as do all relationships in nature. Ants, Lions,
Oak trees, Suns do not need vision and charismatic leadership to
organize to their optimal potential. Nor should people - nor did we. But I get ahead of myself......
When we think of organizations - we tend to think of them as ones that look like this.
They are neat and tidy. They are like a "well oiled machine".
They have parts, or departments, that have specific roles that have to be coordinated and directed by great leaders.
We think that high performing organizations have "Great Leaders" - all our management books talk about this requirement. All the millions of organizations hope to find a great leader. Great leadership is seen as the holy grail. If you get a great leader - you will win. Pity there are so few of them around. Sad to have a model that depends on such a scarce resource.
We think that high performing organizations are efficient. To be efficient, great organizations have to know know what they are doing and where they are going. So the key to a great organization is to have a Strategy based on an appreciation of the overall context. Then they develop a clear and focused mission. They have as little redundancy as possible. The best organizations are highly aligned to the goal of the mission. So in the current model all depends on knowing what is going on and how best to act. Oh if only the world could slow down and be more predictable again like it was say in the 1950's.
In the best organizations today, middle management is frowned on as an idea. It is the current whiz to talk about decentralizing power direct to the workers. Teams and individuals are seen as the panacea. But after the great leader tries this for a while - he often finds that little gets done and gets frustrated. They tend to centralize again. Not a lot of fun for those inside. So what is the model then - decentralized or centralized?
I could go on. The bottom line is that we think that organizations are machines.
Machines with brilliant leaders who can see the world with clarity and who know best where to go and how to get there. The shame is that the people in them are so difficult to deal with. But it's the only model we have and if we tried hard enough we surely will make it work. If we got a leader like Alexander the Great we would be fine.
I think that all of this is false. Everybody believes it to be true but then everybody believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that it was flat too.
This idea of how an organization should work is a dogma.
A dogma that is reinforced by the gatekeepers of the orthodoxy - the new church of business schools and consultants who punish heretics - just as the Church shut up Galileo.
My intention is to refute utterly this dogma about what an organization is. I intend to show you, as Galileo was able to show those who could choose to see, that if you get enough perspective, you can see beyond the immediate and the obvious to what is really there in nature.
Galileo used a telescope to show the moons of Jupiter. This is what he showed people. This is his working paper where he showed the new reality. That moons swung around Jupiter and had a relationship with Earth that proved that Earth also orbited the sun. He used a telescope as a tool to get sufficient perspective to make this observation. I have been struggling and fussing to find my moons of Jupiter. My self imposed goal to find an observable, replicable, math based, emergent and hence natural and hence human model for a high performing organization that would knock the dogma organization for six. I think I have found it! Instead of a telescope, I have used time to get enough perspective to see what what was hidden from us. I have been disciplined in seeking my "Moons". What I found meets the conditions of Science. As I recall, Science has to be observable, repeatable and hence it has to have a
coherent mathematical underpinning. A Natural, and hence Human Organization, must share the principles of all organizations in Nature. In Nature, organizations do not need brilliant top down leadership. They need only good initial conditions. Good natural organizations will naturally tend to excellence. They don't need a vision or a strategy. They need to have an inherent ability to react appropriately to changing conditions. They do not drive dysfunction or ill health, they do the opposite. Healthy natural organizations increase the overall well being of all their members. Their purpose is to allow the group to reach its optimal potential. The organization that I have found through the telescope of time - has all these properties - does yours? In addition to these principles, unlike Dogma, everything that is truly based in
Nature has relationships that are mathematically
consistent and replicable in all cases. Light or gravity are not variables that shift depending on scientific whims. The organization that I have found is based on the Magic Numbers of how humans relate best to each other. What are the mathematical truths about your organization? In Nature, the best designs evolve until they reach an optimum. The organization that I have found had a 400 year development period and then settled into the ideal, after massive crisis, for a 400 year period of excellence. How long since your last reorg? The power of the design of the organization that I have found is so great that it has left a 2,000 year design legacy in modern organizations that have to deliver extreme performance today. Later today I will open up my kimono and tell you more.
