The great hope for the big consulting firms and ESN Tech firms today is that they will find the technical path to help their big clients - the ones that can pay the $25 million fees - make the shift from top down machine organizations to agile networks. "Hire us and we will give you the technology to make the change".
Can they do this? Is it possible? This short post is the first in a short series that will make the case that you cannot get from A to C via B. At the root of my case is this, what is really required is a "Transformation" and transformation is not a mechanical process that goes in steps from A to C. It is a bifurcation.
This is a transformation. A creature with a body plan designed for crawling on land and in trees becomes a creature with a body plan that is designed for flight. Other than life itself, they share nothing. The caterpillar cannot start to thin out, grow small wings, grow small legs etc all incrementally as a mechanical process. Instead it enters a kind of death, pupation, and emerges as an entirely new creature. It is either a caterpillar, a pupa, or a butterfly. There cannot be a direct linkage between A and C.
So with this natural process as our guide, let's look at the social challenge of our time.
Image source:https://plus.google.com/109479022314471643787/posts/9V61WXEWAxp
So here is the Caterpillar and the Butterfly of organizations. Other than a salary in the intersection, each element is the opposite of the other. The world we grew up in is on the left. That is our A. The world we seek is on the Right. Our C.
The big consulting firms and the big social tech firms hope that they can get you to shift one bit at a time until you end up on the right.
I just don't see how this is possible. For all the parts on each side are interlocking and support each other. Imagine how you take supervision out of a traditional organization and still keep performance management and job grading? Imagine taking out clear rules but keeping in supervision? How do you replace exclusivity with trust and not change it all.
Has this ever been done? I defy anyone to find one case of a traditional organization that has gone from A to C along an incremental path. It's all or nothing folks.
My bet is that it is impossible to get frm A to C by using any kind of practice that is derived from A.
So what do we know that will help? Anything?
We do know how this transformation works with the individual.
Some individuals experience true spiritual conversion. In a time of agony, shame and pain, the old persona suffers a kind of death. And a new one emerges. The body remains but the person has been transformed. The person who once lived in fear and alone in the venn on the left has died. And in their place stands a new person. Who is never alone but now is integrated into all of life. They are so different that many of their old friends do not recognize them.
What drives this? What drives the caterpillar? What drives the baby to be born? It's a mystery.
Worse, often this shift is not desired. In the bible, this is called the "Agony" Jesus sweated blood and begged to be excused from this fate. But he could not. When our old self dies, it dies kicking. All we know is our old self.
I had no plan to be different. I thought I was going mad when it happened to me. So much so that I entered the care of a doctor. I did not want this but I had no control over it. The new feelings just grew and grew. In the end, the new me burst out of my chest.
Until recently, very few people made this transition from being a person who believes in the concrete world as their only reality where we live alone and separate from everything. But for reasons that I do not understand, more and more people are going through this process.
This is where I think we can have hope and where we can even make plans to accelerate the transformation.
As more people transform from left to right, they create a critical mass of new energy. As this builds, it attracts more and more people out of the world on the left to the one on the right. It is the energy, like a gravity, that is accelerating the shift. As the mass increases, so will the pace and the extent of the shift.
I suspect that, as the people on the right get attached to each other, they will create a force that will act like the sun does with the planets. It will hold the system together and it will also shine its energy out into the darkness and fill the void with light and so with life.
So if this is the metaphor - how might this happen in "Real Life"?
In part 2 we will start to explore this.
