What Organizations are Unlearning

WARNING: If you love bureaucracy, you’ll hate this post. If your life is consumed with climbing the corporate ladder, this post will give you a splitting headache. If you are in what is considered a “safe” occupation (HR/accounting/law) – be prepared to be unnerved.

This is a follow up to my post about unlearning. Here, you’ll learn what you might need to unlearn about how organizations operate and the work done within them. The content of this post draws both on my personal experience with a variety of organizations I work with, and the work of Frederic Laloux and his book, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.

And here is the punch line:

The future of work is creating more engaged, humane, soulful, purposeful organizations.

We’ve been taught and conditioned to think of organizations as machines – with people as cogs in the wheel. Virtually every business school preaches that profit is the Holy Grail and the “return to stockholders” is the solitary purpose. People are seen as commodities – as “human capital”. Decisions are made at the top, which is an isolated and lonely place. Efficiency and scale are sought after.

And we see the outcomes of organizations organized with these worldviews. Disenfranchised workers. Lifeless organizations. Large organizations who do great harm to the bigger economy and environment in the pursuit of profit at any cost.

Laloux studied ten organizations that broke the industrial era mind-set. The list includes Buurtzorg, FAVI, Morning Star, Patagoinia, RHD, and Sun Hydraulics.  These organizations span geographies and industries. They are dramatically different in the way they work, but they are also dramatically different in that they are places that are creative, innovative, productive and resilient – and are producing outrageous results by any measure. And oh, by the way, they have enduringly high levels of employee engagement.

One of the first differences about these organizations is that they are organized around purpose and not profit. This is not a generic and hard-to-remember mission poster gathering dust in the corner of a conference room – but a living, breathing purpose. One that everyone knows. One that guides decisions. One that shapes their identity – in who they are and what they do.

The second big difference is that they see people as responsible and trustworthy adults. They encourage spirit, creativity and “whole” people to show up. They refuse to manage to the lowest common denominator and insist that committed, responsible people are capable of making good decisions and managing themselves.

Although the specifics of how this gets done varies by organization, in general all use some form of self-management in which:

• There is no hierarchy; people are clustered in teams.
• There are no bosses, supervisors or managers; teams are responsible for their own actions, decisions, and results.
• The traditional functions of planning and operations, project planning, finance, marketing, and HR don’t exist as centralized functions; the work is distributed to the teams.
• If there are support functions like finance, marketing or HR, they can advise the teams. But they cannot dictate, decide or impose.
• Information flows and is readily accessible to all.

So what might we have to unlearn about organizations and work? Here is a short list:

• That climbing the ladder is the ultimate career goal.
  There may not be a ladder to climb.
• That command and control is the only choice.
  It may be counterproductive in a world that requires agility, adaptability, and responsiveness.
• That people are cogs in a wheel, a mere means to an end.
  We might discover that people are an amazing mix of energy, passion, creativity and productivity – if that is allowed to show up.
• That profit is the sole goal.
  We might be amazed to find that profit can flow from achieving a worthy purpose. Profit can be the outcome – not the purpose of an evolving organization.
  
• That hierarchy is not the only way we can organize ourselves.
  And we may learn along the way that the hierarchy was not nearly as neat and efficient as we imagined.

Want to learn more? Laloux’s book is a great place to start. You’ll also find a great slide presentations here. And I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts – and what you see emerging as organizations adapt to a world that is increasingly global, technology-driven, and interconnected in ways inconceivable a decade ago.