Leveraging the Magic of Self-Organization – Part IV

by Lanny Goodman on July 10, 2011

That Was Then, This is Now

There are two problems with this model. The first is that this way of running a business is profoundly deadening to the human spirit. This has been known and acknowledged for decades and has been tacitly deemed an acceptable cost of doing business.

The second problem is the ‘check your brain at the door and do just what we tell you to do’ approach intrinsic to the machine model means that you are getting only a tiny fraction of the value that your employees are capable of bringing to your company. In today’s competitive climate there is no room for that kind of waste.

You may have noticed that things have changed a bit in the last century. For one thing, the Newtonian model of the universe has fallen victim to quantum, chaos and complexity theories.

The current economic hiccup not withstanding, you all know that in this day and age, anyone worth hiring has plenty of other options. The demographics of the workforce has changed dramatically. There was a time when you could sit behind your desk in a job interview and confidently ask what the applicant was going to do for you. Now you can expect the applicant to be interviewing you as well with an eye towards what you are going to do for him or her.

Lessons From the Natural World

In the last newsletter we looked at the free market as an example of self-organizing behavior and how to begin to bring that dynamic inside your company through explicit customer/vendor relationships. We touched on another place to find a useful model of self-organizing behavior – the natural world.

In nature, all systems are driven by two imperatives: survive and propagate. (Interestingly, how that gets done has at least as much to do with cooperation and symbiosis as competition.) In the typical entrepreneurial company the CEO has the most focus on survival and propagation of the company and the urge for those things drops dramatically as you move down the organization chart. Historically, the presumption has been that employees are people who just don’t care very much beyond a steady and hopefully increasing paycheck. Yet there is plenty of data to suggest otherwise. The reasons employees tend not to care much about the company is that:

1. They don’t know very much about the company.
2. They don’t know very much about how businesses work.
3. The system in which they work does not structurally encourage them to care about the company.

When you have to check your brain at the door, it’s hard to care very much about the system that asks you to do that.

Perhaps the most important concept to come out of the quality disciplines is that all employees operate within a system that they don’t control and can’t change. What this frame of reference tells us that if things aren’t working the way you’d like, it is almost a certainty that it’s the system that is causing the problem and not the employee(s).

So if we buy that premise, then we should be prepared to accept the notion that if:

  1. 1. Employees had the same kind of information about the business as the CEO, and
  2. 2. They were educated in the basics of business like the CEO, and
  3. 3. The organization was designed to draw out the full potential of their creativity,

then the odds are pretty good that you’d have a tiger by the tail.

The Ants Go Marching One by One

So back to the natural world.

Consider the lowly anthill. Where I live, we have some large red ants. Peaceful enough if you leave them alone. There are about 20,000 of the little guys in a mature hill. Edward O. Wilson at Harvard who has devoted his career to the study of ants tells us that each individual ant has only 19 discrete behaviors (as far as we know). Not a very rich repertoire, yet each ant, like all organisms is driven by the urge to survive and propagate. The anthill is a very complex structure with a wide variety of different jobs doled out to the worker ants. Who runs the show? The queen? Actually, it appears that the queen is fully engaged in making more ants. There is no management hierarchy. There are no supervisors, directors, vice presidents (plain, senior or executive). With each ant having only 19 behaviors to work with and motivated by the two primal urges of survival and propagation they self-organize.

Is it successful?

Well, let’s put it this way, in the rainforest, the biomass of ants is greater than all the mammals put together. They are a very successful species.

So if we could create an ecosystem in our companies that:

  • had the dynamics of the free market,
  • could tap into the natural urges on the part of all people to survive and propagate,
  • dismantle the systems that keeps everyone locked in boxes that stifles their creativity and
  • replace them with systems supports people without getting in their way

would that make a difference in your business?

My guess is the answer is yes. We’ll go into more detail of how to do that in the next few newsletters.

There is also one other ingredient that, like icing on the cake, will bring a company alive, but we’ll talk about that next time.

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Leveraging the Magic of Self-Organization – Part III

by Lanny Goodman on July 2, 2011

Business and the Natural World

Another problem with traditional management is it has always been assumed employees would be unable to grasp or understand how the system of the business as whole functions. As a result employees have been kept in the dark and told just to do the job for which they were hired.

Entrepreneurs understand that the imperatives that drive a business in the free market are to survive and propagate and they behave accordingly. And yet underneath them in their companies they create organizations in which only themselves or maybe a small cadre of senior managers are focused on or even know how to survive and propagate. The net result is they have to put an inordinate amount of energy into making the organization function in a way that supports the goals of survival and propagation.

Surely, if the whole organization understood the need for survival and propagation and had the skills to function in a way that optimized the whole system, there would be far less need for the attention of the entrepreneur to be focused on trying to make the company work (in other words – management). What might it mean if all that energy could be focused on creating new products and services finding ways to satisfy customers better?

The concept of survival and propagation being the fundamental imperatives of a business sounds strikingly like the fundamental imperatives of the natural world. In fact, traditional management was built on the concept of the organization as a machine with each part performing its function as designed. But organizations are human artifacts and they function far more like organisms than machines.

The Machine Model

Management as we know it was developed early in the twentieth century by nineteenth century intelligentsia. These were people who grew up in and were educated in the cosmology of the Newtonian universe, a predictable universe governed by inexorable physical laws that it was felt we would eventually understand. It was a universe that looked like a giant, cosmic machine. For those of us from western European cultural stock the Newtonian model made life seem tidy and comfortable and gave us some sense of control.

Not surprisingly, this worldview got translated to the organization. Given that at the time workers were largely uneducated and new to the concept of ‘job’ (many just coming in off the family farms), it was a very plausible approach. It helped build the highly adaptive industrial infrastructure that very directly led to our success in World War II.

We’ll talk more about this in the next article.

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Leveraging the Magic of Self-Organization – Part II

June 29, 2011

In my last newsletter we discussed the power of self-organization. Now we are going to explore that concept in the context of something that you know and understand intimately. The Invisible Hand In 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in which he articulated the concept of the ‘invisible hand’. Unless you are a [...]

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Welcome to the Self-Management Community

June 29, 2011

We are at the dawn of a new era in organization design, one that promises important benefits across the board. You have locked in the hearts and minds of your employees, a treasure trove of insight, knowledge, wisdom and experience. If you could catalyze that into focused, creative energy, what could that mean for your [...]

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Leveraging the Magic of Self-Organization

June 29, 2011

Perhaps the most important insight to show up in management thought in recent memory comes not from business school research but from the relatively new discipline of complexity theory, an outgrowth of chaos theory. Complexity Made Simple Complexity theory states that in complex systems (e.g. an ant hill, a flow of turbulent air, an organization, [...]

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