Part I: Designing Organizations: What’s wrong with efficiency?
A few weeks ago, I saw the brilliant and impassioned play Hamilton for the second time. What a remarkable ride. Imagine what it must have been like to play such a part in the birthing of a nation! Of course, the play flies through an epic life in a matter of a few hours — mostly through catchy song and dance — with only glimpses of the dirt, sweat, hunger, blood, and sacrifice that was part of it all. Watching this play made me think of my own company, and how in a much smaller way, my seven partners and I are building a republic of our own.
We are currently in the process of reorganizing our consulting company, and we are going through some growing pains doing it. We have offices in seven different countries, and it feels like we have our own constitutional conventions every six months. The eight of us have a lot to talk about. It is humbling, though, thinking about doing this kind of reorganizing at the scale of an entire country versus our own consultancy across seven countries.
As we try to accustom ourselves to operating at this new scale, as well as take stock of where we are and where we are going, the decisions we face are quite profound and existential. I am sure these challenges have been faced by every company passing into a new phase of growth, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
How should we organize to better operate for the needs of our clients? How can we establish interesting and smart ways for our staff to grow and thrive? What should we really be optimizing for? How have others done this? Why can’t we all just agree? Why is this so damn hard? Change is never easy, even if you are in the business of innovation, which, by nature, is all about constant change.
It turns out that many of these decisions are wrapped up in several layers of cultural values and historical baggage. These concepts are very difficult to diagnose and move through. It can get personal, and it is all tied up with feelings of ownership, vision, and trust.
I have seven partners, and we all like to — how do you say it — express ourselves. Some of us want to stay the same and continue to operate as a set of federated entities that cooperate. This way of operating has worked well, and we know how to do it. On the other end, some of us want to redesign the whole company and establish a centralized center of control where we theoretically manage and enable efficiency, eliminating certain redundancies of activities like HR and Finance. It’s like we’re caught between Taylorism and another form of Taylorism. (More on Frederick Taylor and how his models of efficiency came to dominate our thinking later.)
We are now living in a fundamentally different time than even twenty years ago. We have transitioned into another age, referred to as The Knowledge Economy, the Information Age, the Anthropocene, among many others. (I don’t really think we get to name it, though. Others will do that later.)
The simple truth is that the reality of our age is fundamentally different than the previous one, and we are emerging headlong into it. It feels like many of us do not even realize it has happened. The trick is that we still have leftovers from other ages, which can cause confusion. Take for instance the inefficient process of jury duty, and the baffling existence of Jell-O. At the same time, we also have remote drone delivery, self-driving cars, trucks and boats, private space companies, and even sensors embedded in our toothbrushes. We have mapped our genome and are working on our biome. We are still wrestling with mortality, but we are designing life forms to do our bidding, to make our fuel, food (e.g. egg whites), as well as ingredients of other raw materials for manufacturing (e.g. spider silk).
We now have volumes of data that can tell us all sorts of things about ourselves, our days and buying habits. This data can make us more efficient, healthy, and in all honesty, it would probably make Frederick Taylor and his practitioners drool. (As a side note, I am pretty sure none of this has made us any happier. If anything, it has removed some of the mystery and ambiguity and struggle that allowed us to be happy. If you want to be happy, look at what is obsolesced by efficiency.)
Yet there is a fundamental issue that should make all of us pause and take a deep breath as we describe the world we are now building. We do not anymore live in a predictable universe. I’ll just say it outright: we cannot always predict our way into the future as we once did, despite having so much at our fingertips enabling us to do so.
This hubris is well documented. Problems arise when we misdiagnose which domain we are dealing with, and how complicated or complex a system is within that domain. If you believe your domain is merely a closed universe, like a factory or a hospital, you would be mistaken. These are massive complex systems that interact with other complex systems. For example, the components within an electronics global supply chain are international and interact with geopolitics, the weather, and national security. It is misconstrued to think that that these things can be simplified for the sake of management and Tayloristic efficiency.
The world that we exist in now is not the one a reductionist thinker wants to believe we live in. The world is not a set of tasks that can be broken down and re-optimized and made more efficient by finding the one right way. It is vastly more complex and unpredictable than that. We get into a whole lot of trouble when we misconstrue the merely “complicated” with what is “complex.” My business, for example, is not an assembly line of repeated tasks.
But certainly there must be areas where we can still apply 20th century Taylorism and still reap the rewards, right?
For example, the areas of accounting, expense reporting, or the systems for time tracking, procedures where the basic ideals of centralized control have a real need for efficiency and a “right way;” otherwise, chaos ensues. Right? How else can we keep things ordered and controlled? For the love of country (now love of business to you and me)! That’s how it’s done! You’d be foolish to ignore the benefits, and let things be so loose!
Perhaps to some degree we might continue to use approaches around efficiency where it makes sense, but it is very hard to keep that genie contained in the bottle. But what other values are we not honoring by blindly following this century old idea of Taylorism? For example, visit any American public elementary school around lunch time, and you will see how Taylorism has been applied to engineer the one right way to get as many kids as possible to eat as fast as they can — nutrition be damned.
But what if we were to take other approaches that actually account for the human being in the equation? Maybe we could engender better ways to relate to one another, right here and now, by taking a different approach to designing elementary school lunch. What if our values were not time and efficiency but understanding the dialectical roles of nutrition and biology, as well as savoring meals with other (small) humans? We take so many things for granted in our world. The truth is, most of the world is designed for old needs. It’s our job to redesign it using 21st century methods to account for the changes in 21st century needs.
Part II: Designing Organizations: How Efficiency Became King
Part III: Designing Organizations: Efficiency needs some company
Part IV: Designing Organizations: The Perennial Search for Inspiration
Part V: Designing Organizations: What’s next? Designing Organizations for the 21st Century
Other Articles by Ric Edinberg
Is Design Thinking Really Bullshit?
Influential References
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Drucker, Peter F, and Mark Blum. Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Solon, Ohio: Playaway Digital Audio, 2009. Audio.
Harford, Tim. Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. 2012. Print.
Harari, Yuval N, John Purcell, and Haim Watzman. Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind. 2015. Print.
Kilcullen, David. Counterinsurgency. Brisbane: Queensland Narrating Service, 2010. Audio.
Kilcullen, David. Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency. Washington, D.C.: Iosphere, 2006. Web.
McChrystal, Stanley A, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. 2015. Print.
Mintzberg, Henry, and der H. L. Van. “Organigraphs: Drawing How Companies Really Work.” Harvard Business Review. 1999. Print.
Mokyr, Joel. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Print.
Wilson, EO. “Consilience Among the Great Branches of Learning.” Daedalus. 127.1 (1998): 131–49. Print.
