Part IV: Designing Organizations: The Perennial Search for Inspiration
Why all the fuss about designing an organization? It happens to be my belief that the organization has been one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. In my book, it’s up there with the drywall screw, paint rollers, and toilets. Maybe someday I’ll write a love story about drywall screws, paint rollers, and toilets, too, but personally, organizational design is more interesting to me right now. At Insitum, we are helping to do this for some of our clients who want to integrate sustainable innovation into their business, which typically requires some level of adjustment to structure. We’re also attempting to make some major structural changes to our offices at Insitum as well.
The whole reason I am writing this series is to learn from the past, understand what is going on right now, in this moment, and share insights into what we need to move these ideas forward within my little world. Maybe we can add something to this great experiment along the way. That’s the point of opening up a dialogue, right? I think we can and need to do much better in this basic human endeavor. There is much to know, but there is also a lot to try.
Any organization that is engaged and wants to make these sorts of changes soon realizes how much knowledge is needed just to begin, or worse: they design without knowing anything about the past. Once this journey has begun, I have found that what we seem to know is not really going to enable the next great leap forward into what we really need. We should be better able to identify what that need actually is:
We need novel structures suited to our tasks, and we need better management techniques suited to the particular people and resources we manage.
In the last three posts, we just scratched the surface at how organizations have embraced the driving force of efficiency in the last century, (and even to this day), using management as their primary tool. It is a rich history littered with the bones of some amazing (and not so amazing) companies and leading personalities that haven’t been able to survive for various reasons, and there are other — sometimes newer, sometimes older — companies who have grown exponentially in the recent past. Why is this?
I believe it is high time to consider alternatives to what we have inherited and breathe new life into these structures; no, scratch that, we need to imagine new structures for the needs of the 21st century. (Yes, maybe we are 18 years late, or maybe we are just officially of legal age now.) Or maybe we should just start a Kickstarter.
It is very easy and seductive to look at successful — which often means large — organizations and believe these to be the very things we should be copying. Those organizations are often designed particularly to their unique business model, which is why they are successful. It is an illusion to think that you can copy and paste such models. They may have informal, back-end structures that make it work despite of the structures they actually show on the surface, or they may actually be experiencing extreme cultural and efficiency problems because of the very structures they insist on retaining. Companies are complex beasts, and have quite interesting informal structures, as well as the formal processes that are well documented in manuals. As humans, we often want things to just be easy, so we look and we copy and we derive. Unfortunately, we rarely question.
Taylorism was copied, derived, and masterfully applied in the German military in World War II just as it was to America’s manufacturing base at the same time. Germany was able to build an efficient fighting machine in just under six years when Hitler came to power in the late 1930s, but America was lucky Germany mostly focused that energy on their military. We were out producing them by two to three times in regards to resources, which it turns out was the way mid-century modern wars were won. (At least World War II was won that way.) The team who out produces and has better logistics for transporting supplies (and people, unfortunately) to the fight at the front more often and for a longer periods of time than the other, wins. This is not how modern wars are fought, but from what I have gathered this was pretty true at the time.
We are told narratives about the Greatest Generation and how everyone pulled together to win that war. I think that story is also true, but the structural things at play like setting up our factories with relatively unskilled labor, including a lot of women new to those contexts — most of the traditional workers with experience were in training or in battle — and have them all out produce Germany is nothing short of miraculous.
What if we are doing all of this backwards?
If we are truly able to start over, what values, what strategies, and what structures do we want to be the driving force behind our organizations for the next hundred years? (Peter Drucker would have us do it in this order). Certainly, it’s worth asking, and finding out some options, as the structures we have been left with feel more like old and dusty lime green suits. (Although as a designer, I might be able to pull of a lime green suit).
New organizational forms always emerge after great upheaval and social change. In the past for example, and throughout history, new branches and orders of the church emerged after social change and upheaval. In our age, I think about services like Tinder (tap and swipe (eCommerce) for love), Occulus (we are sick of this reality — or there has to be a better reality — no drugs required), or Instacart (www.I.hate.shopping.dot.com) to illustrate just how much social change we are living through at the moment? We even have the new urban version of the commune — the work principle monetized by the phenomenon of co-working spaces. (Insitum US was recently a tenant of a co-working space, so I have nothing against co-working spaces. They are fantastic!) I won’t even bring up anything that has to do with our post-expertise politics, either. As we say during a roller coaster ride, Weeee.
Right now, it may be wise to look back into the distant past of human history for some perspective. For 120 years, we have had some basic assumptions of what management essentially is, and what it is for. (That it may have been wrong all along is besides the point; the myth has carried us forward.)
But let’s go back even farther — way, way back to when we first figured out how to domesticate plants. (No, not to your parents’ house experimenting with a garden.) Go back to the agricultural revolution in humanity’s early history, about 12,000 years ago — that’s just under 6,000 years before the Old Testament was sung mournfully about in minor keys and almost 9,000 years before Hinduism was even imagined.
For the first time, we had something resembling a food surplus. We finally had the opportunity to think ahead! Hunger was diminished (only temporarily, though, and probably only for a privileged few). One of the first things that happened is that as small dense communities formed, they developed myths and stories about how dependent on deities and spirits they were for success with their food production. It turns out, these stories became the building blocks of humanity’s ability to dominate the planet, for better or worse.
“While human evolution was crawling forward at a snail’s pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation unlike any other ever seen on earth” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
So to underline this idea from Harari — because it’s a whopper — the physical evolution within our bodies went along at its normal genetic biological pace, but the social evolution in our collective minds greatly accelerated our ability to adapt and convince larger and larger numbers of people to do some pretty insane things to other people, animals, and the environment. This is a pretty interesting idea.
We still are using these same stories to bind ourselves to each other in all kinds of ways which in turn have brought us to 2018. Religions, sports teams, the stock market, “fake” news, nationalities, militaries, government “parties” (is there a reason they are called parties?); movements, unions, the national stories we tell ourselves like the American Dream; and more to the point of this article series, our brands and companies, they are all cooperation networks. These are myths we tell ourselves so we can perpetuate what we need them to be. The important point here is that while they are powerful, they aren’t real: they are all collectively imagined.
“Myths, as they transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
In 1999, Peter Drucker came out with a little gem called Challenges for the 21st Century. In it, he lays claim that many of the deep unspoken assumptions about how organizations have been and should be run were all wrong and have been for quite some time. (Imagine that! Oops!) In so many words, Drucker says, our current assumptions about running organizations are now untenable. For example, one deeply held assumption emerging from Taylorism from the early part of the last century — when many of our big companies were formed — was there was one right way to run an organization. Should a gas station really be run like a homeless shelter?
Another is that there is one right way to manage people. Both of these whoppers were myths we collectively believed and which served many of those companies well (perhaps it served some of the workers less so). It worked for a long time as our markets developed, matured, and as society progressed. These assumptions were originally and specifically oriented to developing work places like manufacturing plants, managing them, and then marketing the outputs. It wasn’t really designed to develop organizations that require people to work together and use their minds to develop and run an operation using abstract knowledge. Take for instance hospitals, government services, or in my case, a strategy and design consultancy. Although no one seemed to care, the old 20th century attempts have been made in all those cases to streamline and infuse these operations with the values of productivity and efficiency (and in the case of healthcare efficacy as well, to mixed results. This is partly why we feel like pieces of meat when we are under clinical care.)
Now we can see the way these myths have, like some Ridley Scott Alien host, taken over our better senses and eliminated the very potential to challenge these assumptions. But some of us are waking up. There is an exploration happening, and there are examples now of companies trying to reform themselves in new ways.
“The reality is that most cooperative human networks have been geared toward oppression and exploitation.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
What if this didn’t have to be the case anymore? What would an organization look like if it took inspiration from other sources like ecologies or other social and biological structures rather than mechanical ones? What if we inspired and infused our organizations with values other than the ones that drove the last century? What would our org charts look like then? Might we enable our organizations to actually achieve even more through their design? I wonder what myths we would have to create and nurture to make this happen?
There are many facets of this topic, and many great minds at work trying new models of interaction. Collectively, those engaged with it are working on developing new mythologies, new cooperative networks, and new structures, which is pretty exciting. The other exciting thing is that we have a lot of choices, though at present it may feel more like a Chipotle menu, not an IRS tax return.
To distill some of the above questions, I have outlined three main questions to ponder over.
- If there is not one right way then there may be many, or at least several. If true, are there some tasks that certain kinds of organizations are most or least suited to?
- What are some of the ways companies are re-forming themselves today? What are some options? Is there a taxonomy of company structures we can learn from? (typical answers are traditional hierarchies, flat organizations, flatarchies, and holocracies, though there are also areas of description like span of control, departments, functional, matrixed, and many more.)
- How do we design, test, and develop the right organization for a given task?
I do not have the answers (yet), but perhaps we might create them in the next decade, together.
Part I: Designing Organizations: What’s wrong with efficiency?
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
Burlingham, Bo. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, 10th-Anniversary Edition. 2016. Print.
Churchill, Neil, and Virginia Lewis. “The Five Stages of Small Business Growth.” Harvard Business Review. 1983. Print.
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.
