Is Your Organization A Lab Or A Factory?
One of the things I’ll be talking about in my upcoming webinar on 5 Ways You Can Future Proof Your Company in 2016 is this idea of thinking of your organization less like a factory and more like a lab. Unfortunately, many of our organizations around the world are simply trapped in the factory mentality.
Ever sine the dawn of modern management with pioneers such as Henri Fayol and Frederick Winslow Taylor, our organizations have been constructed in a way that made them resilient to change. Organizations were about process, productivity, efficiency, and a linear way of working. There was no focus on engagement, inspiration, or innovation. Health and wellness? Give me a break. Employees were literally timed with stop watches to see if they can shave seconds off of their tasks. This was the mentality of the organization in the early to mid 1900’s and it is the same mentality that plagues our organizations. If you think about it, factories are perfect places for robots to work, unfortunately we didn’t have robots decades ago so we had to use humans to perform those monotonous tasks. Today, we do have robots and they are coming to take the jobs that were designed for them to do. Factories don’t change and they don’t innovate, they simply excel at repeatable tasks. If your organization thinks of itself like a factory it will die.
Laboratories on the other hand are a very different kind of animal. In labs you test ideas, you experiment and use data to make informed decisions, you are coached and mentored, and you embrace failure. Organizations like Adobe give employees $1,000 to build prototypes of ideas or concepts. Whirlpool allows any employees within the organization to go through a structured ideation process to either improve a product or create a new one. At Linkedin and AT&T employees can literally pitch executives their ideas to get funding much the same way a start-up founder would pitch a VC. There are many examples out there of organizations that are doing these types of things. The goal being to bring that entrepreneur mentality inside of the organization to create intrapreneurs. This is the type of approach that is required of organizations that want to be able to attract and retain top talent.
I interview and speak with a lot of executives on my podcast and at the conferences/events I attend. Every business leader I speak with is trying to focus their efforts on shifting their culture from factory to lab. In a world where the workplace is changing as fast as it is, we can’t afford to have organizations that think of themselves as factories. Labs adapt, factories die.
I hope you can join me for my upcoming webinar on the 5 Ways You Can Future Proof Your Company in 2016
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Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. You can invite Jacob to keynote your next conference, subscribe to his videos on Youtube, check our his podcast, or subscribe to his newsletter!
