9 Principles of Emergent Organizations
I’ve recently embarked on a new journey — founding a consulting business called LongSpoon Consulting. I work with companies and organizations who believe, as I do, that in order to do our best work, we must rethink the hidden assumptions that drive how businesses have organized to get work done for the last 100 years. It’s time to move the organization into the 21st century. This is the Future of Work.
Below is a set of Principles I’ve been working on that I think are critical to embrace if an organization is truly interested in moving towards flat, autonomous, and adaptive teams. I’d love to hear your thoughts below.
Purpose Driven
We come together and our organization continues to exist because of our Purpose. Our purpose is our North Star for everything the organization, department, and individual does. We use our Purpose to orient and steer and drive our decision making.
Networks
Work to diminish (or remove) traditional hierarchies and replace them with networks of decentralized teams that are loosely connected but tightly aligned towards a shared purpose and objectives. When traditional hierarchies are diminished, lots of natural and fluid hierarchies blossom — hierarchies of development, skill, talent, expertise, and recognition.
Empowerment & Distributed Authority
A belief that individuals & teams should have the freedom to decide what they work on and how they accomplish their work. A belief that we should be distributing authority and that decisions should be made at the most local level, closer to the customer and where the work is being done (aka the ‘frontline’, the edges), to increase effectiveness, support better decision making, and drive innovation. With this authority comes accountability & responsibility over the outcomes. Empowerment and responsibility are two sides of the same coin.
Consent
We believe in the power of collective intelligence, that nobody is as smart as everybody. We believe that the best decisions are made with consent (note: not consensus) rather than “majority rule” or “the boss decides”, and that everyone has a right to consent regarding decisions that affect them directly. (learn more: Decision Making)
Learning Organization
As opposed to trying to predict the future, instead, we create lots of ‘safe to try’ experiments with built in feedback mechanisms. We iterate — sense & respond — and learn our way into the future. Every decision (every experiment) is an opportunity for individual and organizational learning, so we observe, measure, review and discuss our successes and our mistakes. Hiding or neglecting to learn from failure is not acceptable. We will always be learners. We have never arrived.
Responsibility
We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. it’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the limits of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation.
Transparency
To truly develop a strong, autonomous company and culture, everyone must have access to critical information and data. For people to do their work and make informed decisions, we must trust them with access to sensitive information. When information is available everywhere, different people see different things. It is information — unplanned, uncontrolled, abundant, superfluous — that creates the conditions for the emergence of fast, well-integrated, effective responses. “Default to Open”
Supportive Leadership
Leaders must shift their mindsets from “decision makers” to “stewards”. Leaders create the container (the space) for the organization to absorb new principles and adopt and support new practices, gently guiding and encouraging. As leaders, we need to shift the internal language from that of “asking permission” to that of encouraging others to “propose solutions”. Everyone is a leader.
Equity
We are all fundamentally of equal worth. A strong sense of fairness and the removal of privileges supports inclusion and creates balance around contribution and opportunity. At the same time, our community will be richest if we let all members contribute in their distinctive way. We appreciate the differences in roles, education, backgrounds, interests, skills, characters and points of view.
QUESTIONS / FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
- How might we use these principles to design practices that make our work more dynamic, effective, and fulfilling? Using these principles, think about how your organization might redesign your daily practices or “ways of working” to create an environment where you can best thrive — as an individual and as an organization.
- What do these principles mean to you? Do they resonate with you? Why or why not?
- Have you seen them in action in your organization? Where or how so? What would the benefits and drawbacks to the organization be if you tried to live up to these principles?
- What practices might support these principles? How might we design a small experiment to trial one of these practices? What shifts in our beliefs or organizational structures would be required to make them work for us?
Emergence: A principle from Complex Systems Theory that explains how complexity can arise from simplicity, and order can sometimes emerge from chaos. Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
NOTE: I did not develop these principles in a vacuum. Big thanks to Pete Dignan at EverBetter, the good folks at The Ready, and the Reinventing Organizations community.
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