Organising for the future

Julian Waters-Lynch

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Openfield

6 min readSep 15, 2017

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Optimising for yesterday

Just as we shouldn’t drive a car by fixing our view on the rear view mirror, we can no longer lead organisations by looking to the past. I’ve spent the last decade attempting to understand future scenarios regarding work and organisations. This has been critical to make sense of my PhD research that investigated the early culture of Coworking communities in Melbourne. In fact the pioneering wave of Coworkers were at the vanguard of many changes affecting the likely futures of organisations.

Advances in technology, intensification of globalisation, new cultural practices and even shifts in identity are leading to a more complex and less predictable world. Self-organising crowds can now destroy a woman’s professional reputation in the span of a plane ride, help astronomers classify galaxies, or save lives through distributed medical diagnosis. Not to mention the Cambrian-like explosion of the blockchain and recent Initial Coin Offerings.

These disruptions are leading to some extreme outcomes for organisations, which are exciting or unsettling depending on your vantage point. For example:

Optimising for tomorrow

All of this presents an immense challenge to the principles of management that have dominated organisational life for decades. Since the time of Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol the weight of management protocols have largely focused on the most efficient methods for reproducing pre-established outputs by following fixed procedures. The early goals of management were to transform the heuristic, rule-of-thumb ways of working into repeatable, algorithmic tasks. But these algorithmic tasks are, unsurprisingly, those most susceptible to offshoring and automation. The focus of organisational life must now marry the production of novelty with the management of routines. Organisations require the skills of exploration of the unknown as much as exploitation of the known. The new world of work demands an ambidexterity of discovery and delivery. The primary challenge of management today is to systematise and scale learning and innovation rather than simply efficiency and operations.

I often see lean and agile management practices introduced into standard corporate arrangements as a hopeful fix, a silver bullet to address why projects are constantly delivered late, over budget and often under quality. It is true that these management innovations, when well executed, can make significant inroads into the pathologies of the older, rigid management and administrative principles. Yet more frequently they fall short of expectations. Partly this is because they are often bolted onto existing hierarchical management systems, perverse incentive schemes and fixed budget arrangements that do not give them the scope and autonomy to function effectively. However it is also because creative work now requires different skills, more responsive organising cultures and appropriate physical and digital infrastructure which takes commitment to develop.

You can clone an app, imitate a business model, copy and paste codified knowledge and increasingly automate a set of procedures. But you can’t copy the trust and tacit skill distributed within a high performing teams. You can’t clone the intangible qualities of creative and productive human relationships. Navigating this transition from the older managed to the newer entrepreneurial economy brings to the fore three interrelated concepts, learning, creativity and innovation. In an increasingly automated world, skilfully designing human interactions that maximise these domains actually becomes more important than ever. These skills can be learned and developed through practice and we believe there are three domains that should be foundational to organising today.

Collaboration

Facilitation literally means making things easier, but we prefer to think of it as making things smoother. Collaborative work — creating something new together — usually isn’t ‘easy’, but constructively working through differences is not the same as suffering the bumps of poorly designed sessions. Crystallising the purpose, sharing the right amount of information as inputs, understanding how to explore alternatives and coordinate different perspectives - doing this well involves both skills in communication and design but also an attention to the emotional dynamics of groups. Knowing when to adjust your approach in response to the subtle signals of feedback from others.

These are the elements we have explore in our upcoming book, Collaboration by Design and focus on learning and developing through the Facilitation Starter.

Innovation

Creativity is the generation of novelty that is useful. Learning involves not only acquiring new knowledge or skills, but also modifying existing ideas and assumptions in response to new information. Innovation weaves these two processes together in ways that add practical value to a product, service, process or business model. Innovation can be incremental and sustaining, or radical and disruptive. But just like collaboration, there are learnable skills that can improve our individual and collective innovation capability. Individual practices such as observing, networking, questioning, experimenting support ‘associational thinking’, or the creation of the novel combinations that characterise innovation. Collective practices that assemble small but optimally diverse teams and offer them the support and genuine autonomy to explore, prototype, pitch and iterate bring this work to life in organisations. In this spirit, we are particularly passionate about open innovation, where firms gain by reimagining their boundaries with the environment, and remix the relationship with their stakeholders.

Transformation

Building individual and team capacity for collaborative and innovative work are necessary but not sufficient for a deeper transformation of an organisational system. This requires an uncompromising vision, bold leadership and a sustained commitment. There are six elements we foreground in our transformation work. The foundational skills in collaboration, design and facilitation are essential, but equally important is building a wider body of knowledge fit for the future. Innovation work requires appropriate physical and digital environments to support and sustain, but also rethinking the relationship between the boundaries of an organisation and its wider ecosystem. Finally, forging strategic alignment within and across an organisation necessitates the art of storytelling, crafting a new narrative that helps a group make sense of what is happening now and what we are working to create next.

Building collaborative capacity, fostering skills in innovation and working to transform the organising systems that continue to nourish this virtuous cycle. This is how to break the spell of the past, shift our gaze from the rearview mirror to the path and the horizon ahead and lean into the future. This is where we love to play and are excited about what lies around the corner.

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If you are interested in following our journey and learning more about this work, please join our community here . If you love discussing these ideas, we are always up for a coffee and a chat when you’re in Melbourne.