Futocracy case study — part 4

Cobra Development
By Dr. Reg Butterfield
19 minutes read.

Welcome back to our “Cobra Development” case study. Today, we continue the induction process for June our new colleague in the team. In our last session with June, we introduced how Cobra Development approaches the issue of change, together with the Change principle, “All changes MUST support and/or reinforce our Five Foundational Principles”.

Those of you who have been following the Futocracy approach to organisations will know that it is built on five foundational principles (see newsletter 2 April 2023). These are then reinforced by additional subject related principles such as the change one described here.

[For more detail about the principles approach to organisational design and management read our newsletters 13, 20, and 27 November 2022]

Today we are explaining to June the reason for not having job descriptions and how this helps to enable future-proofing Cobra Development as it meets the challenges of a changing technical and social environment; both in society and business.

Continuing June’s induction

Hi June, thanks for meeting me again today. Last time we met I explained how we at Cobra Development approach the challenging subject of keeping up to date through change. I discussed it with you at a fairly high level together with some background information. At the end of the session, you commented that you were pleased to know the background history, which you understood as the foundation of our change philosophy and now wanted to know “how we do it”. How do we make changes across the organisation?

It will not be a surprise for you if I say that the change principle is supported by instructions, guides, and processes, which are clearly set out and are available via our good friend “drone” (corporate data base and communication platform). We have given a lot of thought about how we can create a workplace that takes change in its stride and so I will explain in more detail about how we approach work. I will then demonstrate how this supports change.

Our approach to work is different when compared to other more traditional organisations, hierarchical or not. This means that we can break away from the causation and highly structured approach that most organisations currently use. You may remember that causation is a linear approach to doing things through strict processes and set objectives that tend to lack flexibility and opportunities for different thinking and behaviour.

As a result, we do not have the same rigid structures, job descriptions, and decision-making formalities that often get in the way when other organisations consider and/or invoke some form of change process.

We have abandoned the traditional foundations of organisations and I will briefly tell you what this means and how it helps us to bring about the flexibility needed for all forms of change, ranging from changes to customer requirements, through new innovations in how we work, and to complex technological change across the business.

[Readers who wish to have a more detailed understanding of our Futocratic approach to the foundations of an organisation, which are described below, can read this in our newsletters 4, 11, and 18 September 2022]

Symptoms vs Cause

When our CEO was discussing our need to change how Cobra Development worked, Ross, Reg, and Silvia explained how focusing on new ways of achieving change was a false journey. Their extensive research had identified that searching for new tools and techniques for achieving greater success in effecting organisational change was a case of chasing symptoms (of less than effective change) and not dealing with the underlying problems.

It was in 2018 that they realised the whole approach to organisational design and management was focused on control and compliance as opposed to how best to get the work done. This meant that instead of supporting the process and design of work, the emphasis was on designing control and compliance mechanisms to ensure that work was done in specific ways, typically designed by “job and process experts”.

Organisational philosophies

They also pointed out that historically organisations have been, and still are, built on one or more of the three main philosophical models: Paternalistic / political paradigm; Accountability / authority paradigm; and Work-flow paradigm. A fourth one, Decision-making paradigm, was discussed briefly in a political context in 1973 (Simon) and later from about 1986 (Huber) efforts were made to bring decision-making into the organisational discussion. Unfortunately, the response seems to have been increased bureaucracy and associated control, often under the guise of new approaches to leadership.

When we discussed your experiences at your last company over lunch yesterday, we agreed that decision-making is now becoming even more important to understand as organisations wrestle with the inherent hierarchical approaches of bureaucracy, which slow things down in a world that will not wait. You told me about the type of contracts that your former company lost because of this.

Cobra Development also suffered in this way. It was very much a traditional hierarchical organisation with only specific individuals at levels of management allowed to make anything but the most minor of decisions. We also had annual performance management systems that focused on achieving goals designed to connect with the commonly used Balanced Score Card approach to management and strategy. Nobody but top management really took any notice of them, and most people saw it as a management exercise that took up valuable time. Our overall approach was to use the classic “authority” and “workflow” paradigms, that I mentioned earlier, with strict compliance required by everybody.

The CEO discussed the negative impact of this situation with the members of the Board and the Directors; we were struggling to cope. The decision was to find ways to ensure that the organisation is in a fit condition to face the ever-increasing demands for continual change. This meant looking for new ways to ensure that the organisation’s energy and ways of working were focused on the best way and review how we dealt with change.

In essence, their decision about work and change was in line with all the foundational principles of Futocracy even though they didn’t realise it at the time; that came later when Reg and his colleagues met them to discuss in more detail what their decision meant as a way forward.

What does it mean to focus on work?

One thing that Reg and his colleagues made clear to us right from the start — if you focus on the work, you need to understand what that means and how it differs from the traditional views and ways of working. It changes just about everything you do over time.

Job vs Skills

I know that one of your questions for HR on your first day here was, “what is my job description?” HR told you that we don’t have job descriptions and that we are a “skills-based” organisation. At the same time, they said that we do not have jobs or functions and that as part of your induction your team colleagues are best positioned to explain what this means for you and the people working with you. Which is what we are doing today.

HR asked you to complete a section of your personal profile on the drone database. It asks for a full inventory of your skills and your experiences associated with those skills. It is also helpful, for reasons that I will explain in a minute, for you to also add any other experiences, good or bad, that you have had, which helped you to develop yourself.

Have you done this yet? Not yet, OK let me explain the importance of this information and how it is used.

Most organisations have job descriptions in varying degrees of complexity. For example, project manager, programme manager, software engineer, mechanical engineer, finance clerk, finance controller, and so on. Each job has a salary bandwidth and/or grade associated with it. This places the job holder into specific categories regarding hierarchical position, responsibilities, decision-making rights, career paths, and so on. Once a person has such a job description it is difficult for an organisation to change it because of contractual and legal rights, trades union agreements, and other often unforeseeable human behaviour traits such as not wanting to take on more responsibilities or even change the type of work that they do. This also applies to some extent when people want to change their job or move to another part of the organisation. Their job description does not show what they are capable of doing or the real skill set that they have. Job descriptions put people into categorised boxes, and it is difficult to climb out; a chemist is in the chemist box and an accountant is in the accounts box, etc. Job titles have similar issues associated with them and, in some national situations, the job title is important for societal status and to change it is a challenge most organisations avoid, particularly if it could be perceived as a demotion rather than just a new position.

Traditionally, job descriptions are also a way of bundling together a set of skills considered necessary for the tasks of a job to be completed satisfactorily. If the job outcomes or associated processes need to change, the job description is seldom broad or flexible enough to take this into account and, once again, can lead to conflict with the job holders. This is particularly the case when new technology is being introduced and work patterns need to change, which is currently one of the major drivers of change, it’s known as robonomics.

Robonomics is an excellent example of current difficulties in this area. Jobs are changing rapidly with improved technology, automation, and AI, which also means the demand for knowledge workers is increasing worldwide. How do organisations define the job of knowledge workers? Knowledge working is more about the application of various skills and not job tasks.

In Cobra Development we now work as a skills-based organisation. This means that we not only have a more flexible approach to teamwork, but also provides us all with better career opportunities. We can move from one assignment to another based on skills that we have or want to learn as opposed to fitting a job description. When I look around, I can see that our colleagues are now more engaged in what they and the business does than they were in the past because their skills are being used and they feel more valued and not just a (human) resource for a job.

In your case, you have a generic title of chemist that you brought with you based on your education and previous jobs. However, in our team you are more than a chemist. You are a person with a range of skills and experiences that we can draw upon in our collective work as a team. So, we have no titles or allocated tasks per se that job descriptions tend to imply. You, like the rest of us in the team, have a project outcome to achieve and your role is to use your skills and experience to ensure we all achieve that outcome. As our project develops, each of us will take the lead and facilitate what needs to be done according to the circumstances pertaining or foreseen, based on our skills and experience. This means that we have a continuing collaborative community-like approach to our work as a team and with other colleagues in Cobra Development.

Focusing on the Work itself and not where the Work is located.

This focus on the ‘what’ of work and the skills of the people opens other opportunities for us all to think and behave differently.

In traditional organisations, job descriptions not only fix what a person is (manager, fitter, mechanic, finance clerk, etc.), but also where that person works. This collective of people working to job descriptions is then moved to a Function or Division under the control of hierarchy within that function or division. For example, the traditional engineering division is broken into different functions such as electrical, mechanical, physics, chemistry, and so on. This means there is little if any natural interaction between the people ‘hidden’ away in their functions and this means that they rely on linear transactional processes to connect them in cross functional projects.

This is exactly how things were done in the past here in Cobra Development and as I said the other day, each director was effectively running their own business individually seemingly in isolation of what their colleagues were doing in other divisions. Thank goodness we no longer work in that way.

Skills going to where they are needed.

Using our skills-based approach it is much easier for our Purpose Alignment Team (PaT) to identify the skills that people have and allocate them to where they can add the best value to achieving the organisation’s Purpose. This is how we do it in three parts.

The first part of the method is to identify what skills are needed and where — optimisation of all types of resource is one of the key responsibilities of the PaT.

The second part is to identify who has those skills (skill profiles are a major help here), where they are currently located, and the impact on that team if they move someone to a different work location — the PaT uses our drone system to assist in this process.

In many traditional organisations these first two parts would predominantly be an HR activity together with a line manager. In Futocracy, a senior HR person is an optional member of the diverse team that constitutes the PaT whose role includes resolving strategic and operational oversight situations; in our case the CEO decided that our head of HR is a member of our PaT.

The third part is to decide who will move, where, and when. There are three parties involved in this decision-making process before moving a person (see figure 1). These are: (1) the team that needs the skill, (2) the teams that currently have the people with the skill, and (3) the person who is the preferred candidate to be moved. In some cases, there may be more than one potential candidate to be able to move, and all would be involved in the decision if necessary. As a member of the PaT, the services of the Network Weaver as a coach or arbiter are available to assist in this process of coming to a decision, if required.

Figure 1: Decision-making process to Move and Engage a “skill” to a “work location”.

How we manage such a situation as this is a good example of our principle of distributed authority and decision-making in action. The decision involves the necessary people who are closest to the situation. It also focuses on achieving the purpose of the organisation as opposed to political silo-minded decisions that we suffered from in the past.

We also have this simple process because it means that we not only focus on the work, but also value our people in a transparent decision-making process. In cases where two or more people want to take advantage of the move, the priority is given to the person whose move would not only meet the operational work requirement, but also add value to their personal/skill development and as such broaden the organisational and personal capabilities.

If we have nobody within the organisation to fill the skills need, the PaT decides which of the alternative forms of resourcing are available depending on the type of skill, duration required, and so forth. This is another example of how important it is to have HR working strategically with the other support and operational expert members within the PaT.

Our “skill follows the need” policy is also adhered to when a new project team is set up. The network weaver, together with PaT colleagues, either recruit new people or use the existing skills that are currently free or about to become available, such as when another project is coming to completion. Our policy is not to automatically reallocate a whole team to a new project just because they have been successful together in the past. Each team is selected on a skills-need basis to achieve the work, considering individual experience in both personal and technical skills. We do it this way because it not only ensures the best skills for the work, but also encourages diversity and relationship building across the whole organisation. As I mentioned before, we work as a community based on a collaborative network of networks. As you will see in a moment, this is a crucial part of our approach to change.

Automation and people

This may be a surprise to you. We treat automation and people the same in terms of skills and work location. We strive for the optimum combination of people and automation whenever and wherever possible. We do not automate anything “just because we can”.

This approach means that we must clearly identify the true nature of what is necessary to achieve the work outcome we need, together with the optimal approach to how the skills are provided. There is no one-size-fits-all here that traditional organisations tend to operate.

The only exception to this approach is our communication and management system ‘drone’, which is a corporate-wide system used by everybody in the same way unless a good case for a specific and different tool or process can be made. Even then, the data and communication systems must be able to synchronise and integrate for transparency of data and information.

Location, location, location.

There is a lot of discussion around the subject of work-life balance currently, particularly post-Covid. The media is full of different arguments for or against working remotely or coming into the office, for example. Some organisations are trying to lure their people back to the office, whereas others try hybrid solutions of one sort or another. We have a large proportion of people who need to use complex technical tools here at the works and so remote working is not an easy solution for them.

Our CEO raised this at our recent ‘town hall’ meeting because he wanted everybody to be clear about the policies of Cobra Development around this emotional subject.

As an organisation that operates the principle of skills go to the work, it is the same for where the work is undertaken.

The work is undertaken at the location that is the most suitable for achieving the work outcome objective(s) in a safe and equitable environment.

Each team decides on their preferred approach when setting up their team strategy and processes at the beginning of a project in line with our discussion last time when we discussed how we know what work we need to do (26 March 2023 newsletter).

Whatever our preferred team approach is, we need to ensure that we agree on a design that includes how we are preventing the creation of artificial silos within and between teams; collaboration is a major factor of how we work. A hybrid approach to the work location has a high degree of risk in this context and as such great care must be taken to avoid this happening. You may remember that our performance management system includes team processes because of this important need for real collaboration (2 April 2023 newsletter).

Breaking down silos through skills

One of the major obstacles to effective change is the artificial boundaries that exist under the titles of Divisions and Functions that are often known generically as silos. The drivers for having organisations built around divisions and functions were the early challenges of aligning people with work during the last industrial age. The very term ‘divisional’ arguably encourages division and functions tend to reinforce this divide. As an organisation, we have now moved beyond this.

At first, there was a lot of opposition to removing the divisions and functions, which I mentioned in one of our earlier discussions at the beginning of your induction. You may remember that we have ‘expert workshops’ where people with similar educational and technical backgrounds come together as part of their continuing professional development, which includes examples of how things work or not in their respective projects (2 April 2023 newsletter). You may know this as a ‘community of practise’ approach that is often discussed in management books and yet seldom introduced in organisations successfully. For us, this was a major breakthrough in terms of moving away from the arguments for functional silos; I don’t think that you will find anybody who wants to go back those days.

The ’experts’ now realise that they have more to offer their team colleagues than just their technical competence. They also found that they can develop their own skill-base in areas that they would never have considered before, almost entirely by working in multi-skilled teams. As you know from your own experience, it is important to learn new skills if you want to have a career nowadays; things are changing rapidly.

Time today is also catching up with us and so let’s discuss how we personally process change in our team.

Changing Beliefs is how we Survive and Grow.

Change means different things to different people. For some it means altering something, others believe it is about modifying something, whilst for some it is about varying things from what they are to something different. Whatever people understand change to mean, it can only be successful if people believe in the change.

Neuroscience has demonstrated this very clearly in recent years because change means we need to think differently, and this can only be achieved if we develop new neural pathways to replace existing beliefs about how and why we do things (18 December 2022 newsletter).

In the past we had to do what were told to do. This meant that we could not think differently because our brains had developed danger signals that were alerted if we tried, and our belief systems would not support such changed behaviour.

Our new ways of working in Cobra Development have helped us to have open discussions and feel valued for our ideas, thoughts, and even solutions. This means that it is now a safe place to discuss and be different. A brilliant outcome of this new way of working is that we continually develop neural pathways in our brain that actively support new thinking.

Our belief systems recognise we can have different perspectives and this, probably the most important change any organisation can have, is now supported by everybody across the organisation.

Aligning a basic belief system is the priority of any organisation.

Time has caught up with us and next time we meet, we will continue this discussion about how changing beliefs has become a major tool for the way we bring change into the organisation and apply it successfully.

References:

Huber, G., & McDaniel, R. (1986) “The decision-making paradigm of organizational design.” Management Science, 32(5), 572–589.

Simon, H. A. (1973) “Applying Information Technology to Organization Design,” Public Admin. Rev., 33, 3 (May/June 1973), 268–278