Why Cultivating Bottom-Up Change Agents Trumps Top-Down ‘Command and Control’
In his “Meditation XVII” John Donne wrote, “no man is an island.” For our era of increasing knowledge intensity, “no one’s knowledge should be an island.” We all have insights and ideas to exchange, with the potential of making private and public institutions more agile and robust.
By empowering individuals, stepping away from “top-down” management, and focusing instead on “bottom-up” cultivation of ideas and knowledge, future organizations can effectively address the difficulties of knowledge-overload and turbulent world environments.
We live in exciting times indeed.
10 years ago I was pursuing a PhD, focused on how to improve how organizations respond to disruptive, turbulent events. After five years with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program, I was convinced that our world in next twenty years was going to experience more turbulent and disruptive events with increasing frequency.
The reason for my prediction was based on the increasing availability and affordability of technologies that previously were only available to large corporations or nation states. When placed in the hands of individuals, these technologies can be greatly empowering and allow each of us to do wonderful things — as well as mundane things — or, unfortunately, not-so-great things to each other.
The PhD process took three years to complete and in hindsight was one of the best decisions I ever did. The PhD allowed me to crystallize what I had seen during the response to 9/11, anthrax in 2001, West Nile Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in 2003, monkeypox, ricin response, and other international emergencies. I recently blogged about memories of 9/11 and anthrax events of 2001 specifically here.
After writing that blog post, a friend from my PhD recently sent me a link from the Internet Archive’s WayBack machine from 2008 that referenced my dissertation research seven years ago, including these two quotes:
“I saw several instances where this workforce of 1.2 million government workers, not counting contractors — which is probably another 800,000 — had significant disconnects. In fact that’s what the 9/11 report specifically comes out as saying: the United States did not connect the dots across multiple agencies.”
“There were times with our program where we knew something at the trench level, tried to pass it up the hierarchy, but unfortunately it never got anywhere. Events like Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, anthrax, occur in part because organizational structures in which we trust, particularly for government — but also for most large businesses — aren’t built to respond quickly to turbulent environments. And now, in part because of globalization and also because of technology, things can change so quickly half a world away.”
Those two quoted paragraphs were from March 2008, more than seven years ago.
The friend who sent the link to my old PhD research asked what has changed since then and what hasn’t changed?
Personally, I think both the private and public sector continue to have challenges responding quickly to turbulent environments. Technological advances continue to make available and affordable both cyber- and bio-related technologies to individuals previously only available to large corporations and nation-states. We humans continue to make choices and commit actions that are wonderful, not-so-wonderful, and a spectrum of activities in-between.
That same article about my PhD research from 2008 notes: “We wanted to explore whether having a top-down or bottom-up strategy would help or hurt organizational hierarchies when faced with environmental turbulence. We specifically were testing the idea that while top-down hierarchies may be great at command and control and maintaining internal control and reality, they’re bad at addressing a changing outside environment; a change in the marketplace, a change in competition, or an emerging national security threat.”
My PhD dissertation pulled together strong evidence that top-down hierarchies that stress command and control are ineffective in managing knowledge in turbulent environments because they decrease a hierarchical organization’s ability to maintain accuracy with its outside environment.
If you add tiers to a top-down hierarchy, you’re actually creating fragmentation in the communication pathways within your organization.
This fragmentation is also creating delays where somebody in Section A of your organization may know something that’s relevant to people in Section B, but it’s got to go up the hierarchy and then back down the hierarchy. That’s really bad if you’re a top-down hierarchy because important insights might not percolate up the hierarchy.
For organizations wanting to adjust to an outside reality, be it marketplace or changing customers or security threats, top-down hierarchies hurt.
Bottom-up hierarchies, however, where knowledge and information are passed along from the firm experts — most notably those on the front lines — can be very effective. Managers are crucial to this process in that they must encourage the cultivation of expert insights and the dissemination of knowledge through the organization. The trick is to get that expert ‘edge’ of your organization to pass its insights to the rest of the organization, particularly to attentive managers.
Empowering people who are directly involved with a task or project to share and aggregate their knowledge is seldom a managerial priority in most organizations. Typical managers find a bottom-up approach threatening to their own jobs. They are taught instead to direct, control, and manage. Such “controlling” behaviors are taught in both the private and public sector and unfortunately do not work well in rapidly changing, turbulent environments.
Fast-forward to 2015: I recently was at a breakfast discussion panel with three other senior executives in public service. One of them said “You have to tear open that scar… and basically say, We need you to be open to… changing yourself”, implying that levels in the organization hierarchy were “scar tissue” and that they must change.
While I am sure the individual who said that comment meant well, his comments did not recognize there are people who are really hungry to make changes in public service. The individual emphasized “you” need to change “yourself” vs. “we need to change together”.
His comment also didn’t recognize that a senior executive in an organization — public or private — shouldn’t be focused on pushing top-down change or “tearing open scar tissue”, but instead should be encouraging bottom-up change agents.
In contrast to that individual’s stated perspective, over the years I’ve encountered plenty of non-partisan senior executive behind-the-scenes who are chopping at the bit to make a difference and innovate, they just haven’t been invited to — so we press on despite any organizational backing. They need to be encouraged to lead bottom-up change in our turbulent, disruptive era.
My recommendation back in 2005 is the same I’d make today: Recognize that you don’t always have the right answer. It’s more about cultivating those who work with you as your reports; cultivating their insights and rewarding good insights and passing them up.
It really is about how you make managers more cultivators and gardeners of experts — as well as reward managers who take on this role of cultivators. Your goal is to keep the garden free of weeds, nicely bordered, vibrant and healthy, and ideally you want your people to become the best and the brightest in the organization. As an organization, you want to reward such managerial behaviors.
In turbulent environments, cultivation — not command-and-control — wins every time. Comments and feedback welcomed on bottom-up vs. top-down and what have we learned since 2005?
Little did I know that right after finishing the PhD and post-docs, I then would volunteer to deploy to Afghanistan in 2009.
That’s a blog post for another day.
