Chapter 1: Introduction
For around 200 years, since the industrial revolution took place, we’ve had jobs as we know them today. This turning point in history affected society on many levels and many thinkers and academics has throughout time tried to theorize around organizations and work. One of the first and most known is Frederick Taylor and his book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, that was a cornerstone in organizational thinking. It was based on a scientific approach and maximizing specialization with a very centralized approach to management. Henry Ford developed this into Fordism and introduced concepts like assembly lines, standardized mass production and mass consumption with his T-ford.
One of the strongest counteracts came in the 1960’s when Douglas McGregor published his book The Human Side of Enterprise where he introduced Theory X, an authoritative, directed, and controlled approach to management, and Theory Y, which was based on integration and self-control. This introduced a softer side that has trickled down in organizational history with HR becoming a big trend in the 1990's.
But still, the very notion of traditional organizations today still depend on strong management and is based off the concept of Taylorism where specialization and strong leadership within a company is the norm. Organizations are riddled with middle-managers, silos and an abundance of meetings, all in an effort to try to predict the future.
In today’s world, that is defined by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, this approach doesn’t cut it. Plan and predict is not a valid strategy anymore, instead you have to incorporate change into your organization and build a strong culture that resonates with your purpose.
There’s a small community of people across the world that see the need to redesign organizations and who are immersed with solving the riddle that is the future of work. Some are focusing on adult development, some are supporting big corporations in adopting Holacracy, and some are focused on developing self-leadership. The conversation is definitely there when it comes to these big corporations.
But what about the smaller organizations? The average age of a company is decreasing rapidly (Perkin, 2015), meaning that startups are the future. At the same time many startups, as a result of growing so fast, fall into traditional ways of organizing and managing because that’s what they’ve been taught in school and have their experience in. The irony is that big corporations are trying to mimic startups by adapting their responsiveness and nimbleness with, for example, a lab or trying to go lean, while the startups consciously or unconsciously mimc the large corporations in terms of hiring processes and structure.
All of these interventions, solutions and initiatives are trying to fix a problem that’s deeply rooted within the organizations and grows over time. And we know that 70% (Leonard and Coltea, 2013) of all change initiatives fail. The way you operate and what culture you have is hard to change. What if there was a way to start at the very beginning, as a startup starts to form and grow, to start working on these issues before they turn into a huge problem? What if there was a way to enable these startups to build their culture from the start?
This research project aims to answer the research question “How might we enable startups to build their culture?” through interviews with startup founders, organization design consultants, and accelerators along with academic research and design a framework for culture building, providing a practical approach to the problem at hand.
Next: Chapter 2: Research design
Previous: Chapter 0: Abstract
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Hyper Island — MA Digital Media Management
Industry Research Project
