Week 50, 2021—Issue #182
Management Models: Domains, Principles, and Practices
Each week, three ideas on the future of work and organization. This week: three ideas on organizational management models. Originally published in the WorkMatters newsletter on Dec 17, 2012.
Your business model describes what you do. Your management model describes how you do it. The models are two sides of the same coin. And yet if you’re like most people, you’ve spent lots of time thinking about the former, but almost no time thinking about the latter.
Let’s change that, shall we?
1. Domains
Your management model answers key questions about how your organization works. It follows that the first step in defining such a model is to decide what questions to answer. That is no small feat. Too few and you risk missing important parts of your organization. Too many and you’ll suffer information overload. So ask yourself: what parts — what domains— of the organization do you need to address? And what are the key questions that you need to answer? Write them down.
PROTIP: For a running start, consider borrowing parts/questions from existing models like McKinsey’s 7S, Hamel and Zanini’s Humanocracy, The Ready’s OS Canvas, or the ISO56002 standard. As Picasso is rumored to have said: Good artists borrow, great artists steal 😜
2. Principles
Once you’ve got the domains of your management model figured out, it’s time to think about the principles that you will use to answer your questions. If you are borrowing from models like Humanocracy, you’ll find that it comes with principles built-in. If you are going at it alone, you might want to consider your organization’s core values. And if you need something a bit more… topical, consider how Amazon uses time-bound principles (Amazon calls them “tenants”) in their operating plans.
PROTIP: I’ve written previously about the need to juxtapose core values in an effort to clarify meaning. The same goes for principles, tenants, and virtues. Remember: Zuckerberg didn’t just want Facebook to “Move Fast”, he wanted it to “Move Fast and Break Things.
3. Practices
Having defined both parts and principles, you are now ready to finalize your model. Ask yourself: given this set of questions and these specific principles, what systems, processes, and activities (collectively: practices) do we put to use? Write them down. And to earn bonus points: identify the specific individuals, roles, and teams that are accountable for each. Because as Stephen Covey wrote in The 5th Discipline: “Accountability breeds response-ability.”
PROTIP: For a great example of this last point, check out WorkMatters #138 about Intuit’s Design Thinking practice. Their use of dedicated facilitators — called “Innovation Catalysts” — inspired MAQE to appoint an OKR Coach to facilitate our adoption of that practice.
If you think all this sounds like a lot of work, you are absolutely right. It is. But before you dismiss the idea, please consider that you already have a management model. All organizations do! It’s just that few of them are intentionally designed and communicated.
You basically have two choices: you can leave it to chance and hope that your organization understands your management model the same way you do or you can get out in front and invest the time needed to design and build a shared understanding.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
