Week 4, 2022—Issue #188
Reading Notes VI: Hoverstadt on Supertankers, Senge on Ocean Liners, and Ruimin on Ship Configuration
Each week: three ideas on the future of work and organization. This week: Three takes on the old organization-is-an-oil-tanker analogy.
You’ve heard it before: hierarchical organizations are like oil tankers — slow and difficult to maneuver. It’s an apt analogy, and I do like the armada-of-speedboats solution that typically follows. But there’s more than one way to perform naval maneuvers!
Here are three different takes on that same analogy:
1. Hoverstadt on Supertankers
“A UK Secretary of State for Health, when talking about changing the National Health Service, used the metaphor of turning a supertanker, observing that this was a very slow process with a huge amount of inertia built in. It was a model of the change process that was often repeated in government and in business. But if a metaphor or model is inappropriate it will lead managers to make assumptions about what is going on that can have very far-reaching consequences, and metaphors always have assumptions built into them. In this case, built into the comparison with steering a supertanker are several fatally false assumptions: that the NHS is one cohesive entity that can be steered, that the Secretary of State is the one doing the steering, and that there is any sort of steering mechanism.”
Patrick Hoverstadt is a management consultant and the author of multiple books, including “The Fractal Organization”.
2. Senge on Ocean Liners
If people imagine their organization as an ocean liner and themselves as the leaders, what is their role? For years, the most common answer I received when posing this question to groups of managers was “the captain.” Others might say, “The navigator, setting the direction.” A few would say “The helmsman, actually controlling the direction,” or “the engineer down below stoking the fire, providing energy,” or even “the social director, making sure everybody’s enrolled, involved, and communicating.” While these are legitimate leadership roles, there is another which, in many ways, eclipses them all in importance. Yet, rarely do people think of it. The neglected leadership role is that of the designer of the ship.
Peter Senge is a systems scientist at MIT and the author of multiple books, including “The Fifth Discipline”.
3. Ruimin on Ship Configuration
Leaders of other enterprises often define themselves as captains of the ship, but I think I’m more the ship’s architect or designer. That’s different from a captain’s role, in which the route is often fixed and the destination defined. For example, in the past, our destination was to build the enterprise into a walled garden. Today, however, our destination is [better thought of as] a rainforest [or a self-adaptive ecosystem], and our strategy and structure have changed. And perhaps in the future we’ll need to reconstruct the entire ship for a completely new route. The point is that all enterprises must keep pace with the times. Fortune 500 enterprises have shorter and shorter life spans. My mission is to make sure Haier can always advance with the times.
Zhang Ruimin is the founder and former CEO of Haier Group. This quote comes from an interview he did with McKinsey back in 2020.
Hoverstadt, Senge, and Ruimin are all systems thinkers with a keen interest in organizational design. They’re using the same analogy to make different but related points:
- Hoverstadt: affecting change in organizations with ill-devised systems and structures isn’t just hard, it’s downright impossible.
- Senge: the best way to affect change isn’t to work in the system, it’s to work on the system, ensuring it’s fit-for-purpose.
- Ruimin: working on the system is a task that is never complete, it requires continuous improvement and reconfiguration.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
