How would you prefer to manage the traffic on a busy junction: with traffic lights or through a roundabout?
If you think about it, each option assumes very different things. The traffic light option, assumes that people cannot be trusted to manage crossing the road on their own. It assumes that such a complex problem requires technology, control centres, sensors and algorithms. And it requires a plan for every possible scenario. It may make you wait when there is no need to. On the plus side, you’ll have a few seconds to check your text messages.
The roundabout option assumes looks at the matter very differently, and here the assumptions are that people can be trusted to use their judgment to do the right thing, that complex things can be managed with simple rules and agreements, and that solutions will emerge when new scenarios present themselves. As a driver you’re asked to use your head and experience, with the reward that you should be able to move across more smoothly.
Interestingly, research shows that the roundabout option is the safer, cheaper, most efficient and resilient. Yet as a society we keep installing more traffic lights than roundabouts… (Milton Keynes excepted, perhaps).
This is how Aaron Dignan
– in his book ‘Brave New Work’ - introduces his view of the fundamental differences we can identify when looking at organisations. He calls the set of assumptions that underpin these two options their Operating System. They run silently in the background. Once your choice of OS is made, they drive much of your subsequent choices and practices (think of the operating system of your mobile phone for instance: Apple’s iOS versus Google’s Android) and make it hard to go back.
Most of our organisations’ operating systems are like the traffic light example. Dignan calls them Legacy Organisations. We take it for granted that that is the case, but we assume we need managers, budgets, performance reviews, in order to deal with the complexity in our world. To deal with today’s increasing uncertainty we just need to have more capable leaders, a bit more efficiency, more data, more algorithms.
But what if your organisation could run itself? What if your company was like the roundabout? These are the Evolutionary Organisations this book explores, and they are based on two fundamentally different mindsets: being People Positive and Complexity Conscious. To be People Positive, is to assume and expect the best of everyone. It believes that people come with intrinsic motivation to do well (see also my earlier blog ‘What makes you go the extra mile’) and an ability to self-manage. To be Complexity Conscious is to be able to distinguish complicated systems (that can be captured in rules, processes and control mechanisms; let’s say a moon rocket) from complex systems, that cannot be controlled or solved, only nudged or dealt with (say the weather).
In part One of the book, Dignan lays out his arguments for why the world is becoming increasingly complex, and how this is exposing the limitations of the assumptions underpinning Legacy Organisations. He explains his fascination with organisations that rather than trying to make things 10 percent better, aimed for making this 10 TIMES better. And did so by ripping up the rule book.
Part Two shines a light on the components that he believes make up the successful operating systems of Evolutionary Organisations and where, how and why they are different. Enter the OS Canvas, which consists of 12 dimensions:
• Purpose: How we orient and steer
• Authority: How we share power and make decisions
• Structure: How we organise and team
• Strategy: How we plan and prioritise
• Resources: How we invest our time and money
• Innovation: How we learn and evolve
• Workflow: How we divide and do the work
• Meetings: How we convene and coordinate
• Information: How we share and use data
• Membership: Ho we define and cultivate relationships
• Mastery: How we grow and mature
• Compensation: How we pay and provide
In the next 180 pages or so, the core of the book in some way, the author explores these 12 elements in more detail. For instance on Structure we read about hierarchy versus network, centralisation versus decentralisation and functions versus integration. And how in Evolutionary Organisations the concept of the team has been redefined. To bring it to life he provides short, punchy examples from well-known evolutionary organisations such as Haier, Netflix, Buurtzorg, and FAVI. But also from other outfits such as Enspiral and Bridgewater. Each section is brought back to the two central questions underpinning the book: how does this translate to being People Positive and Complexity Conscious?
It is a very rich section of the book, but towards to the end I was ready for some practical pointers as to how go about DOING some of this. Luckily, Part 3 ‘The Change’ is aimed at just that. Using the recurrent examples of fictitious organisations Control Inc. and Emergent Inc. the book explores the philosophical conundrums involved in the journey towards transforming your organisations towards becoming more People Positive and Complexity Conscious. To name a few:
• How can you lead your organisation to a place where you are not the leader anymore?
• How can you change the culture of your organisation if culture can’t be controlled or designed?
• How can we plan for change if the mere act of creating a change plan in an increasingly complex world is regarded folly in itself?
Dignan starts to unpick this and provides ingredients and thereby the confidence to embark on a journey where the outcome is less clear than the approach towards the journey itself. Which is one of openness to learning, willingness to experiment, to amplify what is working and minimise what isn’t.
The author goes on to provide some genuinely hands-on concepts and working methods to have the right discussions within your organisation that will help you emerge with a clearer idea of the next step(s) to take. The role of the leader is explored too, and the importance of living and breathing the principles behind your new approach to change. The book concludes with reflecting on the challenge involved in moving from your small experiment to scaling it up across your wider organisation. A particular area where concepts of self-management still have a track record to achieve. (And a topic of one of my upcoming blogs).
The strengths of this book, for me, lie in the combination of concrete examples from organisations that have developed alternatives to how work can be organised whilst providing a conceptual framework to make sense of those examples. And contrary to many other books on the subject of self-management, Dignan is brave enough to offer hands-on tips and tools on how to go about starting the transformation of your own organisation, should you be sufficiently inspired. It is clear that he comes to the subject with great experience, and many of his observations chime with what I have encountered in my work.
It will come as little surprise that the book is not necessarily going to give you all the ingredients required for a successful transformation. After all, the complete cookbook for organisational change is yet to be invented, especially where self-management is involved. But it should help you give yourself the green light to make those first baby steps to turning your organisation into a roundabout. And while the circumstances in which we work are changing faster and more dramatically than ever before, that is a welcome gift.