Continuation….

There are disturbingly similar and the all-too-familiar scenario where executives feel they’ve been incredibly clear about their organisation’s goals and strategies, while those lower down in the organisation chart are positively bewildered – or at least foggy – about the goals. Equally alarming in this exercise is the lack of curiosity among B, C and D team members about their team’s goal.

Although confused, team members C and D often sit through the entire experience without ever asking B the purpose of the exercise. And, even if B is asked about the team’s goal, “Busy B” is usually too occupied reading and organising their blizzard of post-it emails to respond.

In the end even teams that are successful in completing this exercise report that they felt uninspired – in fact, people in successful team position’s A, B, C and D, say that they felt as negatively as the unsuccessful team members did during this experience!

• A reports feeling frustrated with their team. (“What’s wrong with my people??!!”)

• B reports feeling overwhelmed by the communication demands of their role. (Maybe B stands for “Bottleneck?!”)

• C and D report feeling confused, or even lonely. (“What’s wrong with our manager??!!”)

Other alternatives to hierarchy

Given the negative feelings that a lack of shared goals and stifled communication precipitate – even among successful teams – it’s no wonder that organisations like Facebook and Google are experimenting with alternatives to traditional hierarchy-based communication, as this image playfully shows.

Programme and project teams are less hierarchical

The concept of holacracy sounds a lot like a project team organization. Here’s an example of a team organization chart that I used for one of my projects over a decade ago, well before the 2007 invention of holacracy. I based this concept on Michael McGrath’s “Setting the PACE in Product Development”, originally published in the last century.

Rather than focusing on position, title and hierarchical power, these kinds of project team charts are relationship diagrams and communication maps among members who may not even work for the same company. A map of this type vividly illustrates stakeholders and relationships regardless of hierarchy, position or organizational affiliation. This makes it particularly well-suited to situations where the key players do not report to one leader or even into one organization. Where chain of command is uncertain, such a map is vital to defining how to strategically manage communications in order to get results.

Here are a couple of areas where I’ve found this tool particularly useful:

1. Programmes and projects with stakeholders that cross organizational boundaries – development of products and services that include alliance partners, joint venture partners, vendors, clients, university researchers, contractors, government, regulatory agencies, and various other third parties.

2. Non-profit organisations – these often include volunteers, donors and community stakeholders with no reporting relationship to key players within the non-profit.

3. Professional associations – these often are entirely volunteer-based, and each person tends to function with a high degree of autonomy.

The relationship map process, in brief:

• Review the purpose that brings these stakeholders together.

• Identify all relevant stakeholders regardless of their organizational affiliation.

• Group stakeholders together with others with similar interests.

• Diagram stakeholders in relationship to the core project team, and to each other.

• Explore stakeholder interests for each group.

• Imagine what each group might say when wildly successful results are achieved.

• Prioritise stakeholders based on the importance of those judging your results.

• Create a scorecard of the measurable success criteria through the eyes of the highest priority stakeholders.

• Create a communication strategy based on the relationship diagram.

Using a highly interactive, graphical facilitation style in creating these charts enables people to visualize relationships, so I recommend lots of wall space, flip charts and post-its as shown below

Holacracy isn’t for everyone!

As dysfunctional as hierarchical relationships might be, children need parental guidance and civilised societies need political leadership. While I doubt if a pure “holacracy” is ideal for most organisations – or even possible (everyone knows who the founder is, even if they don’t hold an official title) – experience has convinced me that we need to move beyond hierarchical organizational structures.

At Zappos, 210 of their 1,500 employees chose to quit the company when offered the “embrace holacracy or get                out” three-month severance package. That’s one-in-seven people! Were               those people performing useful roles? I certainly hope so because I’d hate to think that 1/7^th of Zappos employees were merely taking up space. Holacracy isn’t a good fit for every           situation or every human being, but it might be worth    exploring how holacracy works, and considering how you might redistribute the              power in your own organisation to avoid the dysfunctionality designed            into hierarchical power structures.          

In a previous column I wrote about self-organising systems and emergent behaviour.  Anytime I see a flock of birds flying together I shout “There is no CEO bird!” Flocks fly in formation by following simple organising principles.

This morning I watched dozens of ants walking along a pipe in my garden. There were no signs set up by executive ants saying “Walk on the pipe!”, and no manager ants assured that the ants walked there. I imagine that the ants walked on the pipe because they found it easier than walking on the rocky surface of the ground. If you are going to have hierarchical power structures, you might want to think about these ants. Should the people in positions of power spend their time telling people where to walk, or creating paths that make it natural for their people to walk where they want them to walk?

Structure strongly influences the behaviour and capabilities of a system, and the results that you will get from the system. If you create a hierarchy where power is based primarily on position and title, you will have an organization that fails primarily for entirely predictable and avoidable reasons such as a lack of clarity around shared goals and communication breakdowns.

And, just like in the ABCD exercise, even when your organisation succeeds you run the risk that your executives will feel frustrated, your managers will feel overwhelmed, and your employees will feel confused and lonely.

Fifty years ago, a career spanned about 40 years and economic cycles far exceeded that in length. Today economic cycles shift much more frequently, and our working lives are far longer, so one person’s career spans several economic cycles.

How might organisations adapt to the reality of rapidly changing economic cycles while honouring the need to support the human beings who make our businesses successful? I think the million-piece puzzle challenge holds some clues for those of us willing to wrestle with this question. My solution is to for the person chartering the project to refer to the puzzle box, project the image of the finished puzzle on the stadium HDTVs, map out the dimensions of the puzzle on the playing field, indicate which is the “top”, and then get out of the way of the 1,000 people.

So how will YOU solve the million-piece puzzle challenge in your organisation? Write me your thoughts! I’m looking forward to learning from you about this fascinating topic.