Sourcing Great, Proven, Work and Management (RE)design
How do you think about this to promote good business, human development and democracy?
WE all bemoan the downsides of work design in business, especially in large organizations. Hierarchies, inequity of opportunities and treatment, and politicized cultures. But, if we did not have the current work and management design, what would we replace it with? If no managers, do we substitute procedures and standards in hope of having fair, innovative, rational, non-competitive organizations? How could we have truly self-directed organizations, where individuals become self-determining and great contributors. Where organization growth exceeds your best financial effectiveness to date and serves global imperatives simultaneously. Maybe work with a hierarchy of teams with power over work; instead of managers, teams that have power over others. Teams over other people with detailed specs about how that is expected to work. The Holocracy consultancy advocates for that. But the problem is, it turns out managers are not the problem, but instead it is the theory that causes them to come into existence in the first place. These assumed alternatives are still invisibly at work behind a flattening of the hierarchy and substitutes of decision-making. They are still innate to the alternative.
Our founding consultancy members built the first holarchical management systems in late 1960s in P&G, ICI, Sherwin Williams, Honda, and a dozen other companies. I have written about these. I partnered with two organizations in the design of my own first efforts 1982 in DuPont TiO2 and Consolidated Diesel Company (CDC). We called them Holarchy after Arthur Koestler’s, Ghost in the Machine. He was on a US book tour and visited P&G. Our initial effort had a lot of the design characteristics of the modern adaption installed by Zappos, etc. e.g. No managers and layered teams. Then we found the ghost that lay behind the design and how to design it out. It is not a problem of hierarchies, or managers, themselves. They are the symptoms. The ghost is the source of that thinking. And it is what harms humans, businesses and democracy. And flatten hierarchies or creating another formal decision-making mode is unlikely to eliminate it since it is in thinking and individual and cultural belief systems.
There are eight major ghosts that produce erroneous premises in current work design and management. The erroneous premises are founded in a misunderstanding of the working of external vs internal motivation and theories of change. With examination, we can see both change and motivation in modern and the hot new designs are based on the idea that change, and motivation assume that people and work need to be external sourced and managed. In Western culture. Behaviorism was introduced and actively promoted (see my book,No More Gold Stars, for detailed history) in the early 20th century, simultaneously with commercialization of farming, manufacturing, and education and subsequent scaling of workforces. This led businesses to have a foundation in the idea of people being ordered and managed in hierarchy of power not the concept of contribution which was the basis of craftsman era. But even with the removal of managers, whereby we get rid of power hierarchies, but don’t create the hierarchies of contribution that build the connection of every individual to the market and customers and knowing how to improve consumers and customers lives.
The new work design of modern day is working from the same erroneous premises, in the same way, doing the same work but decision making is redistributed with more procedures to do the work managers did. The popular new systems do not set up the organization and each person for innovations, only improvement. Regenerative Work Design becomes aspirational and significant when we see that we need to make the driving design aspect, the development of humans with higher order function (including critical thinking), being development, and preeminence of personal agency. That is what we learned in the decade we were also working from an internal motivation and change idea of restructuring. When we designed from external effects on markets and democracy, and inner being ableness, we could make lives really meaningful, and society gained a new potential of citizenship. We can take away the visible organization structure of hierarchies and substitute team management structures, but that does not bring the hierarchies of development and contribution into existence.
Related to this first erroneous premises, these systems focus organizational members on thinking internally; about the business, looking at themselves, and not with external considering for beneficiaries and potential casualties of endeavors. We don’t design work and management principles that fosters people thinking for themselves and imaging their effects on other beings (human and none) and entities (markets, democracy). The flattening of hierarchies does not change this. Nor does substituting teams of hierarchies. Another example: If we measure OUR performance and not that of the external beneficiaries, we are internal considering and not external nor Systems thinking. The businesses may try to add on missions, maybe, separately. But with this approach, we don't know how to assess externalities. It merely removes one visible manifested symptom of the underlying erroneous premise which still show up in how the new manifestation is designed and run. E.g. a hierarchy of teams. As long as you try to play ‘whack-a-mole’ with the manifestations of internal focus and managing behavior, the ghost erroneous premises will drive the business and not achieve the developmental culture and work practices. These are a couple of the errors that are part of the ghost in the machine. Others are: True or Erroneous-1) having a foreground of development rather than performance gives better financial results; 2) exercising personal agency over the offering of autonomy is the stronger driver whereby individual growth and contribution are the highest motivations; 3) every person promising to deliver for a particular market or customer nodes is the best focusing concept for getting loyalty from all customers; 4) connecting each person to specific real customers nodes is where performance really matters. Learn about the proven premises and erroneous premises and how to create a design for work, and more
For 60 years of work design, our network has partnered with businesses, institutions, and organizations, in over 2000 organizations, worldwide; 156 I have been directly involved in. It has a lifelong effect on those involved even when they move to another organization. It forever permeates their volunteer and family life because the premises of a Regenerative practice are holographic for all living entities because they are drawn from how living systems work, not trying to correct the problems in traditional organizations. Because the awaken of Regenerative principles and exposing of the underlying ghost drivers, the hidden erroneous premises, means we are no longer easily convinced that we need hierarchies of power in any form to function nor that they are natural to humans. The reactive redesigns, based on the 8 errors, are why we cannot think systemically about how humans and living systems-at-work would look and how to build them. And see how to answer my opening question of what it would look like to design work based on developing humans to think for themselves and initiate innovation in offerings, technology and processes, in human capabilities. People are not just happier and motivated with Regenerative designs, they get measurable smarter and more fulfilled.
The one year community of multiple companies, The Regenerative Business Development Community (TRBDC), faces into the ghosts and makes them more opaque and eventually they become obvious to your organizations which can sidestep the misdirection they offer. We spend eight sessions on the eight errors and 8 phases of redesigning work. By the end of the year, your team will catch yourself in the disproven errors that are, now, so familiar they seem right. And you will know where, and how, you are getting fooled. The eight phases launch your work and management redesign on sound footing. There are many global case stories offered where the new understanding, clear reality, of how humans and living systems invite us to partner in a Regenerative, Living Systems, Design and management of Work.
Who should attend: Managing teams of businesses, Governing Board who guide policy, Principals and Boards of Education that lead or guide/advise practice and policy, leaderships teams of institutions for education, philanthropy, and policy development. You pay for three attending because that is the minimum it takes to work in a breakout and to learn together. No exceptions! Organizational consultants only admitted to Change Agent Development Community.