I’m constantly looking for new ways to think about organizations. New perspectives don’t always lead to insight, but without them, any insight remains elusive. To create this model of an organization I started by aggregating all of the types of activities or work that is done inside the organization into three categories. These categories are much different than you’d find on a typical organization chart. In fact, no matter where someone is on the organization chart, they will find themselves engaged at some time or other in each of these major activity aggregates.
All work can be divided into strategy, design or operations. In the most mechanical of companies, the operations component is streamlined to the point where human beings simply manage exceptions or perform repetitive tasks that are not yet automated. Well executed operations yield efficiencies that are necessary for competitiveness, but all operations are basically entropic, meaning that their effectiveness and coherence decays steadily over time unless work is done on them. This sounds more complex than it really is. It means that if a company continues to produce the same things in the same ways, that it will lose competitiveness, and that loss of competitiveness, if unaddressed, leads to a diffusion of the energy in the organization, similar in metaphor to the effects of entropy in physical systems. One definition of synergy is the amount of energy in a system that cannot be used to do work. Metaphorically in organizations this is the amount of energy expended by people and systems that cannot be used to create net positive value. (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy)
The work that must be done on operations to keep it from increasing its entropy and eroding its ability to create value is called strategy and design.
The purpose of strategy and design is always to provide some operational (including perceptual) differentiation in the marketplace that will yield an increase in some measurable aspect of value–price, performance, presence, scale, share, margins. Strategy tends to set direction. Even deep in the organization, people formulate local strategies as they figure out how to get work done. A local strategy might be a goal or objective, or a direction in which an individual decides to take his work or his department. Goals in this sense are the simplest types of strategies.
Design is the process of translating the strategy into something that can be made operational. Design may involve the creation of a new product or service, or it may work on improving products or services. It may address the layout of the physical environment, the structue of departments, or the operating guidelines for teamwork.
In the end, strategies and designs are translated and compressed into operational algorithms like procedures manuals, automated processes or rules of thumb because only a widely distributed and executed algorithm can create efficiencies. Without this compression and absorption into the culture, the strategies and designs will fail and the entropy of operations will lead to an unfavorable position in the marketplace.
Even in the simplest of companies, all strategy and all design is collaborative–people must work together to achieve something because they can’t do it alone. They must decide what they want to create together. They must uncover something new or innovative about what they want to create because it’s usually been done before or has other competition for it. They must form a strategy for positioning their creation. They must make the creation understandable to the marketplace–this is the process of creating products and services. They must design the algorithms by which many people can learn to make and deliver the products and services, and useful structures to help people organize their efforts. They must also craft plans and strategies that allow for the easy adoption of what they’ve created by the rest of the organization.
The sole glue that holds all of this together is that somehow, and in some way people must be encouraged to work together–to collaborate with one another. Typically, the challenges are too difficult for individuals to solve alone and more important, no one individual or even senior management team has the breadth of perspective to be able to adequately address the challenge of creating strategy and designing ways to fold it into operations. The people who have front line interaction with the customer or direct access to the manufacture of a product or the delivery of a service have a perspective that must be added to senior management perspectives in order to create a response requisite with the complexity and reality of current conditions.
Without this vital competency of collaboration, organizational friction will cause damage to the company, damage to its people, or both. Our premise is that people support that which they help to create, that creativity is natural, that collaboration is natural, and that an environment can be created where creativity and collaboration are protected and where great designs and strategies can emerge and become operationalized.
I agree with most of your comments and am curious to learn where you feel the role conflict within an organization plays in the process described. Vantage points, collaboration, design formulation, interaction… all quite important, but most involve conflict in one form or another — how to keep this healthy and productive is the tricky part and determine the success or failure of the endeavor.
Sorry for the long delay in responding. It has taken me a long time to think about the answer and I’m not certain it’s a great answer. Part of the answer has to do with the word “conflict” and how we view it. If we view it as primarily destructive–meaning that it tends to attenuate the abilities and viability of both sides, then there is little that conflict has to recommend for itself.
I’ve been practicing yoga for a little over a year now and have a lot of time and opportunity to think through what’s going on in my body-mind while I practice (whether it’s postures, breathing, or meditation). What I’m seeking in my yoga practice is integration and balance. In a standing pose, for example, integration involves many forces learning to act in consort but at the same time creating tension and compression. This is just like the deck of a highway bridge where the concrete protects from failure from compression and the embedded steel protects from failure from tension. The two work together in graceful balance but any engineer can do the calculations and tell you that the vertical and horizontal forces on the structure are monumental. But the materials of the structure are up to the challenge.
The materials of the structure are up to the challenge.
That’s the first waypoint I can identify in my path to understanding conflict in an organization. If the concrete and steel are in conflict–if the steel is placed by the deck instead of towards the bottom of the stringers, then as the bridge comes under bending, the bottom of the stringers come under tension and without the steel, the concrete will break apart. The steel at the top of the stringer then can’t take the compression, it bends, and the whole structure fails.
The whole structure fails. Without proper design, the whole structure fails.
This is the second waypoint on my investigation. The first has to do with selection of materials. The second has to do with proper design.
The third point takes me away from yoga and bridges as metaphors and looks instead to natural exosystems that are held exquisitely in dynamic balance. They’re not stationary but subject to evolution just as the life forms that make them up are. Within the ecosystem the whole cycle of life and death and rebirth plays out endlessly. This is all messy and sometimes disconcerting but it keeps the ecosystem viable through distributed action of its components.
The ecosystem is kept viable through distributed action of its components.
This is the third waypoint in the investigation.
So now I think I have three balls that I can juggle in the air (I can’t juggle more than three): materials, design and viability. Design seems to be a uniquely human capability but we can also see that the ecosystem employs distributed mehtods of design: is there anything more beautifully designed than a tree or a leopard? Or bacteria for that matter.
Now I can put conflict in its place. Since it’s inevitable, I can steer it with a combination of attention to materials, a continuing, calm focus on iterations of design and a continuous distributed dialog on viabilty.
Materials would be people–the materials of the ecosystem are living systems and the materials of my yoga practice are the elements of my own body. I don’t get to choose parts of my body but I can choose how I develop the parts. And in yoga, they can’t get developed in isolation. The same goes for the bridge and the ecosystem.
The continous dialog on design takes place in yoga as I hold a pose or observe my breath in meditation. It’s vigorous but gentle and forgiving all at the same time. And there is a dialog going on between the different parts of my body in yoga. In organizations, the dialog on design is an approach that is different than problem solving or conflict resolution. Design puts all of the parties on the same side of the table and facilitates them through building models–whole systems until they discover new heights of viability for the organization. This sounds pretty esoteric, but it’s more like what an architect does than a typical business problem solver. As an architect moves forward in his design, the system that he is designing must remain a whole system. Work on one part affects the other. A whole systems approach prevails or the house will fall down when it’s built. Or the bridge. Or my body when I’m doing a headstand.
The design must happen in a distributed fashion. I think that one of the reasons that most companies are so short-lived is that they remain dominated by a small set of personalities and lack the resilience of the ecosystem with all of its living systems creating the soil, influencing the weather, building and wearing down rock and carving out more viable niches. Few organizations are living below the “head.” They are mechanical (implemented plans, routinized processes) below the senior headquarters. In the jungle, the ocelot manages as much of the “strategy” as the tree frog does. And the lowlier the life form, the more of the strategy it may influence. Not so in human organizations. This inability and unwillingness to engage the entire workforce in a meaningful, distributed way means that most organizations are doomed to failure far short of their potential lifespan. A major exception is the work being done by Ricardo Semler at Semco.
In our experience, if people work on personal development (not just personnel development), focus on design instead of intra-organizational combat, and distribute the role of the strategy and implementation dialog throughout the organization, then they will experience the benefits of the right kind of conflict. This is the active sort of balance found in the yogi, the bridge and the ecosystem.
Hopefully that helps.