Easy Reads #8 - Changing the circle to a sphere

Before the #EasyReads series, the last article I wrote in LinkedIn was in June and felt it is high time that I break the laziness/writer's block or whatever crap that paused my writing. So I came up with this short Easy Reads format.

'Scale' is one word that pretty much every organisation struggle - be it people , revenue, commercial model. It is either ' How to scale' or the familiar problem of ' How to sustain at scale'. If I have to be honest, my own company ThoughtWorks is going through a rapid scale in the past few years in every dimension. Scale is difficult - because what works at lower scale cannot be replicated to create a large organisation, like a fractal.

Fractals can't happen magically- creating them in an organisation requires so many decisions , sacrifices to be done. Response to Markets , Hiring , alignment , cooperation at scale , career paths, balance have to be changed continuously. Crucially, the cultural values and its adaptiveness , responsibility to build the organisation has to percolate across people who join. Now this is the golden rule that stumps all.

Unfortunately, the rate of aligning people is way slower than the growth rate of the company

When this happens, the typical solution is to centralise governance, observe patterns and create corrective actions and arrive at some optimisation from this centralisation. I'm a big fan of centralisation - if only we use it to create alignment, provide inputs/help to local units and take decisions at corporate level. On the other hand, if the solutions to problems is thrusted across the organisation irrespective of the maturity state of the individual units, we tend to bloat the individual units with additional things that is either out of context or don't add value to them. The classic example is enforcing some form of heavy documentation across all organisation simply because there was an incident that happened in a context .

Easier said than done , the balance between centralisation-decentralisation is largely an art and its success is driven by feedback and transparency, stating upfront the objectives of the same. When at war, command & control works for a short duration , if extended for ever all the organisation sees is only war and nothing else.