How stable is your evolving organization?

In the book ‘Reinventing Jobs’ Jesusthasan and Boudreau compare the impact of Industry 4.0 technologies with playing Jenga. This is a game where players take turns removing one block at a time from a tower constructed of fifty-four blocks. The removed block is then placed on the top of the tower. This creates a progressively taller and more unstable structure. Organizational structures can be like the Jenga tower. You might be lucky if changing one element, such as reinventing a job through rotation, won’t effect the overall stability of your organization. More often, reinventing a job has collateral effect on other jobs, the relationships among them, and the communication, authority, and power structures of the organization.

Often, if you’re not careful, reinventing only one job may make your organization unstable. When the job gets enriched and becomes more complex, there can be a level shift. The accountability towards clients and stakeholders can become more complex, eg. when an ecosystemic network of partnerships needs to be developed. Or the accountability for innovation can become more complex, where legacy systems need to be reinvented together with the processes that support the delivery of new products and services. Or the planning and coordination can become more complex, where borders between roles blur and cooperation between different teams across the value chain need to be managed. When people are not prepared for this level shift, the instability only increases.

How can you identify or predict how job- and work-level changes affect the organization? There are, in my opinion, four dimensions that play a role.

 Value-add role design as an enabler of decision making

The first dimension is the most obvious one. It starts by understanding how the Industry 4.0 technologies might enable the transformation of your strategy. You consider how work must change to support those organizational and strategic outcomes. The essence here is to find out what kind of decision making, often closer to the client, needs to be integrated in the new roles. This often creates a reshuffling of the accountability towards clients, towards innovation, towards the management of resources and towards planning and coordination. It is quite feasible to integrate artificial intelligence in customer service. But the real questions are different. For example, whether customer service representatives

• should sell based on their understanding how multiple products connect with each other (in the IoT era) (= accountability towards clients),  
• should also formulate new product design ideas as they coach customers on how to make use of the companies digital platform (= accountability towards innovation),
• should have a budget to build a full understanding of the AI-generated data (= accountability towards resources), or
• should plan for how the work shifts following the integration of data from sensors, information processing automation and analysis powered by AI (=accountability towards planning and coordination)?

These questions are all related to the essence of the value-add one can expect from a role, and how this value-add is supporting the larger whole. Overlooking the role design is one of the dimensions that creates instability in the organization.

 Guarantee a shared focus in team or circle design

The second dimension is less obvious. Thanks to the new technologies and the strong customer approaches, employees work in multiple teams. The customer service representatives start with a more intense collaboration with their product design, IT, marketing & sales colleagues, and others. We often take collaboration for granted and we sometimes forget to think through the relationships between roles when we design them. The way in which responsibilities are defined in roles determines the attention focus of the role holders. A focus on ‘quality and service delivery’ will focus on the short term, while a focus on ‘continuous improvement’ will extend the time horizon somewhat, and a focus on ‘operational processes’ will be tackled with a more medium-term focus. Team dynamics are influenced by the extent to which one succeeds in creating a certain agreement in foci in teams. Too large differences in expected added value creation in roles can lead to tensions in teams and substandard performance of the team as a whole. This is a second dimension that creates instability in the organization.

 Avoid overlap in reporting relationships

The third dimension has to do with the structure of the organization. The basic idea here is that every higher role in a reporting structure should add value to the underlying role. This means that coordinating roles must be designed at a higher level of complexity than those that they need to coordinate. If data interpretation becomes more important in certain employee roles (an assignment that may have previously been the manager), then the role of the manager should evolve into thinking through interdependencies and processes through which new product, technology and market combinations can be realized. If shifts in single roles are not thought through the reporting lines, (unintentional) overlaps between functions arise. Poor alignment is a significant barrier to optimal performance. It creates instability and is detrimental for an effective strategy execution.

 Employees interpret their reality

A final dimension is the least known, and has to do with the way in which individual employees deal with complexity (De Visch, J & Laske, O, 2018). Complexity management starts from the way individuals interpret their reality. Each individual constructs his/her own world both social-emotionally and cognitively and lives in his/her own psychological bubble. This bubble, influenced by one’s level of adult development, determines what one understands the organization wants to become, and how one will reinterpret the expected value-add in a role. When someone's development is inadequate for a particular role, he/she will narrow the role and will not be able to take the full complexity of a challenge into decision-making. When someone exceeds what is necessary for a certain role, he / she will broaden the role and take responsibility for matters that are not immediately in his / her area of responsibility. If this is not adressed, this can become an important source of irritation between team members, and result in increased instability in collaborative relationships.

In summary, the real impact of Industry 4.0 technologies is related to the way in which the organization is thought through. If this is not the case, build a Jenga tower, move your blocks and create instability. This is at the expense of the results.

Are you worried about the possible instability of your organization? In-Flow solutions as a young start-up is creating a platform that helps CEOs and CRHOs to map and actively manage the above four dimensions. Currently the first prototype of their application is ready and they are looking for 10 pilot projects to experience the power of the approach and further refine the application. The application is being developed with support from the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and is currently available in the Dutch language. If you want more information or want to step into one of the pilot projects, please contact [email protected]