An intelligent designer MUST be involved!

An intelligent designer MUST be involved!

Selling oversimplification as an expertise

I have stepped into the article describing the approach to scale the organization and it made me mad.

I know writing something because someone's wrong on the internet is one of the worst possible motivations but... the problem is the subject: scaling the organizations.

The motivation described is a kind of refrain I see alot these days. When people do not want to dig into the fundamentals and go with oversimplified explanations of things.

This approach over the last couple of decades has brought the generation of naive "inventors" that put an evolutionary approach of "self-organization", "don't bother with planning/analyzing/designing", "the team will figure it out themself" and other crap that is replacing the knowledge and expertise with enthusiasm to reinvent the wheel. Surely for someone else's money.

Nevertheless, the subject of the article makes sense and it's definitely one of the biggest problems of any business, but the grounds as they are described is a stretch full of false assumptions and syllogistic fallacies.

So let's start...

What is work?

"Work is solving other people’s problems."

Well, it's not. Work is a process of reaching the designated goal with available resources within an acceptable timeframe (and with reasonable quality). The classical managerial triangle. No need to reinvent the wheel by redefining the basics (especially while completely missing the point).

One does something called work either because he has set some goal for himself or is set for the goal by an entity he has a contractual relationship with (directly or via an agent of said entity) and commits to reaching it in exchange for an agreed benefit.

Solving other's people problems is a general idea of business (service or product), but not the work. And a good message for a corporate bumper sticker.

So any work is full of limitations. Which aren't coming from within the team. Ignoring this, under the romantic notion of helping people, is one of the things that makes teams ineffective in their work.

"Most progressive companies think they do that best when structured as networks of teams, rather than hierarchical pyramids."

Well, here we go, our grandfathers were wrong but we have finally got it right.

The general idea of the article is that the mental inability of individuals to maintain a big number of connections requires an organization to structure itself into a small network of self-organizing teams.

People aren't devices!

It starts by stretching Metcalfe's Law to the social interactions within a corporate environment, or simply saying in a workplace. The application of the law implies that adding another person to a team will increase the number of social interactions. Like in the picture.

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Originally Metcalfe's Law describes how the power of the internet increases with adding another device to it. Which is supposed to be a good thing.

Well... team is not the internet. Hard to imagine how adding more men to this team will complicate these guys' work and will put at a risk the outcome of their activity.

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Adding a new team member is not a problem, the problem is the necessity of the communications, and we know that no one can maintain a big number of communications. The article got that right.

But communications aren't imperative. They are either required or not. If not, there is no problem. You can put a battalion of people to the same work and there will be no problems. Other than control and coordination.

Control and coordination

What should evolve in order that control and coordination would be achievable? Hierarchy. Yes, our grandfathers got it right. If an individual employee's work is simple, the only problem we have is organizing these employees to make sure that work is split right and the process is manageable, so the managers are in order.

Imagine the above guys having self-organized teams driven by different individual motivations and dependent on their leaders' personal qualities and experience. Do you see the simple grass trimming job ending up well?

"As more people try to communicate with each other, the number of interactions increases immensely. Here we hit a problem—our brain simply can't handle this."

What does our brain capability have to do with the rising number of required communications? We're not talking a cooler chit-chat here. If people communicate to do their work, they have needs to be solved with these communications. Just splitting them into smaller teams won't eliminate the needs. Not that simple.

"Uninventing" managers

"There are two things that make the ‘inventing’ of managers (and their spans of control) problematic".

Let's regard it.

"First, the wellbeing of the front-line employees: they did not benefit much from this change. Most people don’t like to be stripped of tasks like communication and coordination. It didn't really motivate or engage front line staff."

Non-sense. Managerial staff is required to address the scaling of the organization. At scale, lots of processes that were implicit are required to become explicit to be consistent and effective over a growing number of employees.

Someone needs to be responsible for introducing the same effective process throughout the organization. Otherwise, every team will introduce their own process and they won't be able to work together effectively because they will invent different wheels. Why shouldn't they? Self-organizing implies just that.

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"Second, the possibilities that digital technologies brought to internal communications meant transaction costs of one-to-one and one-to-many interactions dropped basically to zero. This questions the manager's role from a 'transaction cost' perspective."

A manager is not a messenger. Coordination is not a message passing. Does "problem ownership" rings any bells?

So what is the problem?

It's not how big the team is.

It's the requirement of communications driven by the complexity of work of every individual or ineffective process requiring individuals to maintain a big number of connections to do their work.

This is the problem that requires fixing. Not the number of people in the team because of their limited mental capacity.

Evolution in a workplace

There are trends to "introduce an evolution into a workplace". There is nothing wrong with evolution, but we need to understand that evolution is a very costly process that does not necessarily lead to a successful result.

The basis of evolution is a survival of the fittest. How can you guarantee that the drivers of that evolution will correspond to the interests of the organization and not to someone's personal interests or individual convenience? How can you guarantee that the process team spawns won't fail? How can you guarantee that the effective process will evolve within a reasonable timeframe?

You can't.

So there are no "self-organized teams"?

There is an old classic called CMM . There is a level called CMM-5, where teams optimize and evolve internal processes to achieve better results.

The common mistake is thinking that the team that has no process (CMM-1, personal heroism) can build a process because they are all smart guys. This approach is designed to fail unless there is a professional process builder with managerial skills in the team. And even then, this does not guarantee consistency and effectiveness throughout the organization.

Intelligent design

If your organization is facing growth, the worst thing you can do is to split the teams into smaller squads and let them play evolution on their own. If the number of communications rises, it's a signal that you need to scale and improve processes, not just let the small startup-like team replicate itself.

This is why having professionals who know how to scale the organization is so important. Splitting the big teams into smaller ones should come with well-defined cross-team processes, formalizing implicit practices to become explicit, and lots of processes that were "understood" should become clearly defined.

Organizations that claim they have "self-organizing squads" either kid themselves and they aren't that "self-organizing", or their teams are just ineffective because they are burning the organization's money on evolutionary experiments reinventing the wheel.

There is another possibility where "self-organizing" teams could work as described in the article. Their work is so textbook and so simple that things just can't go wrong.

But that's not your business, isn't it?

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