New Rules of Engagement

From Efficiency to Adaptability.

 The Premise

The Al Qaeda (AlQ – A terrorist organisation) on the surface looked like a traditional organisation, but under the surface operated unlike a traditional hierarchy that took the form of a dispersed network proving to be devastatingly effective against any qualified anti-terrorist force.  

AIQ had a very unorthodox organisational structure. It thrived in an operating environment that was more connected, faster and seemingly less predictable.

To combat & win such organisational structure #change is essential that has less to do with the tactics or new technology but radically has more to do with #reorganisation of internal architecture and organisation culture.

Organisational culture since the Industrial Revolution as subscribed by most industries is similar to Frederick Taylor’s “Scientific Management,” a system excellent for achieving highly #efficient execution of known, repeatable processes at scale. This approach though successful had its limits as it was insufficient in tackling a new generation of threats.

Efficiency is no longer enough.

The technological changes (development) have led to a more interdependent and fast-paced world creating a state of complexity and uncertainty. This unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with managerial models that are based around planning and prediction.

Today’s operational environment demands a new organisation and management approach that helps organisations in developing resilience, flexibility and learning abilities for re configuring & reorganising in confronting & responding to a complex situations more decisively.

Efficiency vs. Adaptability

The pursuit of efficiency often limits flexibility and resilience. To survive and face the constantly shifting threat in a complex setting, organisations must adapt to pursue adaptability for survival.

The AlQ achieved #adaptability in organisation through its networked structure, which could organically reconfigure with speed, #agility and #resilience.

Organisations to survive must become a true #organic network.

Commands & Teams

The command and control structures are good in executing planned procedures efficiently whereas the team structures are less efficient in execution but are much more adaptable.

The #connectivity of trust and purpose fills teams with an ability to solve problems that could never be foreseen by a single manager and their solutions often emerge as the bottom-up result of interactions rather than top-down orders.

Organisations with team structures have thrived across domains that were previously dominated by command & control structures in the face of rising strategic complexity.

The traits that made teams so good also made it extremely difficult to scale those attributes, personalities & behaviours across the large organisational setup. Building a single large team is operationally difficult but not impossible.  

Organisational Ethos should allow teams that traditionally resided and operated in separate silos to become fused to one another with other teams via #trust and #purpose.

System Approach

Organisations are in need of members who have the potential of understanding the entire interconnected system spread across a wider geographical area. For harnessing the capability of the dispersed organisation it is essential to share information at various levels of transparency and that demands disciplined effort in creating #shared consciousness across the organisation.

Shared consciousness in an organisation is delayed or assisted by physical structure and established processes. Transparency in information sharing at a larger scale requires physical redesigning and rethinking of every procedure in organisational culture that can facilitate sharing of information about the entire scope of operations to all members and partner by offering everyone the chance to contribute.

#Systemic understanding is a valuable step in developing cooperation across the functional silos necessary to succeed. Organisations should nurture the sense of purpose & trust among the stakeholders if it wants achieve the fluidity in face of complexity and unpredictability.  

Systemic understanding mirrors the sense of “purpose” that helps bonding of small teams with trust and the sense of purpose & trust in teams helps in the establishment of shared consciousness that is vital to success.

The Challenge:

New technologies offers unprecedented opportunities to gather information and direct operations, but because of the speed of execution, the centralisation of power is now coming at a great cost.

Shared consciousness helps in overcoming the complexity and speed of execution.

Effective adaptation to emerging threats and opportunities requires the disciplined practice of empowered execution. Individuals and teams closest to the problems have to be armed with unprecedented levels of insights from across the network, offering the best ability to decide and act decisively. The leadership should acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains the organic organisational ecosystem.

Take Away:

Organisations must learn to emerge as transparent organic entity rather that fine-tuning itself into a hyper-efficient machine. The journey to adaptability can be achieved by fostering the culture of shared consciousness through strict, centralised environments for communication with extreme transparency and empowered execution involving decentralisation of managerial authority.

Organisational transformation should be viewed as a philosophical shift in mental models of embracing the change for unlocking tremendous potential for human progress.

 CA Vinod.Kr Sharma