The Science of Organizations:
An idea and exercise to help you assess your organization’s capability to evolve and perform.
When I work with executives to design strategy, we inevitably get to a point where we’ve been asking tough questions, working with ambiguous ideas, hitting dead ends, and then end up finding ourselves sitting in an uncomfortable silence. A fellow facilitator of mine calls this feeling, “Scratchy.”?
Scratchy is good.
Scratchy means that you’re pushing it – going to places unknown and discovering what you don’t know. You’re asking the hard questions and discovering the myriad of things you as a leader will need to make decisions about. Not to mention, you and your leadership team are discovering how aligned, or not, you may be on where you want to take the organization, and how.
This discomfort is natural. High-stakes strategy design is not something we do often, or enough, to build as a discipline, much less to become comfortable with Scratchy.
I help my groups to quantify Scratchy and stay engaged in working with ambiguity by introducing a theory I use called the “Science of Organizations.”?
The Idea
The Science of Organizations was seeded from a somewhat embarrassing addiction I developed to podcasts in the 2010’s. I’m still addicted BTW.??If you recall that era, there were some emerging content makers getting amazing guests on their shows and basically being brokers of big thinkers and their ideas. This continues today and is often a great resource for subject matter experts in almost any field.
Regardless of what you might think of Tim Ferris, Mark Maron, or even Joe Rogan, listening to these podcasts gave us access to long, intimate conversations with crazy-smart folks. Think of a three-hour TED talk.?
Some guests were doctors, retired generals, cutting edge nutritionists or neuroscientists. Some of those ninjas were from the business world like Simon Sinek, Seth Godin, Jocko Willink and Brenee Brown. But one that I really took to was Sean Carroll. Sean is not in the business world per say. He’s an astrophysicist – a guy that studies physics, and the universe. He wrote a book called “The Big Picture” which I highly recommend.?
The Big Picture?is not a stodgy physics theory book. I can actually understand and internalize Sean’s ideas [disclaimer, I may have had to read/listen to a few chapters twice.] The book looks across the universe not only from a physics point-of-view, but is also looks at biology, chemistry, and neurology, and how they work together – to give us a larger view of maybe, who we are, and why we’re here.?
A key idea that Sean shares in this book is a simple one, but one I feel is paramount in understanding most anything, and specifically businesses and organizations. He has a theory called?Emergence. Simply put, Emergence explains that seemingly simple, but high performing and effective things are the result of systems – comprised of many complex factors. E.g., the universe.
When I’m helping teams with strategy, system thinking, and what-ifs, and the meeting goes Scratchy, I take a second to acknowledge what we’re all feeling and share with them the concept of Emergence
I do this by explaining to them, “The Science of Organizations.”
I start with a photo of this little guy:
I explain that that a hummingbird is a small, elegant bird in the animal kingdom. I ask for agreement that the hummingbird is, in fact, a high performing system. I also share some fun facts like:
1.?????Hummingbirds weigh less than a nickel
2.?????They can’t walk
3.?????They flap their wings at 500 times a second
4.?????They fly up to 50mph
5.?????They have a heartrate of 1260
6.?????They can fly backwards
7.?????They migrate 4000 miles each year
8.?????They see in UV and can see farther than a human
For this little animal to “Emerge” to such a level of excellence and performance, a tremendous number of things had to happen over a very long time.?
First, there had to be the right?Chemistry. All the core building blocks had to come together in just the right ways, to let something organic happen.
Then, that Chemistry spent a long time evolving to become more complex and more capable. This is the?Biology?that the hummingbird had to go through – evolving the basic building blocks of life into something complex, competitive, differentiated, and high performing.?
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And as that biology evolved, the hummingbird’s iterations had to figure out, and overcome the world she lived in, the world of?Physics?– outside forces.?
The external forces that need to be overcome and managed for flight – really good flight mind you – required even more from the system that is our hummingbird, and she delivered.
When you look at what had to happen for the hummingbird to be what it is, you can grasp the idea of Emergence – a high performing system as the result of managing and evolving through complex factors and time.?
This discussion has proven valuable when helping leaders to build complex, high performing systems that are our teams and organizations.
The Pitch
If we want our systems to be high performing, it’s going to take experimentation, time, trial and error, and learning – across complex factors.
There is no hack, we must do the work.
When we accept this viewpoint, we can better manage ambiguity – by deconstructing Emergence and making the strategic decisions about the Chemistry, Biology and Physics that will govern, and achieve our high performing systems.?
Scratchy lets us know we’re doing it right.??
Emergence reminds us it’s going to take hard work, paying attention to the details, and that there is no quick fix – we must put the time in, just like the hummingbird did over thousands of iterations of evolution. And, the Science gives us the places to start managing our own Emergence.
Once we embrace and appreciate the complexity, and we realize the work is hard, ambiguous, and Scratchy – we also begin to see that it is ripe with frontiers, possibility, and opportunity.?
This is where we’re lucky being humans. Our hummingbird had very little choice about her emergence. But, the ways we build and evolve our organizations… is up to us.
Case-in-point:
A North American electric utility has supported their organizational and digital transformation by addressing each of the “Science” areas. The examples below are only but a few out of hundreds, that have helped them to become one of the most progressive, best performing, and innovative in the industry.?
In one instance, they addressed their “Chemistry” by changing where they sourced their talent from, for new and emerging roles. Historically they had pulled this core building block from other utilities, and their state university, which produced solid traditional engineering grads. That makes sense, and they still do that today. However, as they assessed the new work and skills needed to operate a state-of-the-art digital grid, innovate in the renewables space, and meet evolving customer needs, they needed different types of skills and thinking. So, the changed where they sourced some of their workforce. To get their new Chemistry, they looked to different learning institutions as well as the start-up tech sector to change their chemical make-up to also work better with data, automation, AI, and the IoT.
When it comes to “Biology,” the company’s President was steadfast in assessing and changing the traditional 120-year-old Utilities operating culture. He has long professed that performance comes from the engagement of the people. So, to better innovate and sustain performance, the firm needed to overcome antiquated top-down leadership styles, slow-to-change policies, and over-valuing the ways we’ve always done things – the status quo.??The firm worked to develop and expand their leaders’ capacities to promote more autonomous work, foster innovative thinking, and to value problem solving and continuous learning at the front line. Their performance today is a direct result of how they evolved their Biology of leadership, and operational behaviors to be more agile in the face of change, and to make innovation an expectation of daily work.
New talent, and an evolved operating environment provided the opportunity to then take on their “Physics.” One example was when an up-and-coming engineer’s idea became the foundation for a cutting-edge new project. New perspectives on how outside forces were changing the rules, resulted in what would be one of the industry’s first projects to take advantage of changes in Federal regulation. By thinking differently, the company was able to react to the changing factors in transmission regulation and be a first mover in how Utilities could look beyond traditional borders and monopolies to generate new revenue and services.
This set the tone in the organization for what changing the science can do.?
Your turn
Now, I invite you to test the Science of?your?organization. Consider the following questions. Read them aloud and note that they are worded to have you inquire about yourself and your firm from within.
What did you come up with?
If you want to take it further and get more insight, include others. We encourage you to share this article and these tables with various people in your organization – across functions as well as at different levels, from leadership to front line. Not only do we see great value in the insights you get back from increased inclusion but should and suggested changes take the shape of initiatives, you have change-agents at the ready to help with the new efforts!
[Oh, and by the way, managing you Science requires great change management - more on that later!]
Below are a set of tables with some key ideas and questions to consider for each “Organizational Science Discipline.” Feel free to copy and paste these tables as needed
As you work to articulate and illustrate the science of your organization, consider that these are the defining inputs to your high performing system. With these inputs in hand, you’re beginning the journey of true organizational system design.?
To see where to go next with inputs and system thinking, stay tuned. That’s what comes next.
As always, I’d love to hear how you did. Reach out with challenges, successes, and any questions you may have.
Until then, stay Scratchy.
KS
(Copyright "The Science of Organizations" Kevin Smith 2021)