Structure of work groups in a digital world: Dealing with vanishing tribes of middle management

In this changed world, knowledge is free and is accessible without a cost. Companies have not fully explored this changed paradigm. Experience on the other hand is no more a prized possession, unless it is sharpened with today’s requirements. Even then, it is highly probable that with today’s inter-connected world, someone somewhere could be doing your very job, if only it could be rightly tapped to your advantage.

Your product that was converted into a service is now vanishing completely. The differentiation in a product could be killed with one added service point in an existing service.

Cameras vanished and now selfie-sticks sell more than cameras do. Tomorrow the virtual mode would replace the stick as well.

Let me turn to work and to work-groups organized in the traditional way.

How is work typically done in large companies? It is structured through an organogram; some have exactly defined, based on an evaluation of the work, what is to be done by an individual who is part of the structure, which is known as the job description. You can actually measure the work and its impact on the organization and define bands for people.

That’s how large organizations can work and succeed.

In the digital world, such definitions of work could be questioned. For example, all the work done by some cohorts could be actually purchased at a fraction of the cost. So the work in-house is constantly competing with small start-ups outside whose job is to convert every work into a service at a fraction of the cost. It started off with payroll processing some fifteen years back, now it has progressed to designing, engineering, production, logistics, selling, promoting, almost whatever you can think of can be out-sourced and managed as you would have liked it.

This much was known. But what did not seem obvious is happening. Product moving into a service was known, but some service is being digitally converted to being freely delivered.

What happens to those large groups of people manning the middle-management positions, which are neither engaged in the direct transactions, nor are part of the strategic apex? The operating core as in Mintzberg’s Structure in Fives is like a vanishing tribe whose very existence is being weighed as an option against a range of things on offer by ‘outsiders’.

The types of structures are also under threat. The typical “machine bureaucracy” you would have seen in asset heavy industries that were converted into “professional bureaucracies” later, are no more of any significant value. As the value on the table from such structural association is lost; the output could be purchased as a service with better overall efficiencies.

The quintessential analyst is replaced with a digitized platform which could churn any set of numbers into a trend and any set of descriptive statements into a cogent set of observations through algorithms running with complex mathematics.

Organizations with high internal over-heads have now slimmed down in favor of slight increase in a variable consulting service.

Project organizations have been dismantled as cohorts with specialization could be doing bulk of the work and it is no more learning while executing the project; all the value comes from improving on the already agreed terms.

Wherever the source of value is deeply entrenched and is not transferable or replicable, some cohorts are working around it with a loosely knit framework, whose purpose is not to protect the secret recipe but to find avenues of creating additional value through associations with other cohorts of all kinds.

The human interface with a digitized and inter-connected world is yet to be fully understood in terms of scope and attributes. While the traditional ways of management structure are destined for overhaul, the new start-ups are very thin on finding ways of how to make things work better without a prescribed structure.

Some start-ups and those growing at a frenetic pace have already done away with some of the middle-management jobs altogether as they found that the workflow was getting disrupted and was slowing down because of their presence in the structure. One senior leader with absolutely junior staff of twenty in a direct one to one structure is very common. The digital network allows that as one could actually participate at every stage of the puzzle solving exercise, instead of waiting for the end to happen wrongly or rightly or slowly.

The structure itself is so flexible and variable because information is available to one and all who are engaged in the work associated with a given target. The structure could need induction or it could need deflation to pave way for the information to flow to the right places. If design was at the core of differentiation, it is not any more as the value is in implementing an ever-flexible design that would take care of eventualities as they occur. You would need a different set of people and structures to deal with this changed paradigm.

You are dealing with enormous speed to succeed with such rising competition. The structure cannot slow you down. On the contrary the structure or the lack of structure must facilitate the process of speeding your delivery.

When the technology is aiding you, speed must replace structure till you find the right mix of both. Digital world is yet to find the right blend; it has rejected traditional structures to succeed but.