A thinking watch-maker and the design of an organization: A lonely walk on Principles

Human beings have evolved through natural selection, but what about an organization, could it be a random conglomeration or a retinue of chance events?

Richard Dawkins in his book, "The Blind Watchmaker" posited these questions: Our existence is a miracle otherwise how could our brains possibly be an ensemble of ten million kilo-neurons, that engage in highly complex tasks seconds after seconds? How could every one of the trillion cells in the body have thousand times as much precisely coded genetic signals as the computers have? But what about thousands of minds in an organization?

Grand design is the source of our being what we are. Most of these designs could be complex, like the aircraft; principles that apply to the wings are different from those that control the entire gamut of things from locomotion to steering or from lifting to landing.

By definition a complex thing could hardly be assembled by a chance event. It can hardly be a random conglomeration.

As in the manifestation of the design of a watch, there has to be a maker, but human beings have evolved through natural selection (which Dawkins has envisioned as a blind watchmaker making a design); but what about an organization?

Organizations are powered by the illusion of design, but they do perform complex tasks not entirely by planned arrangements. These tasks are not always pre-determined by structures and codes of conduct and vision and values that bind the organization together. Much is attributed to performance management and people development and process development, and the list could go on.

On the question ‘How do things get done in an organization’, some would say through “Hierarchical reductionism”, which means at every level, the work gets that much deployed from the top as would render the flow useful for the next level.  This could well be an inadequate explanation of how things get done in an organization. And it is here that I raise the topic of design, rather than by chance, that sways an organizational capacity in a given direction.

Doing things as part of a design in an organization would need vision and values of the organization to be aligned with some core processes through some governing principles to which one and all in the organization must be committed to. Strategy and leadership are the key enablers, but could be inadequate to make a lasting contribution to the delivery of results in a sustainable manner.

In the book ‘How to Fly a Horse’, Kevin Ashton has bordered on some of these questions around innovation in organization but he has not attempted the question how complex tasks end the way they do in organizations. Is there a common thread or a retinue that would enable repeatability of results in spite of differences of all kinds existing in people and traits or abilities?

Structure in organization answers this question partially, but structures by themselves may not be good enough for collaboration to happen so that certain tasks end the way we want them to end. We could be an intelligent watchmaker in designing the basic parts of the watch, but when it is people we are dealing with, the possibilities could be manifold and the chance element cannot be ignored. But a complex thing as an organization cannot be left to chance events; it belies the very construct of an organization which must have a purposeful design behind its activities.

The thinking watchmaker therefore must create those interventions that would make individuals and groups to come together for tasks to be performed or puzzles to be solved or new processes to be built. Too much of structure could be a deterrent as Kevin Ashton has shown that most tasks deliver lackluster results if the people knew before-hand that these tasks would be evaluated based on some rubric; while those that are left to autonomous groups or individuals with unlimited choices actually led to superior results.

But one cannot ignore the illusion of a rubric and its role in making organizational behavior to be swayed in a given direction. This rubric takes different connotations as in the framing of the principles, to which attention of the watchmaker must be diverted such that commitments to some common themes are justified. The watch-maker better take a lonely walk to help frame the principles to which people would be committed to. That if done the connection would be easy to establish in the design.

It is in the design of principles that the organizational rubric makes the most impactful positive assault; it makes the working of people be united for a shared purpose. These principles better not be imposed by the intelligent watchmaker; most organizations get these principles framed through group-think or cross fertilization of ideas.

Diversity, for example as a principle, could change the fabric of an organization. Here diversity is to be defined as Judith Rodin does in her book, ‘The Resilience dividend’ that which is such an important component of resilience and allows free thought and actions to be nuanced; hierarchy almost becomes the opposite pole to diversity.

A diverse organization by design would be far more resilient and anti-fragile as it would make decision making process far more robust. It could work both ways as in top down decision making as in bottom up or horizontal and vertical, cutting across functional boundaries as well.

As diversity is a powerful principle, so is customer centricity, which is as misunderstood as mis-practiced. To understand this principle one needs to be wary, as this walk will be lonely as not too many examples flourish. In the quest for the quarterly results, the customer does not even feature in most reports apart from being mere numbers; the financial world thrives on such in-sensitivities as do investment banks. But it just takes some small failures to get the pendulum return to its other extreme position; the pendulum remains the best symbol for this principle, it is a reminder that the evaluation by the customer is never complete and final, it is transitory and always in motion and no one is spared.

The watch-maker's lonely walk on framing principles of the organization is the first step towards organization design.