#WorkingOutLoud on the Socially Dynamic Organisation: Disaggregation

The shift from the Domain based Organisation, through to the Socially Dynamic one, is essentially a disaggregation of certain legacy industrial mechanisms, structures, and ideas, into a series of new organising principles and approaches. It’s a shift in two dimensions: partly ‘what we do’, and partly ‘how we do it’, because this shift in foundations coincides with a shift in context and ecosystem.

This is best summarised by considering what many of our Organisations are seeking: they seek to change (to be more innovative, effective, responsive, adaptive, resilient, efficient, and agile), whilst also unlocking something new (invested engagement, social collaboration, purpose, intention, knowledge, agency, creativity, trust etc).

Change within a system, and change of the system, in parallel.

The industrial process required models of oversight and control, standardisation and labour mobilisation that delivered consistency, scale, and profit, but which are less suited to diversification, innovation and change. They created monoliths where we now seek more fluid and agile structures. We still wish to mobilise, but to do new things, in new ways. Nobody is asking me how to build an Organisation that will continue to do exactly what it does today, but a little bit better.

Part of the adaptation of our Organisations will lie in their ability to disaggregate previously bonded structures: such as ‘task’, ‘role’, ‘job’, ‘expertise’, ‘team’, ‘system’, ‘process’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘performance’, ‘purpose’ and ‘scale’. We will have to learn to view these things differently, in a range of different ways. Both in terms of how we organise (self organisation vs hierarchical organisation), and how we are effective (systems, processes, rules vs culture, community, social accountability etc).

My current stance is that we need both formal and social structures to do this, but cross connected and aligned in new ways, and hence the value of Social Leadership, which sits at the intersection of these systems.

There is a catch in this: power, decision making, ownership, is typically deeply invested within the formal structure, and hence the changes required can be strangled by an inability to envision, or accept, the necessary rebalancing required. People who are powerful today may be just as powerful tomorrow, after their Organisations have changed, but the mechanisms, and structures by which their power is held will be different, and there is a valley between the two spaces. One that is often too daunting to cross. For this reason, we see the required change rationalised away before it ever really bites. Instead of truly changing, we seek change by tinkering and optimising the existing system.

The Socially Dynamic Organisation will be recognisable, but fundamentally different. It will still have boundaries, but they will likely be permeable, and it will still have structure, but it will be more easily re-configurable, and part of the change will lie in the disaggregation of the familiar, at scale.

Foundations of ‘task’, ‘role’, ‘team’, ‘domain’, and the relationship to ‘leadership’, and even ‘reporting’, ‘performance’, ‘capability’, and ‘reward’, may all change. This is about more that self organising or optimising team structures, but may be more about internal marketplaces of capability and opportunity, and more fluid and diverse mechanisms of effect, as well as fluid and contextual leadership within an overall multi dimensional social and formal structure.

The change is challenging, and significant: paradigmatic, as we leave behind the industrial heritage, and move towards a more fluid, devolved Organisational leadership and design.

#WorkingOutLoud on the Socially Dynamic Organisation.