- Since you're an organizational strategist,
I know I can confide in you.
The organization as we know it is slowly disappearing.
And in it's place will be a variety of new approaches
used to achieve strategic goals.
The truth is the traditional organization
is largely response to a lack of information technology.
I know that sounds like an odd way to put it
but hear me out.
Organizations have hierarchies because humans have a limit
as to how many people they can manage,
at least as we've come to define management.
And most people have a limit for the number of faces
and names they can remember.
It's usually about 150, what's known as the Dunbar Limit.
Yet today we use technology like email
and online social networks to manage
hundreds of relationships.
We communicate instantaneously across vast distances.
Sure, communications and process management technology
isn't perfect but it allows us to coordinate
far more people and activities
than we ever used to be able to.
And it will only continue to get better.
To imagine what a strategically agile organization
of the future might look like,
let's boil down the organization to some basics.
I said before that work is quite simply our skills
applied to tasks, to solve problems, and generate results.
So at the end of the day, an organization is pretty much
all about solving problems and generating results.
If we take the organization to those atomic building blocks,
then here are some of the characteristics
of that completely agile organization.
Individuals would be completely empowered to make decisions
about how to support the organization's strategic goals.
Teams would dynamically bind around problems.
That is, one or more people would identify a customer need
or a problem that needs to be solved,
and all band together to solve it.
Managers would step back into the role of strategic adviser
or coaching and guiding,
but not specifying the specific steps
that workers need to perform.
Sounds like a completely theoretical approach, right?
It turns out there are highly successful organizations
like this today.
Companies like Valve Software and Gore Industries
have no managers.
Employees are empowered to find ways to meet the needs
of customers and other stakeholders.
Teams agree on the problems to be solved.
And companies over all make a combination
of big and small bets,
sometimes over a period of five or six years.
This is the combination of incremental approaches
to existing and new markets,
and several really scaled initiatives
that could be transformative for the organization.
Obviously, what we think of as the traditional organization
is going to be around for a long time.
But as traditional organizations slowly become unbundled,
you're going to find a decreasing need for the organization's
leaders to define the steps by which goals are achieved.
And an increasing number of opportunities
for your organization to empower workers
to execute on your organization's strategy.