I was recently reading this excellent article on the future of organisations and was struck that this theme keeps coming up. Optimising for repeatable and routine work is what large organisations are used to doing.
However, the demands of the digital workplace are increasingly leading to uncertain and unprecedented work activities. Often requiring cross disciplinary communications and skills. Without an appreciation of network theory and providing the means and respecting the value of collaboration between staff companies will become increasingly unable to respond to user demands.
This Sabotage reference is hilarious
Raise your hand if you’ve ever worked with someone who…
Insists on doing everything through “channels.” Never permits short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions...
Well, guess what…
Your company is being sabotaged
These statements are actual instructions from a CIA operative field manual, created in the 1940s, that tells agents what they can do to deliberately sabotage an organization from the inside out.
Optimising for certainty vs uncertainty is critical for success
This difference — between optimizing for certainty vs. optimizing for uncertainty — is at the core of what separates successful organizations from everyone else.
Meanwhile, human beings are really good at the least routine, most complex, most collaborative, most creative work. And we’re much better than computers at this stuff. This is the stuff that’s really hard for computers.
And this is where teams and organizations of human beings — working together toward a shared goal — can create massive value.
Arauz uses a couple of diagrams showing that organisations optimised for certainty focus on purpose by being:
- closed
- controlled
- efficient
and those optimised for uncertainty focus on purpose by being:
- open
- networked
- learning