The Elements Of Evolutionary Organisations
The Constraints We Build
What holds organisations back from embracing their Evolutionary nature are the constraints we impose on them - constraints of process and culture that tell us we aren’t allowed to do that because either the process or the culture says that we can’t, or that others should be the ones to do it.
These constraints are imposed by us. We build the systems of hierarchy, governance, approvals and the like that prevent organisations from evolving. They do not emerge spontaneously from the organisation. We impose them on the organisation. In our quest to make the organisation behave like the perfect clockwork machine, we impose these constraints on it. In order to force it into the clockwork model, we prevent it from doing what it wants to do naturally - to change and evolve.
We impose these constraints, as leaders and participants in these organisations, because we want to see the organisation behave in a controlled and predictable way. It is therefore up to us to embrace the uncertainty that our VUCA environment creates, to remove the constraints and allow the organisation to evolve and adapt.
The constraints we impose on organisations come in four types -
Constraints of Alignment
Constraints of Leadership
Constraints of Governance
Constraints of Culture
Alignment
Alignment refers to the way that the organisation is structured. An organisation’s alignment is the path of minimum friction within the organisation - the easiest way to get things done. Traditionally, organisations tended to align themselves around internal concerns - business functions, work phases, resource pools and so on. These make for efficient delivery of work within a particular domain. The finance team delivers financial reports efficiently, the legal team provides legal advice, the IT teams deliver within their specialty and so on. This is a structure that would be perfectly familiar to the owners of those first industrialised textile mills - the combers comb, the carders card, the weavers weave and so on.
Internal alignment is a constraint we impose on organisations to make the job of managing specialised resources easier.
This type of internally aligned structure of makes cross cutting work difficult. Each team reports to different managers, has different priorities and strategies, different KPIs to meet and so on. Even within a function like “business” or “IT” there are internal structures that work quite separately with little collaboration, and often a lot of internal competition for resources.
Internal alignment gives us isolated teams of specialists who find it difficult to collaborate across the organisation.
Our internal silos resist change. They have their own KPIs, their own processes and, often, their own cultures. They focus on their own internal needs and not on the environment that is changing around them. They resist change that may reduce their importance. They form rigid and inflexible interfaces with other silos geared around protecting their own KPIs and resources. They limit the organisation’s ability to change and adapt.
Leadership
Traditionally, leadership in an organisation has followed the industrial model of the operator on the platform. It is concerned with control, decision making and delegation.
In our industrial view of an organisation as a mechanical thing, control is required to ensure that the machine operates as expected. Inputs are within the allowed range and all the parts of the machine are operating at the correct speed to ensure that the whole thing functions correctly. If a part is out of sync, an adjustment can be made to speed up or slow down that part to bring it back within operating parameters. This is traditional management - managing a system or process to ensure that it operates effectively.
In our traditional model of the organisation, decisions are made by the operator on the platform, or maybe one of his subordinates. The cogs and gears of the machine can indicate a problem, but they can’t act to fix it. All the power to act lies with the operator. The problems with this are well known - slow decisions, decisions made with limited access to actual data and so on. So efforts have been made over the past 30-40 years to delegate decision making - move the decisions to where the information is. In practice this usually means formally delegating decision making and control for a particular subset of the organisation to someone who can then further subdivide and pass decision and control authority further down.
In practice though, those lower in the organisation tend to avoid or escalate decisions upwards because they are unsure of their decision making authority, they have no ownership of the decision, and they need to get it ratified by their leader ( and leader’s leader) anyway. So why not push the decision upwards since its the boss who has the final say anyway. This is a major problem in many organisations but particularly in organisations where “wrong” decisions are punished. So decisions tend to bubble up the organisation back to the chief operator.
While leaders are supposed to tune their machines for greater performance, and to make strategic decisions about future directions, in practice, with decisions coming at them from all sides and a busy machine to run, leaders often focus exclusively on the day to day execution of work. I call this being Trapped in Execution - leaders who are trapped in a system that diverts all their attention towards operational matters and leaves them no time or mental capacity to deal with their other areas of responsibility.
Governance
In traditional organisations, governance is all about control - originally the governor in a mechanical system was an automatic valve that adjusted how much steam would be fed into the machine to make sure it operated at a constant rate.
Traditional governance is about control and compliance. Making sure each cog of the machine does its job within certain parameters to ensure that the whole runs smoothly. Because the cogs and gears in a traditional organisation have no autonomy, and no decision making ability, they need to be controlled to ensure that they function correctly.
Governance is always put in place for a reason. Something needs to be controlled, a check needs to be put in place, a risk needs to be managed. But governance is almost never removed, or changed when the reason for its existence changes. When something changes, old governance structures remain in place and new ones are built on top.
Governance builds up layers of control, through policies, procedures, checklists and approvals that set like concrete around the machine and lock it into place. Often, when it comes to organisational change, re-designing the machine is the easy part. Redesigning the layers of governance around the machine, complete with people who have made their careers through administering that governance, is much harder.
Culture
The final constraint is that of culture. Over time the organisation builds up a set of conventions about how things should be done. What behaviour is acceptable. How people should work together. What they should wear. Who should make decisions. Whether it's OK to talk to your boss's boss without permission. Whether it's OK to challenge authority. To take initiative without asking permission.
These conventions are almost never written down. They form an invisible maze within the organisation that traps everyone inside. You don’t even know the walls are there until you bump into one and are punished for making a cultural transgression. There may be an official policy that is written down but you can bet that there’s an unofficial convention as well that’s not written down and will be quite different.
These cultural conventions often form the greatest barrier to change. Because they are invisible, they aren’t addressed during change programs and remain in place, acting to quickly drag the organisation back to old patterns of behaviour or ways of doing things.
Many leaders, particularly those who are brought in from outside an organisation to enact change, have been undone when cultural conventions they were not even aware of derailed their change programs. Many leaders are themselves trapped within cultural conventions that were created by leaders long since departed. Many leaders become stuck in execution, no matter how hard they try to delegate, because the culture of the organisation forces all decisions upwards.
Evolutionary Organisations
So, in order to move towards and Evolutionary organisation, we must remove the constrains we impose. Constraints of alignment, leadership, governance and culture. We must replace those constraints with a new understanding based around
Evolutionary Alignment
Evolutionary Leadership
Evolutionary Governance
Evolutionary Culture
We will look at each of those in detail over the next few posts.