Those who have read some of my posts in the past will know that I tend to drone on and on about what I believe is an emerging organizing principle I call wirearchy:

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A dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results,

enabled by interconnected people and technology

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In his most recent blog post, Andrew McAfee of Enterprise 2.0 fame notes he’s been invited to a heavy-hitter discourse on "the Grand Challenges for 21st century management" and outlines in the blog post a key point he intends to bring up.

It has everything to do with the current methods of work design (and organizational architecture) used by most organizations today, which are derived from FW Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (see my previous post on this issue).  The methods in use today did not foresee the advent of the web nor the extensive (okay let’s say nearly ubiquitous now) use of hyperlinks and various emergent forms of (trying to manage) flows of information.

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What I Said about the Revolution

[ Snip ... ]

Impediment or design flaw: People and Information are Deeply Mismatched in Most Organizations

Within most organizations at present, the great majority of consultable digital information is either highly structured (customer order records stored in a database), a reflection of the viewpoints and priorities of the formal hierarchy (newsletters), and/or static (document repositories). As a result, this consultable information does not show the current state of the organization as perceived by its members, nor does it accurately represent their views, skills, judgments, experiences, activities, etc.

In fact, it is striking how few opportunities people have to generate, modify, and share information freely and widely on the Intranet, especially when compared with their abilities to do the same on the Internet. Since so many organizations describe people as their most important assets, it is puzzling why these opportunities are so constrained.

These constraints have an important consequence: while most organizations are drowning in many kinds of data they are simultaneously starved for vitally important information—information that comes over time from ‘wetware,’ or the minds of involved people. Lack of access to this information leads to sluggishness, redundancy, inferior decisions, and missed opportunities.

Radical Remedy: Create an Emergent, Social Enterprise Information Environment

An organization should deploy a universal digital environment that lets members contribute and modify content in a ‘freeform’ manner—with a minimum of imposed structure in the form of workflows, decision right allocations, interdependencies, and data formats specified ex ante. This environment should contain mechanisms to let structure emerge over time; such mechanisms include linking, tagging, voting, rating, and trading, as well as algorithms that generate recommendations, assess relative popularity, etc.

Managers’ roles in this environment are to set expectations, guide the development of healthy norms, indicate appropriate uses, and lead by example. A managers most fundamental role here, however, is to ‘get out of the way’—to stop using technology to impose constraints and culture on people and their work, and to instead encourage the appearance of an emergent structure.

This remedy does not necessarily include the transfer of any decision rights beyond those related to content creation. In other words, this remedy does not advocate that decisions related to the running of the organization be turned over to any emergent collective. It simply entails the creation of a novel information environment.

Decision makers will hopefully consult this environment, but the environment does not become the decision maker.

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I’ve shared with Andrew my thoughts regarding work design and the arcane discipline of job evaluation (NOT the evaluation of performance in a job), but have yet to hear back from him despite his stated interest in the issue.

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Tags: hierarchy, wirearchy, work design, organizational architecture

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