governance – Paul Golightly

Emerging and Disrupting With Purpose

The most disruptive idea in the market right now isn’t a new technology. It’s organizations that can disrupt themselves.

In my last post (which was some time ago), I talked about collective intentionality at the end of a series of posts about emergence. Before I move on, I want to bring the two ideas together.

Emergence is often discussed in scientific contexts as something which doesn’t have purpose on an individual level–only the collective appears to have purpose, as with slime mold finding the shortest path to food despite each individual cell having no such specific intention.

The interesting thing about intentionality is that it doesn’t require conscious thought–as a matter of fact, in its best form intentionality is close to unconscious. Intentionality is directed existence, or “being about something.” In philosophy, “intentionality” is typically used in the philosophy of language, for example, the word table is “about” a table. The word isn’t a table, but to signify a table is the word’s reason for being. If tables didn’t exist (even as a concept), “table” wouldn’t be a word, it would just be a jumble of letters or sounds.

Similarly, when we choose to be intentional, what we are choosing is to be “about” something on a fundamental level. It happens at a more basic level even than a typical mission statement. This “being about” is something Simon Sinek describes in his “Golden Circle” approach: the “why” toward which all action in an organization is directed. It’s true that there isn’t an intelligence directing the movements of slime mold or the flocking of birds, but there are many individual parts combining a few simple rules with a collective objective: to find food, to find warmth, to survive and reproduce. Without intentionality, the movement of slime mold or the flocking of birds would never happen: the birds would fly off in their own directions and the mold would grow aimlessly until it dies.

As humans, our intentions can be much more varied, but it still needs to be fundamental. An organization, for example Gravity Payments, could have an internal manifesto with guiding principles, objectives, goals, key performance indicators, and so on, but all of these are worthless if they don’t draw clear circles to highlight the central “why” of the organization: to simplify transaction processing. Everything CEO Dan Price says to the members of the organization must reinforce its central narrative and focus every individual’s actions toward achieving that purpose. Only when everyone in the organization is moving toward the same purpose, does emergence propel the whole organization.

By establishing intentionality and changing the structure of an organization to better facilitate emergence, the organization will be prepared to increasingly disrupt itself. This doesn’t happen automatically. There are other factors to consider, particularly the diversity of perspective, the responsiveness to external realities such as customers and market conditions, the potential for peaceful revolution within the organization, and so on. These factors can affect the viability of an organization whether it’s a garage-based startup or an entire nation-state.

What all this means is that traditional organizations have it backward: Strategy will take care of itself, if you take care of the people. The decisions made by the so-called executive level will bubble up from what were previously considered the lowest levels of the organization. This requires re-thinking the organization’s relationships to some pretty fundamental principles, including power, employment, and compensation.

I’m eager to get readers’ thoughts about this approach to adaptive organization. What possibilities of this approach excite you? In what ways are you skeptical about this approach? What about the idea requires more clarification?

Be What You Intend to Be

Much of what goes on in a traditional organization is unintentional. That is to say, it isn’t an action that someone has decided to take in order to contribute to the well-being of that organization and its stakeholders. It’s operating on default.

Ironically, unintentional behavior can often be the result of trying to clamp down on unintentional behavior. On the other hand, it can just as easily be the result of leaving people isolated and expecting them to do their best work without any assistance or support.

The road to a more intentional organization is one described ideologically by business greats from Warren Buffett to Richard Branson. Here is the idea as verbalized by Steve Jobs:

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea is counter to the operation of a traditional organization. Traditionally, decisions get made and orders pushed down the chain of command; results come back up and get pieced into something like the final result that the person at the top of the chain wanted.

Counter-intuitively, the result of the traditional approach is that much of what happens in the organization is unintentional. People who wait for orders don’t make the best use of their own time; and the people above them, who don’t have the perspective of each individual’s point of view, don’t make the best use of their time either. People fulfill their immediate expectations without a view of what’s good for the whole. What’s more, managers often don’t communicate all their expectations, and the results reflect the holes in each subordinate’s understanding of the tasks assigned to him.

Becoming intentional means, at least in part, understanding myself, acknowledging and accepting what I am, and developing upon my strengths. As in the Cherokee proverb of the two wolves, I become better by feeding what is good within me. It’s not a choice I make when I’m faced with a hard question, it’s a choice I make by the way I condition myself to face the hundreds of little choices throughout the day.

The same is true of an organization: I have to feed what is best in my organization and what is best in the individuals within it.

This is one reason organizations that focus on facilitation can be much more effective than traditional organizations. Instead of “managing” in the traditional sense, leaders help people to do and become their best, guiding their individual work toward the ultimate good of the organization as a whole and helping to connect it to the work of others.

What this means for a leader is that I am first of all responsible to my people rather than for them. (Responsibility for my people is still important, though it’s mostly externally-facing: followers want leaders to have their backs.)

Whereas a traditional organization is merely, as Emerson put it, “the lengthened shadow of one man,” an organization of facilitation is an attempt to leverage the power of community toward a common goal. That makes the intent of each individual important to the whole. Each level is intentional about its own goals and behaviors, and each subsequent level is there to help the previous level attain its goals and bind efforts together.

Here are a few risk factors for unintended behavior, and what you can do about them:

Fear. When people are afraid of something, they tend to either destroy it or hide it. I have never seen either of these behaviors yield positive results in an organization. If the people working with you act fearfully, address it head-on. Learn what they are afraid of. Dig into the root cause, too–few people are afraid of disappointing a customer so much as they’re afraid of what might happen to them. If you start to notice a lot of people having similar problems, you have a systemic fear on your hands–usually one that has to do with trust within the organization–that requires a change.
Inconsistent culture. People are more willing to take personal risks if they feel anchored and supported. That has partly to do with knowing that the people around them have their back–even people who may be on a different team, or come from a very different background. Your hiring practices and cultural guidelines need to be spelled out so that the people you hire are people you’d choose to weather a crisis, not just people who would have fun together at happy hour. More than that, everyone in your organization needs to be telling the same story and believe in the same destiny.
Too much process. Process can be a good thing if done correctly–if the process represents a best practice, serves the people, and is capable of evolving. But if you need a process to mitigate risk, that means you already have unintended behaviors–and adding a process could make the issue worse, as people attempt to short-cut or circumvent the process in order to get their work done. (Ask yourself: Is the process an invention or a control?) Pare down or eliminate any processes that get in the way of doing good work, and instead focus on gaining buy-in from your ostensibly reliable (you did hire them, right?) employees as to how to avoid putting your community at unnecessary risk.
Over-management. If responsibility for my efforts always goes up to my manager, my natural human response is to fight against that control mechanism. I might give up on doing anything that isn’t assigned to me, I might deliberately procrastinate or slack off, or I might start looking for other jobs. (The top cause of burnout isn’t over-working, it’s lacking control over or engagement with your work.)¹ A quote from a study in the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations: “Burnout can be minimized/avoided if individuals develop a high level of involvement in their jobs and they are able to identify themselves psychologically with their jobs.” Adding controls and oversight to prevent me from doing anything but the work I’m supposed to be doing will provoke a desire to rebel against them. Try cutting out levels of management and finding ways to prevent micromanagement, or better yet, train your “hierarchy” to be a facilitating structure instead of a managing structure. If you have good people, you won’t need to control them; and if you stop controlling them, you’ll find out pretty quickly who’s good and who isn’t.

The only way you’re going to get more than a handful of people to be fully engaged in accomplishing a goal is to get them to buy into that goal and work toward it on their own motivation. In other words, hire good people and let them tell you what to do. Think of it this way: As long as I hold the power to fire my leader, what do I lose by being a servant?

What reservations do you have about making this kind of change? Did I miss something? I’m looking forward to getting your reactions in the comments.

References[+]

References
⇧1	A quote from a study in the Indian Journal of Industrial Relations: “Burnout can be minimized/avoided if individuals develop a high level of involvement in their jobs and they are able to identify themselves psychologically with their jobs.”

How Emergence Works in Organizations

Emergence isn’t about collecting a bunch of fine people and letting them do what they want with no structure of any kind. In fact, emergence needs structure–just not the same kind of structure traditional organizations use.

Functionally speaking, the traditional top-down structure is a method of augmenting one person’s ideas with the minds and bodies of others–like a human Voltron.

This is familiar to our way of thinking–a reflection of Industrial Age ideals of order, rationality, and efficiency. But Voltron is ultimately a machine, and as we enter the Second Machine Age, organizational structures that mimic machines are going to fall by the wayside: they are less efficient than actual machines, and less adaptive (in an evolutionary sense) than organic communities.

Consider the example of Microsoft’s .NET versus the open-source Ruby On Rails: the closed, controlled, heavily planned product has consistently lost market share for years, while the decentralized, agile developer community has turned out a consistently more popular and more useful product. In terms of external incentives and long-term planning, Microsoft should have the better product. Instead, Microsoft is planning to make .NET open-source because of the spectacular failure to keep up. The organic community has unequivocally trumped the traditional model.

Let’s take another stab at that organization chart. Take the person at the top and place her instead in the middle. Connect her to all her sources of information, her co-workers, the people who report to her, the people to whom she reports. Do the same for each of those people to whom she’s connected, outward until everyone in the organization is accounted for, and connect each of them with their points of contact to the outside world. What you have now much more resembles a neural network:

This isn’t an aspirational image, it’s a reflection of reality–a reality that the former image attempts to control and confine into a linear hierarchy. For comparison, here is a map of Twitter employees using the platform:

Seeing an organization in this way–as it organizes itself, and not as the linear design into which we try to squeeze it–reminds us of the first principle of emergent structure: the number and quality of connections improves emergent behavior.

This isn’t a call to increase the number of networking events at your business. Human beings will create connections on their own if given the right environment.

Consider Google’s practice of mixing functional groups on the floor. While this would be anathema to a linear hierarchy–I would have to walk to another part of the building to talk to a co-worker–at Google, the people around you may become your co-workers. Some businesses have replicated the design without taking into account the hierarchy and culture, resulting in marginal improvements at best, and often employee frustration. (Even at Google the practice is not without its drawbacks, but it is an intentional culture play.)

The quality of the connections is likewise based on trust; the traditional organizational structure makes trust unnecessary, and by making it unnecessary, undermines it. This leads to a second principle of emergent structure: where traditional organizations depend on chain of command, emergent structure depends on social contracts.

A social contract is, at its most basic, an agreement held in common between any number of people, either written or implied. Top-down structures choose policies and impose them. Leaders of adaptive organizations make a case that a policy is in the best interest of the organization, and modify it based on the needs and applicability to a particular population. We all agree that we need to follow a certain regulation or we will face prosecution, therefore we promise to follow that regulation and hold one another to it.

In this way, instead of imposing a rule that employees follow like the speed limit (seven miles per hour over isn’t really speeding, you know), employees are accountable to one another for their actions. We all know we have made the promise with one another; when I violate the promise, I have broken my promise with everyone in the organization.

Social contract underpins the entire structure of a culture. When I expect that I have ownership over my work and it won’t be taken away from me and given to someone else, that is an implied social contract. When I expect that I can do my work every day without fear of sexual harassment, that is (usually) a written social contract.

Social contract also defines the leadership of an organization. A person can be an owner if he has enough money, and he can be a manager if he has enough connections, but he can only be a leader if he has people willing to follow him.

Finally, in addition to good connections and social contracts, emergent structure requires process. This may seem to contradict what I’ve said so far, except that human processes are approximate–they are always applied using judgment and a “feel” for the particular situation.

Human process is an interesting phenomenon. Machine processes can be made to take variables into account, but machines don’t make judgments. And machines don’t vary processes in ways they haven’t been explicitly programmed to learn, i.e., they don’t introduce personal experience or personal interpretation. Emergent behavior in an organization depends upon human experience and variability, working against an established process, to produce unexpected outcomes. Only processes that are documented and followed can be improved. Everything else is folk knowledge, which is improved by rare individuals and passed piecemeal to others.

This kind of adherence to and improvement of process depends wholly upon social contracts and quality connections: I must know that I am not documenting my changes to the process on behalf of some uncaring management four levels above me, I’m keeping rigid documentation on behalf of people like myself in the organization who are doing their best to cover for one another and keep things moving.

This is why I encourage you to abolish the idea that there is a “top” or “bottom” to your organization. The goal is to have a structure where everyone finds the most appropriate place for as long as that place is appropriate, not a structure where everyone struggles to climb as high as they can. In order for this to work, we also need to rethink the role of leadership in such an organization–because it is still critically important–and what that leadership is attempting to do.

I’m eager to get your thoughts on all this. Did any of this sound like an organization where you’ve worked, either under the traditional model or under a more adaptive approach? Have you seen leaders embrace the “neural network” of organization and truly try to engage all their members in uniquely meaningful ways?

When You Stop Controlling, What Emerges?

In my last post I mentioned emergent behavior is a strength of adaptive organizations.

A definition of emergent behavior: A behavior is emergent if it’s something the collective does without any individual intentionally aiming to it belongs to a collective but not to the individual components that make up the collective. It’s sometimes used interchangeably (even though it isn’t strictly interchangeable) with “self-organizing.” The movement of a flock of birds, for example, isn’t led or organized, but nonetheless ends up creating a beautiful, organized pattern–so much so that scientists long hypothesized that there was some sort of organization or leadership.

On the surface level, it’s easy for leaders to get excited about emergent behavior. It’s engaging, it’s innovative, and because of its connection to artificial intelligence, it sounds futuristic. But as soon as you start to dive into the details of emergence, it starts to get scary very quickly.

Emergence not only unplanned but unplannable. It doesn’t obey a strategy or market tactics. We’re able to tell the stories of the individual parts of a system, and we’re able to tell the story of the system as a whole, but the individual story and the story of the whole are not clearly and causally related. In other words, it’s not possible to control emergent processes to create a specific desired outcome–at least not without some kind of mind control.

To most business leaders, this makes emergence a non-starter, or at the very least makes it something they would limit to a dark corner of the dreaded Innovation Department. Our objective is to contain what we can’t control and subdue it with everything we can control. Giving up control is the exact opposite of what I try to do every day.

The good news is that, although I’ve written quite a few words already about emergent behavior, I haven’t yet mentioned what emerges.

Leadership. We all know leadership and management are not the same thing. Management is a way of delegating down a chain, percolating down to (one can hope) the right people for each task. By contrast, a leader only exists because there are people who choose to follow. Leadership is visionary and inspiring–not the mushy feel-good kind, but the kind that puts such a strong idea in your head that you will stick with it through disagreements and difficulties, even through loss and sacrifice.
Culture. Culture is already an emergent phenomenon, but a particularly interesting one because it works as a feedback loop: culture emerges between people, but then it is identified and qualified and absorbed by the individual who goes on to influence the culture. But even with that in mind, managers still attempt to control culture as though it were something that could obey their will if only they tried hard enough.
Strategy. Slime mold is so efficient at finding food that scientists spent several years laboring under the hypothesis that they would find “controller cells” that coordinated the behavior of the colony. Emergent strategy adapts to present conditions more quickly than planned strategy because its members are responding directly to stimuli, and due to its parity with the pace of culture it is just as good or better at future-readiness. What’s more, due to its emergent properties, it scales much more effectively than planned strategy. (The flip side of its scalability is that emergent strategy is less effective in smaller organizations; emergence is itself something of a network effect.)

I want to emphasize that emergence doesn’t mean surrendering your organization to chaos and anarchy. I will delve further into the subject, but for now just imagine that your organization is your back yard. At present, at its best, your backyard is neatly mowed, has some nice lawn furniture and a couple of lawn games. I’m not suggesting you should let your lawn be reclaimed by nature–covered in scraggly bushes and weeds–but that your lawn could be a Japanese garden, a beautifully manicured work of nature. Without the self-directed growth of the plants, it wouldn’t be possible, but likewise it wouldn’t have form or meaning without the care given to cultivating and pruning those plants.

I’d like to take this opportunity to do a check-in with you. What excites you about emergence? What concerns you? I have several posts in the works, but I’m interested in where you want this to go next. Let’s have a conversation in the comments.

The Strengths of Adaptive Organizations

While most of my posts can be applied to many different kinds of organizations, and even more can be applied to businesses specifically, I write all my posts with adaptive organizations in mind.

Adaptive organizations are generally loosely-structured, non-hierarchical, and depend on temporary teams to pop up and disband on their own. They’re the primary focus of Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations, as well as the driving philosophy behind the consulting firm Undercurrent.

Adaptive organizations are designed to maximize the co-operation of human and machine. Unlike Industrial Age organizations, adaptive organizations (what Frederic Laloux calls “teal” organizations) do not rely on humans functioning as machines. Instead, they depend on the value created by healthy individuals, collected from diverse backgrounds and bonded into communities by a common vision for the future.

The contrast between the two concepts can be so pronounced that some can’t even fathom how these futuristic organizations would work. But the fact that adaptive organizations are already beginning to emerge (as with Spotify, Valve, and GitHub) shows that they aren’t just a philosophical exercise. They are real, they are successful, and they will continue to thrive.

Laloux outlines three principles of adaptive organizations: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. While these are incredibly useful guidelines for creating a future organization, they don’t quite explain why adaptive organizations work. I’d like to propose three corollaries to Laloux’s principles.

Traditional organizations rely on planned behavior; adaptive organizations encourage emergent behavior. Traditional organizations are heavily planned: they hire people with specific skill sets to fit into specific roles and accomplish specific tasks that make up a system that’s carefully designed to play out the vision of the entity at the top. This ultimately makes traditional organizations less than the sum of their parts. Adaptive organizations operate at the opposite end of the spectrum: they expect employees to manage themselves and one another dynamically. Fixed hierarchy is counter-productive because it limits deviation from an established agenda; in a fixed hierarchy, I don’t have much room to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit my immediate supervisor, and he in turn has little room to do anything that doesn’t benefit his immediate supervisor. Designing an organization to encourage emergent behavior means opening up to unplanned innovation by anyone at any time. It can be equal parts dangerous and game-changing; the art and science of emergent behavior is to minimize the danger without discouraging the game changers.
Traditional organizations consolidate efforts in an attempt to design the best, most efficient single outcome; future organizations rely on multiple discovery to generate iterative, multi-dimensional innovation. When a traditional organization discovers two different efforts to accomplish a similar goal, it’s seen as inefficient. Duplicative efforts are shut down and/or consolidated into one another, leading to political battles and possibly resentment on the part of the employees who were trumped. These consolidation efforts frequently fail, either in process (they are never completed) or in product (the outcome is too unwieldy or unhelpful). Multiple discovery allows several efforts to reach the same point from multiple directions, or to reach different points from a similar origin. The outcomes of the individual efforts tend to be leaner and more focused, and if one option fails there are others at the ready.
Traditional organizations depend on metric productivity (output divided by hours divided by pay rate); adaptive organizations develop unique value. Metric productivity is the enemy of unique value: it suggests that all products, customers, and employees are comparable and judges each employee against some Platonic ideal of productivity. Metric productivity is what causes us to believe that putting in more hours makes us more valuable to our employer, that what we do to our bodies in our off-hours isn’t important to what happens when we’re on the clock, that our mental and spiritual and social well-being is something we do on our own time and work doesn’t factor into it. But metric productivity isn’t just bad for employees, it’s also a dead end for employers. If your concern is wholly for metric productivity, chances are high that you’re in competition with someone. Competition is a sinkhole. If you’re not digging yourself out of it and creating unique value, you’re bound to lose.

This is how adaptive organizations can thrive in spite of the concerns that keep leaders locked into traditional models. Adaptive organizations eschew the assumptions of traditional organizations–efficiency, competitive pricing, planned behaviors and outcomes–and take the lead because they engage both employees and customers in a way that makes traditional competition obsolete. They also gain efficiencies in unexpected ways–from Buurtzorg spending less time on patients by spending more time with them, to Netflix’s “the best are 10x better than average” philosophy. In the end, adaptive organizations are even better than traditional organizations at traditional metrics, because they focus on purpose and put the future of their organization in the hands of each individual. Instead of focusing on functional planning, an effective leader provides focus, narrative, and inspiration to the efforts of the collective–as Saint-Exupery puts it, she teaches them “to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

This post serves as the frame for my next several posts, in which I’ll tackle multiple discovery and dig further into emergent behavior to provide some practical understanding of how to apply these concepts to a real organization.

What do you believe about adaptive organizations? What’s keeping you from applying these principles to your own organization? I look forward to discussing with you in the comments.

Listen to the Opinion, Speak to the Experience Part 2

“For acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It’s been pointed out to me that my previous post is a bit confusing. Granted, it’s a topic that’s probably worth writing several books, and a skill that can take years of personal development. But I want to drill down to a core that’s useful even in the short-term.

There is no such thing as objectivity among humans. (As software people are fond of saying, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”) In collaboration with one another, we represent a wide array of experiences and we have each filtered out what we have found to be the salient points that we apply as broad rules of the world. This is a cognitive belief, or what we call an “opinion.”

But behind the opinion is the semi-instinctual gut feeling that is our initial filter. This is an emotional belief: a reaction, derived from our experience, that we first feel and then attempt to understand through logic and words. (I say “semi-instinctual” because highly developed, balanced individuals can actually inform and change their emotional beliefs.)

So, when we are dealing with people–whether it’s working toward consensus at a meeting, motivating a co-worker, or addressing a client’s concerns–we are dealing with a complex of emotional beliefs, masquerading as opinions.

Particularly in business, we’ve been taught to act as though the world is a rational place–or at least, that it can be made rational. And so when we encounter conflicts in opinions, we take all the facts and information from those opinions and try to reconcile them. When we can’t, we start throwing out those that don’t agree with our views until we come up with a patchwork of ideas that meshes together. Or worse, we split the difference between competing opinions and call it “compromise” just to get people on board.

The message of this process is that not every experience is valuable. If I’ve contributed my opinion and it’s been thrown out, it means that I am wrong and my perspective is useless (according to whoever is throwing it out).

But there are reasons for every opinion that are relevant to each solution. If I have a difference of opinion from everyone else in the room, it means I have an important experience to contribute–even if my opinion, the product of that experience, doesn’t bear with reality.

So much of our focus in management (and even leadership) is on getting the facts, the efforts, the opinions to fit together into a whole. And so we may often end up with solutions that are like an exquisite corpse: a too-elaborate tacking-together of mismatched parts that could never be functional.

What if, instead of trying to mesh together a patchwork of opinions, we instead undercut the opinions and worked to form an understanding of the human experience underlying the problem? What if there were no relevant experiences that didn’t matter? What if an opinion, which we often use as a way of rationalizing our emotional beliefs, is actually a lens we can look through to find the experiences that are most important to what we’re doing? Could we find a way to address the whole reality of our human experience of a problem, instead of presuming that our years of experience or our level of mastery elevate us toward perfection?

I’m not sure of the answer, but I do know that developing my own emotional maturity and my own ability to see through the eyes of others is one of the skills I value most in my business experience. This post is my own opinion: the way that I make sense of my experience. I look forward to being informed by yours.

Listen to the Opinion, Speak to the Experience

We each have at least two sets of beliefs: cognitive beliefs and emotional beliefs. Which one do you believe controls you?

You’re likely to say your cognitive beliefs–because it’s your cognitive self that is analyzing the question, and that part of yourself wants to believe it is dominant. That it has the power to bully your emotional self into agreeing with it.

But if we were all governed by our rational selves, we would look at the same facts, see the same things, and form the same opinions. There would be no public debate, and we certainly wouldn’t have the incessant raving of rabid pundits on every form of media.

My emotional beliefs determine which facts are more important than others, which virtues are more significant than others, which vices are more destructive than others. They are the substance of all my conflicts with my lover, my mother, my best friend, my boss.

But my cognitive self wants to believe it’s in control. And so it formulates cognitive beliefs–what we call “opinions.” These opinions form a shield around our emotional beliefs, which is why we hold onto opinions so dearly. To expose our emotional beliefs would leave them open to invalidation.

To measure and count and address the opinions of people is to be a representative, not a leader. A leader isn’t concerned with opinions, she is concerned with experiences.

Consider the myriad experiences in the debates over immigration: legal immigrants with illegal-immigrant friends and family who risked their lives to cross the border; legal immigrants who struggled through a complex system; immigrants whose legal status is threatened or has slipped; union workers put out of work by immigrants; refugees from physical and economic violence; citizens who live close to violent border towns; illegal parents of legal children; kids who grew up with immigrant parents or grandparents. Every one of these people (and more) has his own experience that informs his opinions about immigration.

Phenomenology, the study of experiences, adjoins the fields of philosophy and anthropology. It’s a field that has gained some notoriety lately through books such as The Moment of Clarity, which describes case studies using anthropological techniques to inform business decisions at companies like LEGO and Intel. It also helps to turn this inquiry inward, to observe not just the experiences of customers but the experiences of the people within my own organization.

When I shout an opinion at you, what I’m saying is, “This is the best way I can see to reconcile my own experience with what I know about the world.” If you attempt to address my opinion, you are saying, “You just don’t know enough about the world.” When you attempt to address my experience, however, you are asking, “How can your experience inform what we know about the problem?” Doing so not only moves a team toward consensus, but promises a better solution.

Of course, it’s not wise to ask, “What experience do you think is driving your opinion?” Nobody wants to turn a business meeting into a therapy session. Instead, try to live like an anthropologist among those you would seek to lead. Watch how they work and observe their environment. Hear the patterns of their complaints and identify their core beliefs. Consider their incentives and responsibilities. Try to become one of them (without taking it overboard and acting like you can do what they do). Always, always ask, “Why?”

Over time, and with practice, you will start to hear the experiences. And as you do, it will become possible to address problems in a real, substantial way, rather than simply speaking to the opinions.

If you agree or disagree, please share your own experience in the comments so that we can all learn from it.

Can We Open-Source the Law?

Here’s a wild idea for you.

When the United States was formed as the first modern democracy, its founders had some pretty crazy ideas about how the democratic system would work. People would be elected and leave their jobs to become lawmakers for several years, and then return to their jobs and let someone else take a stab at it. It was an efficient approach to getting the perspectives of the people who made up the nation to collaborate on laws.

But how would they have written the Constitution if they had today’s technologies and insights? Would it have been different?

Enter Jos de Blok, CEO of Buurtzorg, a nursing organization that turned the business of home-care on its head. Unlike traditional leadership that does extensive strategizing and change planning, de Blok has a blog. When he’s planning a change in operations–usually a small, incremental change rather than a massive treatise–he posts it on the blog and allows 24 hours for response from an organization of nearly 8,000. Based on feedback, he proceeds, amends, throws out, or gathers a task force to hammer out the details.

The specifics of Buurtzorg’s approach will not apply for every organization, but the concept is sound: Centralized (non-hierarchical) management of an open-sourced approach.

Open-sourcing has provided not just stable software but some of the most secure software in the world, despite the early concerns over its transparency and malleability. Yet the approach has yet to make much of a leap to other fields, despite being at its core a knowledge method and not a software-specific method. (Wikipedia is among the few notable examples.)

There’s a lot to be learned from the way open-source groups guide development. Many have small development teams that are able to invest and focus on key features that aren’t getting as much attention on the outside. Some companies identify features that have to be developed in a closed environment in order to be valuable, and embed them within a different version of the product. But there are often so many eyes on every line of the source code that it’s difficult to deliberately sabotage the effort, and developers who comb through the code before a final release are typically able to pull out unnecessary operations and tie up loose ends.

These open-source software projects are at work in the wild, accessible to billions of people, and many of the developers working on them have very little personal stake in the outcome except their own excitement about and investment in the project.

Suppose these same techniques were used to guide your organization, every member of which is deeply invested in your policies and decisions. Instead of investing in a complex analysis of the state of your company, you’d get immediate feedback from the people who know it best. Instead of deciding on a change plan and having to get buy-in from every last member of your organization, you’d already have a good chunk of your organization on board. Instead of having to course-correct in the middle of an enormous project, your incremental changes would correct themselves.

If it sounds idealistic, that’s because it is. Don’t misunderstand: It’s a completely practical approach, and may even become a necessary approach to managing large organizations in ten or twenty years. But it’s also idealistic because it requires leaders to relinquish power, and perhaps just as importantly it puts them on uncertain footing. Leaders not only want power for its own sake, they want power because they don’t trust their people, and this approach to an organization’s policy and strategy relies absolutely on trust.

Fortunately there are ways to develop that trust, some of which I’ve already written about. You can treat your employees as partners. You can remove the stigma of failure. You can establish shared values. And as always, you should approach it in the way that works best for your specific organization. But as with any change, at some point you will have to make a leap without knowing exactly where you will land. It can be terrifying, but it’s the only way we accomplish any meaningful change.

Perhaps the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have open-sourced America’s laws even if they’d had the tools. But on the whole they were the kind of people who were always trying to improve upon the work of others. We’d be doing them a disservice if we didn’t try to improve upon theirs, even if it’s only within our own small organizations.

I’m looking forward to discussing your insights and concerns in the comments below.

Rethinking Your Government

Corporate governments don’t often look to the past to see the evolution in tribal and national governments, and consider whether the next step in management will follow along the same lines. In fact, in the business writing and discussions that I’ve encountered, very rarely if ever have I noticed even the suggestion that a corporate “governance model” and a national government might have deep and important similarities.

In fact, the true genius of capitalism from a human-development standpoint was that it decoupled and abstracted political and economic realities. What were formerly struggles between nation-states (consider Machiavelli’s Italy) could now be struggles between nation-corporations, with the toll counted in jobs lost instead of lives lost.

Another impact it had was to more effectively hybridize government, i.e., I am subject to the government of the United States, the particular state and city where I live, and the business for which I work, as well as any other organizations in which I participate. This hybridization makes the world more efficient because each organization can seek the most effective form of government for its activities.

So when I say that most businesses’ governments are totalitarian, oligarchic, and/or socialist, I don’t mean these are negatives. They are simply characteristics that can be properly aligned or misaligned with your organization’s values.

Consider how your organization’s government works. Is it a top-down affair, like a monarchy or an oligarchy? Are there democratic features, and are they really democratic or are you just pacifying the people to keep them from revolting? Who wields the practical power within your organization? And how is your Constitution holding up? Have you added features (like an Innovation Department or a Chief Happiness Officer) instead of revamping your system to fit your present values?

Forward-looking businesses will have to leapfrog the development of world governments in order to keep pace with the future. They will have to skip from where they are (perhaps a little ahead of feudalism) to a post-democratic solution.

Fortunately, we’re starting to get a handle on how such governments work. Frederic Laloux has a great lecture (with Q&A) on the priorities and operations of forward-looking organizations. I have a few things to add, as you will see later this week, but please speak up in the comments about your own experiences with forward-looking governments.

Your Organization Is a Nation

Your organization is a nation.

It isn’t like a nation. It doesn’t have the properties of a nation. It is a nation.

Your organization starts with territory. For countries, the territory is geographical: the southern boundary of much of Canada is the 49th Parallel, and Mayalsia is bounded in part by the Golok River. For most businesses, the territory is intellectual: Amazon’s territory is its online retail site, Johnson & Johnson’s territory is its products, etc. The territory may have physical properties–offices, factories, warehouses, etc.–but it is intellectual in nature.

Your organization has sovereignty within its intellectual territory, which means it can conduct its business more or less the way it wants. Your organization has governance, a.k.a. “government,” to guide and regulate the actions within its territory. And of course, your organization has its own culture, with its own language, beliefs, and customs.

Because your organization is its own nation, there are a number of lessons to be derived from public policy and economics. It also faces dangers similar to those faced by world governments, even if it’s at a much smaller scale and the results look different: a revolt may look like an internal power struggle, but it may also be a mass exodus. And if your organization is large enough, it has its own subcultures that have to work with one another.

This week, I’ll be discussing some of the practical ramifications of this idea that your organization is a nation.