HR operations for organizations make a fine art out of developing job descriptions, roles and responsibilities, duties, and key performance indicators.
They’ve led to management layers and mechanical thinking, and sometimes to zombie businesses that work to the script but can miss essential opportunities.
In effect, they’ve developed cogs for factory structures. This ‘division of labour’ model, whilst not necessary entirely obsolete, can have the effect of doing business today a lot of harm.
The problem with cogs is that a cog out of alignment can halt a whole machine. Cogs are geared to work in a pre-prescribed fashion, they’re passive processors, part of ‘the system’.
Many a corporate structure today is based on a structure comprised of cogs.
One of the principles of Visceral Business is that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’; we help organizations adapt to become socially calibrated so they’re more strategically connected and dynamic.
As we become more networked in general, as the lines between inside and outside the co-created business become blurred, I have a hunch that we may look at mechanical business models one day and see this way of organising as having as much sophistication as a set of meccano.
By comparison, corpuscles are rapidly adaptive receptors that respond to mechanical pressure or distortion. They balance introvert and extrovert stimuli within the corporate body as a whole, based on a combination of shared imperative and free will.
And because they’re adaptive, they can coagulate.
In business management today, there are strong arguments emerging to think of people as corpuscles not cogs, as vital, dynamic and highly differentiated elements of ability, and to work with them in this way.
Evidence is emerging to suggest incorporating (quite literally), the biological nature of human networks into business strategy, that strong organizations are ‘super-organisms’ as Nicholas Christakis, talking about the power of social networks at the RSA, described them last week.
Matthew Taylor, writing in the RSA blog yesterday, expanded on this by referencing the RSA’s Connected Communities project, and saying ‘it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.’
Coagulation, at a very primal level, breeds creativity. It happens when corpuscles cluster together through shared purpose and affinity and, today coagulation doesn’t just breed creativity, it breeds profit.
Have a look at this video of a talk Robert Scoble gave recently at Stanford. Making some leeway for the slightly amusing subtitles, it hints at the way social business is going and makes the point compellingly that how we need to be thinking and organising today, how people work and how ideas spread now, is a biological business.
Businesses can gain ground today by re-imagining their business frameworks to be less about structures and more about genetics, by thinking about making a move from managing cogs to cultivating corpuscles.
Organizational structures are highly interconnected, and as we move away from the mechanical concepts of organization they’re becoming more permeable; as such, I think they’re going to be more capable of spreading ideas through affinity, by receptive people as a process of osmosis and by working with the talent connected to their brand, both inside and outside the walls of the organization.
What are your thoughts?
