I was recently involved in running a remarkable meeting with a group of senior people from a particular region of Scotland: the local council, the enterprise company, tourist development, VisitScotland, large local business interests, political leaders.
They met to address the conundrum – repeated I suspect across the country – of why, in spite of their best efforts over many years, their region still fails to fulfil its potential. They were there to give it one more shot.
Compared with what I am used to however, the preparation was chaotic and distinctly unpromising. There was no agenda, no preparatory reading, no papers, no formal invitation. I had the sinking feeling that this was one of those “poisoned chalice” assignments, doomed to failure.
I should not have worried.
The meeting was a great success and the loose way in which it had been convened played a big part in that. Indeed, I see this as one example of a much larger trend that has been growing in recent years and that government – I might say especially in Scotland – is struggling to keep up with. Disorganisation is the new organisation.
You may have noticed this yourself. It is a trend visible at all levels, from global diplomacy to local action. We see it wherever people are steering clear of formal organisation, rules, remits, committees and bureaucracy and developing looser, more ad hoc structures, often time-limited, organised just so much as is necessary to get the job done.
At the global level, new groupings of countries are arising to address specific issues, flexing the rules of formal structures. NATO has “coalitions of the willing”. The EU has “variable geometry” for different groups of members to collaborate at different speeds. Formal treaty alliances are giving way to looser “global issues networks” comprising groups of nations “especially concerned by or experienced in the issue”.
Take climate change negotiations, for example. The usual international categories of rich/poor, big/small, north/south etc are thrown into confusion by coalitions around emissions, energy security, coastal vulnerability and a host of other new factors. There are doubts now whether the blunt instrument of international treaty- making is capable of dealing with such complexity. Gwin Prins and Steve Rayner have argued we are trying to prise the world community into “the wrong trousers“.
The same trend is evident in business and organisations. “Ad-hocracy“, identified as the most creative organisational form nearly 40 years ago, is now all the rage. The think-tank Demos produced a pamphlet in 2004 on Disorganisation. Matthew Taylor at RSA has become something of a champion for Michael Thompson’s work on “clumsy solutions” to complex problems. And the plethora of recent policy and business tomes on “management 2.0″ are full of suggestions for how to introduce disruption and creative innovation into structures that have become too big, too complacent, too rigid, too set in their ways. I recommend Jim Collins’s timely book How the Mighty Fall as a sobering warning for many of our more established companies and institutions.
But this is not just a management fad. There is good science emerging too. Resilience as a constant cycle of growth, decay and adaptation is starting to influence business thinking. Natural cycles go through phases of rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganisation. By analogy, at some point, at the height of its power, an organisation has to start to let go and release some of its tightly bound energy in order to spark regeneration.
We also understand much better the way that structure and order is not necessarily something that needs to be imposed. It arises naturally in self-organising systems. Anyone participating in the web 2.0 world of social media experiences that every day. Smart organisations are starting to realise the considerable benefits (and cost savings) of what Stuart Kauffman identified 25 years ago as “order for free“.
So how does this relate to a high level meeting in a small corner of Scotland? It turned out that the group could turn its informality and flexibility into an asset. The individuals involved had sat round countless tables together discussing the same issues for years – strategies had been drawn up, policies agreed, governments lobbied… but not much had happened.
They realised that they stood a greater chance of being influential in action if they resisted rigidity, remained informal and low key, did not claim authority, were able to participate on a personal basis rather than as representatives, and provided a strategic context, a unique resource and a source of encouragement to the innovators actually moving the region forward on the ground. Predictably it was the senior business figures in the room who took the lead in framing this way of working.
I have seen the same pattern elsewhere. A recent session on how to maintain momentum in the My Future’s in Falkirk programme identified the risk that managing the process might stifle it. Again it was an industry voice arguing for something less formal: “We have to allow people the excitement that comes with a shift in the way of thinking. We cannot just tell them what to do. We can’t have people using the management structures as a source of comfort. People need to get out of their comfort zone if we are to realise our aspirations.”
This shift to less formal structures seems deeply counter-cultural in Scotland where the state is ever present, highly visible and always keen to claim the credit. I see the shift being led in practice by enlightened individuals in the business community – who have a greater latitude than their public sector partners to step out of line, often a more natural humility in the face of big social issues beyond their day jobs, and a greater faith in looser structures.
Government and its agencies should learn to swim with this flow, not resist it.
Tags: economic regeneration, governance, management, order, organisation, resilience
Nice post Graham. Disorganization is very visible here in California. 90% of the conferences I attend have an open space technology component (http://www.openspaceworld.org/) to them. The cutting edge of software development practice is agile (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html), and then there is the democratic workplace movement (http://www.worldblu.com/).
The key in all these cases I find is that people end up having a more direct human interaction with one another, unmediated by predefined roles. These filters are removed so the group can bring forth the best from each person present to meet the needs of the moment. Otto Scharmer’s work on Theory U (http://www.ottoscharmer.com/) is really all about this.
I also found this article the other day (http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09306?pg=all) about the neuroscience behind high performing teams, which is well worth a read. The concluding quote being:
“Perhaps the greatest challenge facing leaders of business or government is to create the kind of atmosphere that promotes status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. When historians look back, their judgment of this period in time may rise or fall on how organizations, and society as a whole, operated. Did they treat people fairly, draw people together to solve problems, promote entrepreneurship and autonomy, foster certainty wherever possible, and find ways to raise the perceived status of everyone?”
Lovely post Graham.
You don’t name it here, but I know you know all about it because you wrote about the ‘edge of chaos’ in the New Statesman at least 10 years ago. So just to chip in that, if the edge of chaos is evolutionarily the most creative place to be, then this kind of disorganisation bodes well for creativity and survival in any other context too.
It also reminds me that Alain de Vulpian identifies the trend towards ‘the self-organisation’ as perhaps the defining characteristic of the new modernity. Which means that it could be just the thing to permit the New Model Citizen’s Army to go banging on the doors of our leaders’ homes insisting that (say) ecological collapse be shunted up above knife crime and skunk on the political agenda.
Finally, talking to Mark Brown the other day, I was reminded that in the old pendulum swing between ‘control’ and ‘freedom’, the most fruitful condition might be a more stabilised middle way (Lord Gautama’s not Lord Anthony’s).