Boundary-less organisations – meeting notes

Had a fascinating couple of hours this morning at a round table session organised by Roger, founder of http://www.profinda.com on the changing world of work; how do we organise ourselves in a world where (contrary to Marissa Mayer’s preference, perhaps) the teams in which we work don’t all sit in orderly divisions within a single company in a single location?

Some, possibly disconnected, thoughts in reflection:

Whilst much is made of the individual, little is thought about the organisational

Much of the thinking about how to enable people to work in boundary-less organisations today focuses on technology and personal psychology. Sociological, or cultural, issues are skirted around, and often become things lumped together into something that lands on the desk of the internal communications team (as if telling people what their culture will be is in someway helpful).

A model I’ve found that helps a great deal to get people thinking around the issues of culture is The Lily Pond model – the physical manifestations of an organisations’ culture (the flowers and leaves of the lily) are the visible things: physical artifacts and people’s behaviours; but chopping away at the visible will only cause it to grow back as before. To affect deep cultural change in an organisation (and therefore change the physical manifestations), you need to get to the stems and roots: the beliefs, which in turn are driven by the values people hold.

Take an example – a train company. In a train company that holds values around running trains on time, passengers can be seen as getting in the way of the service delivering to its objective, and therefore can further reflect in the way passengers are treated by staff. Training staff in customer service does nothing in the long term if you want to improve customer experience – you’d need to change the core values around providing a great journey (that would probably include being on time). Compare this also with the use of the word “user” to describe the people who use a system or service.

Organisations age; some hold true to founding values, others focus around shareholder value

Within a few weeks of joining Reuters as an employee a few years ago, I was hearing stories of how Julius Reuter experimented with pigeons and the early telegraph. Interestingly, the focus of those stories was the transmission network  not the information it carried, and shortly before my arrival, the core networks at the heart of their business had been sold off. The transition from network provider to “information company” was something that was a struggle if nothing else because the founders stories didn’t match the new mission.

For companies that still have their founders around, the founder’s story tends to stay alive. But challenges emerge when those founding stories dissolve – either through time, or through dilution as a result of changes in purpose or M&A activity and the like. Is this the point when “shareholder value” emerges as the primary mission for an organisation (and at that point, do many organisations (and the people working for them) lose their way?

How many companies, I wonder, employee historians or archivists these days to actively keep these stories alive?

Aim to “lock your staff in”, and you’ll probably lose them

As we become more loosely connected to the organisations in which we work (through trends of outsourcing, contracting and a breaking of the social contracts that have traditionally existed on the basis of career paths), there may be a temptation for organisations to focus employee engagement and development to try to “lock them in” to the the employeer – for the few folk that are actually employed on a salary, make them stay. But might making people as externally valuable as possible actually be a way to get the right people to stay? Is there anything worse than the sense of golden (or even iron) handcuffs tying an employee to a job and employer they no longer want?

If someone knows that they can easily get a job elsewhere, then they’re more likely to be there for the right reasons

Trust issues

A lot of our discussion focused on areas of trust – and how much negative behaviour in organisations seems to relate back to a lack of trust – of organisations in their people, and of people in their organisations.

Learning from freelancer cultures

If the working world is to become increasingly boundary-less, what can be learned from industries that have already deep cultures based on freelance working? What is it about the film and creative industries that means that people prefer freelance status, and that that works both for the individuals and their collective, collaborative output? (Or is it just that they don’t know anything different?)

If the future is unknown, why is leadership still expected to have unambiguous knowledge of what the future holds?

What holds us back from organisational leadership being clear that they don’t know what the future holds, and focusing on helping people work together to define it? What role does company ownership have hear (the “logic” of the markets where “logic” is equivalent to the emotional reactions of drunk teenagers?)