Group items tagged

It is essential that autonomy is combined with responsibility.

staff typically manage the whole work process from making sales, manufacture, accounts, to dispatch

they are also responsible for managing their own capitalization; a form of virtual ownership develops. Everything they need for their work, from office furniture to high-end machinery will appear on their individual balance sheet; or it will need to be bought in from somewhere else in the company on a pay-as-you go or lease basis. All aspects of the capital deployed in their activities must be accounted for and are therefore treated with the respect one accords one’s own property.

The result is not simply a disparate set of individuals doing their own thing under the same roof. Together they benefit from an economy of scale as well as their combined resources to tackle large projects; they are an interconnected whole. They have in common a brand, which they jointly represent, and also a business management system (the Say-Do-Prove system) - consisting not only of system-wide boundaries but also proprietary business management software which helps each take care of the back-end accounting and administrative processing. The effect is a balance between freedom and constraint, individualism and social process.

embodiment of meaning

But culture is a much more personal phenomenon

Culture is like climate- it does not exist in and of itself- it cannot exist in a vacuum, it must exist within a medium.

underlying culture

Incompatibility between the presenting culture and the underlying one provide a great source of tension

The truth of course is that when tension builds to a critical level it takes just a small perturbation to burst the bubble and the hidden culture reveals itself powered by the considerable pent-up energy.

Consider again the idea that for the health of an endangered species; the conditions in their habitat must be just right. In business, the work environment can be considered analogous to this idea of habitat.

A healthy environment is one that provides a blank canvas; it should be invisible in that it allows culture to be expressed without taint

The over-arching, high-level obligations are applied to the organization via contractual and legal terms.

But it is these obligations that the traditional corporate model separates out into functions and then parcels off to distinct groups. The effect is that a clear sight of these ‘higher’ obligations by the people at the front-end is obstructed. The overall sense of responsibility is not transmitted but gets lost in the distortions, discontinuities and contradictions inherent in the corporate systems of hierarchy and functionalization.

employees are individually rewarded for their contribution to each product. They are not “compensated” for the hours spent at work. If an employee wants to calculate their hourly rate, then they are free to do so however, they are only rewarded for the outcome not the duration of their endeavors.

Another simplification is the application of virtual accounts (Profit and Loss (P&L) account and Balance Sheet) on each person within the business.

The company systems simply provide a mechanism for cheaply measuring the success of each individual’s choices. For quality the measure is customer returns, for delivery it is an on-time-and-in-full metric and profit is expressed in terms of both pounds sterling and ROI (return on investment).

The innumerable direct links back to an external reality -like the fragile ties that bound giant Gulliver, seem much more effective at aligning the presenting culture and the underlying embodied culture, and in doing so work to remove the existing tension.

With a culture that responds directly to reality, the rules in the environment can be “bounding” rather than “binding”- limiting rather than instructive; this way individual behavior need not be directed at all. The goal is to free the individual to express himself fully through his work, bounded only by the limits of the law. With clever feedback (self-referencing feedback loops) integrated into the design, the individuals can themselves grow to collectively take charge of the system boundaries, culture and even the environment itself, always minded of the inherent risks they are balancing, leaving the law of the land as the sole artificial boundary.

the conventional company, which, instead of rewarding enterprise, trains compliance by suppressing individual initiative under layer upon layer of translation tools.

apply accountability to the individual not command-and-control.

without the divisive and overbearing management cabal the natural reaction of humans is to combine their efforts

a new member of staff at Matt Black Systems

recruited by another staff member (sponsor) and they will help you learn the basics of the business management system- they will help you get to know the ropes.

jobs are passed to new staff members, a royalty payment can be established on the work passed over.

Along with that job you will be given a cash float (risk capital), P&L Account, a Balance Sheet and computer software to help plan and record your activities. Your operation is monitored by your sponsor to see if you increase the margin or volume, and so establish a sustainable operation. Training and mentoring is provided to support the steep learning curve - but without removing the responsibility of producing a return on the sponsor’s risk capital.

You will, in the meantime be looking to establish some of your own work for which you will not have to pay a commission or royalty to your sponsor and this will provide you with more profitable operations such that eventually you might pass back to the sponsor the original operation, as it has become your lowest margin activity. It will then find its way to a new employee (along with the associated Balance Sheet risk capital) where the process is repeated by the sponsor.[4]

Remuneration for staff is calibrated in a way that reflects the balance of different forces around ‘pay’

there is an obligation upon the company to pay a minimum wage even if the profitability of the operation does not support this

there are therefore two aspects of the basic pay structure: one is “absolute” and reflects the entrepreneurial skill level of the employee according to a sophisticated grading scale

A further 20% of the original profit will be paid into his risk capital account, which will be his responsibility to deploy in any way he sees fit as part of his Balance Sheet. Of the three remaining 20% slices of the original profit, one is paid out as corporation tax, another as a dividend to the shareholders and the last retained as collective risk capital on the company’s balance sheet- a war chest so to speak.

Julian Wilson and Andrew Holm sell products / services to their staff (such as office space and software) they have an identical customer/supplier relationship with the other employees.

Naturally there are some people that can’t generate a profit. The sponsor’s risk capital will eventually be consumed through pay. After a process of rescue and recovery- where their shortcomings are identified and they are given the opportunity to put them right, they either improve or leave, albeit with a sizeable increase in their skills.

there is a gradual process of accustomisation; the void of the new employee is surrounded by others dealing with their particular activities, offering both role models and operations they may wish to relinquish. One step at a time the new employee acquires the skills to become completely self-managing, to increase their margins, to make investments, to find new business, to become a creator of their own success. Ultimately, they learn to be an entrepreneur.

responsible autonomy as an alternative vision to traditional hierarchy

Matt Black Systems it is not simply commitment that they targeted in their employees, rather they aim for the specific human qualities they sum up as magic- those of curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality).

a new form of association of individuals working together under the umbrella of a company structure: a kind of collective autonomy

The business is called Matt Black Systems, based in Poole in dorset

Turning an organisation on its head- removing all management, establishing a P&L account and Balance Sheet on everyone in the organisation and having customers payment go first into the respective persons P&L account has revolutionised this company. 

This innovative company’s approach views business success as wholly reliant upon human agency, and its wellspring at the individual level.

problem (of unnecessarily high overheads placed on production) that arguably is behind the decline in western manufacturing

over-managed business

Autonomy Enables Productivity

organizational design brings to light the unconscious socio-philosophical paradigm of the society in which it exists, organizational development points to how change occurs.

a mechanistic approach to organization

scientific management employs rationalism and determinism in pursuit of efficiency, but leaves no place for self-determination for most people within the system.

Command and Control

today, a really “modern” view of an organization is more likely to be depicted in terms that are akin to an organism.

When it comes to getting work done, the simple question is: are people the problem or the solution?

the Taylorist approach may be more real in theory than in practice: its instrumentalist view of the workforce is cursed by unintended consequences. When workers have no space for their own creative expression, when they are treated like automata not unique individuals, when they become demotivated and surly, when they treat their work as a necessary evil; this is no recipe for a functional organization.

The natural, human reaction to this is unionization, defiance and even outright rebellion; to counter this, management grows larger and more rigid in pursuit of compliance, organizations become top heavy with staff who do not contribute directly to the process of value creation but wield power over those who do.

voluntary slavery of ‘wagery’

Even when disgruntled employees strike free and start their own businesses they seem unable to resist the hegemony of the conventional command-and-control approach

Making the transition involves adherence to a whole new sociology of work with all the challenging social and psychological implications that brings.

first principal that people in the business have the ability to provide the solution

In the “theory of constraints” the goal is to align front-line staff into a neat, compact line for maximum efficiency. Surely the most considered approach is to have front-line staff self-align in pursuit of their individual goals?

The removal of hierarchy and specialization is key to a massive improvement in both profitability and productivity. In summary: there are no managers in the company, or foremen, or sales staff, or finance departments; the company is not functionally compartmentalized and there is no hierarchy of command. In fact every member of staff operates as a virtual micro-business with their own Profit & Loss account and Balance Sheet, they manage their own work and see processes through from end to end

Formal interaction between colleagues takes place via “customer and supplier” relationships.

autonomy enables productivity

if one creates a space in which staff pursue their own goals and are not paid by the hour, they will focus on their activities not the clock; if they are not told what to do, they will need to develop their own initiative; if they are free to develop their own processes, they will discover through their own creative faculties how to work more productively- in pursuit of their goals

The human qualities which are of greatest potential value to the business are: curiosity, imagination, creativity, cooperation, self-discipline and realization (bringing ideas to reality)

These qualities are the very ones most likely to be withheld by an individual when the environment is ‘wrong’.

Any elements in the business environment that undermine the autonomy and purpose of the individual will see the above qualities withheld

High on the list of undermining elements come power-hierarchy and over-specialization

the responsibility of the individual is formalized, specified and restricted. An improved system is not one where responsibility is distributed perfectly but rather one where there is simply no opportunity for responsibility to be lost (via the divisions between the chunks). Systems must be reorganized so responsibility -the most essential of qualities -is protected and wholly preserved.

Matt Black Systems believe this can only be done by containing the whole responsibility within an individual, holding them both responsible and giving them ‘response-ability’

The experience of Matt Black Systems demonstrates that radical change is possible

productivity is up 300%, the profit margin is up 10%[3], customer perception has shifted from poor to outstanding, product returns are at less than 1%, “on time and in full” delivery is greater than 96%, pay has increased 100%.

staff develop broader and deeper skills and feel greater job security; they get direct feedback from their customers which all go to fuel self-confidence and self-esteem.

the staff manage themselves

“only variety can absorb variety”.

What is particular about their story is that behind it is a very consciously crafted design that surrounds the individualism of each person with hard boundaries of the customer, the law and the business. It is these boundaries rather than the instructive persona of ‘the boss’ that gives rise to the discipline in which individuals can develop. Autonomy is not the same as freedom, at least not in the loose sense of ‘do as you please’. An autonomous person is a person who has become self-governing, who has developed a capacity for self-regulation, quite a different notion from the absence of boundaries. Indeed, it is with establishing the right boundaries that the business philosophy is most concerned. The company provides the crucible in which the individual can develop self-expression but the container itself is bounded. Wilson calls this “designing the void”. This crucible is carefully constructed from an all-encompassing, interconnecting set of boundaries that provide an ultimate limit to behaviours (where they would fall foul of the law or take risks with catastrophic potential). It is an illusion to think, as a director of a company, that you are not engaged in a process of social conditioning; the basis of the culture is both your responsibility and the result of your influence. The trick is to know what needs to be defined and what needs to be left open. The traditional authoritarian, controlling characters that often dominate business are the antithesis of this in their drive to fill this void with process, persona and instruction. Alternatively, creating an environment that fosters enterprise, individuals discover how to be enterprising.

create optimal conditions in a research organization with the aim of enhancing the creativity of its scientific staff

Creativity has been traditionally associated with art and literature but since the early twentieth century, science has also been regarded as a creative activity

Measuring creativity is a challenging task owing to its complex and elusive nature

Measurement of brain activity showed that creativity correlates with two brain states: a quiescent, relaxed state corresponding to the inspiration stage, and a much more active state corresponding to the elaboration stage

models of creativity

have a common feature: they depend on a balance between analytical and synthetic thinking, and usually describe the creative process as a sequence of phases that alternate between these states

Most research on creativity has focused on the individual

However, more recent studies suggest that creativity also depends strongly on the social and cultural context

breakthroughs depended on collaboration and social support

social environment in business organizations affects the creativity of their employees

Although creative individuals are essential, the strong link with the environment indicates that creativity might be greatly enhanced by generating a culture that supports the creative process.

Many of the interviewees repeatedly emphasized three main qualities necessary to be a good scientist: rigorous intellect, the ability to get the job done and the ability to have creative ideas.

almost all interviewees characterized their breakthrough moment as an abrupt leap in understanding

Although breakthroughs in science depend on such an ‘internal' conceptual shift, they also rely on ‘external' experimental results. However, most interviewees described their breakthroughs as largely internal:

Only two scientists expressed the view that their breakthroughs were purely external events, based on the observation of novel data.

intuition

must be combined with rational thinking to be effective

Although the synthesis of a new concept relies on intuition, which is based on subconscious mental processing, it must be subjected to conscious examination and analysis

specific mental skills or attitudes

ability to make unexpected connections

ability to choose relevant possibilities from an infinite set of irrelevant ones

interest in the unknown'

enjoyment of the creative process

stimulation by interacting with colleagues

undoubtedly the most crucial trait for creativity, which thrives on the exchange of ideas

The majority felt that the individual and the collective are equally important:

what interactions are optimal for creativity

The majority of interviewees answered that other people provided them with ‘inspiration to do something new'

positive feedback after the emergence of a new idea is almost as important as the inspiration that triggered it

collective provides the individual with technical expertise

Therefore, scientists would value a culture of interaction and mutual inspiration more highly than access to technology, although the latter is essential for their experiments.

At the end of the interviews, each scientist was asked to describe the best possible conditions for generating creativity at a research institute.

Cross-fertilization is absolutely essential

These results indicate strongly that an interactive environment is the single most important factor for stimulating creativity

interacting with people doing very different things

interacting with colleagues informally

interactions within any institution are strongly affected by its organization

Several interviewees described ‘an open hierarchy' as an important factor for creativity

hierarchy is based on genuine respect because people are great scientists, but at the same time they're very approachable and open towards what you have to say

These results suggest that the best conditions for scientific creativity come with a free-flowing hierarchy and a highly developed culture of interaction to guarantee the exchange of ideas and inspiration.

Furthermore, interdisciplinary interactions lead to the generation of new and unusual ideas

Finally, because of the freedom to try new things, these ideas can be tested and eventually generate new insights.

Creativity can be described as an emergent phenomenon

nonlinear phenomena

Emergence depends on dynamic interactions between individual agents within the system

The importance of a ‘freedom to try new things' and a ‘free-flowing hierarchy' further supports the idea that individual components in an emergent system must be able to interact flexibly without central control

During the interviews, it became apparent that although a culture of interaction and creativity exists at EMBL, this itself is not often the subject of discussion. The values on which this culture is based are seemingly implicit rather than explicit

Potentially, the EMBL culture of interaction could be strengthened further by consciously expressing and discussing the values on which it is based

maker faires

community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising

The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological

Technological

information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web

appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development

Sociological

People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems

get informed and take action

Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes

play and work together

rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’

The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.

Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation

What’s coming along next ?  “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?

Shorter cycle-based development and release

Agile development

It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.

The Internet of Things (IoT)

clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities

experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used

The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data

ethical, political and social impact policy decisions

that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives

‘we’ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies

participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the ‘new rules’

What the Future May Hold

the ‘scenario planning’ approach

world’s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy

A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation

Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century

are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies

The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.

cultural ‘mutation’

Wirearchy

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.

the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East

The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.

Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.

Participative Work Design – The Six Criteria

in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.

contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.

peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world

Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.

But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.

systemic problems that arise from the R&D funding system and incentive structure that the federal government put in place after World War II

Researchers across the country encounter increasingly fierce competition for money.

unding rates in many National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) programs are now at historical lows, declining from more than 30% before 2001 to 20% or even less in 2011

even the most prominent scientists will find it difficult to maintain funding for their laboratories, and young scientists seeking their first grant may become so overwhelmed that individuals of great promise will be driven from the field

anxiety and frustration

The growth of the scientific enterprise on university campuses during the past 60 years is not sustainable and has now reached a tipping point at which old models no longer work

Origins of the crisis

ederal funding agencies must work with universities to ensure that new models of funding do not stymie the progress of science in the United States

The demand for research money greatly exceeds the supply

the demand for research funding has gone up

The deeper sources of the problem lie in the incentive structure of the modern research university, the aspirations of scientists trained by those universities, and the aspirations of less research-intensive universities and colleges across the nation

competitive grants system

if a university wants to attract a significant amount of sponsored research money, it needs doctoral programs in the relevant fields and faculty members who are dedicated to both winning grants and training students

The production of science and engineering doctorates has grown apace

Even though not all doctorate recipients become university faculty, the size of the science and engineering faculty at U.S. universities has grown substantially

proposal pressure goes up

These strategies make sense for any individual university, but will fail collectively unless federal funding for R&D grows robustly enough to keep up with demand.

At the very time that universities were enjoying rapidly growing budgets, and creating modes of operation that assumed such largess was the new normal, Price warned that it would all soon come to a halt

the human and financial resources invested in science had been increasing much faster than the populations and economies of those regions

growth in the scientific enterprise would have to slow down at some point, growing no more than the population or the economy.

Dead-end solutions

studies sounded an alarm about the potential decline in U.S. global leadership in science and technology and the grave implications of that decline for economic growth and national security

Although we are not opposed to increasing federal funding for research, we are not optimistic that it will happen at anywhere near the rate the Academies seek, nor do we think it will have a large impact on funding rates

universities should not expect any radical increases in domestic R&D budgets, and most likely not in defense R&D budgets either, unless the discretionary budgets themselves grow rapidly. Those budgets are under pressure from political groups that want to shrink government spending and from the growth of spending in mandatory programs

The basic point is that the growth of the economy will drive increases in federal R&D spending, and any attempt to provide rapid or sustained increases beyond that growth will require taking money from other programs.

The demand for research money cannot grow faster than the economy forever and the growth curve for research money flattened out long ago.

Path out of crisis

The goal cannot be to convince the government to invest a higher proportion of its discretionary spending in research

Getting more is not in the cards, and some observers think the scientific community will be lucky to keep what it has

The potential to take advantage of the infrastructure and talent on university campuses may be a win-win situation for businesses and institutions of higher education.