Are you an HR or IT professional with a skillset, talent, and/or God-given gift that needs to be shared with the world and throughout the digital economy, rather than isolated — even hidden — within a single organization?
Talent Misalignment
If you answered YES to the question, I would guess that you probably have proactively developed a unique skill set as part of your desire to stay current and relevant in the Digital Age. Unfortunately, there’s a high probability that you have also run headfirst into the proverbial “brick wall” when it comes to dealing with an outdated Operating Model (or two), and the multiple layers of bureaucracy and resistance to change — most often from those that have been very successful in defining, strengthening, or enforcing the status quo and will pretty much do anything to keep it intact.
A secondary question is…do you spend a significant amount of time trying to convince your colleagues and leadership to adopt new ways of working that align with your unique skill set, desired interactions, growth mindset, etc? If it has risen to the level of what your mother taught you as a kid that one shouldn’t argue with idiots, because it will make you look and sound like one…then you definitely will relate to this post.
This type of talent misalignment within the current IT Operating Model is not only a concern related to The Great Resignation but also the underlying Quiet Quitting issue…nor is it even limited to the IT Organization. For example, this dire situation exists because every Chief Information Office (CIO) is now charged with elevating their traditional IT Organization to become the business as software continues to dominate and become the new means of production throughout the digital economy, either through consumption or development. Let’s just say that it has become a major part of my purpose to make sure that — at the very least — every HR and IT professional understands this misalignment. Even more importantly, how detrimental is the entrenched status quo to your chances of truly working in new ways? …and potentially even resulting in destroying any chance one has of feeling personally or professionally fulfilled in this thing we call work, which is not just a physical place anymore. ChatGPT and generative AI, in general, simply supercharges software development, possessing the potential for everyone to become developers via natural language.
The Human-centric, Networked Organization
Much has been written and recommended in regards to how difficult cultural transformation is and what it should entail so I won’t even attempt to summarize the complexity of it all but yes, it is beyond being just complicated — especially if one dives into a transformation effort believing that the culture and organization is something that can be shaped to management’s precious specifications, like wet clay. The entangled nature of organizations is exactly why the Human-centric, Networked Organization is a better target state as we seek to gain business agility, even if one has to first become a Connected Enterprise on the way to removing the traditional org structure.
A networked organization is one that is connected together by informal networks and the demands of the company’s purpose, rather than a formal organizational structure.
Another option – as an intermediate step to removing the formal organizational structure – is to first become a connected enterprise by focusing first on Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) and understanding the why and all the benefits of being more connected.
Both approaches should prioritize relationships, openness, teamwork, and communities — hence its human-centricity — rather than based on distinct reporting lines that just simply reinforce the worn-out command and control management style that has very little relevance in the Future of Work and the subsequent development of a Digital Operating Model (DOM). An operating model that only comes into existence as the IT Operating Model gets reimagined, ensuring the traditional IT organization has an opportunity to adopt its new role as a Digital Product Broker. A role that includes leveraging a Ways of Working (WoW) Center for Enablement (C4E) as a central tenet of one’s Working in New Ways Strategy. The WoW C4E concept was discovered in Jonathan Smart’s book, Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility. There are a lot of fundamental concepts and principles in what Smart describes as Better Value Sooner Safer Happier (BVSSH), which has become not only a movement enabling organizations to achieve better outcomes for all and a more human-centric world of work, but has grown into a community, consulting, and training program.
Without a doubt, the Future of Work is coming into focus as the world becomes more decentralized, distributed, and personalized — which should provide us with some great actionable insights for our collective journey to being digital. The current challenges as well as those in the future related to Digital Business Transformation and thus becoming an Exponential Organization (ExO) are what this post seeks to uncover. In doing so, the following hierarchy of terms and concepts then become a foundation:
Future of Work — Visionary content that one can subscribe to, from a multitude of different analysts and futurists following macro trends.
Working in New Ways — The Strategy required to make one’s chosen Future of Work vision a reality — must be linked to talent acquisition and retention.
Enterprise Service Management — Becomes a Digital Business Capability to support your Working in New Ways strategy — defines what.
Modern Digital Workplace —The Product that gets continuously envisioned and developed throughout the organization — defines the how.
If one subscribes to the notion of a digital economy, a shift to an Open & Participatory governance model is also a critical success factor. Participation was an area of focus, more than 50 years ago in Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Y in his book, The Human Side of Enterprise, where he described two management styles, authoritarian (Theory X) and participative (Theory Y). Authoritarian aspects of the theory have led to micro-management, largely due to the explicit or perceived dislike or lack of motivation from employees towards the work at hand. Historically, a notion that is now popular among those that have a “Type-A” personality, even though education levels of employees have risen dramatically, and the work has shifted from manual labor to knowledge work. This also explains where we got the command-and-control management model often associated with Scientific Management, aka Taylorism, by Fredrick Taylor as well as the higher levels of bureaucracy that models like Humanocracy attempt to reduce or eliminate.
Experts in this area argue that Theory X has very little place in a human-centric, networked organizational model, leaving Theory Y as the desired (some 50 years later) mindset for the Digital Age as it aligns with employees taking pride and ownership in their work. Ownership leads to higher levels of trust and collaboration between managers and team members. After all, digital is a battle of ideas and human creativity is critical. It is worth stating that some employees need a Theory X management approach; however, it should be limited or short-lived and if issues persistent, it is time to make a change. Many will confuse or try and deliberately substitute a Matrix Organization for a Networked Organization, but they are very different structurally; a matrix just adds additional layers of control and hierarchy with every individual contributor also reporting to a Project Manager. From a Cynefin Framework perspective and given their project rather than product focus, a Matrix Organization’s structure is highly calibrated for always attempting to apply best practices (Cynefin Clear Domain) and traditional Waterfall project management methods that one would associate with an efficiency-focused, operational context.
Final Thoughts
In order to be a significant player in the digital economy, one must be able to solve customer’s complex problems at scale through innovation. The ultimate challenge is simultaneously ensuring the underlying technology simply disappears via an array of ambient computing experiences as part of the orchestration of value throughout an ecosystem. This includes not only change in the marketplace but also change related to improving our ways of working and recognizing that our organizations need to be Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), which are also emergent in their disposition and thus are by their very nature, lacking direct causality. This means that the entire organization becomes dynamic, continuously learning to adapt to external forces, and emerges to new states when necessary to meet unique environmental needs. What makes an organization a CAS is the fact that it is no longer a collection of complicated components, largely due to entanglement.
I personally believe that every person be offered the opportunity to become independent in their work and almost every organization is starving for ideas…ideas that only humans can produce through their unique skillset, talents, and God-given gifts. Some ideas will be the result of one’s tactical mindset, while others will be transformational AND we need to stop believing that every person is capable of producing both — or going from tactical to transformational — just because they’ve reached a certain level on a traditional org chart. This also makes strategy accessible to everyone, rather than only being done from the top-down. Stop the madness folks…
If you found this post insightful and are curious about the idea behind The Value Network LLC, please Join the community as well as follow us on X and connect with me personally on LinkedIn. Always happy to collaborate on Working in New Ways strategic ideas.