The two approaches are what I call the keeping up and letting go approaches. There are two basic (but not mutually exclusive) responses you can have to this phenomenon of shrinking org-chart views of corporate realities: turn to more powerful maps or step back and reconsider what sort of situation awareness you actually need in order to be effective. The evidence of vast numbers of zombie corporations (and other organizations) around us suggests, prima facie, that the amazing, shrinking org chart is the symptom of a pervasive problem: that of adapting to a more dynamic business environment. In its terminal, mortally stricken form, this disoriented, disconnected entity turned into the zombie corporation - living-dead corporations like Radio Shack - that had failed a critical transformation challenge. Inside became the direction of increasing disconnectedness from reality. Up become the direction of increasing disorientedness. Inside/outside too, became an increasingly meaningless fiction, as natural connections reasserted themselves across nominally controlled boundaries.Īfter a century of subservience, the social graph had reasserted its authority over the impoverished org chart. The corporation’s chief storyteller in the stock market (or, in more regulated and corporatized parts of the world, chief lobbyist in the corridors of power) rather than its leader. The CEO became increasingly a figure of heroic myth-making rather than the apex of the lived social reality of the corporation. Up became increasingly a meaningless fiction. Then came outsourcing, keiretsu, core competencies, process re-engineerings, value-chain partners, unbundlings and rebundlings, and a steadily growing contingent labor force: the stagehands of the corporate theater. Then came the half-hearted stab at agility known as the matrix organization, with rows and columns. First came the bane of the cubicle-drone’s life, the dotted-line reporting relationship. This theoretical structure of course, never entirely true in the first place, began to crumble in the 1970s. It is more aesthetically pleasing when viewed from the top or outside.It is more legible you can read more meaning into it.It embodies a function that results in orientedness (“up”) and boundedness (“inside”).So to summarize, a hierarchy as represented in an org chart transforms its raw social-graph input in three ways: A good deal of the process is about imposing anxiety-alleviating platonic structural beauty. The process makes the underlying social reality simpler and more legible of course, but not entirely, or even primarily, in service of function. A strict hierarchy also admits a notion of inside/outside, defined and enforced by means of a set of deliberately broken or weakened natural information flow links: a boundary. Unlike a network, a hierarchy has a notion of up, defined and enforced by the converging flow of solid arrows towards an apex of power. The whole is a natural human social network pulled upward into a hierarchy by the bootstraps of the founder. We acknowledge the element of theater by calling each box a role. In your classical corporation, each box flows via a solid upward arrow into a unique superior box. The org chart is a visualization of a theatrical web of masks and power. Certainly too long.īut we rarely stop to consider what exactly an org-chart is, conceptually.
The org chart has been the main orientation tool for corporate life for at least 160 years, going by the map I opened with.
What, if anything, should be done about it? The part of the organization that is both possible and useful to represent using an org chart has been rapidly shrinking. There’s a very good excuse for this though: the pace of organizational and environmental change today turns static maps into garbage very quickly. Most senior executives - VP and above in organizations of 1500 or more people say - are in the position of surgeons operating on the basis of having played the kids’ game Operation rather than on the basis of medical training and tools like MRI machines. There is usually no operational capability for drilling down into finer points where the situation demands it (Proctor and Gamble, apparently, is an exception). Often, even CEOs only have a coarse, low-resolution view of the whole, with blocks representing entire huge divisions of thousands of humans and billions in capital assets. Just little local views that could, in principle, be patched together into a global view, but in practice never are. In fact, you rarely ever see a big global view anymore. By contrast, a modern set of org charts is usually a showcase of apathetic PowerPoint banality.
0 kommentar(er)
