New ideas: Building the organizations of tomorrow

I recently spoke at an event organised by Building the Organisation of Tomorrow, a group created by alumni of University of Technology Sydney’s Master of Business in IT Management program.

The format was very stimulating, with three 15 minute presentations, each followed by 15 minutes Q&A and then a ‘disruptive event’, including some awesome satirical musical performances and a planted heckler in the audience. Below are notes from the three speakers.

Bryan Fenech spoke about what the organisation of tomorrow will look like. The corporate form has been called into question, with many wondering whether new structures are possible. Today’s organisational structures need to be understood in the context in which they were first created, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In a hyperconnected world any business initiative can be copied, driving ever-shorter product cycles and the imperative of innovation.

Organisations are built for standardization, founded on physical assets, and driven by strategy formulation. The driving organizational metaphor is of control and authority. The organisation of tomorrow must be based on distributed power. Creative knowledge workers don’t function when told what to do and how to do it. Cellular organizations – as exemplified by the form of many terrorist groups – provide an alternative structure. Sports teams also provide a useful model for business.

Project portfolio management is a discipline based on lean, agile structures that can transcend hierarchical structures. Hierarchy is dysfunctional, and there are better ways to bring together resources to create value.

I then spoke about how technology is changing society. The starting point is that individual humans are merging with technology – we already on the journey of augmenting who we are. In addition, communication is enabling a global brain, creating a collective intelligence that has never been possible before.

The changing boundaries of work and how humans have been replaced by technology, from the spinning jenny through to artificial intelligent in law, have shaped our society and who we are. Now crowd work is both distributing and aggregating talent in unprecedented ways. The rise of social networking tools is both drawing out our ‘latent humanity‘ and changing the actual structure of our brains.

Given the awe-inspiring capabilities we now have, including of merging ourselves with machines the dominant question in our future must be ‘Who do we want to become?‘

Applying this to the organizations of tomorrow, our key themes must be Engagement, in helping organizations connect deeply with their customers and beyond, Talent, in understanding what will attract the most capable people and best channel their energy, and Structure, in looking at how organizations can combine the value of unplanned, emergent interaction with necessary process, guidance, and governance.

Bruce McCabe followed by talking about managing creative professionals. He spent the early phase of this career working as a technology analyst, first for established firms and then building his own firm. He then spent two years working for KPMG setting up an innovation arm, and is now developing a software venture.

While managing creative people is largely the same as managing anyone, however there are some differences. The over-riding theme is freedom. Some kinds of freedom are incredibly important to creative people.

There have to be interesting problems, and variety to those problems. Creative people want to learn and grow, not just do one thing well. This is not necessarily about keeping on working on completely different things, but working on different facets of the same project.

Structure and deadlines are not just realities, but also motivators and enablers of creativity. While freedom is important, work needs to be done in structures.

You can almost define creative people by the fact they take risks. It is volatile and potentially explosive when you combine them with risk people. The role of a manager is partly to buffer creative people from the constraints.