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There's so much I love about this. First, the admission that silos are natural and organic is important... and that we can't get rid of them without new ones forming. They eye-opening concept which you so elegantly stated is the thing that hit me, as a change agent, our role is to instigate and nudge these silos to form in a more constructive way *around* the products and services that serve the business' customers.

My word! What a striking explication! Brill! On second thoughts, isn't a well formed cross-functional team a designed silo, of sorts!?!

That's so insightful! Thank you 💜

What a message !!! Thanks dear.

Evan, thank you for sharing your thoughts. It is important to build the kind of awareness your video conveys. I agree with everything you comment, however I would like to share a couple of comments: 1. Some times I think Mr. Taylor is satanized, you help to change that perception, I read some of Taylor thougths in his classic book and I happily discovered that he talks about a topic that we know now as Knowledge Management. I am not defend him nor critiize him, however I think he was kind of advanced to his time. 2. In my experience, some people do not know how to handle the degrees of freedom involved in granting trust, abusing it. This libertarianism results in management incorporating controls, which are usually applied "institutionally" to the detriment of all. This is why I believe that the awareness of a management based on trust must also be instilled in the mindset of collaborators, as part of this cultural change.

I'm excited for the audit based governance video. Truly though, if the company doesn't trust me to do my work, then why did they hire me.

3:13 - 3:16 🤣 As they say, a sucker is born everyday. Brilliant video and brilliant message 👏🏽

Look after the worker, and they will look after the customer. Seems business look after themselves only these days. NO ONE WANTS TO WORK LOL.

Great insights! I recently built a relationship diagram to visualize for a very large, well known brand how the actions they were taking in the name of profit were actually negatively impacting their ability to create profit. It's all about what an org is optimizing for and what they aren't seeing or are intentionally ignoring.

I love this *sideeyes layoffs and closures in the games industry*

I believe that employees will be OK at doing the "crappy jobs" as long as they have a line of sight as to why that job is necessary to achieve the strategic vision of the organisation. I don't think bots will replace all crappy jobs so, as you say Evan, we need to create an environment where people are OK at working in these jobs. One more observation and that is that this is a very "western view" - I live in South Africa where the unemployment rate is very high - so any job is better than no job - that does not mean that we can't make it better.

Love it Evan - one thing that I would add is that we need to first look at capabilities before the skills - we are starting to talk about capability planning a lot - what capabilities does your organisation or team need to deliver value - once we know the capabilities - we then break that down into skills - through doing it this was, the cross functionality is inherently built in

To add a related contradition: we hear a lot about companies wanting people **back in the office** and employees wanting to work from home. These are the same companies that over the last 20 years have reduced personal space in the office, reduced the size of desks, made people keep belongings in a locker (if they are lucky) and work at random "hot desks". Time was employees got to sit with the colleagues (who became friends), decorate their desk with pictures of family and lay the desk out to match their personal style. Now the first and last 15 minutes of the day are packing up and putting away. Is it any surprise people don't want to be in the office when the office has become so less welcoming?

In "A Leaders Guide to Radical Management" Steven Denning tells a tale of how American railroads established the template for organization design in the 19th century. He says that after a particularly bad crash Western Railroad commissioned a study which considered the heirarchcal management structure used by the military and rejected the relaytively flat heirarchy (with devolved authority) found in places like the East India Company and Hudson Bay Company.

Interesting. Butterfly effect of the pill

Great points. Knowledge work, more complex provlem solving requires more collaboration, cross functional teams with complementary skills from its members

Love it! I often refer to current org structure to the heirarchy of the great pyramid builders which are 3000years old!!

I’m not sure successful companies still have functional hierarchy as the overarching model for production. Yes, there is some hierarchy of the functions of business, for example, the executive function is seen as higher than administrative functions. This is because one directs the other in the subordinative sense. However, you are referring to people in the organization and their roles. Certainly, the skills may be developed in the company by having people subordinate to other people with greater skills. This is a competence hierarchy. It works well for human development. In your medieval analogy, apprentice, journeyman and master craftsman. 

 In modern corporations, this still exists in a sense because it works. It is efficient (i.e. cost effective) in skill development. But, there is another option. Just hire the skills you don’t have. No one, these days, thinks the CEO has to be a better programmer than the highly skilled software developer. 

 Optimizations are always a trade-off as you say. The classic example being the cost, quality, time triangle. In your case, it is functional skills vs. collaboration. They need to be balanced. A bunch of incompetent workers who collaborate well is nobody’s goal. 

So, as I mentioned above, if skills align with function, then within functions we weight skill competency more. When we work across functions, we weight collaboration (itself a skill) more. 

Finding the right balance is key to profitability. In the end, the punchline of your presentation is “flow of value”. What exactly is that? How do you measure it? 

 As we have experienced during our time working together, waiting on a handoff from another functional area can be very sub-optimized. In our case, especially, as the next function in the chain was to the customer. I recall vividly how a senior manager within the functional hierarchy was very resistant to allowing any of his team's time to be devoted to anything cross-functional as his priority was billing for skills, not selling the software. (Maybe there is a case study there). 

 Good luck with the channel. I suggest, investing in better lighting and a good mic to polish it a bit. Two cameras work great to avoid the jump cuts. Your delivery is great. 👍

Oh this is genius!

Oh that's such a banger ending, I love it. Would be great if we could create societies where businesses had an incentive to create environments where people want to work, instead of laying off people and crunching through staff. 😭

This is so informative!!

Well articulated and delivered. Always enjoy chatting with you about topics like this. I am very interested to see you public take on value delivery optimizations. I appreciate calling out that skill development may have impacts when the model is changed. I find that to be the hardest hurdle to overcome mentally for leaders.

I especially highlight the last thing: "it is the responsibility of the business to create an environment where people want to do it", in LATAM there is still a lot to do

Loved the video, Evan. Can’t imagine how many of these archaic embedded structures and systems are in place holding back actual progress?!?

I feel like a relevant quote here is one of my favourites from James Nicoll (best known for the "The Problem with defending the purity of the english language" quip) "Until recently baby production was largely dependent on slave labour; as soon as women are allowed to answer the question "Would you like to squeeze as many objects the size of a watermelon out of your body as it takes to kill you?" they generally answer "No, thank you." This leads to falling birthrates everywhere women are not kept enslaved and ignorant of the alternatives. "

Great points! And there are certainly other ways to support learning without it being the core organizing principle. The sad part is how many orgs rely on the learning-centric structure and then focus on performance measures that suboptimize learning. 🤦🏻‍♂️