Your Org Structure is 1000 Years Out of Date!
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- čas přidán 10. 09. 2024
- Ever wondered why modern workplaces often feel frustratingly inefficient?
Evan delves into the fascinating history behind the organizational structures of today's corporations, revealing how they are inadvertently rooted in medieval practices. We explore the functional hierarchy prevalent in most organizations, where individuals report up a chain that prioritizes skills transfer-an approach strikingly similar to the apprentice system of the Middle Ages. This system, designed for a simpler time, now hampers modern companies by sub-optimizing for collaboration and the flow of value in an era that demands cross-functional teamwork and agility.
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.
Great points. Knowledge work, more complex provlem solving requires more collaboration, cross functional teams with complementary skills from its members
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
+1 to this. With an almost infinite combination of skills, capabilities is a great starting point.
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. 🤦🏻♂️
That's the great irony (and curse) of modern business.
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.
Balancing tensions and trade-offs is a key skill for leaders and managers - and yet so rarely taught.
Loved the video, Evan. Can’t imagine how many of these archaic embedded structures and systems are in place holding back actual progress?!?
I've got a few more scripts ready to go - just on these topics :-)
Oh this is genius!