While workers are becoming more and more mobile and
entrepreneurial, traditional organizations are becoming less appealing. Here
are seven powerful models for work that aim to redefine the traditional
organization.
(TheMIX)
— There is a lingering notion in the world of business and beyond that
organizations are things with four walls, that employees are people who report
to work inside them every day for years on end, that work is a matter of
executing on defined “key performance indicators,” and that success is a
product of climbing ladders and exerting an ever-greater span of control.
But
the fact is, we’re in the midst of a great reshuffling of the talent deck. Today,
some 35% of workers in the United States are “contingent” — freelance,
temporary, part-time, contractors — and that figure is expected to rise to 40%
or 50%, depending upon which report you read. The members of the next
generation of workers are expected to change careers at least 10 times before
the age of 40, while solo businesses are already popping up at the rate of
about half a million a year. Meanwhile, more than 70% of workers in the U.S. —
and 87% of workers worldwide — report that they are not engaged at work.
In
other words, while workers are becoming more and more mobile, entrepreneurial,
creative, and free, traditional organizations are becoming less and less
appealing. No matter how many nap pods, “hot desks,” and free lunches companies
provide, most still can’t seem to shake the factory mentality that put flesh
and blood, freethinking human beings into the straightjacket of institutional
obedience at the dawn of the industrial revolution. To this day, the ruling
management model promotes efficiency over every other goal and conformity over
every other human virtue. It’s called bureaucracy — a highly effective approach
… if your company’s goal is to achieve efficiency at scale. If you’re after
anything else—such as adaptability, innovation, or unleashing passion—then
you’re out of luck.
In
this creative, disruptive economy, your share of profits is a function of your
share of differentiation, which is a function of your share of creativity —
just how deeply, how broadly, and how systematically you can unleash human
potential — wherever it exists.
That’s
a two-part challenge: organizations and leaders today must focus on designing
environments and systems for work that inspire individuals to contribute their
full imagination, initiative, and passion every day — and on taking advantage
of new social, mobile, and digital technologies to activate, enlist, and
organize talent across boundaries. We launched the Unlimited Human Potential M-Prize to
unearth the most progressive practices and boldest ideas around those two
challenges. Today, we are delighted to announce the winners of the M-Prize,
selected from over 100 entries from every kind of organization and every corner
of the world.
Zero
hierarchy, maximum collaboration
The
old question was: How do we get people to serve the organization’s goals? The
new question is: How do we create a sense of community so compelling that
people are willing to bring their greatest gifts to work every day?
The
answer to that question for Mario Kaphan and his colleague at the Brazilian
e-recruiting company Vagas.com is a singular design for a radically open, free,
and entrepreneurial organization. In his winning entry, Horizontal Management at Vagas.com, Kaphan
describes the company’s 15-year experiment in managing without managers.
Vagas.com has no hierarchy, no titles, and no formal rules. Individual
“members” enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and collegiality (the mantra is
“individuals are empowered to do whatever they want BUT everybody has
everything to do with that”). All work is done in small, self-managed teams,
and decisions are made via reasoned debate and consensus — an initially
laborious process that all members practice daily and that yields powerful
results.
At
Vagas, every management process — from performance reviews and rewards to
strategy — is highly participative. Rather than rigid planning and budget
cycles, the rhythm of the organization is set on a rolling two-week management
cycle — each team meets fortnightly to review progress. The result is a
fast-growing, entrepreneurial organization.
Shared
values was the starting point for Wellington, New Zealand-based Enspiral, a
path-breaking collective of professionals and social
enterprises driven by the desire to change the world. As an
entirely new kind of organization — a collective of individuals with a common
ideal working on different problems with radically distributed resources,
information, and control — the Enspiral team found itself tackling and
disrupting just about every core management process, from decision-making and direction setting to
budgeting.
Alanna
Krause’s winning M-Prize story, “Collaborative Funding: Dissolve Authority, Empower
Everyone, and Crowdsource a Smarter, Transparent Budget,” recounts
the development of Enspiral’s approach to collaborative budgeting. Krause not
only describes the development of a visually engaging and flexible approach to
budgeting — an app called Co-Budget that started out as a shared
spreadsheet — but also the resulting increased transparency and surprising
generosity that emerges when you involve everyone in deciding on where and
how to spend resources. Just as important, it offers a short course in launching
a low-risk, high-impact experiment in even the most high-stakes realm —
prototype a solution with low-tech tools, test it, measure it, improve it, and
repeat.
All
work is social
Unsurprisingly,
many of the entries in this challenge focused on using emerging digital,
mobile, social, and analytics tech to redesign work. Toronto-based Klick Health,
the world’s largest digital health agency focused on equipping providers and
patients with insight and information about care, reinvented its culture and
approach to work with an organizational operating system called “Genome.”
Chelsea Lefaivre’s winning story, “How We Harnessed Big Data and Social Technology to
Empower and Engage Employees,” unpacks the workings of this “social
environment.”
All
Klick employees start their day by logging into Genome and spend their day
connecting via its many features, including: “tickets” or tasks; project
homepages and wikis; the “gene sequencer” program, which creates a personalized
plan and support for any individual starting a new project; and dynamic
dashboards to help individuals set, prioritize, and track goals on a
moment-to-moment basis. Every aspect of Genome is designed to give the right
information and tools to people at the moment they need them. At Klick, work in
progress is shared and visible, which allows people to step in and offer help
to colleagues. Crucially, Genome evolves with the organization — some 70% of
its features have been suggested and developed by employees, and anything that
doesn’t get adopted enthusiastically dies off.
Lukas
Masuch’s winning hack, “Enterprise Knowledge Graph—One Graph to Connect them All,”
offers a design for a powerful platform to structure, simplify, and render
immediately accessible all the relevant knowledge and data so often dispersed
and hidden across large organizations. Using the latest Big Data and graph
technology, Masuch imagines a platform that sits on top of existing corporate
wikis, document sharing systems, and social networks, with a rich menu of
possible applications. One example: “enhanced enterprise search,” which
immediately assembles a total view of related content, experts, and connections
for any query.
While
Genome and the Enterprise Knowledge Graph seek to switch people on, connect
them together, and extend autonomy and accountability to the far edges of an
organization, Andrew Jones’ Nomatik Coworking hack aims to build
community and connection beyond the walls of any particular organization.
Nomatik is a clever social platform designed to extend the spirit of coworking
beyond actual coworking spaces, to engineer productive matches between
individual talents and organizations, and to reimagine the boundaries of the
organization in the process.
Jones’
approach acknowledges that no single organization will ever be able to directly
employ all of the relevant, talented people who could make valuable
contributions. And, just as important, that colleagues aren’t necessarily the
people who sit next to you at work, but rather the people who are working on
the same problems with the same passion that you have. The organizations and
leaders who figure out the most clever and compelling ways to connect those
people and organizations will be the real winners in the creative economy.
Big
company, individual impact
Now,
it’s one thing to cultivate a culture of innovation, participation, and
collaboration in an organization. It’s another thing entirely to make that
journey as an older, bigger, more entrenched organization. Global IT
consultancy Cognizant took on this challenge a few years ago. As Shyam Sundar
Nagarajan recounts in his winning story, “Incubating Intrapreneurs to Revitalize Customer Business,”
the leaders of the practice sought to equip individuals across its 9,200-person
organization to act as innovators and entrepreneurs.
Cognizant’s
“InsuranceNext Premier League” challenge was modeled on cricket’s Indian
Premier League, with a competition for a championship title. The initiative
utilized every innovation tool in the book — from storyboarding to prototyping
to role play to app building — to engage every single employee, produce 88
viable business ideas from some 968 “players,” and ultimately offer 10
fortune-flipping business concepts to some 40 different customers.
While
the Cognizant InsuranceNext initiative represents a sweeping approach to
encouraging entrepreneurial behavior across an organization, Accenture’s Clare
Norman’s entry, “Developing Tomorrow’s Talent: A Girl, A Blog, and 30 Days
to Business Impact,” advocates for a purposely narrow, tactical
approach: rethinking “people development” as a continuous project that’s woven
into the fabric of everyday working life rather than an isolated process that
only the HR department handles.
How?
The deceptively simple “30 Day Challenge” — a program of 30 “micro-actions”
that can be integrated into daily work and take less than 10 minutes to
accomplish. These tasks are intentionally micro — from writing a short note of
acknowledgement to a colleague, to introducing yourself to someone new, to
stepping back to write down three things that went well this week — the 30 Day
Challenge activities had an immediate and widespread impact at Accenture, with
some 8,650 direct participants interacting with 61,000 colleagues. Participants
reported long-term positive effects and changes in behavior, and the 30 Day
Challenge has since resulted in a series of spin-offs, including a coaching
challenge, a culture change challenge for a client, an on-boarding challenge
for new recruits, and a learning challenge, among others.
There
is so much to learn from these progressive approaches to unleashing human
potential. Explore the full line-up of winning entries and learn more about
the Unlimited Human Potential M-Prize.
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