"Well-Oiled Machine" is So Last Century
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When I was coming up in business, pundits would describe a successful organization as a "well-oiled machine." That's not surprising, since most early management thinkers were engineers.
It was an appropriate metaphor for most of the last century. Many of the largest companies in the world manufactured physical goods. They had well-planned assembly lines. They expected people to fit into specific jobs.
Planning ruled. Most companies prepared five and ten year plans, complete with projections of inventory levels, cash flows, and staffing needs. In the 1950s, General Electric produced the five volumes of its famous "blue books" with guidance for GE managers.
That was then. Today many pundits and theorists describe companies as living beings. That's a very different metaphor with very different practical implications.
Machines can be complicated. You design them. You can take them apart or add new parts. You can replace one part with another, identical one.
Living beings are complex systems. They grow naturally. You can't predict how they'll turn out. And you can't add or take away "parts" without changing the entire system.
For living systems, planning isn't possible. Instead you must adapt quickly in accordance with a simple purpose. A sentence or two to define your strategy is enough. It allows you to spot opportunities and guides your adaptation. Instead of detailed instructions, a few simple rules work best.
In a living system, people are not interchangeable parts. They are living parts of a living being. Instead of slipping them into pre-planned slots, a living system allows and encourages growth. You can't cut people off without damaging the system, even if you don't need those people at the moment.
William Gibson told us that "The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed." That's true for the living being model of a company. We know they're out there. And in the years to come, they'll become the new models.
Boss's Bottom Line
If you haven't already done so, start looking for ways you can move to a living system paradigm. Seek ways you can reduce formal planning and increase agile adaptation. Help the people who are part of your living system grow, adapt, and contribute.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
A successful organization is like... a perpetual motion machine. A perfect one cannot exist; one that comes close will appear to carry on indefinitely, but will stop working eventually. Maybe it's like Escher's waterfall - because water is so dynamic... just thinkstorming. "increase agile adaptation", "living system" (I suck at gardening) - good points.
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Thanks for adding to the conversation, Anna. I've been thinking a lot recently about what an organization that was a "living organism" would look and act like. This post is my best shot so far. I'm noticing how hard it is to wrench free of the "machine" model, even when we aren't explicit about using it.
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Great post Wally. Love this line..."Seek ways you can reduce formal planning and increase agile adaptation."
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Thanks, Susan. I think that formal planning over long time horizons worked when things were relatively stable, but even then uncertainty increased with the distance from the planning point. But we had this idea that with enough equations, everything was predictable, so off we went.
Other than humans, living beings, don't do that kind of planning. Instead they seek opportunities, avoid threats, and adapt as they go.
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I like the way you put that.
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Thanks for the kind words, Laura.
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Have you considered that complex machines begin to act like organisms? That's way ocean going vessels have always been referred to as "she" and talked about like a living person.
On the other hand, a mast is a mast and sails can be replaced...And crew.
I don't think it's one or the other, but a surprising blend of the two. Too often leaders wanted to pretend the people are utterly cogs. We've also seen the error of thinking no one else can do the job except
The Marines take plow boys and consistently make sophisticated warriors. If they can complete such an alchemy, so can the business world. We can't just reduce everything to simple formulas, either way. -Kirk
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Thanks, Kirk. I've got a lot of thinking to do on this one. I'm trying to get to understand the differences and similarities between designed things and living things.
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Erika Andersen compares management to gardening (not organizations as a whole, but there are still some great analogies)...
http://www.whatdoyouwantfromthem.com/members/blog_view.asp?id=566624&post=100559
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Yes, she does, Anna. In fact it's the metaphor Erika used in the book, Growing Great Employees. I don't know anyone who's used that metaphor more effectively. You're right that it's not the whole organization, but the idea of using plants in a garden as surrogates for people in a workplace is compelling.
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Thanks for the thoughts Wally. Have been reading Margaret J. Wheatley book "Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time" with similar ideas. She says that leaders that see organizations as living systems "trust our humanness; welcome the surprises we bring to them; are curious about our differences; delight in our inventiveness; nurture us; connect us; trust what we can create." It is definitely a different way to look at organizations and at leadership.
Thanks for starting the conversation. Only as we share together and make meaning together can we start to create better, healthier, and more resilient organizations.
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Thanks, Ada. Wheatly was one of the first to write about a lot of these issues. The key question for me right now is "How does a living thing act differently from a machine?" I hope that will be a good starting point and that others with different starting points will help figure this all out.
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This is a perfect correlation between us stating that the industrial age is gone. So much of that era was machine/production/distribution based. Even people were treated this way.
The rules have changed in that business it is not mass production, but serving & adding value the masses.
Leadership, not management, is what will "produce" results. Being servant leaders instead of just having servants in the form of an organizational chart, will secure the entities that thrive in these times.
Being on the edge of a gigantic paradigm shift is exciting!
Thanks so much for your contribution of wisdom!
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Thanks for adding to the conversation and the kind words, Geneva. I think we should note that "machine/production/distribution" businesses are still with us. They're an important part of the economy. Some of our best models for what organizations using a more biological model are, companies, like WL Gore that make and distribute physical goods. What will be interesting to watch over the next couple of decades is the ways that complex systems may become more adaptive and less planned. To do that, companies will need to make better use of the knowledge and relationships of people. Much of this is not new at all. People like Taiichi Ohno and W. Edwards Deming were saying similar things a half century ago, but without the biological metaphor.
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