In Important Ways, Today's Organizations Are Relics Of Another Age | Top-down control, divisions, and departments separated by function are part of the industrial-age view that organizations are machines, work is routine and repetitive, and experts can solve all problems.
That thinking has hardly changed but people view the world differently now and work has changed enormously over the last century. Almost everyone is a 'knowledge worker'. Knowledge work is creative, complex, and challenging in ways that factory work of the industrial age never was. Software development, for example, is about creating something that 'works' because it does the job the customer requires, it is not about gathering data to solve a specific problem. Organizations are inhospitable places for doing creative work and, in most organizations, management is struggling with this problem.
Figure 1 | People's actions are intimately tied to how they see things. Conventional management and leadership practices rest on outmoded beliefs that organizations work like machines and the job of leaders is to control them, by demanding people's compliance. Knowledge work, however, is team work. For teams to be successful people have to be accountable to each other. Transforming organizations from industrial-age structures to information-age networks, where people share information, means changing the culture of compliance along with leadership and management practices.
This is where our work, based on the ten conversations for aligning, begins. Our intention is to create a shift from compliance to accountability. Our goal is to create possibilities for new actions and to influence the way people work, so they are much more effective in whatever work they do. |
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Management's Dilemma