Becoming a manager at age 23, strung as a bow, bulbous pen in hand bought on occasion of enrolment into the plenary session, tapping with the big brass finally now on those squiggle lines. “They have machines to do that for you.” So we are told by the chap with a dimple. “If only it were that simple.” A shining new cog graduated and fitted in the sweet spot is just as fine. “But it does not mash with our other splashes unless you draw some serious dashes.” “I hear that’s being rewritten as we speak.” “What I will give for a decent scrum!” The clock in the paneled room chimed as does its thousand brothers on the march elsewhere and everywhere.
Living on the Edge: Lessons from the Living Cell
INTRODUCTION
”Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…..” William Butler Yeats
The person is the primary productive unit of the company. It is in their careful selection that we preserve an intricately regulated internal environment, in their diversity that we have the remarkable capability to adapt to changing organisational context and marketplace niches, and in their succession that we rejuvenate and acquire new responses to external challenges. There is a resulting tradeoff between being operationally efficient and robust to deliver good service and maximising variability and innovativeness to adapt to the extreme changes. This disparity is most obvious for the people working at the “edge” of the organisation. We know them variously as the knowledge worker, telecommuter, virtual team member, field service, frontline, remote office, contractor and temp, each sharing some common traits (and grouses):
They deliver high-calibre results that differentiate.
They style themselves as highly mobile, fast-paced and fleet-footed[1] radicals. They can do so because they are their own means of production – able to create lasting value such as intellectual property, alliances, customer satisfaction, supplier partnerships, brand, reputation, loyalty, etc. for themselves and for the organisation. They are able to work with abstractions and a minimal of information to make quality, at times counterintuitive, decisions.
Their technology needs evolve rapidly.
Their technology needs are the least understood because they evolve rapidly to satisfy the capricious market needs of customers. As a result, they are constantly frustrated by the priority given to the so-called “mission-critical” core enterprise systems and the consequent delays in getting them the tools and information they need to get their work done. This presents an image of winged zephyrs running on elephant legs.
They can not be type-cast as average employees.
They use their own unique blend of local knowledge, personal talent and specialisation, much of which resists codification, standardization and measurement, and therefore defy the usual levers of control. They have pride in their work and reputation, to a fault, inviting controversy and debate but never indifference. We see them challenging the current leadership practices of hierarchical authoritarianism and its various forms of reductionism.
CELL ORGANISATION
The highly subjective and tentative conditions found on the edge require that we give full play to the innate spontaneous and participative nature of workers. We must redefine work by encouraging uniqueness, tolerating temporal structures and designing variable work systems designed to fit the task and people. It seemed like a storm brewing in a tea cup that threatened to overturn the carefully balanced apple cart. We looked for new organisational patterns that could make sense of the extreme complexity and unpredictability and how we could help the workers to optimize their time and resources in their daily tasks be they nurses, doctors, teachers, service engineers, legal assistants, lawyers, etc. Word associations like symbiosis-sharing, organism-organisation, differentiation, catalysis, synapses, etc. led us to the study of biological cells as possible models.
Cells are the smallest living organised units and able to function alone or as part of a more complex aggregate, assimilate raw resources from the surroundings, grow and specialize. In these aspects, the living cell seemed rather similar in character to the employee. Our initial impressions deepened when we listed some basic factors that could define the cell. Interestingly, the same factors were as relevant when we replaced “cell” with “employee”:
Culture provides a stable and nourishing medium for cell growth. In the company, employees are immersed in a mix of values, goals, language, learning, behaviour, customs, codes, tools, practices, policies, ceremonies, and symbols. Autonomy is the cell’s ability to carry out all functions necessary for life. The employee has autonomy to the extent of its designated decision authority and may be further empowered to take advantage of domain knowledge or to decentralize decision making. Information allows the cell to be always aware of its state and its surroundings and it uses an array of transporters and receptors to sense changes. Like cells, Employees must be actively provided with enough of the information they need to perform optimally and to react and adapt adequately.
We could use the factors to describe 2 typical situations in organisations where (1) autonomy is given without the right tools or (2) information is disseminated but no one acts:
The model bears out some important points about the interaction between employees and organisations:
Information has a social context (Culture – Information). Information has meaning based on where we place our values and within the social context in which it is derived. Culture frames a lot of the ideas that get aired and the range of activities that are considered as acceptable. Conversely, information can shape culture over time. It can clarify assumptions, communicate success, rally opinions and check perceptions.
Leadership shapes culture (Autonomy – Culture). The influence of founders and present leadership on organisations is deep-seated and long lasting. The leadership’s vision, values, worldview, and assumptions are transmitted as culture into the very fabric of the organisation. The CEO is also the only person with the authority and political clout to drive a successful talent acquisition and upgrading process (and decide on a differential reward system). In turn, culture becomes one of the key factors that frame decisions and influence performance.
Intellectual property rights rule (Autonomy – Information). Information and information technology must help the worker and the organisation make decisions that favour its growth and survival. IT has been subjugated to the role of data storage, transmission and presentation. As rich in content and colour as it may be, there is just too little, and increasingly less of, interpretation, intelligence, induction, intervention and integration (planning) being done to understand what it means. These survival processes are particularly well developed and efficient in the living cell and it therefore is no mere coincidence that the “I” in IT is being emphasized emphatically. There is a sixth – in the information economy, the careful accumulation of intellectual property[2] can give the company control over a particular customer base, enhance manufacturing capabilities, build brand, pre-empt competition and set the industry standards. In turn, domain or content experts, as they are called, become strong attractors for the technical talent needed to produce ground-breaking innovations.
Employees in the same team are affected by the same conditions because, as you recall, we are starting to organise the teams to fit the task. Therefore, the pyramids can be used to illustrate the factors determining team performance as well as for the individual members. The cardinal factors autonomy, culture and information can also be swapped with their constituent attributes, for example, leadership for autonomy and values for culture. We show an example of 2 team pyramids with different objectives and structures:
- The “Leadership Team” describes a self-directed team of highly committed workers sharing common values and able to effectively pool their resources and strengths together to perform a common task. While the organisation sets the overriding strategy and territory, they define the scope of work and intermediate goals, resource commitments and implementation plan.
- The “Skunk Works Team” is an independent team of highly innovative individuals given the right tools and tasked primarily to envision future scenarios and develop leading edge products. It is essentially the “blue sky” approach to innovation where management intervention is minimal and the team is entrusted with full creative freedom and minimal corporate constraints.
In these pyramid diagrams, the employee or team is at the centre of 3 cardinal forces and the extent of the influence by any force is proportionate to its distance along the axis. The diagonals are called “matching concepts” because the forces do not act independently but in unison, moderating or augmenting the other. As demonstrated, the model became more immediate when the factors assumed some possible attributes. It therefore gives a measure of how conducive a particular organisation’s environment is to the types of workers or teams it hopes to develop. It gives us the means to examine employee performance given certain groups of key success factors and to determine the inter-dependencies at play.
CELL ADAPTATION
The preceding discussion has centered on questions of strategy and structure and gave us a framework to organise our teams according to our strategic intents and initiatives. However, it is the processes that breathe life into the cell. The simultaneous execution of an enormous number of parallel processes tightly coordinated and interlinked. Imagine Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Score Card and its KPI’s cascading down the value chains, triggering events and processes in a finely tuned display of management flair.
Cells adapt by having a vast arsenal of responses at its disposal and being able to dynamically activate the appropriate action pathways in reaction to environmental stressors. They are also good listeners, able to receive and amplify weak signals to elicit feedback. In the same vein, the survival mechanism of a worker in an organisation is realized through the combined and cumulative wisdom of co-workers, associates, friends and family and other members of his immediate and wider social community who are attached to his or her network. This survival mechanism can be broadly organised by its functional divisions:
The effectiveness of the network is dependent on the network topology and the quality of information being transmitted to the worker. We have to pay particular attention to the workers on the edge because information is their primary resource and they are highly dependent on their networks to communicate with their fellow workers and to garner the choicest bits of data needed to do their jobs, especially information about what is happening outside the narrow focus of their own company.
Network Topology
“The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network”[3]. True to this assertion by Reed, relationships increasingly add value to organisations and their products. They have transformed supply chains into highly integrated value networks, built brands literary overnight and created industry wide standards. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are the lynchpin of successful strategic leverage. Unfortunately, most existing CRM systems provide only a piecemeal view of the customer, removed from his or her nest of relationships and references. This limited view exists partly because of most companies’ heavy emphasis on enterprise information including financial data, inventory, sales, shipments, etc. These are readily available because they derive from the mammoth core enterprise systems where most management and IT attention, and budgets, have been and are continuing to be, spent. This leaves little time and funds to accommodate the requests for customization or tools from workers at the edge. Often, the enterprising worker resorts to off-the-shelf software or make do with spreadsheets. This not only diverts energy and focus away from extending the external network, but the information captured about existing relationships and networks cannot be shared with others, in direct contradiction of Reed’s Law.
Organising Information
Cells can differentiate into different forms and functions, each requiring a different type of stimulus and information, and becoming very efficient at their dedicated tasks:
By the same token, workers on the edge tend to specialize and their information needs are narrower and context-specific. Enterprise systems can not be realistically expected to provide the information within the specific context and timeframe in which it is relevant. It is becomes especially wasteful when they rely on those who own or manage the systems to design and deliver their information needs – it comes full circle back to them to decide what they need, in what amounts and formats, how it is to be converted, organised and presented. Workers at the edge of the organisation must be viewed as a separate phase from the core and intermediate tiers, because they have rapidly evolving needs of such specificity and complexity that only they themselves understand fully and can provide. Instead, they should be provided with portable databases that they can use to model data and get the results they want. For example, other than spreadsheets, a good example is the use of database development applications such as FileMaker[4] to create operational data stores (ODS) or customer-facing applications that can respond quickly to changes in customer preferences or business processes. A backup tool called SyncBack[5] can be used to synchronise FileMaker databases across networks, making them more responsive and allowing the databases to be extended to the edge. Finding information must be less of the random walk it has been for far too long.
CLOSING
Perhaps the most beguiling aspect of cells is their ability to function in isolation as well as in perfect harmony with similar cells to perform tasks greater than the sum of its parts. This dualism exists on the edge, where workers learn to manage themselves and are their own best coach. They find the most engaging and productive way for them to accomplish any task while being rooted in a common value system. They would have gotten the knack of self-learning and self-correcting by filtering out loud environmental noise and picking up weak signals in changing conversations. They are also good at building networks, gathering data and associating disparate pieces of information into a unified and actionable framework. In short, they are able to gain knowledge directly by observation or indirectly by deduction. In some cell structures, form and function is defined by the network itself and we see this already happening in some organisations.
We do not doubt that more dilemmas and debate will come from the edge and we will return to the cell for more lessons in life. We thank you for sharing this first journey with us.
Copyright 2008 Anemoni Pte Ltd
[1] The ability to attract and to hold on to the best workers is the first precondition of success at the edge.
[2] We broadly define intellectual property to include the patent portfolio as well as any disclosure of innovation and information assets by the employees.
Reed’s Law, as cited in “The Law of the Pack.” Harvard Business Review (February 2001 pp 23-4).
The FileMaker suite of products is published by FileMaker Inc. (www.filemaker.com).
SyncBack is published by 2BrightSparks Pte Ltd (www.2brightsparks.com).
