The shape of your organisation is wrong for this next digital world. This is an existential problem.

This is part one of what I think will be a three part series, as it’s perhaps my most important and fundamental topic, and the essence of everything I do with my clients.

Let’s get to the rub. I vehemently believe that if your organisation continues to be defined by your org chart, then you’re dead in the water in ten years. Maybe five. This may not be patently true if you have a safety net, but I’d assert that you won’t be doing that well, and will likely be subject to intervention, turnaround and control measures. But we’ll get to my beloved health sector in the third article.

“What’s wrong with an org chart?” you may ask… “Nobody actually looks at it”.

Correct. But you don’t need to look at it. It’s so ingrained in how most people work, that the parts of it that relate to you are hard-wired in your brain. Consider this — do you know who you work under, who they work under, and who works under you? Of course you do. Everyone does. There will be the odd nuance but most staff have a clear understanding of who controls them and who they get to control.

This is the essence of the issue, and the org chart is the flag that flies this methodology. In practice it’s the most simple and powerful symbol that decides who actually gets to decide what they can and can’t do. In a sense it is the map of power, empowerment and disempowerment.

But that’s just the start, because this map then translates into other forms of control mechanisms, such as policies, operating procedures, job descriptions, system rules, compliance reminders, and, more left-field, formed email circulation lists. We’ll circulate back on emails in due course ⏱.

The org chart and the different manifestations are understandable, and will be entirely justifiable, because “it’s the way we’ve always done it”, and “it’s worked fine so far”.

That sentiment is predicated on us being in the same place that we were before. But are we?

Let’s look at the writing on the wall:

Often I hear that there has always been change and this is just another, but it’s not, and don’t take my word for it. If you consider the position of the EU, the Bank of England, the World Economic Forum, virtually every major consultancy, the Economist, the Harvard Business Review etc. then we are going into the second major industrial (digital) revolution. This is not change as usual, and the change is existential.

I have written a separate and more detailed article on the above here.

In the many organisations I have spoken to and worked with I hear the same sentiments: that keeping up is getting difficult, that the stakes feel higher and that the costs are becoming greater, and that they’re having to do more with less:

In other words, the cost is real and it’s personal. For leaders, for staff and for those who are affected by the organisation.

Oh yes — org charts! So whilst the ramifications of this major societal change aren’t possible to know without a time machine, let’s look at the present, and what we can know. Somehow you need to be able to respond, deliver and produce the goods more quickly. Therefore, the need, indeed, is a need for speed.

But your org-charty organisation is not built for speed, it’s built for precision, control and relative safety. Aaron Dignan’s Brave New Work provides an inspiring and detailed case for what this means and how it manifests if you want a more detailed case.

Ask yourself this question — does the org-chart, policies etc. slow you down or allow you to go faster? The answer is pretty obvious, those agreed decision points and processes create many micro-bottlenecks that slow down the ability to do something new or different. This will be culturally embedded, and whilst big strategic statements about being more agile, or digital, or innovative may be very nice, they’ll be undermined and unrealised in real-time.

Having had these conversations many times with organisations, I know you may have questions about the alternatives and the simple principle of what happens if we take the safeguards and controls away. We’ll come to alternatives in the next article, but for now I’d invite you to humour me, and go with the following hypothesis:

The future of your organisation is digital. The future shape of your organisation needs to allow digital. The shape of digital is not compatible with the current shape of your organisation. A lot of things need to change.

To put it in it’s most simple form the shape of digital is transitioning from one of root and branch to one of more complex systems or the Rhizome. In a simpler world we created logical pathways of decision (or trees — which upside down = org chart) to try and achieve greater productivity with precision.

I’m not saying the details aren’t important, but like any new cultures (in a literal and figurative sense) digital in it’s various forms needs the right kind of soil to grow in. That soil is the formation and shape of your organisation, and the many real-time micro rules that manifest as a result.

In the next article I’m going to try and move from the case for change (the why) towards the shape of that change itself (the what), but in closing I’d like to take a leaf out of the book of The Great British Bake Off, and offer you a preview of the next episode: the shape of the digital cake we’re going to bake.

More Predictable <-> Less Predictable [👉 direction of travel]

I’d go as far as saying that 90% of the work I do around digital transformation (if we’re to use this crude term) is in helping organisations to allow all, but particularly the last four, points to happen in real-time. By this I mean undoing the things that get in the way, slow them down, and stop them happening.

My friends, as we’ll cover in the next article, those things all lead back to the org-chart, and how it manifests.

I facilitate digital-organisation change in health and social care. Healthtech advisor & mentor. National advisor. Social enterprise advocate, founder and non-exec. Founder of Sector 3 Digital.

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