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As civilizations and organizations grow larger, so does bureaucracy, often indicating a slow demise in communication and operations. Kaihan Krippendorff takes a look at a business trend and new organizational model that may indicate a more agile future.

As we reenter the post-Covid workplace, many companies are facing a period of reorganization and restructuring. Our research has forecasted and proven that organizations of the future will need to adopt agile approaches and embrace open, networked structures instead of outdated, top-down hierarchies.

Strategy will become a company-wide conversation, rather than a quarterly report, and employees will be seen as a critical source of creative, innovative advantage. Organizations who learn to establish a culture that inspires continual innovation will be the ones to succeed in the long-term.

GARY HAMEL’S HUMANOCRACY 

This transformation of culture is easier said than done, especially after a year of chaos like the one we just endured. When so much of the world is left in the hands of fate and more employees are working remotely out of their own homes, it can be tempting for organizations to grasp for increased controls and regulations. However, employees being left responsible for making their own choices about when and how to work may be precisely the opportunity that leadership needs to realize that they can.

Gary Hamel warned us about the need to reform organizational models. In the near future — and in many cases in the present — bureaucracy will be pushed aside and humans will move to the center of organizations. Many members of our network of chief strategy officers have expressed concern about the struggle to shift to agile development, to bring Scrum and Lean models outside of IT and into all aspects of the organization. Gary suggests that, although these models are correct in methodology — they provide the foundation for speed, flexibility, teamwork, and innovation — they will fail if we do not consider the humans inside of them.

Gary explains that there is no shortage of human creativity: every day 50,000 hours of content appear on YouTube, 3 million blogs are published on WordPress, 40 million photos are posted on Instagram, and 1,300 new apps show up on Google Play. Speed, production, and creativity are everywhere, but our existing organizational models struggle to harness the power of the humans working for them.

Key points include:

• Controlling “controlitis”
• The Haiar case
• The in-ovate model

Read the full article, Bidding Goodbye To Bureaucracy: Future Organizational Models, on Kaihan.net.