The Downside of Organizational Flexibility - DBR 037

Do Busy Right

We all try to help our organization be flexible. We hear about the benefits of flexibility, responsiveness, and flat organizational structure. In addition, we all hear about the power and benefits of teams. We feel that fast communication is good (fast information exchange). So, we avoid structure in the belief that this benefits our organization and allows our people to have autonomy. We feel that structure, procedure, and management is slow and inflexible. We think that procedure limits our speed. We know that our employees need and want autonomy. But there are significant challenges to flexibility. In our individual management systems, we try to plan, which is another term for making things predictable. Constant flexibility forces task-switching and is stress-inducing, so we fight that with our individual task, time, and attention management systems. But a big part of what is happening is: our people are fighting to control something that our organizational systems may be creating or amplifying. So, we’re gaining (possible?) benefits but putting the costs on the backs of our people. This lowers their productivity and increases their stress, leading to overwork, low engagement, and burnout for our “greatest asset”. Can we, as bosses, do better? I think we have to try. Here are some ideas. The sources of problems here

• I focus a lot on the individual problem and tools elsewhere
• Sources of organizational stress
• Stress is an unpredictability problem – a lack of control
• In organizations, we meet other people’s expectations – more loss of control
• Why it’s the boss's problem
• Introduce the business model A) valuable product; B) is produced via a business process(es) Broken business model(s)
• That business model is in the hands of the organizational leader – the ownership
• An example
• So, it’s the business leader’s responsibility to fix it
• An organization needs structure

Challenges to structure

• Our attempts at autonomy allow structure to be disrupted
• “autonomous” teams
• Multi-teaming
• We’ve adopted a model of “teams are more productive” – but there’s overhead
• Because of all of this, as bosses, we need to be careful about how we allocate our people
• Multiteaming raises the stakes on good communication – it introduces more challenges and more risks
• Our tools amplify our ability to disrupt structure
• Our communication tools primarily focus on asynchronous communication – the primary deviation from face-to-face
• The hyperactive hive mind and work assignment - Cal Newport Our tools have a lot of influence on how we do work – our choices matter and should not be left to preference
• Do business owners understand it from that perspective?
• So, stress is an organizational problem
• So stress is an organizational problem – manage to the ‘tolerances’ of the people

These factors tend to push our people into more challenging work and workflows

• We don’t tend to train our people in communication
• Nor do we enforce standards
• So they do what’s most convenient for them
• Sync is more challenging to set up; async is more challenging to execute
• Asynch is hard to do well
• Cal talks about the challenges of async
• Fred brooks talks about additional communication channels – addition is not linear
• Learning to communicate is a large part of team "chemistry" and effectiveness
• We need to keep this stuff in mind when we design the organization
• we need to be thoughtful about that design
• Our tendency is to not respect the ‘teaming challenge’
• If you have good teams, consider ‘bringing the work to the team’

Ways org design increases and decreases stress on individuals

• Communications design – asynchronous is hard, synchronous is easier, but we tend toward asynchronous comms tools
• Team structure raises the stakes on good communications – makes it harder – 1-1 comms is easier than team comms
• Work assignment design
• These two come together when our best resources participate a little bit on several teams
• Team creep – we’ll just pull in marketing for a consult
• "We see that she doesn’t look too busy, she can lend us a hand "

Ideas

• Don’t believe that flexibility and autonomy are free
• Have a nuanced understanding of antonomy
• Develop work assignment procedures
• Make work visible
• Closely review your organization’s communication structure
• Look for unintended consequences

Managing an organization and its business model is not easy, but it is the boss's responsibility. In this episode, we talked about some of the things that we need to consider as we're doing that work. Unfortunately, we receive generic advice (or legend and lore?). We have to take on the challenge of understanding the nuances and applying the tools and advice wisely, according to the details of the situation we face. That's why I recorded this for you. I wanted to give you reasons to deepen your understanding of these ideas so that you can apply them well and thoughtfully. If you'd like to think about it some more with me, reach out via (ahem, asynchronous) email. [e-mail].