What does self-organising require?
The process of dealing with or controlling things or people.
For that management would require a plethora of tools and methods like organisational hierarchies or other structures, communication methods like meetings and reporting, rules and restraints like budgets and KPIs, measurement methods like double entry book keeping and the resulting financial reports.
Assuming an organisation has a purpose, usually one to create value of some sort:
Then management's sole purpose is to ensure that the value creation flows goes in the right direction and that it's moving at the right pace, usually as fast as possible.
Thus, by itself, management creates no value. It's merely the current flow-moving method in use.
Management methods are age old based on old technologies like quills and scrolls and sandal-leather.
2000 years ago the Roman army found that one boss for ten subordinates was the way to go, hence decurions and centurions. Now after 100 years of business schools and 40,000 business handbooks in print at any time that figure has not changed.
The most recent management "tool" is only 516 years old (double-entry book keeping) which made good use of the recent invention of books, hence double-entry.
The cost of management amounts to 2/3rd of a knowledge worker's time. And that for about 63% of the world's value-creation. Imagine a world where this waste could be eliminated!
When the first enterprise ICT solutions came to life more than 30 years ago nobody questioned the methods used to run organisations. Hence the software promptly proceeded to model a model, quckily adding complexity.
For more than 30 years enterprise software has focused on becoming very efficient single activity support tools without any, or very little, notion of the holistic flows from A to Z that value-creation is all about.
The ubiqutous solutions we use every day are vertical silos, in best case linked together with duct tape. That is myopic and highly limiting.
Now's the time for a radical break with the old approach and ICT architecture as we know it.
In general, there are five parameters you can influence:
New products and/or services, growth fuelled by universal economic growth.
Status: Product development and innovation are all part of the daily efforts, so not much more to be squeezed out here. And the general economic growth does not look promising either.
Outsourcing, procurement strategies, production process enhancement.
Status: Another not-so-new area of effort, marginal return on effort expected.
Outsourcing, production process enhancement, HCM programs (training, reorganisations).
Status: Yet another daily effort by the HCM department with declining returns on effort.
Financial engineering.
Status: The daily tasks for the finance department, “hygienic“ as it is, a daily effort with minuscule results, still has to be done.
Process innovation, remove non value creating “flow work”.
Status: This is the big but forgotten area of opportunity. Knowledge work happens mostly in non-linear, unpredictable processes/flows, a kind of process where about 63% of the world’s value creation happens. At the same time these kind of processes have only manual support - organisational hierarchies and management - that costs approximately 2/3rd of a knowledge worker’s time.
Conclusion: 1 to 4 can only yield marginal returns, if any. It’s in 5. the future lies, this is where your should focus today.
Context: The circumstances that form the setting for an event, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and asessed. The base for any decision.
Purpose: The reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. The base for any action.
Both requires that you can see the ongoing process. Preferably in real time.
You cannot drive a car by reports, spreadsheets and meetings. You need raw and instant view of everything. The same principles should apply to driving an organisation.
Everything that happens; who did (and does) what when and how to what, as well as responsibilities and authority - all must be captured and fullly visible exactly when it happens. And the data must be unencumbered and unfiltered so you can trust what you see.
| Theme | Classic | Modern | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Guidance | Rules | Purpose | Purpose drives, rules controls. It's leadership vs management. |
| Control | Reports (delayed) | Trust (transparency) | Replace the concept of "control" with trust, which again equals transparency. When you see everything in real time you know if the flow is on the right track or not. And that should suffice as it's the only need for the owners of the strategy. |
| Leadership | Manager | Leader | Leadership must be dynamic and dependent on context, knowledge, group dynamics and more. |
| Structural nodes | Position | Role | Role is what responsibilities and abilities a person have and it's work related. Anyone can have multiple roles, that also changes all the time. |
| Authority | Delegated | Distributed | Authority should be a result of ownership and hence responsibility and follows the work. Ditto for accountability. Totally dependent on ironclad handovers. |
| Process changes | Reorgs | Iterative changes to process framework. | Today, changing a process is by changing the organisational structure. This makes innovation immensely difficult to attain. |
| Operations | Control | Support | Turn the hierarchical pyramid upside down and the "top leadership" becomes the crucial support for those who actually does the job for the customer. |
| Visible struture | Departments etc | Circles / spontaneous groups | Circles/groups of common interest, goal, or task. Dynamic and dependent on context. |
| Admin | Manager control, central administration | Self management, power to the edges | Any type of administration from hiring and firing to setting salaries or changing jobs to purchases and travel expenses can be handled by those who knows best and are in need. Transparencey, per review and pressure will take care of the rest. |
| Flow framework | Management / Organisational hierarchies | Thingamy | Automating management and administration, freeing resources, implementing all above. |
| Enterprise software | Multiple vertical single activity supports | Single horizontal and holistic process | No more single actvity support tools patched together with duct tape. One system only. |
It's a place to be, for your work life. Like Facebook is for your social life.
While other enterprise ICT solutions are mostly organising tools, manual "sorting tables", and single activity support, Thingamy delivers the complete process from A to Z. Goodbye keeping to-do lists, having to remember what next, looking for stuff, and following rules. Goodbye to doubt about who's responsible.
It's a place where tasks and projects appear, including all required information and tools. It's the place where you can act or react by initiating processes, even involving others. It's the place where you can see all that happens in real time, who did what and when, and who does what now. And it writes all reports for you.
In short, it frees you from administration, it gives you autonomy back, it let's you organise your work life, and it removes doubt and frustration.
Download a one-pager on "what 'is' Thingamy?" here.
One single process based system that will make most current stand-alone single actvity support system superflous.
Your bespoke solution will be in the cloud, created for mobile and stationary devices, delivered as a service.
It delivers the right task to the right person at the right time, it captures all that happens in context, it writes reports automatically, it ensures ironclad handovers and full accountability.
It requires little or no training, it's what Maria Montessori suggested: Prepare the environmen, then withdraw and observe. Let your people find out themselves that the tool is better and easier than the current mish-mash of single activity vertical solutions taped together with duct tape. Then the old structure will crumble by itself and wasted time will be freed to create more value for your customer and your organisation. If the solution/service does not deliver, then stop using the service.
It can be "Selforganised-no-management-organisation", "Teal organisations" or "Holacracy" in-a-box. It can be the infrastructure for a nation-wide healthcare system. It can break down the barriers and make your customer and supplier a natural part of any internal team or project. It's the value creation flow framework for the future.
Activities/processe/flows comes as a activity-timeline, click on one and you see the flow-timeline including who did what when, who's next to do what and real time in-flow in-context chat. Visible to all who's involved in the flow. Tasks appear in the timeline.
Has two flexible columns side by side; one with activity timelines (flows including tasks, chats and object views), and one with the reports menu that includes "flow-starters" directly from objects in context (to initiate a sequence of activities).
Starting a flow, an activity, is always from a report (green drop down list), in context - "do something" would always be with/for/to an object - an idea, a person, anything.
Note that layout is easy to change. These examples are just our own defaults, as simple as possible.
Thank you for your interest in Thingamy. Please contact us using the information below.
Sig Rinde
Founder
Your contact
The following articles are indicative only. The first link typically sums up only the time cost of information search and process related ad-hoc communication. In addition one should include: action oriented and hence flow related meetings, all reporting, disturbance costs, moving from application to application, duplicate work, and in fact anything that normally can be understood as administration or management. Conservatively the total could add up to 55 - 75% of a knowledge worker's time. For simplicity we assume 2/3rd of a knowledge worker's time.
An acid test: this finding (in Norwegian) shows that a Norwegian physician now spends only 42.7% of her/his time on patients.
McKinsey & Co research article from July 2012 - mapping the time spent on non-value creation like search and ad-hoc communication.
The high cost of finding information.
The cost of interruptions - the often uncharted byproducts of manually run flows. In this pointing to 28% of the knowledge worker's time (P 4).
One should also take the "management tax" into consideration: As "management" in essence is all about ensuring and making the flow move forward the management payroll is a "flow cost" that in theory could be replaced with a proper flow framework.
The rule of thumb is one manager per ten subordinates which leads to 11% of employees being managers. Combine that with the much higher average manager compensation and one would find about 20 - 30% of total payroll to be the cost of having management. Here's one of a few examples of firms that manage without managers:
"First, let's fire all the managers" - how a successful firm manages without any managers in Harvard Business Review. (Requires registering)
Most of the following links are to articles discussing the use of EMR/EHR as a panacea for all that is wrong with healthcare. Other industries and services tend towards the same notion that even more of the existing might help - not always the most logical but rather quite human when lacking an alternative.
The US National Bureau of Economic Research - Does Health Information Technology Reduce Costs?
Electronic health records not a panacea - how 50-80% of implementations fail.
Escaping the EHR Trap — The Future of Health IT.
Handovers are crucial for any organisation or value creation flow - without total perfection the flows breaks or at best gets flimsy. The issue is the smooth, complete and registered transfer of responsibility AND all pertinent information.
Avoiding handover fumbles: a structured trial. Points to that 51% (of clinicians in this case) do not have confidence in handovers.
A study points to 80% of serious Preventable Medical Errors having its root cause in imperfect communication during handovers.