The Needs of Every Modern Organization

Book Reviews – Team of Teams and Reinventing Organizations

I just read two books (Team of Teams and Reinventing Organizations) that very much go hand in hand… in the same way that Factfulness and Abundance correlated strongly. Both books focus on organizations as reflections of worldview, culture, and modern complexity.

Team of Teams, written principally by General Stanley McChrystal, chronicles the US Joint Special Operations Task Force’s development as they battled Al Qaida in Iraq in the mid-2000s. The book focuses on the shift from traditional organizational hierarchy and systems to achieve maximum efficiency, to an arrangement that enables ‘shared consciousness’ and ‘empowered execution’ which in turn increases organizational adaptability – a necessary characteristic for nearly every organization in light of the complexity of the modern world.

Main takeaways:

• The world today is not just complicated, it is complex, and this distinction is critically important for organizations. A clock is complicated – the way that all the parts work together to produce something precise to within a millionth of a second. But the weather is complex, rendering predictions less certain by many orders of magnitude. A computer is complicated. The human brain is complex. The difference arises from how many components interact with one another. In 1850, before the widespread use of the telegraph, the world was complicated, because the interactions between people were limited by distance. Today, we live in an increasingly complex world because billions of people are interconnected like a neural network that operates at the speed of light. Modern complexity means the self-immolation of one man in Sidi bou Said, Tunisia sparks the overthrow of multiple dictators and one of the bloodiest civil wars in recent history. Complexity means that organizations must be able to adapt much more frequently and holistically than ever before, otherwise they risk becoming a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, and by the time they have received approval to become a round peg, the hole has iterated from being a circle to an oval, then a triangle, then a star… and is about to become a pentagon.

• To become an organization that can adapt quickly, you must have two things: trust, and common purpose.

1. Trust means that we invest much time and effort in developing the next generation of leaders so that decision-making can be pushed out to the wings of the organization. If I, as a leader, don’t trust the members of my team, then the fault lies principally with me as I have not adequately cultivated their character and/or their requisite skills, or helped them transition into their next adventure in life. Empowered execution, where more people have more power to make big decisions, is essential for an organization to keep pace with a complex society. If decisions have to move up and down several layers of bureaucracy before being acted upon, it is likely they have become irrelevant before they are finally rolled out.
2. Common purpose means that an organization has a shared consciousness. Companies used to be able to specialize to such a granular level that a person might be hired on to turn one lever on an assembly line, and would have little to no knowledge of how the whole widget was put together, packaged, marketed, sold, delivered, and serviced. Today, organizations can no longer afford to stratify their labor force to that degree of specificity. Rather, they need generalists who understand the vision, mission, and general protocol that governs the organization so that they are equipped to handle any number of unpredictable scenarios in our vastly interconnected world.
3. The Ritz Carlton provides a wonderful case study of the intersection of these two concepts. For decades their employees, down to the janitor, have been entrusted with the ability to comp guests up to $3000 to deal with complaints. To sanction the man who cleans the toilets with that kind of pecuniary power means he needs to understand the overall mission of the company so that he exercises proper judgment. That requires investment in his personal development. The thinking, however, is that by the time the guest’s concern has traveled up and down the chain of command, the guest might be lost to the company forever, costing the hotel far more in lost revenue than the occasional errant misuse of company funds by a bellhop trying to pacify a weary and irritable businessman.

• To that end, not empowering your employees, and not investing in transparent communication to promote shared consciousness means that employees have to stick with the standard operating procedure (SOP). Embedded in a system that is increasingly complex, employees run the risk of ‘doing things right’ (i.e. sticking with the plan handed down to them) instead of ‘doing the right thing’ (that is, doing what is most beneficial to the organization, which, because of complexity, can’t be predicted). An effort to predict an increasing number of possible scenarios an employee might encounter has resulted in company manuals and SOPs that are hundreds, even thousands of pages long. Some organizations have rewritten the rules into a set of values that fit onto a single page that can be applied with discretion by team members with shared consciousness, or alignment, and who have been empowered to innovate.

• Lastly, it means that leaders today need to be less like battlefield commanders issuing a steady stream of directives, and more like gardeners who are consistently cultivating those in their care.

In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux holds that organizations tend to mirror the prevailing worldview of the day, and he codes organizational structure by color, corresponding to a specific epoch in the evolution of human society. He contends that we are shifting out of the era of Orange institutions (characterized by centralized, meritocratic machinery) where the goal is to beat the competition and to achieve profit and growth, into the age of Teal organizations, which are distinguished by self-organization, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose, and where the goal is contribute holistically to the global human endeavor.

Main takeaways:

• While I disagree with Laloux’s underlying philosophy, I do generally agree with his approach to self-organization. He contends that organizational practices are the byproducts of a set of beliefs. If people are fundamentally distrustful, then company policies and procedures will be adopted to curb errant human behavior. If people are generally trustworthy, however, organizational culture will reflect this belief. To this point, one company ran a study that showed the enforcement of certain punitive policies was costing the company more money than the value of the articles they were designed to protect. While this isn’t always the case, the point is that our preconceived notions about the world and about people directly influence our institutional structures. A movement toward a more trusting organizational ethos (and significant investment to help create that culture) means that companies are able to self-organize, or, in the verbiage used above, push decision-making out to the wings.

• In the movie Cinderella Man, there is a gruff man of business who, after deciding to prioritize profit over certain men who are suffering the effects of the Great Depression, says that his brain is for business, whereas his heart is for his family. Many people today no longer desire to make that distinction. They want to bring their whole heart, soul, and mind to their work – hence the idea that Teal organizations are defined by wholeness.

• And concerning evolutionary purpose, a point that loosely connects with the idea of complexity, the thinking is that organizations can and must consistently adapt. This happens most effectively in self-organized institutions where the folks on the front lines, who are in touch with social trends, have the ability to act with lightning speed on these developments. And they do so with their hearts, and not just their brains, meaning that the metrics of success have more depth to them than mere dollars. Rather, success can be measured in terms of social development, environmental impact, or the proliferation of truth and beauty, to name a few examples.

Neither book was written with the church in mind, I don’t doubt. But I feel that many of these takeaways apply to the church. The world is increasingly complex and the church doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Entrusted with timeless Truth, we are called to engage a dynamic society with savvy cunning to leverage the world’s systems for eternal purposes (c.f. Luke 16:1-9, esp. v. 8). How can we flatten the systems that push the church further out into society, empowering individuals to make decisions based on the unpredictable complexity that we are bound to encounter? How can we develop those coming up through the ranks so that we quickly replace ourselves? How can we bring all that we are into every meeting, sales call, and family dinner?

I’m open to all thoughts on the subject! I believe it’s not only highly relevant, but critical to our effectiveness as the 21st century church. May we be like the sons of Issachar, who ‘understood the times,’ and then bring the heart of David to bear on them.