I attended the Harvard Business Review webinar Leading the Agile Organization with guests Michael C. Bush from Great Places to Work, Jeanne Ross from MIT Sloan School of Management, and Sanjay Sehgal from KPMG, and it was an hour well spent–informative, topical, thoughtful (Nicely done Angelia Herrin).  The discussion was meant to highlight;

• How senior leaders can empower agility, build collaboration, and create diverse teams that innovate throughout the organization
• Why companies must embrace technology disruptors to transform their decision-making and their operating models
• How “relentless experimentation” can become part of a company’s plan for continuity and growth

Having only an hour, the guests did a nice job of briefly discussing these ideas as well as tackling subjects such as AI and Organizational Change Management (OCM).  It was a lot to pack into 60 minutes, and obviously was not meant as an exhaustive discussion of the topics. 

But I was a little surprised that a critical idea didn’t get more consideration–how do our core ideas about organizations prevent organizational agility?   

The issue is not new, but old–well over a century old. The model still deeply entrenched in our organizations, culture, and practices is a hierarchical command and control structure with origins in 19th Century military thinking and refined by men like Fredrick Winslow Taylor in his 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management. Here we are over a century later and the core principles of centralized planning and control by professional managers overseeing underlings is still the bedrock on which organizations are built.  It’s the air we breathe–everywhere but invisible.

Another series of profound changes, particularly in the United States, further solidified the model–Agency Theory and Maximizing Shareholder Value. The key idea as it relates to organizational agility– the sole purpose of the modern corporation is to maximize shareholder return with managers as agents of shareholder interests. How that concept has shaped organizational governance is profound. Management became first and foremost agents of control.

These concepts became the guiding principles and practices used in our organizations (even non-corporate entities) and taught in our business schools. The purpose, the core identity of management centers on planning, organizing, commanding, and controlling work. Agility by its very nature radically shifts that dynamic and in turn threatens the very identity of managers.  That is the primary impediment to enabling organizational agility.  It’s certainly not the only impediment, but as a root cause, it is the most critical.  Organizational agility requires rethinking what it is to be a manager–from control and efficiency to coach and experimenter.  It is a radical shift that some companies have accomplished to varying degrees (Amazon, Bosch, Google, ING Bank, Netflix, Saab, Salesforce, SAP, Spotify, Tesla, SpaceX and USAA to name a few- courtesy of Steve Denning), and I am cautiously optimistic that others can transform.

In upcoming posts, I’ll examine these topics in detail…