The Future of Organization

The Future
of Organization
Philip Sheldrake

Euler Partners, 23rd May 2014, by-nc-sa

Image credit: ComplexCity Rome, by Lee jang sub, by-nc-nd

The Future of Organization
Eliminating the
compromises in
organizational life.
An incomplete review of
interesting ideas and some
new ones to boot.
#e20 / #socbiz / #futureofwork / #responsiveorg

With forewords by
Microsoft Yammer co-
founder and CTO,
Adam Pisoni, and
Social Media Today
founder and CEO,
Robin Carey.
Freely available at www.attenzi.com

Organization.
noun:
a coordinated group of people
with a particular purpose.
This presentation is available
with voiceover and transcript
at eulr.co/futureorg

The problem.
Organizations are about
mutual value* creation, but it’s
too difficult to give all one can
give and too difficult to derive
all the value there is to derive.
* Value: the importance, worth or usefulness of something.

The problem.
Employee engagement*
is symptomatic.
* an employee's involvement with, commitment to, and satisfaction with work

www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx (2011-12)
24 63 13%
actively
disengaged
not
engaged
engaged

The opportunity.
Can we reshape and regear
organization?
!
new insights + perennial values
modern tech + enduring aspirations
academic exactitude + earnest practice

All human beings …
should act towards
one another in a
spirit of brotherhood.

… an organization
of the people, by
the people, for the
people.
Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln’s commitment
to the principles of human equality.

www.attenzi.com/sixty-eight/
Lincoln

If your company
was a country,
would you live
there?
http://simonterry.tumblr.com/post/80222651306/

“We have learned a great deal; we
are awash with insights; we have
had significant influence on the art
of management. Yet we have failed
to address – in the sustained and
systematic ways they merit – some
of the central problems of
organization and governance.”
Philip
Selznick
“Institutionalism ‘Old’ and ‘New.’” Selznick, Philip. Administrative
Science Quarterly 41. 270–277. 1996.

Organization
is complex.

ISBN: 9781851684885

complexity

noun:

• a system in which there are multiple
interactions between many different
components

• bridges the gap between the individual
and the collective

• may lead to emergent behavior

order leads to chaos
chaos leads to order

“… emergence is a
ubiquitous feature of
the world around us”

John H. Holland, Emergence: From
Chaos to Order, 1999
“[T]here is a co-operation of things
of unlike kinds. The emergent is
unlike its components . . . and it
cannot be reduced to their sum or
their difference”

G.H. Lewes, 1875
G.H. Lewes

“They get their smarts from
below. … In these systems,
agents residing on one scale
start producing behavior that
lies one scale above them.”

Stephen Johnson, Emergence, 2001
“All new organisational forms, no
matter how radically new, are
combinations and permutations
of what was there before.”

The Emergence of Organizations and Markets,

Padgett, Powell, 2012

“In the short run, actors
create relations; in the
long run, relations
create actors.”
!
The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Padgett, Powell, 2012

In all things of nature
there is something of
the marvellous.
Aristotle
If one way be better than
another, that you may be
sure is nature's way.

By XKCD: http://xkcd.com/435/

www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/12/deal-complication-complexity-chaos-
youd-better-know-difference/

www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/01/stowe-boyds-manifesto-peoples-front/
Traffic
Organizations
Com
plication
Com
plexity
✓
✓
✓
✓
Cars

Saying goodbye
to some familiar
heuristics.

Actually, it’s
all in the
complex mix
our people
are our greatest
asset
it’s all about
shareholder
value
the customer!
is king

Organizations are relationships.

They entail the constant adaption
of the way we think and behave in
order to influence others to think
and behave differently in support
of our goals.
Relationships
at scale

“Customer-centricity is an
organizational point of view, not a
customer point of view. It’s actually
the organization-centric-view-of-the-
customer.”

“Don’t you want CRM to help you and
the customer mutually, allowing you
both to manage the relationship? …
Or would you rather propagate the
status quo – CRM as a construct to
manage the customer?”
CRM
www.attenzi.com/sixty/

Influence.
!
You have been inﬂuenced
when you think something you
wouldn’t otherwise have
thought, or do something you
wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Six Influence
Flows
1
3
2 5
6
4
THE!
ORGANIZATION STAKEHOLDERS
THE!
COMPETITION
The Business of Influence, Sheldrake, Wiley, April 2011

http://eulerpartners.com/influence-flows/

The numbers are just labels, not a ranking of importance

“There’s influence in
everything an organization
does, and sometimes in
what it does not do.”

“What is the intended outcome of
your marketing and PR campaigns,
and the design of your organization
overall, if it’s not to get stakeholders
to think and behave as you’d like,
and to be sensitive to how they’d
like you to think and behave?”
www.attenzi.com/thirty-iii/

www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/03/influence-request-for-comments/
Influence

“Whereas traditional business
relies on some bureaucracy to
determine what constitutes
organizational knowledge, this
function is delegated to the
individual who now determines
whether something is worth
sharing / passing on or not,
explicitly or tacitly.”
www.attenzi.com/forty-three/
Knowledge

Personal Knowledge Mastery
A set of processes, individually
constructed, to help each of us
make sense of our world and
work more effectively.
www.jarche.com/pkm/
Harold
Jarche

Influence
Flows

Alex
Pentland Social physics

“patterns of idea flow … are
directly related to productivity
growth and creative output”

“high levels of engagement
predict high group productivity
… [but] increasing engagement
is not a magic bullet.”

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-big-data-
can-transform-society-for-the-better

Alex
Pentland Social physics

“Exploration [a mathematical
measure of the extent to which
the members of a group bring in
new ideas from outside] is a
good predictor of both
innovation and creative output.”
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-big-data-
can-transform-society-for-the-better

You can fool some of the
people some of the time,
but not so many for so
long now that everyone
packs a smartphone.

www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/social-business-mutuality-stack/
Trust

“If perception is reality
characterized twentieth-
century marketing and PR,
reality is perception is the
twenty-first century axiom.”
http://hbr.org/product/balanced-scorecard-report-july-august-2011-vol-13-/an/B11070-PDF-ENG
Trust

It’s not all about
the tech, but it
helps.

Serendipity

The occurrence and
development of events by
chance in a happy or
beneficial way.

… All you have to rely on if
you can’t identify and interpret
patterns systematically.
www.attenzi.com/fifty-six-iii/

Digital nervous system

“The winners will be the ones who
develop a world-class digital
nervous system so that
information can easily flow through
their companies for maximum and
constant learning.

… To think, act, react, and adapt.”
Bill Gates
Business @ the Speed of Thought, 1999, ISBN: 0446525685

www.attenzi.com/fifty-nine-ii/

1999 → 2014

Now, our nervous system extends
out into the world.

Gates advised building an ideal
picture of the information you
need from technology. Now, we
also want technology to help us
build that picture.
www.attenzi.com/fifty-nine-ii/

IT now interweaves with the reality
that provided the metaphors.

The Internetome:

the manifestations (facets and
implications) of the Internet of
Things.
Internetome conference, 2010, www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/internetome/

Business performance
management

A discipline encompassing
metric selection, measurement
and organizational learning.

We’re moving such capability
towards real-time sensory
feedback in an organization-as-
organism / business-as-biology
metaphor.

Web 3.0

The web as a universal medium
for the exchange of data,
information and knowledge.
www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/09/introduction-web-3-0-social-data-week/

“Hegel didn’t rate public opinion.
He didn’t think it could appreciate
the shades of grey in serious
matters, but has a tendency
instead to polarize argument …”

He said we don’t learn from
history. Might we now learn from
our digital history?
www.attenzi.com/thirty-two/

www.attenzi.com/seventy-one/
Can we now
prove Hegel
wrong?

Mutuality.
Empowerment.
Learning.

Public Relations
The planned and sustained
effort to influence opinion and
behaviour, and to be influenced
similarly, in order to build mutual
understanding and goodwill.
http://eulr.co/publicrelationsdefined

www.PRredefined.org

www.prweek.com/article/1285244/pr-dead-public-leadership-future

understanding points of
view and reasons for
those points of view
mutual revision /
adaption of opinions
and behaviours
recognising the value
contributed and the
value derived
focusing on this
whole stack to
drive value for all
stakeholders
MUTUALVALUE
MUTUALINFLUENCE
MUTUAL
UNDERSTANDING
www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/social-business-mutuality-stack/

When one stakeholder
group in an organization
takes permanent priority
over another, that’s not
organization.
When one always loses a
little when another wins a
little, all lose a little.

Empowerment
“Any increase in worker power
that enables them to achieve
organizational objectives.”
Manifest in four cognitions:
meaning, competence, self-
determination, and impact.
Seibert, Silver, & Randolph, 2004 / Spreitzer, 1995 / Thomas & Velthouse, 1990

Performance
through
learning
Single loop Double loop Triple loop
Are we doing
things right?

Are we doing
the right things?

What’s right?
Learn new
behaviour

Learn new

thinking 
Learn new
beliefs / unlearn
old
Acting
Reframing
Transforming
Management
Leadership
?
www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/triple-loop-profound-leadership/

To successfully respond to the
myriad of changes that shake the
world, transformation into a new
style of management is required.

The route to take is what I call
profound knowledge – knowledge
for leadership of transformation.
W. Edwards
Deming
www.deming.org/theman/theories/profoundknowledge

Photo courtesy of The W. Edwards Deming Institute®

MIT Center
for Collective
Intelligence
http://cci.mit.edu
How can people and
computers be connected
so that — collectively —
they act more intelligently
than any individuals,
groups, or computers
have ever done before?

Ideas for
organizing.

“Work has profoundly changed in
recent years … a new normal …
based on principles and practices we
don’t totally understand …

Something new must be found,
perhaps distilled from the latent
energy in social connection and
frictionless communication, and it
must be tapped even if the workforce
is harder to lead than ever before.”
Stowe Boyd
www.hightail.com/en_US/docs/GigaOM-Research-The-Future-of-Work.pdf

Stowe Boyd
www.futureofwork.co/post/78477268155/a-manifesto-for-a-new-way-of-work
dissent
consensus
cooperative
collaborative creativity
tradition
autonomy
heteronomy
democracy
oligarchy
fast-and-loose
slow-and-tight
laissez-faire
entrepreneurial
hyperlean
waterfall
small and simple
large and complex
open and public
closed and private
emergent strategy
deliberate strategy

Responsive
Org
www.theresponsiveorg.com/manifesto
From To
Efficiency
Responsiveness
Hierarchies
Networks
Controlling
Empowering
Extrinsic rewards
Intrinsic motivation
Office & office hours
Anywhere & anytime
Customers & partners
Community

Sociocracy Sociocracy Democracy
Rule by the ‘socios’ –
people who have a
social relationship

Rule by the ‘demos’ –
the general mass of
people
Consent-based (rather
than consensus) 
One man, one vote
Alignment
Tension
Building and built on
trust and understanding 
Partisan

“It radically changes how an
organization is structured, how
decisions are made, and how
power is distributed.”

Explicitly hierarchical, but a
hierarchy of roles rather than
people per se, with a distributed
control system.
Holacracy™
http://holacracy.org/

http://youtu.be/h2lFqeJZN0g Brian Robertson, December 2012

Podularity

A pod is a small,
autonomous team
enabled and
empowered to
deliver the things
that customers
value.
Dave Gray
www.sprinklr.com/social-scale-blog/the-future-is-podular/

https://medium.com/the-connected-company/d5c3107a78f1

Dave Gray
Reproduced with permission. http://connectedco.com

Wirearchy

“a dynamic two-way flow of power
and authority, based on knowledge,
trust, credibility and a focus on
results, enabled by interconnected
people and technology.”
Jon Husband
http://wirearchy.com/what-is-wirearchy/

“There is probably no single
management methodology or
organisational structure that can
meet all the needs of a growing
firm, let alone be replicable across
industries, and so part of the
challenge lies in enabling
methodologies and working
practices to evolve over time to
meet new challenges.”
Lee Bryant
http://postshift.com/grow-your-own-organisational-structure/

www.futureofwork.co

www.theresponsiveorg.com

http://eulr.co/e20Gplus

(E2.0 on G+)

http://twitter.com/search?q=
%23e20 (#e20)

http://twitter.com/search?q=
%23socbiz (#socbiz)

Provocations.

“This is a connected world … but
the shadows of the industrial age
are long and run deep.”

“The healing mesh of social
business … creates the
opportunity for a new kind of
social fabric, woven together out
of connected intention. That kind
of co-operation can be the fabric
for an emergent civilization.”
Anne
McCrossan
http://stoweboyd.com/post/74638842971/

www.visceralbusiness.com/blog/brand/social-business-social-fabric-and-the-healing-mesh/

Do you help all the individuals
associated with your organization
build worthwhile relationships with
each other and others, coalescing
by need and desire, knowledge
and capability and shared values,
to create shared value?
Defining
social
business
www.attenzi.com/seventy-two/

www.philipsheldrake.com/2013/09/3m-thinktank-conference-getting-social-business/

Managing Oneself

Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself by
identifying your most valuable strengths and
most dangerous weaknesses.

Articulate how you learn and work with others
and what your most deeply held values are.

Describe the type of work environment where
you can make the greatest contribution.

Peter F.
Drucker
Harvard Business Review Onpoint 4444, 1999

http://hbr.org/product/managing-oneself-paperback/an/2312-PBK-ENG

Self-organization

A process where some form of global order or
coordination arises out of the local interactions
between the components of an initially
disordered system.

The Organized Self

Equipped with an ‘organization agent’ –
software representing us in finding opportunities
to create mutual value with others, and helping
to realise that value.
os

Socioveillance

A component of Organized Self.

A personal and private service
monitoring our interactions with
our socios.

Negotiates data exchange with
others’ service according to our
respective privacy policies to
enrich our mutual understanding
within comfortable boundaries.
SUR
SOUS
SOCIO

CREATIVE
COMMONS
COPYRIGHT
LAWcc

CREATIVE
COMMONS
COPYRIGHT
LAW
HUMAN
ORGANIZATION
CORPORATE /
COMPANY LAW
and
EMPLOYMENT LAW
cc
h

Bread incorporated
domestic jurisdiction
codified selection of most
appropriate jurisdiction
A CB
Bread A Bread CBread B
the middleware
company
foreign jurisdictions
(countries and states)
subsidiary
incorporated entities
companions
companion groups
companion API

Distributed autonomous

corporates / organizations

A DAC / DAO is autonomous, distributed,
transparent, confidential, trustworthy,
fiduciary, self-regulating, incorruptible and
sovereign.

It’s software based on the same
mathematics as the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/04/organization-personal-reputation-first-
principles-distributed-autonomy/

Bread Traditional
Code interpreted
automatically in milliseconds 
Code interpreted laboriously
over days and months
Open, transparent
relationships and
interoperability 
Closed, opaque
relationships and islands

of automation
Reputation currency  Who you know
The P&L is the cashflow  Cash is king
Global consolidation  Individual consolidation
Frictionless, fluid, fast  Abrasive, leaden, slow
Incorruptible  Corruptible

shareholder
transpersonal
stakeholder
?
http://holacracy.org/blog/beyond-serving-stakeholders

Organization is a global public resource
that must remain open and accessible.

Organization must enrich the lives of
individual human beings.

Individuals’ security and privacy in
organizations are fundamental and
must not be treated as optional.
Mozilla
manifesto
amplified!
from “Internet” to “organization”
www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

Individuals must have the ability to
shape the organization and their own
experiences in the organization.

The effectiveness of the organization as
a public resource depends upon
interoperability (protocols, data formats,
content), innovation and decentralized
participation worldwide.

Free and open source software
promotes the development of
organizations as a public resource.
Mozilla
manifesto
amplified!

Transparent community-based
processes promote participation,
accountability and trust.

A balance between commercial profit
and public benefit is critical.

Magnifying the public benefit aspects
of organizations is an important goal,
worthy of time, attention and
commitment.
Mozilla
manifesto
amplified!

Seoul Paris Rome Moscow Tokyo
ComplexCity, www.leejangsub.com
THANK YOU

The difference between what
we do and what we are capable
of doing would suffice to solve
most of the world’s problems.
Mahatma
Gandhi

vlogbrothers
don’t forget to
be awesome

Image credits

Abraham Lincoln – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

Cellular automata – http://math.hws.edu/xJava/CA/ca_1024x768.png

G.H. Lewes – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/PSM_V09_D668_George_Henry_Lewes.jpg

Aristotle – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aristotle_Altemps_Inv8575.jpg

Engine – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mercedes_V6_DTM_Rennmotor_1996.png

Social organization – http://www.sg.ethz.ch/research/topics/social-se/

Six Influence Flows – http://eulerpartners.com/influence-flows/

Harold Jarche – http://internettimealliance.com/wp/profiles/team/harold-jarche/

Alex Pentland – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alex_Pentland,_MIT_%283238517166%29.jpg

Bill Gates – http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/BillGates2012.jpg

Hegel – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hegel.jpg

W. Edwards Deming – Photo courtesy of The W. Edwards Deming Institute® http://www.deming.org/theman/photogallery

Stowe Boyd – http://stoweboyd.com/about

Dave Gray – http://www.davegrayinfo.com/

Jon Husband – http://secure.flickr.com/photos/kk/97978332 by kris krüg

Lee Bryant – http://plus.google.com/u/1/+LeeBryantPostshift/about

Anne McCrossan – http://twitter.com/Annemcx

Peter Drucker – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drucker5789.jpg

Mahatma Gandhi – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gandhi_smiling.jpg

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