Venkat Rao on the decline of org charts, the rise of ‘stream’ organizations, and why Slack is perfect for the postnormal world of work
Venkat Rao has written yet another magisterial post delving into the meaning of our abandonment of org charts. It’s quite a long post, but in brief he argues that we have slipped into a new era in which volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity have grown dramatically, to the point that companies that are moving fast enough to thrive in our postnormal times must let go of the crutch of top-to-bottom situational analysis.
The (largely invisible) rise of management philosophies grounded in acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty rather than determinate control is not just a wild gonzo “phase” the new economy is going through, to be replaced by a more measured and “mature” phase in 2025 and a New Organization Man era. Like a stream transitioning from laminar to turbulent flow, we’ve moved to a qualitatively different economic environment, and there’s really no going back.
The collapse of organization charts in our thinking reflects a deeper collapse of the underlying imagined organizational realities. The organization chart is shrinking because we are slowly recognizing what has always been true: there is much less “organization” to chart than we’d like.
He argues that we need to adopt a ‘stream corporation’ mindset:
For a stream corporation, an org chart is increasingly a not-even-wrong construct for thinking about corporate anatomy. Because most of the structure is not formally created or under deterministic control.
For example, a marketing department that attempts to “map” its social media promoters and influencers in detail and “manage” the underlying social graph, as though it were the org-chart of an in-house marketing staff, is doomed to failure. “Let’s make a viral video” is an example of the basic category error of imposing a deterministic mental model onto a probabilistic control mechanism. It’s a mistake comparable to thinking poker is chess.
Venkat is a very strong proponent of Slack, which is organized to support stream organizations:
The right question about a stream, or a set of streams, is not what is the hydrological map here? It is what is it like to swim in this particular stream? Creative destruction is something best felt viscerally rather than observed visually.
In the flux/change metaphor, situation awareness lives primarily in the gut rather than in the mind.
Inhabiting Stream Realities
In a flux/change metaphor, structurally, the organization is whoever happens to be present in this meeting, inhabiting this patch of curved local space created by two pizzas on the table, and this frequency band of the atemporal Slack event stream providing global context. Morale is the feel of this meeting or video chat. Most-used emoji are a better measure of culture than the success of the company picnic.
Everything beyond the felt-present is speculation, and rumors of its “reality” have historically been greatly exaggerated.
Mapping stream realities is hard, even with a lot of data and powerful dynamic tools. As the very name Slack suggests, often a smarter, lower-effort approach is to manage anxieties rather than realities.
Venkat has – at too great length – done it again. The reason that fewer companies are updating org charts is that the rate of ‘reorganization’ is far too fast: it is changing all the time, in all parts of the company. The solution is not better ways to generate org charts, or new ways to slow those changes, but to accept the indeterminacy, accept the anxiety of being in a situation that is always in flux. You have to live in the flow, accept the stream, and have a slice of pizza.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/120525209042
