Emergence & Organization
Introducing Doug Garnett
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Now accepting keynotes for 23Q3-24Q1
Every year, I create three main presentations. For 2023, they are:
Delusions of determinism: Why planning for success leads to failure
Regression toward the meme: Why modern leadership continues to fall into old traps
Under pressure: Retail in a new financial era
If you want to book me for your event, workshop, or guest speaking slot, just send me an email. To make sure I am available, however, please do so at your earliest convenience; my schedule is filling up fast. More information can be found here.
A couple of updates before we go-go
Over the last couple of weeks, I have had a number of people reach out to say how my work - and this newsletter - has helped them in their careers, often with salary increases to show for it. Although I would be the first to emphasize that my part probably was insignificant, I also do not want to dismiss a compliment, particularly when it genuinely means a lot. So thank you. I am very happy I could help, however much or little.
Although my time is spent almost entirely between looking after my daughter and writing the book, I have started to outline the autumn content schedule. As promised, there will be virtual keynotes (premium subscribers will be able to enjoy priority boarding, so to speak), but I am also playing around with new concepts. Stay tuned (and please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any suggestions you would like to bring to the fore).
Now onto today’s main event. It gives me great pleasure to introduce today’s fantastic guest writer: Doug Garnett. The newsletter is, as always, split in such a way that the main text is available for everyone, with additional practical takeaways available to premium subscribers below the paywall. Let us get into it.
The Emergent Organization
By understanding complexity, we understand firms
When Eve joined Adam, there was formed the first organization in history. It was a simple one, yet its essential relations and the regulations governing it have not even today been fully worked out.
Vannevar Bush
There are times when a company’s best approach to building smart strategy is to follow what emerges as they do business. Strategies like these are critical when the future potential for a company will only become clear as it emerges from the fog of doing business.
So let me posit an idea: emergent ways of organizing also offer important value.
Emergence, Self-Organization, and the Complexity of Organizing
“As individual employees, we form the pattern we refer to as organization and, in turn, we are formed by it...”
Chris Mowles: Complexity, A Key Idea for Business and Society
Emergence is critical to business success when the information and understanding required to act or make decisions is not yet available or not yet clear. It plays a particularly critical role when organizing, as the information needed to make wise choices is scattered among those who do the work, in addition to vendors, managers, executives, HR, finance, and so forth. In such situations, smart managers can only rely on a clear understanding to emerge over time. Failing to learn what emergence reveals leads to decisions made too early - and such decisions are as damaging as decisions made too late.
Yet emergence is not the only reality at work. Within complexity science, study of emergence includes the behavior of self-organizing groups. Self-organization, we have found, makes starlings fly in organic emergent patterns, geese fly in organized vee’s, and packs of predators hunt as a group. Stuart Kaufmann has found self-organization in evolution and even goes so far as to suggest that “the natural world may lean toward organization.” Groups of humans also self-organize to get work done.
It is important to realize that all organizations are complex. As we do business, parts always interact. At critical times, these interactions lead to results more than, and different from, the sum of the parts. Consider:
Organizations consist of specific individuals with unique personalities and skills who interact as work gets done.
As they work, individuals interact with the specific and unique physical world around them, as well as machinery, technology, or specialized processes.
Individuals interact with the flow of money.
Project teams interact with customers that enjoy the benefits of the work.
Ideas contribute critical interactions with theories driving the work, standards for quality, or, most critically, passion (or lack thereof) for the category or industry.
There are important informal interactions with people who embody the heart and soul of the operation and experienced hands consulted informally. More critically, every operation includes those who pick up the pieces where explicit coordination fails.
The value and effect of interactions among these parts cannot be anticipated and can sometimes only emerge.
The Complicated Challenge to Organizing
Given this inherent complexity, need for information, and potential value of self-organization, it should be clear that imposing textbook structure in complex situations risks eliminating critical interactions. Businesses, after all, do not organize “to have an organization.” We organize to do things which lead to profit, cash flow, competitive advantage, and so on.
Today’s organizational best practices are a poor fit when a situation is particularly complex. Standard organization creates what in complexity literature are called “complicated systems”. Sometimes complicated systems are a good choice, and when they are, they help bureaucracies deliver brilliantly. The problem is that when a situation is highly complex, bureaucrats will still attempt to build such systems. After all, no bureaucrat has ever been fired for creating one.
But complicated systems fail in complexity. They reduce problems into parts by assuming they are unconnected. This is why, when complicated systems are used wrongly, bureaucrats must rapidly add rules and structure in response to unexpected events. Yet no system of this type can ever be complicated enough to thrive when facing complexity.
Emergent Organizations are Not New
I do not claim that management is an irrelevance. But… that the stable instability of every day organizational life arises from the self-organizing activities of what everyone is doing together to get the work done.
Chris Mowles
Jim Collins’ book Good to Great offers one intriguing idea for emergent organization when it suggests that businesses start by getting the right people “on the bus” and only then set the bus’ direction. Specific individuals matter a great deal in success.
Bell Labs, the discoveries of which still power much of our modern economy, built an emergent organization. Knowing the value of interactions between scientists in different fields, they built their human organization relying on physical buildings. Scientists were given offices at one end and labs at the other. Informal interactions happened naturally as scientists walked between the two - and a three-minute accidental chat among scientists turned out to achieve more than ten hours’ worth of meetings. Steve Jobs designed Pixar’s headquarters for similar interactions.
Lockheed’s mythical Skunk Works’ organization was also emergent. Formed in 1943, it was based on understanding which emerged for founder Kelly Johnson as he directed military aircraft design and manufacturing during WWII. Johnson knew unusual organization approaches were needed for advanced aircraft work. So, he developed fourteen “Basic Operating Rules of Skunk Works” (five shown below).
Note the brilliant insight in item 12, where Johnson demands comparable organization among clients. Organizers too rarely improve effectiveness by considering their client organizations.
If they would, the emergent organization that arose would not only be stronger, but more relevant.
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