The Social Organization

How Can Communities Thrive in a Cynical Age?

The Advent and Christmas season is one where I think of my deceased father the most...he was a minister and for obvious reasons this was always a busy season.  It was also his least favorite.  He almost hated the celebration of Christmas - the gifts, the trees, the shopping.  He was actually pretty miserable to live with for most of December...and then, inexplicably, a gift would show up under the tree for me with a tag written in his highly formal script signed 'from Santa'. Clearly he was a bit conflicted but his real issue was that people didn't spend the time appreciating the meaning of the Christmas story and instead focused on the the selfish, superficial aspects.  Granted his ideal version of Christmas day was probably somewhat of a pious nightmare - sitting Puritanically on hard benches for hours contemplating what an innocent baby was trying to demonstrate to a world fraught with conflict and tension...

No one wants that - at least I don't - but he had a very important point. The world is a profoundly flawed place - there is war, starvation, conflict - but people have a huge capacity for good and so there is profound hope as well.  It is up to individuals to choose and it is a choice that we make every day - are we going to act as if there is hope or are we going to act on our fears?  Christmas is all about seeing the hope and the potential in a otherwise dark world.

Acting on hope, however, is not an easy task.  It assumes we've got to take the world and other people at face value - with all their flaws - and act on the assumption that the individual or organization we are dealing with will improve, because otherwise what's the point?  If we take the cynical view and assume that the other individual or organization will not improve, we are looking at a situation from a perspective of fear and it is paralyzing.  Religion then, is all about holding on to the faith that there is, indeed, hope for improvement. 

How does that relate to communities?  Well one, communities are all about forming ongoing relationships with people.  And people are hard to work with - not because they are necessarily difficult - but each person has different priorities and perspectives.  Communities require us to compromise our own priorities and perspectives so that the consensus can form and communities can make a difference.  As a society however, we have become more individually isolated, gotten used to having our way at all costs, and really don't like our decisions to be dependent on others.  We've become cynical and we lose our faith and trust in organizations very quickly.  We've replaced blind trust with blind cynicism.  That is a huge problem because no person or institution I know is perfect but all too often we are ready to simply pick up and move on if we run into issues, rather than dig in and try to help solve the problem.  I see this in myself and other customers all the time - I am incredibly impatient with poor customer service and I am still working on becoming a more patient person. Certainly the companies that I buy from are not actively trying to piss me off. Do they always do a good job in all aspects of their operations? No. But that makes them just like us...a bit flawed but usually trying to do the right thing given the resources they have available.

I don't know exactly where I am going with this but it's a time of year that I think about this topic a lot and this year I've been running into all sort of examples of people who feel entitled or ungrateful for other people and it's a hard year...we all need to give each other a break - and the benefit of the doubt that most people are not trying to sabotage us.  In that vein; go tell someone how much you appreciate their efforts, we're all doing the best that we can.

Personally, I'm quite thankful for my father's persistence in teaching me the lesson of hope & faith.  I don't go to church these days and I do occasionally think I could use a more regular reminder that I should act in faith that things will improve. My father's lesson was a strong one, however, and one that seems to become more important these days, not less. My father would be overjoyed to see someone of his faith finally make it to the White House, taking that message along with him. What can we do to help?

The Alignment Gap Between Organizational Structure & Organizational Priorities

Large companies have necessarily needed a functional structure in order to manage the vast number of people they employ. Somewhere it was decided that any one individual cannot be responsible for more than 7-10 direct reports...and consequently you get functional hierarchies.

The big issue? Whether functions are determined by job type(engineering, sales, etc.) or by market segment (consumer, channel, etc.), corporate priorities and initiatives typically cross function. That may not seem so bad, except that each functional head understands the priorities just a little bit differently. One function may see the number 1 priority as 10x more important than the number 2 priority while their colleague may see them as roughly equal in importance.  That has huge implications on how many and which resources get assigned to different initiatives.  Below is my simplistic graphic of this problem:

You can see where an organization may start to go horribly wrong.  Whatever initiative that is #2 may cause huge engineering and services issues because while marketing and sales ramped up investments...the company isn't staffed appropriately to deliver.  On the #3 priority, the company may be making huge investments in something but if marketing and sales are not also making investments, the initiative will fall flat and ultimately not succeed.  Yet many companies do not hire business owners for their initiatives and priorities (instead they tend to spend lots of money on consultants to try and fix the problem) and incentive structures typically reward functional heads for meeting objectives that are within their scope of control.

In the social media circle we talk a lot about how more open and transparent communication can help identify the gaps and issues but communities can't really solve the problem.  If anything they just put more pressure on understaffed resources to keep up with initiatives in other groups that may be much better staffed.

Let's take a bit of a radical view and say...why don't companies staff initiatives instead of functional groups? For example, a corporate initiative could be to increase customer satisfaction.  There are likely things in every functional area that need to be addressed.  Then maybe skill set based groups become more communities of practice and maybe groups that pool resources when individuals roll off of projects and get assigned new ones...and maybe that is how you also measure individual performance.  Those that always get snapped up for projects should be rewarded while those that are regularly returned to the pool get put on development plans.  This is more or less the way consulting firms work...why not other types of corporations?

My guess?  Most people don't like to leave their comfort zone. Instead of exciting, people prefer predictable.  The problem?  Very little is predictable anymore.  GM is near death's door, The Chicago Tribune has declared bankruptcy, and a handful of well-armed terrorists can create chaos for weeks in the world's largest cities.

I think initiative focused cross-functional teams would be an interesting way to approach this problem.  Hire pure resource managers to manage people who are 'on the beach' as we used to say in consulting and between initiatives.  In my mind that would give individuals one primary goal - for the length of the initiative (which could be multi-year if it involved expanding into a new market).  Communities of practice could then be set up - using social software - to help share skill-specific best practices across individuals.

Anyone else think that sounds like a good approach?