In the traditional hierarchical organization, the top thinks and the local manager acts. In an intelligent organization, thought and action must be fused in each individual. Ray Stata
Metaphor of Plato's influence as an enemy of coaching
To realize what Plato's influence would entail, it is enough for us to read slowly the first chapter of "The Open Society and Its Enemies" by Kalr Popper. He dedicates it exclusively to the summary, made by Plato himself, of this influx.
“Of all the principles, the most important is that no one, whether male or female, should lack a boss. Nor should anyone's spirit get used to allowing themselves to act on their own initiative, whether at work or pleasure. Far from it, both in war and in peace, every individual will have to fix his eyes on his boss, following him faithfully, and even in the most trivial matters he must remain under his command. So, for example, you must get up, move, wash, or eat… only if you have been ordered to do so. In one word:
He must teach his soul, through the habit long practiced, to never dream of acting independently, and to become totally incapable of it. ”
How can an organization distribute its responsibility without losing coordination and control
Clearly, people in an organization learn more quickly when they take responsibility for their actions. The opposite occurs when people believe that other people dictate our responsibility from elsewhere.
When we know and believe that our destiny is in our hands, learning becomes generative.
The metaphor of organization as an organism suggests a systemic perspective, very different from the traditional hierarchy of control.
It is the image of multiple local decision processes that respond immediately and continuously to change.
Thus they remain healthy in conditions of stability and growth.
We can see that the essence of the disciplines of intelligent organization is very suitable for the implementation of distributed controls in much the same way that we find in nature. While traditional organizations maintain management systems that control people's behavior, smart organizations foster personal mastery, develop shared visions, quality of thought and reflection, team learning, and a shared understanding of complex problems.
These skills allow organizations to have greater local power and, at the same time, better coordination than hierarchical ones.
The decentralization process is more emotional than intellectual. It is something that you can check in all kinds of organizations. Traditional executives' biggest push goes beyond money and fame, most would give up on anything more than control.
Instead, the perception that they can exercise control is just an illusion. The illusion that dynamic and detail complexity can dominate from above.
This belief causes many corporations to combine centralism with localism. When there are good results, decisions are increasingly decentralized. When they go wrong, mistrust dominates and returns to central control. This is a typical example of load shifting.
During crises, the burden of decisions is shifted to the central administration.
This stunts local skills and hinders the capacity that would help people experience, learn, control and coordinate at the local level.
This stimulus is only appeased if you really want to decentralize. Managers who have central control should be asked if they believe in learning, in the adaptability produced by the stimulus and enthusiasm that localism encourages.
Is it worth taking the risk of creating a locally controlled organization?
If they don't want it, there will be no sustainable results.
Can control be achieved without exerting it from the top?
The ecologist Garret Hardin identified a systemic archetype that he called Tragedy of the Common Ground, the same one that I call Conflicts of the Common Ground in my book “Coaching with a systemic perspective” and that I apply with my clients and students. To understand and use it, see the Tools tab at www.coachinglab.org
It is very useful to define the decentralization of control. It is one of the bases of the prototypes to achieve it. This archetype is useful because it addresses problems where local decisions seem logical and may not be so for the entire system. Common Ground Conflicts frequently appear in organizations where localism is valued. Corporations have many common terrains that can be depleted: financing, technology, productive capacity, customers, suppliers, employee competence, learning resources, and more. When decentralized, local divisions compete with each other for these limited resources.
Common Ground Conflict structures are very subtle when the relationship between individual acts and collective consequences is weak in the short term but strong in the long term.
These common grounds can be very simple. Productive capacity, for example. Our commitment to decentralization produces competition between different teams working against a systemic understanding.
This commitment is sustainable if you consider several questions:
What are the current and potential Common Lands that may be depleted due to local competition?
What specific actions can these Common Lands exhaust?
When we have identified them we can specifically face:
Who will manage the Common Ground?
There are different options depending on the case.
But the essence of all is to transform the function of the Central Administration into a research and design system.
Does this mean that central managers should stop participating in decisions?
No, on the contrary.
They must participate in many important decisions together with other central and local managers. But the design of the organization's learning processes cannot be delegated to local managers who do not have the overall and long-term vision. Precisely if senior managers don't see it responsibly, they won't build prototypical smart organizations or do it wrong. This is one of the greatest difficulties in building organizations that learn.
What should the Central Administration investigate?
The understanding of the organization as a system by all its components and also the understanding of the internal and external forces that will often drive change.
And what should you design?
The learning feedback processes of all components so that they come to understand the various forces and trends.
