Wouldn’t It Be Great If My Organisation Worked Properly!

Frederick Taylor, whose practical philosophy of organising labour into clearly focussed functional groups overseen by the newly invented role of ‘manager’, laid down such a successful way of working that it is still operating way beyond its sell by date. To my mind that should have occurred on the date the internet was born. Since then ever deeper levels of interconnectivity have correspondingly generated Uber/Airbnb levels of unpredictability. Disruption is the new ‘mot du jour’.

As a result we need another way of organising talent, aligning energies and moving into top gear.

But that’s a massive ask once you start to think about it. If you had the power to take your organisation out of circulation for a complete refit, then maybe you could find a way to move beyond silos. But you don’t have that luxury because corporate targets still need hitting each year so everyone can feed the family and carry on.

So we repeat cycles of behaviour we can trust have got us there in the past. However, the price is that we know it’s much, much harder than it needs to be. And on reflection we know it’s becoming less effective each year as the world moves further into behaving as a digital economy. We can already see ourselves being left behind.

This is why those £250m+ organisations are finding it tougher each year to attract and retain top talent. It’s now a two speed economy. And the more agile are attracting the talent.

But with reinvention, those in the slow lane can speed up and be reborn as viable players. To do that there are three types of behaviour that make winners in a digital economy.

Dramatising the ‘outside-in’ agenda, so it becomes experienced reality for everyone and the reference for every organisational context

Have end to end customer journey teams living within a single story that aligns, inspires and focuses them on breakthrough performance

Being in a state of ‘perpetual beta’ through iterative innovation, guided by real time feedback, then followed through with rapid scaling across enterprise tribal boundaries

Making those behaviours a daily reality needs a much more powerful catalyst than holacracy and self managed teams.

Customer Hubs deliver a new model that nurtures those behaviours. They are a stripped down version of the £250+m organisation’s future self. This facilitates rapid alignment and orchestrated teamwork with everyone orientated to breakthrough results and a start up mindset.

Put another way, the kind of customer hubs we are designing at Beyond Silos create the conditions for sustainable high performance and innovation by unleashing the latent organisational genius that currently stagnates in Taylor designed organisations.

Won’t it be great when things work like this? Friday nights will be a different conversation.