Excerpt from The Superpeforming CEO
From Chapter 14:  Distributed Being

If you look into nature, into these places of community, you will find an amazing degree of alignment; there is a beautiful, symmetrical pattern. No friction, no member out of alignment—the flow is seamless. These organisms all behave intelligently, even though their members are unaware of the big picture and there is no “central controller” to guide them. According to futurist and complexity author Kevin Kelly, they are out of control—a state he describes as “distributed being.” Since this is the preferred operating mode of complex biological forms that have thrived for millions of years, Kelly suggests that our own increasingly complex organizations will inevitably follow the same pattern. In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively simple and locally autonomous agents, rather than a single, super-intelligent executive branch. They are bottom-up, self-organizing systems. In the language of complexity science, they are complex adaptive systems (CAS) displaying emergent features.

For organizations, reaching anywhere close to this level of performance is only possible in a decentralized environment. But decentralization of decision rights requires corresponding levels of personal responsibility.

Agile project teams are an excellent example.

George: “Birds flocking, fish schooling, bees swarming, all move effortlessly in the same direction, it is a more efficient way to forage and travel, the whole uses less energy to operate in this way. Somehow great teams and great organizations are able to operate as something approaching this ‘frictionless’ state. There is something extra–something invisible at work.

“Some companies become fossilized by centralizing all authority. This is suboptimal. Decisions have to be made as close to the customer as possible, at the lowest level of knowledge and skill. Organizations are patterns of relationships. Conversations are the heart and soul of organizational life. Conversations shape commitment to the organization and create a sense of what is possible. Like Buckminster Fuller’s trimtab on the rudder of a ship, conversations seem insignificant, but have tremendous hidden power. Conversations characterize everyday work life and negotiations between people in the organization and their customers. They determine the quality of service and the overall effectiveness of the company. In many organizations, conversations are negative and blocked or fall into otherwise destructive loops.

“Change cannot be imposed or controlled from the top or from the outside. It is better to work with people at all company levels to help them discover for themselves what is possible and what can be done better. This helps to facilitate new conversations, which often cross boundaries within organizations. By focusing on those conversations at the core of the organization, the greatest leverage can be created, for executives working on strategy, teams working on projects, the whole organization working on its next transformation, or any other critical business function. Systems, structures and processes all help the effective organization, but they count for little if the conversations and relationships are not real. Imposing command-and-control solutions to business problems, especially around knowledge work, has proven to be almost completely ineffective.”

An organic Superstructure will provide the most effective platform for Superperformance and its future sustainability. An organic framework is an Agile framework, delivering information faster, more accurately, and ubiquitously, allowing an organization to gain deeper insights into the activities and events that occur at the very edges of their operations. This architecture will enable an organization to execute against new knowledge autonomically, virtually, and collaboratively, without the friction of traditional management systems.

Exciting new attributes of this Superstructure include:

• A High Degree of Openness
• Dramatically Increased Agility
• New Levels of Adaptability
• New Organic Degrees of Freedom
• Fully Integrated Operations
• Speed vs. Mass
• Distributed Decision Rights
• Revolutionary Culture
• Self-Organizing Catalytic Sets of Synchronization
• Nonlinear Peer to Peer Relationships
• Anticipatory vs Reactive Decision Making
• Tailored and Precise Responsiveness
• Maximum Flexibility
• Autonomic Functioning

This is accomplished through the design and implementation of a new approach to an organization’s primary system of work, along with the rigorous integration of the business processes that make up an organization’s driver, mainstay and support processes.  Such integration is an important step toward consolidated process controls across platforms and functions. Integrating critical processes is necessary, but more importantly, selecting the appropriate processes for automation and redesigning others based on the functionality requirements of the business owners is a vital step.

Another important step toward achieving an Organic architecture is leveraging advanced technologies that today allow intelligence to be embedded at the very edges of the system.  Through an Organic Superstructure, organizations can now understand and weed through opportunities to construct an efficient portfolio for their businesses. This includes understanding system requirements, as well as constructing detailed designs and selection of appropriate software. Across the information technology space a new generation of tools is emerging. From the latest advancements in network infrastructure to the newest social networking applications, a forward view is called for.

It is important to note, however, that a critical success factor for instituting Organic architectures is an organizational commitment to nothing less then a cultural revolution. The “next generation” characteristics of a truly intelligent operation require an evolution in management and leadership thinking, as new understanding will drive new behaviors. Within the new optimization aim of the organization (i.e. Superperformance)  it is necessary to provoke the change experience from the inside out, and institute new organizational and governance structures that effectively align business, technology and knowledge processes.  Ultimately, the intelligent operation becomes the new definition for operational excellence, as primary value levers are improved and the financial measures of gross margin, cost and asset productivity are positively impacted.

Distributing Decision Rights, Management and Leadership

A life science of management and leadership exposes the obsolete industrial age Taylor paradigm that still to this day is limiting so much individual and organizational performance. The Taylor model is based on Descartes’ 400 year old clockwork universe and does not  integrate new science discoveries of the last 100 years, especially quantum mechanics and complexity science. By recasting organizations as  living, complex-adaptive systems, an organization’s full capacity for Superperformance can finally be unleashed.

The traditional view of organization—woven together through a systematic framework of production, decision support,  knowledge, and information systems— is based on the model of a well-oiled machine engineered to deliver maximum performance derived from pre-defined parameters and specifications. This industrial age model considers performance a derivative of external controls defined by the designers of organizational systems. They have given only marginal importance to the self-adaptive and emergent nature of organizational systems and the dynamic environments they inhabit. In other words, they are still far from operating with an immune system of distributed decision rights and with management and leadership capacity distributed everywhere, to the very edge of organizations. These bottom-up, agile characteristics of living, complex adaptive systems are precisely what is needed during times of rapid changing operating and knowledge environments, such as those that exist today.

Nested Hierarchies are Natural

From Organism View the self-referencing fractal pattern of system inside of system is apparent. The parts and their environments are continually co-evolving. From this view there is perfect parallel between organization and organism, which present as a set of nested structures, each inside of the next, like Russian dolls.

Organization                                 Organism

Economy                                             Ecosystem
↓
Industry                                              Species
↓
Organization                                       Organism
↓
Function                                              Organ
↓
Department                                         Tissue
↓
Work Team                                        Cell
↓
Individual                                           Organelle

From Organism View the entire global economy can be seen as a gigantic ecology of interdependent and continually interacting (work) cells, organs, and organizations engaged in the production, buying and selling of goods and services. And like any ecology it is self-organizing, not centrally controlled or coordinated.

Regardless of scale or level of complexity, there is a corresponding compartment at every tier of the organization/organism hierarchy. This is not just a novel coincidence—it is the natural expression of order that pervades all of life, from ecosystem to economy. It is simply the most efficient way to organize.

In fact, throughout the entire text of  Darwin’s Origin of Species, the only illustration called for was the picture of a nested hierarchy.

Nested Hierarchy from Darwin's Origin of Species