The New Way of Organizing (Part 1)

In the next couple of blogs I will illustrate the New Way of Organizing which is a crucial part of the New Way of Working (NWoW). There is a lot to be said about that, so I will need some days to explain it.

This 3rd dimension of the 4 dimensional NWOW work environment (see earlier blog) is often overlooked by organizations that journey towards NWoW. It is much easier to change the Office and IT environment. And so most organizations leave it at that. But an organization should direct & support as well as divide & coordinate the work that has to be done in the best possible way. And that demands for a New Way of Organizing work. The old way doesn't cut it anymore. However most organizations still cling on to it, because of a phenomenon that called mental drag: we cling on to an old established mindset even though we know it is not effective anymore. Let's take a step back and illustrate this.

The organizational model of the Industrial era is the Machine Bureaucracy. In this machine bureaucracy, decisions are made at the top level and mechanically carried out at the lower levels. The decisions at the top (strategic apex) are being translated and refined by layers of middle management into specific work instructions to be carried out by the operating core that is closely supervised by a command & control management style. The model is static ("design once, run forever") but highly efficient and effective for mass industrial work. However the machine bureaucracy was so successful that it has been copied by more or less every large organization in every industry across the globe including the financial services industry and the public sector.

But times have changed and so has the type of work and the context of work. In the postindustrial world we work with our brains (both halves!) in a very dynamic environment. Clearly we have to abandon the old static model and create a fluid, dynamic organizational environment which still has to direct & support as well as divide & coordinate the work that we do.  This is the New Way of Organizing. Tomorrow in part 2 of the series I will introduce this model.