The counterfeit money of self-organization
"The existence of errors," write Walter Krämer and Götz Trenkler in their readable encyclopedia of popular errors, is not "what is actually amazing, but that they often remain in circulation for such an astonishingly long time, like counterfeit money. "In terms of self-organization, too, there seems to be a lot of counterfeit money on the road:
Self-organization is seen as something that can be brought into being at the push of a button, so to speak. It is like a big bang revolution for which we only have to flip the right switch. In the event of a crisis, we can then switch it off again.
Agile improvement initiatives are launched, but ready-made recipes are provided. Instead of ensuring a common understanding of the problem in the first place, the solution is already in place. Now it just needs to be implemented according to the rules.
Teams may be called self-organized, but they have little scope for action. Key decisions are still made by line management, agile meetings are used for status reports, and improvement measures are considered but then sacrificed to the operational pressure of everyday business.
It is assumed that agile methods automatically lead to entrepreneurial self-organization. The credo is that it comes as a free supplement as soon as Scrum, Kanban or Design Thinking are used.
This list could easily be continued. However, it seems to us that the search for the famous common thread is more important than a list that is as comprehensive as possible. What do these different phenomena have in common? And what are the underlying errors?
It is not difficult to detect the watermark of the mechanistic organisational image on the aforementioned counterfeits. Change is reduced to solving technical problems: we install programs, implement selected measures, switch to new operating systems. That this ignores the complexity of social processes is anything but a new insight. Equally old is the deep-rooted mistrust on which such blind spots are built. Even if the employees are proven experts, without hierarchical leadership everything threatens to get out of hand. Rules are needed to ensure that performance is achieved. And without close supervision, nothing can be achieved anyway.
The question remains how we can shed light on such blindness. How can we counter the counterfeit money, so to speak, with the hard cash of self-organization? A short fact check provides the first answers:
Self-organization is no longer an exception. This is demonstrated by countless teams, especially in agile software development; it is demonstrated by autonomous business units that have all the necessary expertise to serve their customers in the best possible way; and it is now also demonstrated by many companies that have elevated self-organization to a central design principle. Sigi Kaltenecker's latest book presents over 40 practical examples from a wide variety of industries - and this is undoubtedly only a small sample.
Self-organisation is no longer in its infancy. Traditional companies such as Gore Tex or dm, for example, have relied on a high degree of self-organisation since their founding days. Nor is it a start-up phenomenon that you leave behind once you reach a certain organizational size - rather, the range of practical examples extends from medium-sized companies with around 100 employees (Liip, Compax, allsafe Jungfalk, eSailors) to companies with several hundred employees (Semco, Incentro, Stämpfli, IDEO; Morning Star), to corporations with many thousands of employees (Whole Foods, SOL, Gore).
Self-organization is not limited to individual industries or company divisions. Even if the proportion of digital businesses is very high, notable examples can be found in sectors as diverse as mechanical engineering (FAVI, Harley Davidson, Tele Haase), retail (dm, Hoppmanns Autowelt, Zappos), the manufacturing industry (Patagonia, Blaha, Morning Star), the service sector (AVIS, hhpBerlin, allsafe Jungfalk), the hotel industry (trivago, Traum-Ferienwohnungen, Upstalsboom) and even the banking world (Volksbank Heilbronn, Handelsbanken).
In addition to these diverse role models, we want to provide some guidance here for strengthening your own practice. To strengthen self-organization, you need:
a common picture of the current situation: What is going well at the moment? What can we build on? What is not going well? What should we improve? And what conclusions can we draw from this balance sheet?
a solid understanding of self-organization: What is it anyway? Why do we need it? How does it help us to cope with the current challenges? And what do we gain from it ourselves?
sufficient willingness to change: Do we all see where our biggest problems lie? Are we aware of what can happen to us if we do not improve? And do we know how we can unleash as much solution potential as possible?
Learning ability: How do we ensure that we not only start, but also achieve the desired improvement? How can we learn from our individual change steps as quickly as possible? And how does self-organization help us to do this?
staying power: How can we stay on the ball in the long term? How can we cultivate continuous improvement? How do we use the existing entrepreneurial intelligence for this purpose?