Ralph Waldo Emerson on The Natural Organization

This is the first post in a series that will in a way set the backdrop and the inspirations of my thoughts on the Natural Organization. My intention is that it will show where I'm coming from and what the natural organization is all about. I might not necessary agree with everything that these thought leaders have written or said, but I believe they have found some insights that are "eternal truths" that appeal to the very core of the human heart. I will introduce one thought leader at a time, present a selection of quotations and add a few comments on how this applies or corresponds to the Natural Organization.

First "on stage" is Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher, poet, intellectual, transcendentalist and abolitionist.


"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. "
The world is in a constant hurry. People want immediate results and corporations are short sighted and impatient. Someone said it in a different way; "People overestimate what they can achieve in a year, and greatly underestimate what they can achieve in five years".

"Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons."
Trust in yourself. Believe that you are capable because you are. Don't look to others for leadership. Be a leader instead.

"Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow"
This lesson should be applied to people and organizations both. Don't get caught in your safety zone. The safety in status quo is just an illusion.

"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to leave the world a better place...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
Goes back to my earlier post and Margaret J. Wheatley saying that we organize and lead in conflict to what life teaches. Business life is a sub-system of life. We can't have completely different measurements of success in business from "the real life". Yes, profits and turnover are valid measures, but not in themselves.

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
Learn, make mistakes, don't worry. Rework corporate cultures that are based on fear, punishment, intimidation and politics to one that supports learning, mistakes and curiosity.

"An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory"
Don't overdo planning, meetings, budgets, forecasts etc. Use the collective wisdom in our company, make a decision and go for it. No regrets. Just do it!

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
Imitation is part of the modern business life. We can't invent everything. But make sure to be unique in some way, dare to think differently and constantly challenge your mental models. If not you might be the next company that bites the dust because you did not understand that the world was changing.

"Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved."
Enthusiasm differs from motivation. Usually we say that leaders motivate the employees. Why do employees need motivation? Why do leaders not need motivation? (think about that one) Motivation is extrinsic and enthusiasm is intrinsic. We get enthusiastic when we feel meaning in the work we do. Enthusiasm is closely connected to words like authentic, genuine, free, vision, values.

"As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way"
The reason for naming my coming book "The Natural Organization" is because it is a breaks from the traditional organization. I find the power hierarchies, politics, domination system and the struggle for control as unnatural. It has nothing to do with the rest of life and if you understand systems thinking and view business life as a sub-system of life it becomes apparent that our traditional organizations are abnormal.

I believe Emerson was speaking about how we limit ourselves by thinking negatively. In a broader perspective it can also be interpreted as how we limit ourselves and our organizations by negative thinking and also by restraining our natural strengths with formal rules. A good example is that many leaders view "the learning organization" as an illusion, an utopia. The reason for this is simply because they cannot think outside their own mental models, they are stuck in the industrial paradigm where an organization must be organized as a pyramid. Creativity requires freedom. Freedom breeds responsibility. Responsibility breeds leadership. By organizing our companies in a "natural way" we can set free the human capabilities that are so scarce in today's organizations.

"Nothing external to you has any power over you"
We create our own lives. No one but you can decide if you are going to be happy or sad. The "unnatural organizations" are trying to disturb this "universal law". The more they try the more people flee from these organizations.

"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding."
On my way Ralphie boy. :)

"This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."
Seems like the perfect ending. I have been writing about this before but it's well worth to do it again. Though times may seem harsh and the future bleak, I believe we can take advantage of the problems we see, use them as catalysts for change and rise to a new level. The Natural Organization is my way of articulating this future.

Do you have an Emerson quote that you think fit with the Natural organization? Please add your quote and your comment below.

Tags: ralph waldo emerson, patience, natural organization, courage, happiness, learning, enthusiasm, creativity, freedom, change

Nothing endures but change - Heraclitus 535-475 B.C.

There was more change last century than in all previous centuries, combined. Information has grown exponential. 100 years ago the problem was to get enough information. It was a scarce resource. Today we are overwhelmed with information and our problem is to find what's relevant to us. A recent estimation is that we will see more change in the next 14 years than we did in the entire last century. Holy cow! Can you imagine that?

This means that the information overload will be extreme. We have not yet begun to develop systems and structures for this information boom. Even more important, our organizations are not ready to handle it. People are not ready to handle it. Managers and leaders are not ready. As the level of change accelerates uncertainty will increase. A natural reaction is to try to increase control, which many companies are doing today, but that goes against nature so to speak.

Change is inevitable and the only way to deal with it is to "go with the flow". Another way of putting it is to have an agile, flexible organization that quickly reacts to the changes. It also means changing our values from control to adaptability, openness, transparency, trust and real empowerment. Here we come to the point I'm trying to make in my book; this is only possible by removing the dominant hierarchies as they are built for control and efficiency.

The structure cannot be ignored in organizational design as it puts limits on the content. The structure also states the rules of the game in the organization.
By building hierarchical organizations we immediately know who has power, who will make decisions and what people are supposed to do and not do. Great for control and efficiency.

If, and this is fundamental, the problems are simple. Research has shown that as problems get more complex hierarchical organizations lose both control and efficiency. So, that is why I talk about leaving the industrial paradigm once and for all in order to open up our thinking to the question that need to be addressed today; how do we design organizations that fit our present business environment and our present organizational purpose. Cause it's not about control and efficiency anymore. That's for sure.

Tags: change, natural organization, agile, values, dominant hierarchies, control, industrial paradigm, organizational design

A better world

There are more than a few things one could do to change the world. I will mainly focus on organization and leadership as I find that our organizations have not developed as fast as the rest of our society. The industrial paradigm still reigns and holds back the potential of our organizations. It stifles our creativity and obstructs natural dialogue which make learning organizations an illusion. This paradigm also sets the rules of the organizational game as one of masters & servants and makes our organizations plagued with power games, inequalities, unethical behavior and sad stories.

The industrial paradigm started in the mass production era. Organizations were thus built for control and efficiency. It made sense at the time.

300 years later. Same paradigm, different world. It’s about time we do something about this. I like to think that I have some knowledge about business models and strategy as I have been working in this area for many years and have an own company specializing in business model optimization. From this perspective it is absolutely critical to change leadership and organizations to fit the present demands.

I would not keep my stocks in a company that in 5-10 years has not completely changed from the dominant hierarchies of the industrial paradigm. I offer a different approach to organizing and leading companies and other organizations. I call it "The Natural Organization". Yes, it is a much more democratic and humane way, but at the core it's just common business sense. A company with an outdated business model and an organization from another era is just not gonna make it in our hypercompetitive world. Look at the auto industry. The banks. Old school. Industrial paradigm. I'm not so sure the crisis are about a recession. We might be witnessing a structural change. A transformation that is badly needed. Bailouts or not. A change will come. I can feel it in the wind.

This blog is new. My story is just starting. Please follow me and join the dialogue. Collaboration and dialogue are the way of the future, and to the future.

Tags: natural organization, industrial paradigm, change, structural change, bailout

Business: It's not life on Mars

"Western cultural views of how best to organize and lead (now the methods most used in the world) are contrary to what life teaches. Leaders use control and imposition rather than participative, self-organizing processes. They react to uncertainty and chaos by tightening already feeble controls, rather than engaging people's best capacities to learn and adapt. In doing so, they only create more chaos. Leaders incite primitive emotions of fear, scarcity, and self-interest to get people to do their work, rather than the more noble human traits of cooperation, caring, and generosity. This has led to this difficult time, when nothing seems to work as we want it to, when too many of us feel frustrated, disengaged, and anxious."
- Margaret J. Wheatley

What is an organization? Start surfing the web and you will get more and more confused. As with everything else in life the more you learn about a subject, the less you feel that you know. Ignorance is bliss, or is it?

There are literally hundreds of definitions of what an organization is. I won’t bother you with all of them so let’s just go with one that is very common and probably one of the best definitions:
“An organization is a group of people, sharing the same objectives.”

From this we learn:
1. An organization consists of a group of people
2. Having some common interest that they want to achieve (a goal, a vision etc)

A problem with this definition is that in reality the various stakeholders rarely share the same objectives. The shareholders wants to maximize the shareholder value, the managers want to climb the corporate ladder and the employees want to develop a certain skill. These are just some silly examples (or are they?). The important thing to note is that there are many goals competing for attention in an organization.

But this is old news. Traditionally leaders and managers have tried to control the organization in different ways to align all competing wills and goals. The hierarchical organization was created to maximize control and efficiency. In order to exercise control companies were built on rigid structures with closed borders to the outside environment.

However, as we discussed in an earlier post, times have changed. The business environment has changed. The world is much more complex and uncertain than ever before. In order to maximize shareholder value (or perhaps even stakeholder value) we need to find a new definition of the organization. Why? Because structures, incentives, culture and relationships will look different based on how you view an organization. And all these factors will together determine the organization’s performance.

A better way to look at the organization might be through a systems perspective.
“Systems of independent activities linking shifting coalitions of participants; the systems are embedded in -dependent on continuing exchanges with and constituted by - the environments in which they operate.” (Scott)

“All social systems, including organizations, consist of the patterned activities of a number of individuals. Moreover, these patterned activities are complementary or independent with respect to some common output or outcome: they are repeated, relatively enduring, and bounded in space and time." (Katz and Kahn)

In other words, stakeholders need each other. It is ok to have different and individual objectives, as long as we align them through our organization. However alignment cannot be based on agreement as that by definition creates conflicts, groupings and power domination.

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura instead suggests that we embrace alignment of intention as we then can allow people to differ in their opinions and still align in their intentions. We can then leave the usual politics of opinion-domination, which is subverting the very integrity of human-unity.

Instead we can begin to design our company around principles like openness, partnership, equality, transparency, learning, participation, self-organization, cooperation, caring and generosity.

As implicated by Margaret Wheatley the same rules apply in life and businesses. Why? Because our business life is just a part of life, a sub-system in a larger system.

Now we are getting somewhere. The road to building the natural organization starts here.

Tags: leadership, learning organization, natural organization, systems thinking, organization, Margaret Wheatley, Yasuhiko Genku Kimura, change, life on mars