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The Organization of Chaos and anti-leadership theory. Foundation for an emerging star-company
14 Aug2009
This morning I woke up with a memory of a rather disturbing dream. In order to distract myself a bit and re-trigger my brain to ride on a lighter energetic flow, I started browsing YouTube searching for different talks on the science of emergence, as it is one of the scientific areas that fascinate me lately.
I was looking for supporting materials for a few ideas that came to me last night during a hike with my dear friend; ideas triggered by a passionate philosophical conversation, one of those that we have once in a while under the stars.
Then I saw these videos and a thought came to me that amused me quite a bit. I will share it in a moment as you finish watching.
So, within corporate organizations we place so much significance on the role of leaders, quality of leaders, their ability to direct others, design better strategies, build well run machine. And we think that it takes the company to where it deserves to be, in the frontier of the echelon.
Now what if the leaders would stop being such and become supporters, providing only needed information, resources and encouragement to its subordinates who take initiatives, and allow those initiatives be some time illogical or irrational to certain degree.
Naturally micro-leadership would emerge from the bottom, but what if the policy of the company would be to spot any leadership as it occurs and eliminate it? As we know the crowd is a self-organizing system, leader always will step up out of the chaos, so experiment lays is in disarranging. Seemingly chaotic structure would self arrange itself back to some order that will conceive all elements needed for emergence to take place.
See, not so far in the past I didn’t believe in democracy within the organization, I was firm that “wise and kind dictatorship” is the only way that the system can smoothly run.
I still think that democracy is a waste of energy, and what I am talking about here has nothing to do with democracy.
Some definitions of democracy are:
- a system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them
- majority rule: the doctrine that the numerical majority of an organized group can make decisions binding on the whole group
So, in democratic organization the bottom still elects the top. It’s not a “topless” organization. ?
But what if the experiment would lay in cutting the top, and all “tops” that materialize out of the chaos?
See, in a leader-driven organization we rely on the abilities of a leader to make “right” decision. Unfortunately in this case we give too much power to limited capacities of the human brain. If we add to it individual personality limitations and boundaries of memory as well as imagination, what we can get as a result is an organization that will make step or two either forward or backward, but that’s as far as it can go.
What we cannot expect within a leader-driven organization is a leap, a “quantum” leap that takes the organization to completely new level, it will never surprise with incomprehensible outcome.
I believe that the nature with its laws and the ability to self-organize its elements and emerge, the nature itself, the “life” has much more potential to a rapid progress that one driven by a semi-weak, limited human. Let’s face it, what are we really good at? ?
So, if the organization would create all necessary for emergence conditions, I believe it would produce companies-stars, ones that create legacy, operated within the framework that no human mind could ever design. The direction of such companies could be completely unpredictable for founders, shareholders and employees, yet it would be truly innovative companies that side-tracked to something totally astonishing.
If you ask me: Ok, so how would these companies operate exactly? I will tell you” Don’t ask me. I am just one of those limited humans. I don’ have answers. All I have is questions… may be questions worth asking.
All I know is that for the emergence to take place, the certain level of complexity and variety has to be there and certain level of freedom has to be allowed to each of the system’s elements to exist on its own accord.
You will say: But it will produce the chaos. I will say – exactly. That’s exactly what is needed. The chaos will never remain such for too long. The system will create some unexpected laws and become organized and manageable. Then it might be time to break the system again, create the chaos again and allow some unknown law to take over for organization to make its next leap.
Somehow I suspect that that’s exactly what was happening within all legendary innovative companies. I wish I had data to validate it, and if you can help me with it, I would really love to hear any thoughts or opinions.
Of course if it was happening within “companies that appeared out of nowhere” like Google, Twitter, Facebook or few others, I think it would not be a planed strategy, but an accidental occurrence.
I could see that in emerged organizations founding teams might have been party animals who didn’t think much of la leadership and management, they just had fun with ideas and occupied themselves with either innovation or socializing, abandoning their management responsibilities to certain degree. They also might have an ADD of some sort (no, it’s not a diagnosis, I don’t believe in ADD as a medical condition; those who invented it could just ask his mom why she didn’t do abortion). By this I mean they liked change for the sake of change, just because it’s fun to observe the dynamic of things. They might have been slightly inconsistent in their decisions and actions, or indecisive and let things “slide” or get sorted out on its own. Outside of the fact that they might have driven some more conservative team members insane, they most probably did a great job creating an Organization of Chaos. (That’s the name I am giving to it for now).
As I mention, I don’t know much about personality profiles of founders of companies that will make a history due to its unexpected rise. All characteristics so far is my guess. But if any of you want to look closer at Meyers Brigs of those guys and find some common threads that might support this assumption, please add a comment and your analysis on this page.
May be we will design a new organizational leadership style together. Or may be I am just full of it and my idea has no validity whatsoever ? Nevertheless it was fun thinking it. The good thing – I totally forgot about my nightmare. So, the goal is accomplished at least on this one. Have fun with yours.
…
by Olga Kostrova, CEO of IdeaMama Group:
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10 Responses to The Organization of Chaos and anti-leadership theory. Foundation for an emerging star-company
Sahara
August 14th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Well… I see a paradox here. Even to set up a system that allows chaos and benefits from it requires someone or some group to initiate it. Thus it takes a leader to at least initiate the process — to “light the fuse” so to speak, so the thing can explode.
There are organization models that are managed horizontally, with no one leader, and they do not allow any one business unit to get too big — when a business unit reaches a certain size, they break it into two units, and move on. Unfortunately I forget what the company name is that pioneered this but they are apparently very successful.
A great book that might also bring you some inspiration: “Creativity in Business” written by a Stanford profesor. It has some good info that can feed this chaos theory of your.
Carlis Collins
August 14th, 2009 at 9:59 am
See the video on my blog about spontaneous DNA — it too talks about emergence and how life can come out of chaos.
http://1izen.com/category/vids/
I like your ideas — but we have a lot to learn about how orfer can arise from disorder. Unfortunately, stockholders only care about the quarterly results. So, we also need a new way of funding such possibilities — a “chaos theory of funding startups” perhaps — a way for many people to contribute a little “energy” into an emerging system of chaos, to keep it alive, without messing with the formula of growth too much.
I wonder however… perhaps the “intelligence” that cause the chaos to emerge into order is inherent in the energy itself — maybe energy is by definition “intelligent.” Thus the sun causes dirt and water to turn into plants and people — the intelligence is in the energy…? Maybe?
Sam Kumar
August 14th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Sahara is probably referring to Semco, a very successful example of self-managing employees outperforming an older autocratic organization.
http://www.slideshare.net/aaronross383/semco-seven-day-weekend
These ideas remind me of the book _A company of citizens_, which extolls a democratic approach to corporate governance. But if it’s such a good idea, wouldn’t we see this more often? Perhaps oligarchies like Venice (which prospered for 1100 years) are superior models. It will be up to entrepreneurs like Ricardo Semler to test these models.
ideamama
August 14th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Yes.. However let’s not mix the democratic organization where leadership arises from the bottom with “leaderless” organization, idea of which I am trying to explore… Can there be such? Can there be organization where predominant leadership is tuned down consciously, even if for the sake of experiment, so individual managers’ contribution gets merged with the power or “supporting crowd” and two become indistinguishable. Can there be rules designed to test the operation and later performance of such an organization? I don’t know answers, I have only questions…
Mike Winwood
August 15th, 2009 at 6:47 am
I love your creativity and energy of mind. Some time ago now (1987) Tom Peters published ‘Thriving on Chaos’ which I heartily recommend.
Where your thinking differs is in the momentum to consciously maintain organisational chaos.
I think the only rule is: NO RULEs – only values (respect, free speech, initiate, tolerate, fairness, etc.).
Where I think emergence theory differs is in the notion of inherent order within complexity. Some of the examples are a mere reflection of learned
socialisation (following someone in a crowd to avoid collision, moving out of the way of inanimate objects when in motion) whilst others do appear to suggest patterns with no clear directional orchestration or leadership (shoals or flocks).
The use of complexity theory (computer science and chemistry) is interesting because it does not rule out for example the law of attraction stuff and the notion of embedded power in the universe and nature.
Cellular like structures may also be reproduced in organisational contexts (the Japanese have been using cellular patterns very successfully as part of
lean and total quality. And continuous improvement certainly means continuous recreation of the cells and cellular structures). Whether we might find ways of combining leaderless commitment with productive output from organisations is of course unknown (maybe unknowable). Certainly we need a significant increase in instances and examples of adaptive and
flexible structuring in organisations and networks.
Neural network theory is another source for us I guess.
Interesting stuff though. Thank you for your creativity and for the reference through LinkedIn.
Renee Frank
August 15th, 2009 at 7:11 am
These are fascinating – and important – questions! I love your challenge about comparing the Meyers-Briggs types of the founders of those rapidly emerging companies. In my past as an ADD type myself (Meyer’s Briggs INTP) working in government and healthcare organizations, I observed the great resistance to change – and it wasn’t so much the workers as it was the leadership. Leaders fear the loss of control that comes with chaos.
Healthcare organizations are probably among the most leader-driven organizations out there. And yet there was a fascinating book written in 1998 and a second edition in 2001 called Edgeware: Insights from complexity scienc for health care leaders, by Brenda Zimmerman, Curt Lindberg, and Paul Plsek. The book actually has practical tips and recommendations for allowing emergence to happen! Their premise, though, is that there is a time for emergence and there is also a time for “clockwork” which is the more rational, planned, standardized and controlled mechanisms in an organization that allow for more predictability. Understandable in an organization that wants to predict the outcomes of surgeries and medical treatments!
Thanks for asking the questions!
Paul++
August 16th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
When I read your article, I recalled a seminar I had attended some 12 years ago. In it, various styles of (human) team organization were discussed and explored. One of the team styles was “chaotic” wherein individual team members merely did whatever seemed right to them. A “manager” was not so much calling the shots as he was “picking the best fruit” from this orchard of creativity. Not pure chaos, true, but it certainly relies on a lot of self-direction from the bottom to allow a maximum of creativity. In consideration to those picky, picky shareholders the manager would glean good results from the chaos and try to encourage the successful ideas to thrive. If I can locate my notes fro the seminar and elide any copyright issues, I might consider publishing this to share
In the meantime, it’s all here…in my brain!
Mark Lucio
August 18th, 2009 at 7:22 am
I viewed the videos and read your thoughts in the article and while I find them very interesting it seems to me like the line is being blurred between two different things. While you can have emergence with living animals and even people, it’s limited to dictating more simplistic actions even while creating complex organisms. Companies, organizations, and groups of people operate on a series of complex rules and policies that sometimes change daily. Not to mention that different positions “report” to other positions which automatically insinuate that “this person leads you”. If you eliminate leadership or don’t allow any to emerge, you’re talking more in the lines of “open source”.
Take a look at Linux, there are many people located around the world who contribute to the project, however there are no real leaders. Nor will any emerge since it’s a collective effort. The real interesting experiment would be to have an open source company where anyone could give input or contribute to anything within the company at any level.
S. Narendran
August 24th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
The base of such an organisation is built on inherent trust, which is unfortunately is lacking in many organisations.
If we have a look at the nature around us, then we have enough examples.. forest… even in our own formative years.. we trust our parents, teachers, siblings, friends etc blindly…When we have complete faith, then automatically ideas get generated and it lays the seed for further growth. Therefore, I think OD personnel in various organisations should look at this aspect to enable their organisations to grow further.
Michael Zeppieri
August 25th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Your concept sounds both a little idealistic and a little familiar (and I don’t just mean as a semblance of socialism or communism). However, as much as I’d like to think that such a company can (or does) exist, and furthermore, continue to exist as a model of anti-leadership even after it has achieved a level of success (which would perhaps be the even greater test of your theory), I cannot help but think that the entire business model would have to change in order to support the value of the process, the value of creativity and initiative, OVER the value of efficiency and production.
That is, even if employees were given free reign to explore ideas, managment’s purpose, and (as already pointed out by someone) the stockholder’s focus, is always focused on PRODUCTION, if not profit. The only way that a company with no leadership could survive if it it’s entire mission statement came to reflect almost a concsious ignorance to production as the indicator of productivity. Ideas, atmosphere, well being of employees is not currently a big marker of productivity in the corporate world. Let’s be honest, even the companies that espouse creativity and atmosphere as a prime directive of their company, it is always for the direct purpose of making people more efficent and the company more productive and profitable. If the ideas and atmosphere did not lead, directly or indirectly, to growth it is likely that they would quickly take a back seat to the overall company’s identity and agenda.
I don’t want to sound pessimistic about your theory. I just wish to point out that we are educated at an early age to live with the structure of hierarchy as if it is natural, and to believe that growth can only be tracked with numbers. I suggest that the work of Ivan Illich, a theorist in the 70’s (I think), would speak to the need for an overhaul of the education system itself before any such radical departure from the normal drive towards growth can be accomplished.
The work is called Deschooling Society, and especially the chapters entitled The Ritual of Progress, as The Epimethean Man, would be perfect examples of your theory in the corporate world put to the education system that most (if not all of us) grow up in. If not, it is a good read nonetheless!
MZ