The Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon

What would change if people praised each other more / more often?

Bureaucracy is often a symptom of individual 'power' or 'control' - which some feel the need for to demonstrate their worth and justify their reward. So what if you remove the link between 'individual' performance and reward, and instead replace it with team goals and equal reward for all? .... everyone gets the same reward if goals are achieved, nobody gets anything if they are not.... Suddenly the company dynamic changes and everyone uses their 'strengths' to best help the team / company meet the desired goal / outcome. It then becomes in everyones interest to identify and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy and operate in the most effecient and effective way.

The bureaucracy of perf

If you were going to manage your finances, and not crowd-source your precious, limited resources, how might you do that ? Getting feedback from a large organization is time-consuming, and an already over-burdened management has to allocate resources to future business that has promise. The history of business is full of people whose ideas did not get the recognition they deserved, and left to form their own successful companies (Ross Perot leaving IBM in the 1960s comes to mind). Existing business needs to be monitored and the operations of any business needs tracking, and monitoring. That much is certain. A process to improve it would have to fully vet changes that are needed without falling behind the competition-generated time constraints. Streamlining the process could miss some things and allow a process or business that is not truly serving the organization's customers to continue when it should not, and also allow new ideas to receive funding that they should not. Both discovery driven growth and design thinking, two new ideas, center on truly finding what jobs the customer needs doing and how the organization can help those customer do the jobs they need to do. How that is managed will determine the success of the ideas. No one likes bureaucracy, but evaluating how a large organization is doing takes that kind of tracking and evaluation, and with pubic equity breathing down companies' necks, it has only become worse. One possible solution is breaking large companies into smaller ones that focus on certain markets or industries, each with their own business model and systems of tracking and evaluating performance. It has been done successfully: the earliest I remember hearing of is ABB, with their matrix-style organization. One thing is certain. There must be some balance between the ability of companies to track and maintain their existing lines of business with certainty (Roger Martin calls it 'reliability'), and the ability of companies to foster new business by monitoring where customers and markets are going, what they need in products and services to do the jobs they need to do. There *is* much bureaucracy that could be unneeded if the entire organization adhered to the culture and the values of the organization. Most organizations fight themselves every day trying to make this work. If we are to strike that balance, and make corporate fiscal and managerial 'policing' less needed, we will have to shape our systems to flow with human nature, not fight it. This kind of forum is good for discussion, but shaping the future will lie in corporate practices that help ensure the reliability of what happens in an organization, and unless human nature changes drastically any time soon, some bureaucracy will have to survive. The trick will be to keep it from stifling how people work together.