It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

Thomas Paine

In a recent interview a director at a large telecommunications provider asked me how I would start an Agile transformation. Such a transformation changes an organization’s fundamental form and nature to one that is able to thrive in a “flexible, collaborative, self-organizing, fast changing environment”.

I told this director that I would study the teams and the organization for a week and use Kanban to gain visibility and transparency into the operation. The bottlenecks in the operation would make themselves apparent, and would indicate what to address first. There is more to the answer, however. Much more.

The Optimist vs. The Realist

I am generally an optimistic realist. However I feel frustrated when I respond in these safe ways. This is because I have been of two hearts and minds on the issue of transforming large capitalist enterprises into entities with organizational level agility for some time.

As an idealist, I know that I have the abilities to form coalitions which catalyze lasting change in large enterprises under the right conditions within the current system. In fact, I have experience doing just that when I was in China, where I re-integrated a 2,500 employee electronics plant in Qingdao into the sourcing strategy of a large U.S. multinational.

As a realist, however, I know that catalyzing organizational change of increased international coordination and cooperation with strong executive level support on both sides, in two different countries, is qualitatively different from developing comprehensive organizational agility with limited executive level support. First, because the former requires minimal organizational and cultural changes, other than clearly communicating the needs and wants of the two parties across cultures, and languages, to each other. And second, because organizational agility requires a releasing of command and control behaviors and the dismantling of organizational structures and a movement towards, what narrative coach David Drake calls, “do-it-yourself, togetherness“.

Sincerity and Openness of Mind and Heart

When either I or others fail to emphasize the need to dismantle these organizational structures of command and control, I sense strong levels of insincerity.

During my meeting with this director I failed to emphasize the need to change the fundamental nature of the enterprise. I was being insincere.

Our culture and the cultures of our enterprises are designed to serve themselves, and not the humans who allow them to function. In order to do this, cultures depend on the creation of false icons, false images, and false selves. One these false selves is my dying idealist who believes that he can transform a traditional capitalist enterprise with the assistance of others into an enterprise of organizational agility.

Culture depends on keeping the majority of the people believing in lies. Truth, however, is the only thing that does exist, and life gets a lot easier when operating from Reality. Filtering out all of the lies that we tell ourselves is part of the process.

One of the primary lies that traditional commercial organizations and the Agile community tell themselves and others is this: True organizational agility, maximum delivery of value, and a smooth workflow are possible within large traditional capitalist organizations with highly concentrated decision making authority.

By de-emphasizing it they pretend that the concentration of power at the top can be ignored. I believe that this is done because attempting to dissolve authoritarian, and in many cases totalitarian, structures without the support of a broad and strong coalition is a quest that is quixotic at best and dangerous at worst. While I empathize with the human desire for security, if one hopes to improve the flexibility, responsiveness, and innovativeness of the organization, ignoring concentrations of authority and power cannot be done. According to Stanford biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky, rigid, top-down networks fail to yield high performance, creativity, and agility because they fail to produce emergence and evolution.

The Organic Power of Emergent Complexity

We have forgotten that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by geniuses. Biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses.

–Janine Benyus

This is exactly what Leonardo da Vinci did in the 15th century when he studied the turbulence of fluids, the anatomy of animals, and the wonder of flight, and yet most of humanity continues to take design advice from other humans. In her TED Talk science writer Janine Benyus reminds us of the genius of Nature by celebrating the phenomenon of spring: “Imagine all of the coordination, all without top-down laws or policies or climate change protocols.”

Think of how organizational agility works in nature. Think of schools of fish, flocks of birds, colonies of ants, and neurons in the brain. These incredibly agile organizations are organic, bottom-up emergent complex adaptive networks which function with simple rules of attraction and repulsion, even stigmergy. Only emergent systems produce enhanced innovation and quality, states Stanford neuroendocrinologist and author Robert Sapolsky.

Imagine how well fish, birds, ants, and neurons would function if they always had to defer to some top-down formal authority. When only the Board of Directors and the major shareholders make the most important decisions in the enterprise, organizational agility is severely limited or incapacitated. If the major decisions about what to produce, where to produce it, for whom to produce it, how to produce it, and what to do with the profits is not distributed among the contributors of the enterprise, then organizational agility, worker engagement, and high performance will forever remain elusive.

Submission to Mass Delusion

Instead of confronting this major impediment to organizational agility openly, the Agile community is taking what they call a “more pragmatic and realistic approach” in an attempt “to help the majority of workers in their current state”. With awareness to the flaws of the traditional capitalist enterprise, the coaches within the Agile community, as “realists with bills to pay”, have chosen to work within the system and to make the lives of those in that system “as tolerable as possible” by making “tiny improvements in the lives of people”. They concede that it “may not change the world or the root cause, but it will make some people’s lives happier”. They acknowledge the system and do what they can to counter it from where they are.

As a fellow coach with my own bills to pay, but more importantly as a fellow human being, I empathize deeply with their predicament, and support their efforts. I view them as allies in the pursuit of healthier workplace communities.

However, I suffer tremendous discomfort, even psychological pain, when I and others fail to voice and address the root cause of a problem, no matter the reason. A philosophical and spiritual alignment to the Platonic transcendentals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, an education in engineering and science, and experience in world-class Lean manufacturing environments make it impossible for me to ignore the root cause of the problems, particularly those at the base of our socio-economic system, in essence our very culture, without experiencing great distress and anxiety. The root cause of my anxiety and distress may even resonate with the foundation of the rampant workplace stress in America.

Lean manufacturing has a unique way of solving problems. It does not just look at the effect of the problem and try to cover it with a Band-Aid. Rather, the root cause of the problem is identified and the root cause, as well as all contributing factors, is eliminated from the system, process or infrastructure in order to permanently solve the problems. What is the difference in these two approaches? Simple, when you find and rectify the root causes, the problem will be solved forever. Even other problems occurring due to these root causes will be eliminated in this effort.

–Keith Mobley

It is my understanding that applying this simple Lean manufacturing mindset to Agile transformations would go a long way towards resolving the mass anxiety, disengagement, and discord in the workplace.

The coaches in the Agile community are doing the best that they can given the constraints they face and the bills that they must pay. The executives, those with greater power in enterprises, however, do not suffer from the same limitations.

Quite generally privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibility, and responsibility means dedication to challenging, questioning the verities that are imposed on us by doctrinal systems and structural relationships that are based on hierarchy and domination. And working not only to challenge them, but doing something about it. And to the degree that you have privilege there is more that you can do. I think it is just as simple as that.

Noam Chomsky, 2015

I am reminded of Richard Feynman’s famous conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

–Richard Feynman

With just a slight modification, Feynman’s famous conclusion can be re-purposed easily for organizations attempting Agile transformations.

For a successful Agile transformation, Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

While many of the coaches in the Agile community are aware of the root cause of the problems in enterprises, they are focused on doing what is possible within the constraints of these admittedly less than ideal environments. Again as a fellow coach I empathize with their quandary.

However, instead of dedicating themselves to the Larger Truth, they have committed themselves to the Smaller Truth. The Larger Truth being that concentrated authority is the greatest impediment to organizational agility. And the Smaller Truth being that localized agility is possible with concentrated authority.

At the cost of repeating of myself:

Truth is the only thing that does exist, and life gets a lot easier when operating from Reality.

I fear alienating my allies in the Agile community. I really do not want to do that. Nonetheless at the risk of doing so with my next statement I must speak what I understand to be true.

A failure to act on the Larger Truth while still pursuing the Smaller Truth is a submission in practice, even if not in spirit, to the mass delusion that is our current socio-economic system.

In strongly top-down, hierarchical organizations, Agile transformations, despite their big promises, have shown little success. At best these organizations have demonstrated localized, pocketed agility sometimes at the department or business unit level, but most likely just at the team level.

So what is the current state of the majority of workplaces? When I walk into the majority of these organizations and talk to their employees and managers, I see little quantitative evidence and feel little qualitative difference in their levels of freedom and creativity as compared to employees working in enterprises using traditional planning and development methods. The fear of their superiors and each other is just as strong as it has always been.

If the team exists within a traditional organization or the organization is a traditional commercial enterprise, most of the suggestions made below to create the space for freedom, creativity, and genius to flourish will quickly bang against an impenetrable wall. This wall initially presents itself as structures and habits. Ultimately this wall will show itself to be supported by laws.

Coaches find it difficult to come in daily and remain a catalyst for doing what is possible to make the workplace happy, creative and productive, but the job of the coach is to do just that. As a fellow coach I am struggling to find a place for doing that. I feel a growing unease about working within the constraints of what I see as an economic system that has been architected since its inception to dehumanize people, to treat people like cogs in a machine.

I know that my role is to identify the constraints in the system, and to work to remove them. Recognizing the near impossibility of changing the structure of large enterprises just from within, I feel more energized and hopeful putting my efforts into building a new system which makes the current system obsolete. I am in good company. Both Socrates and Bucky Fuller expressed the same sentiment.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

Socrates

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller

Purpose, Mindset, and Authority

In an upcoming blog post, I will detail the 3 critical areas to address, when developing non-bureaucratic agile organizations with a collaborative culture. These three areas are: purpose, mindset, and authority.

It is not only incredibly disingenuous but also a tremendous disservice to the employees of an organization to initiate an Agile transformation without first calling out the insurmountable barriers to agility that the structure of a traditional capitalist enterprise presents.

Starting the needed change from within a capitalist enterprise can go in a few different ways:

1) The “ideal” Agile Transformation: The change will hit a ceiling that will be either cultural, political, or legal. As the Board of Directors and major shareholders have no intention of ceding their decision making authority over to the workers, the change will end here. The more optimistic Agilists believe that it is easier to catalyze change from within rather than from without. I am less optimistic that such transformations have a high probability of succeeding.

2) The failed coup: Upon hitting the ceiling some change agents may push for further change. Those in power will feel threatened by these change agents, as the current system benefits them. They will use either the structure of the enterprise or the law that is clearly on their side to eliminate these individuals from the organization on the basis of “poor fit” or insubordination. Mind you that in a truly self-organized agile organization the concept of insubordination has no place.

3) The king who cedes his authority and ownership to the people: The CEO/Board of Directors initiates the change and actually seeks to convert the enterprise to an Employee Stock owned enterprise AND employee managed/directed enterprise, or a worker self-directed co-operative. This happens when a benevolent founder decides that he/she does not want to screw over the employees when he/she decides that he/she no longer wants the responsibility of running the enterprise.

As Agile neither addresses organization design nor new legal entities, in its current usage, it will fail to create communities of freedom and creativity with sufficient expression and power, to address the mass anxiety, disengagement, and discord in the workplace. Without the benefit of a benevolent king with a conscience and a sense of social justice, who dismantles the current structure and cedes his authority, pursuing further change within the traditional capitalist enterprise will almost always result in a failed coup.

There appear to be only 2 basic options:

1) Find CEOs and Boards of Directors who are open to the benefits of a full conversion to a post-capitalist model, or

2) Develop an open platform of cooperativism with other contributors/commoners, and then develop enterprises around it.

Relying on option 1 is a bit like waiting for your unicorn. A wiser strategy would be to form affinity groups with people outside the organization and to develop coalitions where new open platforms of cooperativism could be developed.

A capitalist enterprise is only interested in creating teams and workplaces of freedom and creativity to the extent that this creativity can be used to serve the interests of the Board of Directors and the major shareholders.

Unless radical efforts are made to distribute the decision making authority, the suggestions which I propose for creating organizations of collective genius cannot be expressed in existing capitalist enterprises.

Collective Genius and Post-Capitalist Enterprises

Workplaces with distributed decision making and organizational agility are thriving in the burgeoning post-capitalist, “commons sector” movement. These enterprises are also workplaces of freedom and creativity or what I like to call workplaces of collective genius.

Here are 4 Axioms of Collective Genius.

Axiom 1: A genius is a transformational visionary, who requires an environment of freedom and creativity to thrive.

Axiom 2: To allow collective genius in groups to emerge post-capitalist structures and institutions based not around the market but around the commons must be cultivated.

Axiom 3: System transitions have historically emerged over a very small period of time. In the 12th century the commons emerged, and in the 11th and 12th century the craft guilds emerged, both in just about 70 years time.

Axiom 4: Only in these new neo-nomadic seed forms will genius have any chance of flowering.

In future posts I will detail these new economic forms in greater detail.