Decentralization

I've been for the last 10 months rather tightly tied down to a relatively heavy transition program; how do you sell a substantial portion of a company away and make sure that what is left behind continues to function from a technical standpoint ("did you remember to find all your data", "how do you develop new environments from scratch at a rapid pace", etc.). The exercise has been quite rewarding in very many ways, and I think reflecting and post-processing the experiences will continue for the next couple of years.

Some things that have, however, immediately come to mind is the split between centralized and decentralized ways of working. Again, it reverts back to an evolutionary argument: if your organizational design is very centralized, it may provide faster execution and clearer structure. Emphasis on the word "may", as this is not always the case. This all assumes that the core has a good sense of what needs to be done and has the capability to carry out whatever work needs to be done, or alternatively has an efficient way of delegating work down. In the latter case, especially, the clarity in thinking and knowledge about how things should be gets emphasized even more. It's be no means a trivial challenge, and often what is asked are near omniscience from the key people. For good or bad, I think our program was very centralized.

Another way of going about it is obviously to decentralized. If the culture is already heavily emphasizing distribution of authority into self-contained, autonomous entities, this will probably be a walk in the park. Every entity clearly carries responsibility for sorting out how they survive these types of transitions. The amount of chaos, especially when observed from the outside and above, can be quite high, which easily explains why managers often appear to hate this kind of setup as this not only makes them nervous about their inability to control the larger context. A leap of faith, if you will.

Interestingly enough, at the end of a transition you are also faced with the question of cultures, and which way you want to start cultivating your culture. For us, this discussion resembled a bit of a farce; at first the general consensus was that a smaller, leaner, and more decentralized way would be the thing to go for. The problem with this is of course that everyone needs to become more accountable, because ultimately you need to get your job done and if it's a free-for-all at worst, then you probably should already be solving all of your problems.

What we amusingly enough encountered very quickly was a rapid swing back where people and projects started asking about who is responsible for delivering this and that. Paralysis was close-by as the supporting infrastructure and processes had been designed to tackle only the skeleton requirements, but this had been lost in the communication, or more likely a lack of appreciation for the true degree of changes was plaguing many parts of the organization. Unfortunately at precisely this moment it seems that the discourse takes a drastic turn and people cling onto centralized models; there needs to be someone who will provide answers for very specialized topics. And paradoxically enough the empowerment of individuals and greater accountability goes out the window as learned helplessness takes hold again.

This might be a bit of a cynical portrayal, and it is likely very clear that I'm much more in the decentralization camp than the tightly centralized one. This also means that I'm very sad at the fact that we had a chance, a very good one at that, to try to embrace a more dynamic way of working and organizing ourselves, but when push came to shove and we were standing at the edge of the cliff, we took a step back and didn't have the courage to see things through. As a result, the road ahead will be again long and painful and I keep wondering whether we've ever learned anything or if we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again if only because they are comfortable mistakes to make since we've done them so many times already...

Boxing is not a purely intellectual exercise

For the past half a year I've been fairly deeply embedded in the bowels of a relatively large divestment operation of a multinational corporation. No points are given for guessing what it might be, but as part of the program I've been thinking a bit about my working life as well. At a very early stage I was thrown into what I would characterize as the cargo-cult school of strategy and spent quite a few years in positions that, if I'm honest, I didn't really understand and became highly sceptical and cynical of.

Fast-forwarding to the present, having ditched the strategy-land for at least a while, I've gone back to my roots in technology and been solving very tactical issues with visibility to the future measured at best in days. Quite a stark contrast to the horizons of over ten years, which made me disgruntled earlier. Running in the trenches and occasionally coming up to sit across the table from the generals, I've struggled to put into words my frustration. The best I've come up with so far has been the notion of comparing the working life to boxing; too often I have a feeling that senior management is treating boxing as an exercise in intellectual and abstract thinking. However, at the end of the day the objective in boxing is to knock the other guy out while avoiding giving the other guy opportunities to do that to you. It has an intellectual component, however relying purely on that will result in you going to sleep relatively quickly.

In practice what this means is that outside of all the theorizing, at the end of the day the strategizing and thinking must turn into tangible action. In technology industries typically we utilize, well, technical tools to achieve different results we deem worthy of pursuing. Technology is especially interesting as it is one of a handful of force-multipliers in the world. An example would be that if measured in distance per calorie used (i.e. how efficiently one is able to move), humans are not that great, ranking a bit above the average when compared to all animals. But a human with a bicycle, that's off the charts. So in many cases the ability to wield technology effectively allows one to greatly magnify force. In boxing the analogy would be to create a base of strength, agility, speed, and a handful of other attributes and magnify them by appropriate application of technique.

Often, it appears, getting "stuck" in matters of tactics and execution is not deemed too sexy or glamorous. In the trenches of divestment operations the reality is quite harsh and decisions and actions have to be done quickly. For individuals higher up in the corporate food chain, this leads to the second force-multiplier: organization. If appropriate experience in commanding technology greatly magnifies output by scaling vertically, the appropriate organization of resources will allow one to scale out horizontally. That is, by effectively commanding more units, one is able to again magnify force.

There are undoubtedly more force-multipliers than the two listed above, and the natural third one goes back to the initial topic of the post: strategy. When an effective commander is able to organize a technically competent group to achieve results more efficiently, the next force-multipleir can be argued to relate to having a deeper understanding of the mission at hand, the larger landscape, knowledge of other players, and so on. It could be argued that individually any of these might be characterized as superior ability in relation to technologies. But, and pardon the bullshit, putting all the pieces together might give superior insight on elegant approaches that might have been otherwise missed. Identifying pivot points and opportunities for leverage. At best this can result in again greatly magnifying force, and historical precedent is abundant in quantity. However, the pitfall here is that no amount of strategizing will make up for inability in the two previous areas.

To put the above in a different way, no amount of thinking about how to win a boxing match will get you any closer to victory if you have not done your share of conditioning, developing and honing your technique and creating a solid base from which to knock the other poor guy out. Only once you get over a certain threshold level can you actually reap competitive advantage from theorizing. Prior to that, it doesn't matter how big the force-multiplier is if you are multiplying zero. If you can't meet the table stakes, you don't even get a seat at the table. And that, annoyingly enough, is what many people do not seem to comprehend.