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...