Managing a Post-Hierarchical World

[ This post is a version of my reply on LinkedIn to a post by Euan Semple,
‘A Plague of Managers’ (upon your WikiHouses?).

See: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plague-managers-euan-semple ]

There’s an interview with Jimmy Wales of WikiP in CMI’s ‘Professional Manager’, Winter 2016. He says a manager has five functions: planning, organisation, co-ordinating, commanding and controlling. Wales would like to change the last two functions to: inspiring and coaching.

The ‘Agile movement’ is pushing the remaining three functions towards fluid planning and self-organised, networked teams rather than hierarchical power-structures. That suggests to me that the only function left is picking sufficiently inspirational strategies to keep the attention of your teams and to meet their coaching needs. It seems an environment in which teams should be appointing their managers.

If I was a manager, with no remaining knowledge of ‘how things are done now’ myself, I’d be fighting against all this modern nonsense and trying to maintain the status quo; lashing myself in position at the top of a tree made of single-points of failure for information flow, so that I could cut off any branches as threats emerged.

Ah… I see!

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From Nepotism in a Hierarchic Mediocrisy to Competition in a Networked Meritocracy

I wrote this post originally on LinkedIn.

“Have been listening to Euan Semple & Megan Murray ‘Shift’ podcast on Leadership, while stripping wallpaper, without management, because I understood the common goal. Thoughts were provoked.

Who is the leader of the distributed network of Free Software developers? When we move from hierarchical companies, competing, to co-operating groups of people with shared values, does the nature of leadership change? Is leadership an emergent property of effectiveness, instead of power? Perhaps we move from the ‘warring families’ model to competition between cultures. My money is on the Social animals.”

http://business-shift.com/podcast/2014/7/11/shift-episode-027-leadership

Power and Lust

I’ve spent a few days attaching solid-wall insulating lining-paper to the walls of my home office. To stop me climbing up said walls and hopefully to drown out most of the swearing, I’ve been listening to the ‘Business Shift’ podcasts by Megan Murray and Euan Semple. I started with #19 after seeing @Euan tweet about it, then listened to #6 on “Power”, largely because I feel a recent victim of its abuse. Since then, I’ve gone back to the beginning and forward, so far, to #10 “Security”.

Megan and Euan are interested in some of my many obsessions and we seem to share similar values but they come at everything from a slightly different angle, which is always interesting. Listening quickly to several podcasts, recorded over months, allows you to see recurring themes: change, corporate culture, process, networks, complexity, infinite shades of gr(e/a)y (including ball-gags), relationships, anarchism, agility and “IT”.

Their distrust of ‘IT’ is very similar to my distrust of ‘Management’ and they blame it for exactly the same things I blame managers. I see IT from below, where well-meaning and knowledgeable techies propose great ideas that get watered down and corrupted by ‘IT Management’ who feel the need to simplify everything, and then blame the resultant crass decisions on other managers ‘in the business’ (I’ve never quite understood why IT isn’t .) Where I hear “the business won’t pay for it”, I guess Megan and Euan are told, “IT say we can’t do that.” A quick comparison with science and politicians is alarming.

I’ve finally been pushed over the edge into responding by the suggestion that information ‘Security’ is an IT issue. I spent a year of my life telling IT managers that they may own the ‘Technology’ but that the ‘Information’ belonged to the business; that IT controls were only an answer after you had helped the business identify information resources and analysed value and risk. My attempt to change culture was countered by making my post redundant, centralising IT Security and appointing someone who didn’t want to mess with the borders of power. I’m sure my customers were told that I’d wasted a year but now they’d bought in someone who knew what he was doing and they got a single desk-top with automatically updating anti-virus software and fire-walls, whether we needed it or not.

Megan and Murray talk around the way in which the world of work is being ‘Shift’ed by Internet-enabled networks of (hopefully) intelligent humans. A world where people in the business who are trying to do useful things can connect directly to people who have expert knowledge of the tools they need, bypassing the layers of power-hungry or frightened people who corrupt the signal to further their own selfish interests.

You should have a listen and decide whether you want to take back the world from the people who think they own it http://business-shift.com/. I particularly recommend http://business-shift.com/podcast/2013/4/25/shift-episode-006

Free Anarchy

The following has been conceived and written in one day. Please consider it a first draft of the manifesto for the ‘share nicely’ revolution – the happy face of Anarchy in the UK.

As predicted, The Revolution will not be televised. It will however be streamed, live-Tweeted and blogged as the State has only just noticed that it has temporarily lost control.You’d think they’d be putting some sort of controls in place to limit our freedom of speech… They’ve what? Oh dear… Well that sucks!

This week, four ‘comfortably off men’, representatives of the UK’s State: Prince Charles, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband (in my unresearched order of richness) met to encourage young people who face a possible future of economic failure and joblessness to ‘get on their bikes’ and work for nothing for the good of The Big Society (them.)
Obviously only the richer kids will have a bike; just as only middle-class parents will afford to buy their kids a job by funding them during a couple of years of internship or an industrial apprenticeship. I imagine the ceremony to have been accompanied by a backgound chorus of press representatives singing “get a job, you scroungers” to the older siblings and parents of many of the assembled kids.

I fear I spot a discontinuity and I have to agree that Occupy, Anonymous and Russel Brand have a point. Something is seriously Wrong and I don’t know what to do about it either.

The problem for those calling for revolution is that we’re already having one and whilst I applaud our leaders for embracing the uprising of ‘Free culture’, I’m not sure that this is quite what most of us involved at the grass-roots level of the movement had in mind and we’re not ready to be ploughed-over just yet.

A brief review of my superficial knowledge of European history today has informed me that revolutions come in two flavours:

• technological: (which travel in pairs, the second a direct consequence of the first) with ‘the management’ in charge but showing no real forethought, then

• political: the violent response from an angry population that has somehow been displaced by the ruling class’s selfish exploitation of the change. This revolution results in major changes to political and economic systems.

The Industrial Revolution led to the start of modern Capitalism. The next one seems likely to end it.

Political revolutions are often inspired by intellectuals but implemented by people who enjoy the sound of boot on brain. Let’s hope we can avoid that outcome this time around, before Occupy take their Internet back. We’ve had the ‘Computer/Information Revolution’ and we’re in the ‘Information Sharing Revolution’ but They aren’t sharing nicely and I’m angry. A lot of people are. Science recently showed that 2-year old humans are pre-programmed to expect their fair share of the rewards from anything they worked for. Fairness is in our DNA. We’d like it now please.

Our economic revolution seems likely to remove capital as the primary constraint on human endeavour, as agricultural and industrial labour were devalued by earlier revolutions. The Information Sharing Revolution may make ownership of the means of production and mythical Intellectual Property rights and management of the state out of the hands of leaders. Hive society needs a shared purpose not management. ‘Leaders’, please collect your tools of control, today’s meetings are cancelled. We’ll govern ourselves thanks.