You canât demolish bureaucracy with a giant wrecking ball or a stick of dynamite. Instead, it must be dismantled, brick by brick. Detox and delegation are the first steps, but then what? Obviously itâs not enough to change yourself and your team. Ultimately, you have to change the core processes by which your company is runâplanning, resource allocation, project management, product development, performance assessment, promotion, compensation, hiring, training, and all the rest. Each of these processes must be rebuilt atop the principles of humanocracy.
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Though expensive and usually belated, reorganizations are widely regarded as the only way to realign an organization with its environment. As a report by the Boston Consulting Group put it, âRapid change requires companies to reorganize faster than ever before.â Good luck with that!
Whatâs needed are radically new organizational models that downplay formal structure. In a world of relentless change, trade-offs need to be made as close to the front lines as possible. Boundaries must be malleable. Resources, rather than being hoarded, must flow unhindered toward promising opportunities. Interunit coordination must be the product of nimble, self-organizing communities and market-like transactions rather than blanket policies or cumbersome councils. In short, we need organizations that, like the biosphere, the internet, or a vibrant city, are more emergent than engineered.
Third, like nuclear power plants and space rockets, bureaucracies are complex, integrated systems. Every process is connected to every other process. This lack of modularity makes it difficult to change one thing without changing everything. Where do you start? Thatâs the paradox of change in a bureaucracy: what seems doable isnât transformational and whatâs transformational doesnât seem doable. The result: an endless succession of tweaks that never succeed in making the organization fundamentally more capable.
So, letâs face facts.
BUREAUCRACY IS FAMILIAR. You wonât have the courage to take on bureaucracy unless you believe there are alternatives. We must search out organizations that have successfully defied management orthodoxy.
BUREAUCRACY IS COMPLEX AND SYSTEMIC. Fragmented, half-hearted attempts wonât cut it. We need to replace the entire edifice of bureaucracyâone stone at a time.
BUREAUCRACY IS WELL DEFENDED. There will be resistance, so management rebels need to join forces. You have to build a grassroots movement that can overwhelm or route around the defenders of the status quo.
BUREAUCRACY SERVES A PURPOSE, HOWEVER POORLY. The goal is to carefully dismantle bureaucracy, not simply blow it up. You need a change strategy that is both audacious and prudent.
BUREAUCRACY IS SELF-REPLICATING. There will be no easy victories. Bureaucrats will fight back. To persevere, youâll need a sense of purpose thatâs as unshakable as the path is arduous.
So while companies spend millions of dollars on âleadership development,â they invest next to nothing supporting bottom-up entrepreneurship. This has to change. Unleashing the problem-solving, business-building energies of every team member is essential to building a humanocracy.
Bureaucracy, as weâve noted, is a game. It pits contestants against one another in a battle for positional power and the rewards that come with it. We have no problem with competitionâunless winning comes at the cost of oneâs humanity. Bureaucracy will start to crumble when talented and principled people walk off the playing field; when big-hearted heretics decide to forgo bureaucratic wins for the sake of their own integrity, and for the sake of those whoâve been diminished by bureaucracy. As Harvard professor Marshall Ganz notes, the goal of people who change the world is ânot winning the game, but changing the rules.