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ReOrg City
The structure of the “whole” and the behaviors at both the top and bottom remain the same. Only the width and/or height of the pyramid changes with each reorg. But alas, that’s just “the way it has to be“, no?
House Of Cards
Wanna play cards?
CMMI Insanity
This CMMI stuff is getting absurd. There seems to be a CMMI sub-category for everything now: CMMI-DEV, CMMI-Services, CMMI-Acquisition, CMMI-Integration, CMMI-People…. yada yada, yada. It’s typical bureaucratic bloat that causes companies to spend precious money and time on impressing hot-shot, non-doer auditors while simultaneously dropping boat anchors on their teams…. instead of creating products. Some contracts require a minimum level of assessment by an external rating agency in order to win the job.
Let’s crank it up a notch and see who else knows “what’s good for everybody“. For your viewing displeasure, I present the quag(mire) map:
Which certification/assessment bureaucratic borgs hold your company hostage by demanding a ransom in return for a favorable assessment?
Adders, Subtractors, Creators
In a perfect world, every person involved in an org is either a value creator or a value adder. Although there are a handful of hard to find examples of the (almost) perfect org, the landscape is littered with these types of mediocre and poor performing orgs:
Take Me To Your Ruler
Loops Of Distrust
Mistrust reigns everywhere. Governments distrust big businesses and vice versa. Big business heads (and I mean it both literally and figuratively), even though they often superficially espouse otherwise, distrust their low level, non-executive people.
The two cause-effect loop diagrams below crystallize the situation, no? On the left, more regulation begets more lobbying and lawyering – which begets more regulation. Bummer. On the right, more red tape begets more subversion – which begets more red tape. Double freakin’ bummer.
In the government-DYSCO cat-and-mouse duel, government, even though it’s a massively dysfunctional CCH itself, wants its version fairness and equity to prevail. In the DYSCO-DICforce scenario, the DICforce wants its version of fairness and equity to prevail. In both scenarios, the DYSCO DJs want an unfair advantage.
Note: Not all companies are DYSCOs. Only DYSCOs are DYSCOs. Every once in a blue moon I state a disclaimer like this because some people may think I’m a black-and-white binary thinker.Those that do may be binary thinkers themselves?
Norm And Dick
Since the main activity of some management chains seems to be preventing deviations from the norm, I propose that all managers change their names to “Norm“. It would complement “DICk” nicely, no?
Without deviation from the “Norm“, there can be no progress – Frank Zappa
Buckshot
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine – Pink Floyd
Is your borg structured like the impending disaster depicted below? Since it’s so ubiquitous, publicly unquestioned, and taken for granted as a “best practice“, the odds are that it is. Note that the products are second class citizens at the bottom of the chart (if they’re even shown at all) and the people supposedly responsible for product integrity are blasted like buckshot across the DYSCO.
When a self-important SCOL, BOOGL, BUTT, CORKA, or BM is asked to sketch out a model of their beloved borg, you’ll likely get a cookie cutter picture just like it – yawn. In their brainwashed minds, what’s important is who reports to who and who (not what) funds their livelihood. Everybody, including the DICforce, is primarily concerned about who is above and below them in the pecking order. Despite what is espoused, everything else is secondary – especially the real stars in the borg – the product portfolio.
The figure below shows an alternative, flattened, product-centric arrangement highlighted with cross-learning links and dynamic job rotations. How many of these weird animals have you seen? Why not? Is it possible to transform the soulless, stationary borg above into the vibrating pancake below? What would it take? Who could do it? Should it be done?
Recursive Behavior
Information hoarding by individuals and orgs used to lead to success in the past, but information sharing is one necessary but insufficient key to success today.
In this century, if the dudes in the penthouse at the top of the pyramid keep all the good stuff locked up in the unspoken name of mistrust, it’s highly likely that this anti-collaborative behavior will be recursively reproduced down the chain of command. Hell, if that behavior led to success for the corpo SCOLs and CGHs, then it will work for the DIC-force too, no?
“Trust is the bandwidth of communication.” – Karl-Erik Sveiby
Infinitely Late
In deference to Fred Brooks‘s “adding more people to a late project makes it later“, I present you with the enhanced version: “adding more people to a late project makes it later, and at some critical size K, adding more people makes it infinitely late“.
As more smart and competent people are added to an org or project, the capability of the group to accomplish great things increases. The really sad thing about poor management is that this increased capability is countered by increased fragmentation and growth in fatty middle corpo layers that slowly snuff out productivity. The lag time between the addition of people and degraded org productivity can be can be so great that the correlation is totally missed and the probability of recovery goes to zero.
At a really dysfunctional institution, productivity plummets to zero and the immobilized institution withers away – unless some sugar daddy starts subsidizing the beast without regard to performance.
In the cases where the hapless institution is a government, it can become is its own sugar daddy. Since it has the bullying power to subsidize itself via taxation of its constituency, it can maintain its comatose state for essentially infinity. DYSCOs are not so lucky. They can, and often do, run out of money before they even know what hit them.
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WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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