In the face of the exponential rate of change today, best practices are not enough to meet the challenges we face. With this observation, influential business thinker Gary Hamel began Monday’s keynote address asserting that if organizations cannot change as fast as the world changes, trust erodes. This generation has the most empowered consumers who expect perfection in service delivery, while at the same time local governments and most organizations face fiscal challenges.
The biggest impediment to change, Hamel argues, is not unfunded mandates or political maneuvering; it’s bureaucracy. Invented a century ago to support effective management, bureaucracy has been the technology of human accomplishment. It has been enormously successful in organizing people to be ever more productive. But if we need organizations to be as nimble as change is fast, bureaucracy is not the answer.
What matters are not your resources, but your resourcefulness. Only 24 percent of leaders around the world are satisfied with their level of innovation. A Gallup poll showed that only 13 percent of people are fully engaged with their work. As an employee, notes Hamel, you surrender: judgment, interests, and autonomy.
This surrender dehumanizes people. Max Weber, advocate of the usefulness of bureaucracy himself questioned “how we can keep man free from the parceling out of the soul”? People are inherently creative. People are inherently inspiring. Yet our organizations are not as human as the people inside them.
The typical organizational structure has been around for centuries, empowering the few and disenfranchising the many. There are costs to top-down management structures:
- Experience is over weighted.
- New thinking is underweighted.
- They are systematically disempowering.
The control found in most organizational structures inhibits initiative, creativity, and passion. These traits are associated with authority rather than with people. A disproportionate number of people have the “power” to think creatively. Thus, the typical organizational structure becomes a liability.
How do we create organizations that are “bureaucracy-free zones?
- Challenge assumptions.
- Challenge your principles.
- Set an aspirational goal that is beyond the range of planning.
- Enroll your colleagues in defeating bureaucracy. Ask what are the enemies of adaptability? What are the principles of adaptability?
- “Experiment, rinse, repeat.”
Hamel encouraged everyone to leave the room with a commitment to build an organization where people are inspired every day to bring their gifts to work.
ICMA thanks its Strategic Partner Cigna for its sponsorship of Monday’s keynote session.
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