The org chart is a half truth

The murmuration in your organization.

Here’s an idea, in the Ideas Era the paradigm for organizations is a coin with an org chart on one side and a GIF of a flock of birds on the other. A murmuration.

Like a coin, both modes are always present – managers are always managing, and staff are always murmuring. The first question is which side of the coin is face up and which is running in the background.

Here’s a picture.

Photo credit James Wainscoat, Usplash

If you want to see a murmuration in action, prepare to be mesmerized.

Murmurations were mutinous in the Industrial Era.

In the Ideas Era they’re essential.

If you are fond of metaphors this topic is rife with them. The sides of the metphorical org/bird coin offer three metaphors each. Flesh and bones, vertical and horizontal, and solid and liquid. The organizational chart - portraying the accountability relationships - represents the bones/vertical/solid state of an organization and the murmuration represents its flesh/horizontal/liquid state. To be consistent with the 3Vs of Ideas, I’ll use vertical and horizontal with occasional lapses into solid and liquid.

Like flesh and bones in a healthy organism, in a healthy organisation both are working together. Both are necessary because one promotes innovation and the other sustains replication. And without replication, innovation is just something you thought of as you were falling asleep.

Innovation may get the parade but replication is when we get paid.

The catch is that conditions favourable to one side of the coin are antithetic to the other so the trick for managers is knowing when and how to turn the coin. Unfortunately, mostly we flip it thoughtlessly because the org chart is a half truth and half truths are twice as powerful as the truth.

Updates are required for full functionality

For full functionality of the new paradigm for organizations you should also update both leadership and management paradigms. These updates replace the muddle that Information Era patches made of the Industrial Era versions. In the Ideas Era leadership and management are separate and equal.  Baboons, me included, demonstrate for your benefit in the sequel to this post.

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But this post is about the fascinating world of murmurations.

Murmurations

A murmuration is a flock of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings in ever-changing patterns.

Helen Macdonald describes watching a murmuration in her book Vesper Flights

 We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better. It captures their almost celestial strangeness. Standing on the Suffolk coast a few years ago, I saw a far-flung mist of starlings turn in a split second into an ominous sphere like a dark planet hanging over the marshes. Everyone around me gasped audibly before it exploded in a maelstrom of wings.

For years scientists puzzled over murmurations, trying to identify the lead bird and how orders were passed so quickly to the followers.

As they fly, the starlings in a murmuration seem to be connected together. They twist and turn and change direction at a moment's notice. How do hundreds or even thousands of birds coordinate such complicated movement while in flight? ¹

Only recently did scientists determined that no one is directing traffic. The endless creativity of the flock is the product of each bird’s decisions based on its micro context. Each bird is moving in response to up to seven of its nearest colleagues displaying a...²

...remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information…In following this rule of seven, then, the birds are part of a dynamic system in which the parts combine to make a whole with emergent properties — and a murmuration results. ³

Course corrections propagate across the flock at 140 kilometers an hour.

The “emergent properties” are not confined to starlings. Andrea Alfano explains,

Surprising as it may be, flocks of birds are never led by a single individual. Even in the case of flocks of geese, which appear to have a leader, the movement of the flock is actually governed collectively by all of the flock members…When one starling changes direction or speed, each of the other birds in the flock responds to the change, and they do so nearly simultaneously regardless of the size of the flock. In essence, information moves across the flock very quickly and with nearly no degradation. The researchers describe it as a high signal-to-noise ratio.⁴

Murmuring

We have always had murmurations in our organizations. We call it corporate culture and water cooler talk. When we sit in hall listening to senior managers talk, we constantly sample our colleagues’ – not always favourable – reactions even if only unconsciously. What’s new is that the propagation of information across the group is not dependent on physical proximity. We have virtual water coolers.

It’s the third V of the 3Vs of Ideas again, the vertical vector.

Unlike bird murmmurations human murmurations (just for fun let's call them “humurations”⁵) are displaced, disembodied, and clueless. That is, they are unmoored from things that people historically held in common - such as place, social organizations, neighbours, local media, and worksites - and stripped of body language and facial expression.

Worse still, competing humurations can occupy the same airspace so dogfights are inevitable. The principal question becomes “Are you in my humuration or not?” Politics in the United States is an example that comes immediately to mind,

In 1960, only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats said they would feel “displeased” if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had skyrocketed to 49% and 33%.

Republicans have been found to like Democrats less than they like people on welfare and gays and lesbians. Democrats dislike Republicans more than they dislike big business.⁶

However, this is not confined to American politics. American politics is just more visible. Humurations are common in other places, in other ways, and other situations.

So what?

Replication is the province of management – the application and imposition of decisions in the form of rules and tools. Innovation is the province of anyone with a good idea – a liquid state where ideas compete to become rules so they can replicate. Here management referees to encourage the flow of leadership to the person best suited to leading at that moment - perhaps only an instant.

In this ideal organization Management never forgets that the right person is most likely not the manager. Managers are no better at generating ideas than anyone else, but they are well placed to stifle them.

Contrary to a lot of advice, vertical integration and command & control remain potent and essential.

It’s not that the liquid state has replaced the solid state. It’s that, in the Ideas Era, the liquid state is advantageous more often than in it was in the Industrial Era when long run production – replication according to standards - was the competitive edge and adaptation was costly.

Today innovation is cheaper so we require it more often and innovation benefits from an “all the books in the library” approach, and group understanding of a situation and ownership of a decision. Humerations and murmurations offer the most free-flowing creativity but they are aimless and destructive of cohesiveness. So the solid, vertical state is still necessary for organizational coherence, accountability, decisions, and replication. The question for Management is when to reassert the org chart.

Now what?

So, a key skill for managers is knowing when and how to have the flock switch back and forth between murmuration and tight formation.

The question of what to control and when to command is the difference between success and failure. The key to organizational effectiveness is correctly matching the dominant mode to the requirement. The best organizations switch quickly and intentionally from one to the other.

Managers need to think horizontally and act vertically, cultivate innovation and control replication.

Phase changes will be ragged and confusing unless they are well understood by everyone involved.

I suggest you ask yourself this:

“In my organization

• Does everyone recognize our organization’s two modes and knows which we are in right now?

• Do managers model contributory leader behaviour and the graceful transition from leader to follower?

• Does everyone know how and when to lead, and when, how and who to follow?

• Does everyone accept it is management’s job to put leadership back in the bottle, select an idea, and turn the coin to replicate?

• Does management continually invite feedback from staff, suppliers, and customers to help it decide when to turn the coin back to innovate?”

But remember, management never really relinquishes the positional power of the vertical structure. It is running in the background. So it’s important that managers earn the trust of their staff so they can foster the conditions conducive to creativity and the competition of ideas. What you want is the holodeck on Star Trek’s Enterprise, where people interact with each other free from shipboard discipline, but quickly return to action stations when time is up. 

PS: this is the first of a three part series. Part 2, with the baboons, and Part 3, with definitions are up now too.

1. https://www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/what-is-a-murmuration

2. Starling Flock Networks Manage Uncertainty in Consensus at Low Cost, PLOS, G. Young et al, 01/ 31/13 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002894

3. Cosmos & Culture, January 4, 2017 Barbara J. King https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/04/506400719/video-swooping-starlings-in-murmuration

4. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/how-do-starling-flocks-create-those-mesmerizing-murmurations/

5. Don’t bother looking in a dictionary for that, like businessers, it’s another of my contributions to the English language.

6. Quoted in The Economist 8 March 2019.