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Article: From Fragmentation to Aligning
"What can't we see?"
Linda Nessman, Director of Administration for Anubiz Corp. is looking out of her office window. She has led the major reorganization Anubiz will launch today but has misgivings about it. Despite her team's best efforts, she feels that things aren't going to change. What bothers her is that AC's well-intentioned efforts over the past five years to empower teams, increase collaboration, and set-up a knowledge portal haven't amounted to much. Even with process re-engineering efforts and training programs to improve communications and teamwork, things remain very much as they were.
Chuck Garcia, her boss and the CEO, wanted her to take the lead in 'getting people out of silos'. She understands the practical, economic reasons for this. For continued growth, the company must increase productivity and overall efficiency, while reducing costs. People have to work across organizational boundaries. There has been a good deal of talk about 'fragmentation'. The image this brings to mind is a weak structure: a center that isn't holding the organization together. But, so far, their efforts to deal with fragmentation have had little impact and she is equally unsure about this company-wide reorganization. "Apparently we aren't getting it. Something is missing. What can't we see?" she asks herself as she walks to the door and the formal launch of their reorganization.
The Issues
The restructuring of Anubiz Corp is fictional but it highlights our experiences with a variety of organizations. Government departments and non-profit organizations as well as corporate and other business enterprises are all restructuring because, according to the executives, the organizations need to be 'adaptable' and 'responsive'. 'Silos' developed as their organizations grew and what they have now is 'fragmentation'. What they are looking for is 'integration' in order to 'leverage intellectual capital' (i.e. employees' knowledge), 'create better synergies', and 'maintain flexibility'. To achieve these goals they need to 'streamline business processes', 'downsize', and 'create flatter structures' that will 'reduce overheads' and 'allow knowledge to flow more freely' through the organization.
Those sentiments sound sensible and the actions seem appropriate. Organizations bring people together to get things done and dismantling redundant structures has to be worthwhile if that enables them to work more effectively and efficiently. Yet, in most cases, integration never happens. Is integration an impossible goal? Are the restructuring efforts misguided?
At its simplest, restructuring means redrawing the organization chart, yet when people speak off the record about fragmentation we hear them say, 'we are not working effectively' and, 'there ought to be a different way of doing things'.
- What does it take to connect, so we work together effectively?
- Why are employees indifferent to their work, or worse?
- How do we generate trust within this organization?
- Can we tackle the lack of accountability in this organization?
- Why isn't it possible for people to make mistakes, learn, and support each other?
These are questions about fragmentation and three things in particular strike us about them. People in many different organizations are asking the same questions; those people seem to feel it is beyond their power to address them; and the questions refer to the culture, not the structure, of organizations.
The questions and concerns have their roots deep in the 'managerial culture' common to most organizations, especially large ones. There, powerful obstacles to cooperation include separate and competing responsibilities, performance measures that reward individuals not groups, goals framed in terms of the quantity of work (in terms of inputs or outputs) not the quality, and an emphasis on compliance (i.e. following orders) rather than people's accountability to each other for the work they are doing. Unfortunately, the sources of fragmentation and obstacles to cooperation are widely seen as cornerstones of efficient management; hence, as things that cannot be touched for fear of destroying what makes organizations successful.
To appreciate that this is, indeed, a significant problem without easy answers and to see what can be done about it, we should first consider why people have to 'connect' in order to do their work, then see why ordinary management practices prevent this. Finally, the question is, what does it take to organize work collaboratively. Those three issues are the framework of this article.
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