This BCG partner has a great angle on competitiveness of large organizations. He claims that businesses do not really fight their competitors but rather their own complexity.
If I had to summarize the talk in one sentence it would be something like this: Because businesses wish to be productive and engage their employees, they use hard and soft approaches, which finally backfire and create complexity, thereby reducing productivity and engagement – Sounds reasonable. Out of the recommendations I find that the most important, but also most abstract, is the last one. “Reward those who cooperate and blame those who don’t cooperate”. This culture will determine whether people care, work together and perform . But how do we get there? Giving people power and therefore the freedom to make decisions (called autonomy in a different TED talk) seems to be a great starting point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMzx2acLPIo
In his talk, Morieux states two modern enigmas he encountered: Productivity is disappointing in all the companies he worked for (despite all the technological advances) and there is little engagement of employees at work.
Ad-hoc solutions to these issues are always tackled with one of more of what Morieux calls ‘pillars’. You can use the hard way, creating/changing structure, processes, systems, or the soft way, by engaging feelings, sentiments, interpersonal relationships, traits, personality. In the end, both these two pillars, according to Morieux, are obsolete.
He claims that if an organization tries to cater to a new requirement, it will most likely add a layer of responsibilities and rules. This will add complexity, cost – without any real impact. A way out would be collaboration, but this barely happens. This is often compensated for by the individual effort of the employees, and results in disengagement of the employees.
The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation. It can only add new boxes, new bones in the skeleton. – Yves Morieux
The way out is what Morieux calls the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules. These rules are:
- Understand what others do. What is their real work? Go beyond the boxes, the job descriptions, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content.
- Reinforce integrators. Integrators are managers, existing managers that you reinforce so that they have power and interest to make others cooperate. Remove layers!
- Give people power! You must give more power to people so that they have the critical mass to take the risk to cooperate, to move out of insulation. Otherwise, they will withdraw.
- Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions.
- Increase reciprocity, by removing the buffers that make us self-sufficient. When you remove these buffers, people will cooperate.
- Reward those who cooperate and blame those who don’t cooperate. Blame is not for failure, it is for failing to help or ask for help.
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