28 May

In my experience, organisations nearly all make exactly the same mistakes. (A pattern, if you like.) They try desperately to find a way to get a grasp of everything that’s happening in them, to analyse and control things in some way, but the assumptions they start with mean they always fail, and actually make things worse. Most often they first try to run everything through an org chart. Everything is parcelled off to somebody somewhere in the org chart. This inevitably leads to the organisation doing nothing but having meetings all day, as the work they do crosses all of those org chart boundaries, so splitting it up into those territories means the people have no choice but to constantly meet, to try to reconnect what’s already connected - the actual work. In desperation they then often turn to ‘processes’, as in this flow-chart. There’s a recognition processes cross over the org chart boundaries (they do), but then you get a whole new world of chaos and pain, as people lose any agency or authority over things - the chart takes over. And processes constantly change, so this isn’t a solution anyway, because the second you release a process flow chart the reality will have changed anyway. Another post later about a possible way out of this mess.