NEWS: Study published: The Future of Enterprises in the Face of AI.
Philipp Güth
Jul 28, 2021
Build strong hierarchies | Establish rigorous organisational structures
Top to bottom, bottom to top. The issue with traditional hierarchies is not that there are people that are considered more senior than others. It's that people are promoted and respected for having a title rather than providing value (meritocracy). Companies need structure. All the tribe-based, self-organizing, liquidly-flowing new forms of workforce organization essentially have one aim: Abandon traditional hierarchies that focus on structure for the sake of individuals feeding their ego by being formally assigned to be superior to others.
For competitive organizations today, a hierarchy does not need to be one in which approvals are granted. It is valuable knowledge that needs to be a status symbol and that needs to flow. By not having formalized communication channels for how knowledge can be requested upwards and should flow downwards, you make becoming both an efficient as well as an effective, high-value organization a haphazard process.
→ Put knowledge sharing in the set of objectives of senior colleagues and even leaders. Brownbag sessions, internal speeches, guided discussions and AMAs are just a few examples for direct communication that ensure that your most strained resources are not spending lots of time on writing internal papers that no one may need.