Out of the heirloom treasures (and tax-receipts) from my great-grandparents, my lovely sister presented me with an Anthropology book for children, Treedwellers by Katharine E Dopp (1904) - because it was pretty and at one point in time I had studied Anthro. Bored one day, I decided to flip through the gift: it was more a reflection on society’s progress than I was prepared for. I was suprised by Dopp’s questioning the possible, potential detrimental effect of scientific management in education by separating various subjects from their practical application. Dopp stressed the importance of putting knowledge into relevant context (e.g. practical activity) and encouraging exploratory thinking. In the preface, she writes:

Meaning if a topic is decoupled and not put into context, then it is much harder to see the broader picture and potential impact of one’s actions. In the world of work, this is to the detriment of whatever it is one is trying to produce, sell, or create.

Unfortunately, Dopp did not have as much influence outside of pedagogy and Anthropology as one might have hoped (I know, right?!).

As, over the last 115 years, many organizations have been built upon the Tayloristic and autocratic model of high specialization for the production of goods or services. Efficient production was maximized and Taylorism did power growth - so much so that it became the norm. The org design prototype follows the key five principles of

These principles are where the slaying notion of leaving your brains at the door came from. The premise was that a worker is paid for their consistent doing not for their thinking - and that there were others being paid to do this type of work. Based on the above-aforementioned principles, organizations and success measures were set-up in a way that encouraged a “my win” over a “your”, “our” or “customer win”. Examples are Corp vs. operations; sales vs. manufacturing; quality vs. purchasing; engineering vs. finance; view of HR as the labor police, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

These pitfalls are why many organizations nowadays are looking to different models for organizational and role design to foster things that in the world of speed, rapid change and multitude of customer choices are necessary to thrive in a knowledge-based economy.

The people function, leaders, and people doing work are heading up the challenge to rethink organizational and role design which foster agility, empowerment, autonomy, collaboration to deliver an amazing user / customer / employee/ stakeholder / social experience that is considered worth paying for.

Therefore, in this edition of Transforming Talent, we look alternative types of organizational design, look at design principles and ask questions around what are we willing to give-up/do differently to transform the world of work. In Dopp’s talk, so that the “steam” we expend, leads us to the destination we wish the “detached train” to go.