Organic efficiency

Recently I've been thinking about how the future of work will require less rigid systems.

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In the past 200 years, we've gone from independent craftsmen to large corporatized organizations. Organizations where a top down structure was required to build and—potentially more importantly—maintain operations to a massive scale.

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I believe the future will see the future of work relaxing back to somewhere in the middle: the reach and scale of large organizations driven forward by smaller bottoms-up teams inside the organization, each energized by the freedom to make decisions and take responsibility for their actions.

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In thinking about this shift further, I believe our systems of operation have to go from fixed, rigid systems to organic, fluid ones. Ironically, we've tried to do this before with frameworks like agile and sprints, but they've been so bastardized at every level to erode their value. (When was the last time your sprint didn't have something new pop up mid way? How much has your backlog built up over time? Who is happy with the system as it is?) In the future, we need quick communication, the delegation—not distribution—of responsibility, and trust in our teams to work efficiently in their autonomy.

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So, I ponder: does the cell of the organism wait for instruction on how it should work and grow? No, all of the DNA—experise in its specialization—is inside.