3. December 2014
SOPHIA 2014 brought together SYNNECTA consultants and trainers with participants from the worlds of business, academia and culture in the loft style, autumnally warm atmosphere of the Cologne Kunstsalon with a view across the colourful rooftops of the south of the city. The goal was to work together to reach results on the newest issues in organizational development and change management.
The keywords of this event were Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – in short: VUCA. They pithily sum up the pervading sense of life and perception of reality. Markets and cultures are developing at rapid speed, and decisions have to be made at the same speed. However, there is often a lack of the necessary basis for decisions to create an unambiguous situation. There is no (longer) a right and a wrong. Organizations can no longer provide their employees with the security they once were able to give (Ironmongers Jones once and forever).
There are reasons why businesses are at least partly leaving the relative security of a hierarchical bureaucratic organization behind and are opening up to entirely new ways of operating. These constitute great opportunities for some and perceived danger for others. Globalisation used to be understood to be a mere extension of the markets in the industrial nations; it has now developed an entirely new dynamic. The exponential rise of networks speed up markets,has opened wide the field for the competition and had driven the ability to enter a market as well as the speed of innovation. This dynamic demands organizatorial answers and at the same time new abilities and attitudes among managers. In Cologne, both sides came into view: businesses are facing up to the challenges and looking for ways to integrate traditional, hitherto successful action. There developed the lively atmosphere of a searching dialogue.
How can we as persons and as organizations react to VUCA? Rather: How can we leave the reactive role and use the opportunities that VUCA holds? How much of the VUCA situation is down to us and how do we want to design our businesses in the future? SOPHIA is a workshop format that is an answer in itself, providing a space for dialogue, learning and experience. It gives the participants copious room for personal engagement, returns to them their responsibility to learn and yet ensures that there is a secure and stabilizing environment. Individuality, freedom and communality are brought into a productive balance.
Moving away from what we’re used to, the rigid processes and the limited view, we set out in order to do something different – or to do something usual in an utterly different way. It is an enriching and inspiring experience that sometimes demands that we leave our comfort zone. Thoughts and feelings like »I don’t know how to do that«, »OK, I’ll do it, but it’s not pretty«, »What for?« are typical among people who are in the middle of change processes: even those who are highly willing to change, who are creative, flexible, take the initiative and are resilient.
The friendly and inspiring framework of SOPHIA allowed us to create a protected space where the participants were able to try out, enact, test boundaries. Take, for example, the project »Me-enactment – staged self-portraits«. Each participant developed their own individual self-representation concept together with the photography artist Bettina Cohnen from Berlin. The immediate questions that arose were not only »Who am I and what makes me what I am?« but especially also »What do I want to present of myself to the outside world and which of my many faces will I use for this communication?«
Every day, we live with our own complexity, even our contradictions. However, in times of social networks and the like we have to also deal with the fact that the messages we send out develop a life of their own that we can no longer influence in a meaningful way. At the end of SOPHIA, the participants not only had spectacular self-portraits that could not have been more different. They also presented their photographs to the other participants – the »public«. Everybody was allowed to attach notes with descriptive terms to each of the other portraits, so that the wide range of messages contained in each depiction as well as the individual ways of interpreting them had to be »endured« directly.
On the topic of »enduring«: The participants were allowed to experience in several instances the fact that nowadays it is almost impossible to be an expert at something and remain so. They kept having to resort to the art of improvisation: while they were creating Lego constructions as much as when they were brainstorming and clustering on questions of how persons/managers/organizations react to VUCA.
The same was true for two musicians who were invited into the SYNNECTA house on the Friday evening. Guitarist Vincent Themba and bassist Ulla Oster had never before met. The participants were allowed to witness how a minimalistically staged concert grew out of the moment: The wonderful effect achieved by the artists stemmed from a shared flow that emerged partly from dialogue, partly from taking turns to lead. The concert was followed by a lively discussion on improvisation, own attitudes, roles and inter-personal relationships, working and being together. In contrast to the expectations of many participants, who kept returning to the topics of management and power relationships, the musicians talked about trust: trust in themselves and in others. Trust as an attitude that formed the essential basis in order to be able to create something good together as well as alone.
The notion of »trust« came up again and again at SOPHIA. It is important to note that this was not about the trust that is based on tradition and experience. It was about the kind of trust that is given and received. The expectation that trust ought to be earned is almost always disappointed. Especially in the world of VUCA, large and small things will keep bringing us to fall. Trust creates vulnerability and that takes social courage. Where it is supposed to grow into a confirming attitude, trust also implies the ability to forgive: your fellow humans, your colleagues, and most of all yourself. Forgiveness ensures that trust can continue to exist and that valuable energies will not be lost on the »why« of failures, but will rather permit widening of the horizons, attempts at what is new, approaching problems with new strategies. On the one hand, that makes us resilient and on the other hand, it enables innovation and »soft« values like intuition, childish naivety (as a condition of creativity), enduring ambiguity and not least self-reflection.
Self-reflection formed a large part of the Tour de Cologne. Three very different guided tours led the group across Melaten cemetery, into the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and to two churches in Cologne. Careful input and interaction focussed on the experience whilst giving the participants the time to reflect. Next to the understanding that the city can be used as a space for experience as well as a sphere for introversion, a number of overwhelming moments emerged spontaneously and surprisingly.
The meaning of human action and earthly existence was gravely questioned in a lecture by »Astro-Entertainer« Christian Preuß. He gave grounded and mind-expanding perspectives related to the earth, the galaxies and the entire universe. They opened up entirely new versions of VUCA: impermeable, unpredictable, unsystematic space is truly »VUCA«. That insight immediately called up the notion that maybe the VUCA conditions we are facing in our every day lives were actually harmless – by comparison. Christian Preuß sweepingly communicated the multitude and infinite size of space that is hardly conceivable for humankind, the astonishing dynamics of galaxies and planets. This wake-up call made every participant feel »small« in a pleasant way and allowed them to experience our world as much less significant and threatening. There followed a the opportunity to gaze into the night time sky through telescopes on the roof of the Maritim hotel, letting the experience sink in.
Being small, or even being a child, was certainly one of the many VUCA resilience strategies that were ready to be taken home from SOPHPIA. We as private individuals and in business can not only survive but even live and use VUCA if we every now and then approach problems and tasks like children with an empty slate and without a defined goal by simply getting up again after each failure and trying again with a new tactic; discarding successful approaches as soon as they begin to crumble; not hesitating to use the abundance around us in order to play, experiment and eventually produce. After the work was done, the SOPHIA participants walked to »Cologne’s best ice-cream parlour« quite deliberately without a defined purpose, but with a brand new wind-up toy in their pockets, enjoyed their final shared moments and then returned to »real« life strengthened for a world of VUCA that might not always be so serious after all.
3. December 2014
Bangalore, 27 degrees Celsius, hustle and bustle on the busy streets, the sun is shining on an urban soundscape. We, the participants of the conference, notice none of this. Air-conditioning has cooled the windowless conference rooms down to a temperature of sixteen degrees. It is too cold for heated discussions, but there is an atmosphere of critical and constructive grappling with current issues related to »Beyond Learning – L&D as Architect of Sustained Organization Development«. The atmosphere and the conversations are concentrated, interested, open and friendly.
In October, we were invited by the Indian NHRD to participate in the 2nd National Summit on Learning & Development in Bangalore as official knowledge partners. Surrounded by Indian HR staff, psychologists, managers, decision-makers, leadership architects, organizational consultants and students of a business school, we were conspicuous as the only non-Indians in the room. What does it mean to be invited to an Indian conference as a German knowledge partner? What did we experience there and how does that experience impact our work?
The conference was driven by questions of how to deal with VUCA in global conditions and after the sense of human activity and organizational design. The answers contained one assumption: that organizational structures occur through humanness and togetherness in interaction. Hence, the design of relationships is more important than the defence of personal aims when it comes to achieving sustainable action within organizations. In Rüdiger Müngersdorff’s panel »Transformation – Role of L&D – From Solution Provider to Proactive Influencer of Change«, the speakers agreed that it was the proactive behaviour of individuals that made change and variation possible in organizations in the first place and that L&D departments had to be equipped with the according tools and skills in order to enable action. This includes the ability to implement participation concepts as bottom-up architectures: an ability that is currently being lost in a time of top-down, cascading concepts. All participants agreed that vibrancy, agility, alertness, speed can only be developed from within the organisation: middle-bottom up.
We were inspired by insights and statements like the following:
- Participation: VUCA can only be adequately met when all persons in an organization are able to participate. VUCA is not a problem of the subject, but a structural global phenomenon that needs to be addressed from out of the logic of the collective. The performance of an individual only attains its significance in the context of others and has to be motivated by the question of shared values.
- Spirituality: every-day activity derives its meaning from spiritual motivation; shared values are a basic condition for designing organizations. Spirituality is not an end in itself.
- Willingness to change: There is one important prerequisite to learning: unlearning. That includes an awareness of the given conditions and the willingness to undergo a proactive transformation.
What was surprising? The term VUCA and all its levels of interpretation were a key topic. All panels shared the characteristic that they critically addressed conventional L&D strategies: Classic management and senior leadership with all its dominant elements was questioned and participation and organizational development across barriers of function and hierarchy advocated.
To us, every encounter with people, their topics and attitudes always means intercultural and transcultural learning. Such encounters take us away from theoretical analysis and bring us into the midst of direct experience, influencing our notions of the worlds. With our Pashminas still wrapped around us, we return with new strength to the German winter, having gained new stories and enriching perspectives on ourselves and on others.
Hanna Göhler
www.nationalhrd.org
7. July 2014
If your heart is large enough to embrace
your adversaries, you can see right
through them and avoid their attacks
(Ueshiba Morihei, Founder of Aikido)
In previous contributions to the series »Handling VUCA«, I sketched out what VUCA means to then go on to present concrete alternatives in terms of strategy, form of organization and teamwork. As an intermediary summary, this post will put up for debate which fundamental stances make resilience and sovereignty possible in a VUCA situation.
It should be understood at the outset that the concept of VUCA must not under any circumstances be abused as an excuse for a »self-inflicted« situation. Every manager and every employee ought to reflect on the question of what their active part has been in creating the VUCA nature of the situation. Subsequently, one can go on to ask where and how volatility can be transformed (back) into stability, uncertainty into certainty, complexity into simplicity and ambiguity into clarity.
There are many areas in work and life, however, where VUCA cannot be transformed (back). In order to retain the ability to act in these situations, you have to respond to VUCA with integration: If I cannot actively change the situation, I can still »embrace« it. This stance allows an escape route out of victimhood in a VUCA situation. VUCA is simply »de-problematized«.
In one of my first blog contributions, I referred to the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in order to reflect on the situation of businesses as a »state of emergency«: the characteristics of this state are exactly the same as those of a situation that would be described as VUCA. In the same contribution, I introduced the artist and cultural philosopher Yana Milev, whose »emergency design« proposes that the most promising answers to the state of emergency are spontaneity, situational action and creativity. Among other things, she advocates the idea of setting up an emergency design according to the principles of Aikido. I want to take up Milev’s idea (which she proposed in a socio-political context) and use it for the VUCA context in business. What would a successful Aikido reaction look like in an organization?
As mentioned above: Our usual reactions to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity always aim to re-establish stability, certainty, simplicity and clarity. However, it is increasingly frequent that this »warfare strategy« proves useless. VUCA-AIKIDO, on the other hand, does not even attempt to re-establish the old situation: it aims for a flowing, balanced harmony (AI) between energy (KI) and the way (DO). The Japanese martial artist Ueshiba Morihei developed Aikido in the early 20th century as a decidedly defensive martial art. Its overall aim is not victory over the enemy, but to establish defense and protection without an offensive attack. The Aikido fighter initially aims to direct the attacker’s force away in order not to be hit. Then, that very force is redirected and used against that same enemy: the enemy is essentially neutralized with his or her own force. In analogy, VUCA AIKIDO is about positioning yourself in such a way that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity cannot hit you. In addition, you should address how you can use the four VUCA attributes for your own benefit, regardless of how destructive they appear at first sight.
Without going into further detail, I will now suggest the following six stances as focal points of a VUCA AIKIDO:
Agility: I understand my own efficacy and aim for greatest possible independence and self-determination. I am active, awake, light, fast, agile, reactive, adaptive and in movement. I have buffers that do not obstruct me. I am prepared to take sensible risks.
Inspiration & Intuition: I am inspired: intellectually animated, motivated, stimulated. I trust others and myself. I trust my experience, act pragmatically, am able to improvise. At the same time, I am open to ideas and experiments. I value mistakes as opportunities to learn.
Clarity: I know of the meaning created by my actions. I am aware of my values and act accordingly. I know (my) boundaries. I understand my roles. In all of that I am transparent tomyself and others. I take decisions without delay and am consistent in their enforcement.
Interactivity: I give without immediately having to take. I continually invite dialogue. I am well connected to a great number of other people. I use my influence and am aware of the influences of others on myself. I use my network’s swarm intelligence and virality.
Diversity: I value and support the diversity that surrounds me. I am open for other perspectives and can follow these emphatically. I understand my own multifaceted nature and can act in different roles. I make a difference.
Organizationism: I understand myself as an active part of a (social) ecosystem and am aware of the stable instability of the whole. My actions are guided by synergy. I am always learning. I prefer becoming to being. I value the Now in flux. I love and honor life!
These six stances of a VUCA AIKIDO will allow to establish a fundamental resilience to VUCA and act with sovereignty under different (and continually changing) circumstances.
Of course, this is a very abstract outline of these principles. They have to be substantiated for the business context. Attentive readers may already have noticed a more substantiated form of several of theses stances in other posts on this blog. The texts that will be published in the near future will continue to turn to philosophy, social and cultural sciences in order to formulate suggestions that will be as concrete as possible in addressing how VUCA AIKIDO can be realized in practice within organizations.
Johannes Ries
2. June 2014
This blog has looked at VUCA in the business world from a strategic and an organizational point of view; VUCA also influences team work in business.
The high degree of complexity in globalized organizations is causing an increasing dissolution of the units necessary for effective cooperation. Colleagues are located across the globe and are no longer individually locally accessible: if meetings take place at all, they do so via video conference or in Cyperspace. Every locality itself is a hub of busy activity: coming and going, departures and arrivals. Even locally situated teams experience an increasing degree of volatility as everyone reels among tightly set appointments in overflowing schedules.
This trend is most visible to us consultants in our workshops. Take this example: It has become almost impossible to keep all participants together in one room for more than half a day. Some arrive late, being so fully booked that even minor irritations like a traffic jam or a delayed train can throw the entire day into disarray. Others are physically present, but their mind is fast asleep as their home timezone is at least a continent away to the west or the east. At any time, any individual may spontaneously leave the room to accept an important phone call. Others will have excused themselves in advance for a given time to »briefly« leave the event for a video conference. During every break, laptops are opened and emails are answered. Towards the end of the workshop, the first participants will start leaving before the conclusion in order to make their plane. The workshop sponsor is alone in trying to counter all of this by insisting on discipline or maintaining telephone rules. Alternatively, the sponsor may choose to suppress the aggression welling up inside and to accept the situation … In this example, it is the participants’ volatility that is the central challenge facing the moderators.
Regulating teamwork and putting it to efficient and effective good use in meetings has been at the center of many texts. I, however, propose the following hypothesis: The participants’ volatility will nevertheless continue to increase rather than decrease, just as organizations are continuing to grow more complex. Increasing disciplinary action will not solve the VUCA challenges posed to team work; it is quite probable that it would even enlarge them. I will follow another path in this contribution: Maybe the community concept of multitude can achieve a more successful cooperation in VUCA situations independently of uniformity and consolidation.
I will begin by going back in time to almost 350 years ago. The dutch optician and philosopher Baruch de Spinoza published his ideas on ethics and political leadership in c. 1670. His ideas on the freedom of thought and his historic-critical analysis of the bible made him unpopular with the established authorities. Amongst other issues, it was his concept of multitudo (lat: a large number, crowd, multitude) as a vital bearer of civil freedom that met with disapproval. Spinoza described multitudo as a plurality of people that never converges into a One. According to the philosopher, people can unite and act together without giving up their diversity. They can remain in their plurality without having to erect a center or a hierarchy. A multitudo can remain able to act even without clear commitment and definition through individuals’ affective devotion to common issues and the immanence of a situation. Spinoza was convinced that a human (liberated by rational thought) is fundamentally tolerant and is naturally inclined to charitable action.
The English mathematician, state theorist and philosopher Thomas Hobbes published an exactly opposite agenda to Spinoza’s at about the same time: his doctrine of enlightened absolutism. Hobbes thought that Spinoza’s multitudo posed a danger to the unity of the state and would have to be fought by all means. Hobbes offered an opposite to Spinoza’s term with that of the commonwealth of people united in their joint will and acting in concordance in a united stance. The commonwealth refers as one to a common essence and follows the same aim. As man is a wolf to man in his state of nature, he must seek protection from the evil inherent in himself and others. He thus joins a commonwealth as a citizen and together with all other citizens they subjugate themselves to the sovereign (the state) as protection from himself. A social contract passes the power of decision and the power of judgment to the sovereign, who is placed above all others.
Hobbes and Spinoza thus delivered two opposing discourses of cohabitation, collaboration and thus also cooperation as early as the 17th century: homogeneous, transcendentally focused unity versus heterogeneous, immanently situation-bound diversity. It is obvious which of the two models is followed by business organization today. It was not for nothing that the discourse even then had a clear victor: Politics agreed with Hobbes and Spinoza was dismissed and banished from the discussion.
Spinoza’s concept (in an anglicized form) has recently returned with new verve, however, albeit hitherto still only among the fringes. The American literary theorist Michael Hardt and the two Italian philosophers Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno regard multitude as an effective form of organization in the context of our economic system’s state of emergency. Critical of capitalism as they are, these thinkers have published some rather radical thoughts; they define multitude simply as a set of »singularities that co-operate«, as a heterogeneous field of people who are not identical, who are »the many as many«. Hardt, Negri and Virno regard the multitude as providing the possibility of sovereign organization able to withstand the all-encompassing pressure of the spheres of work and economics in its full diversity.
Hardt, Negri and Virno and their ideas greatly influenced the Occupy movement, which began in the New York Zuccotti (Liberty Plaza) Park and kept politics and finance on its toes for months on end throughout the years 2011 and 2012. One of the greatest irritations for many politicians and journalists was the movement’s continued refusal to adopt one program or nominate a permanent leader or speaker. Occupy was accused of failing to follow a clear aim, yet this strategy allowed the movement to retain its character as a multitude: it continuously prevented its own stabilization, allowed no clear point of contact and consistently celebrated its diversity. The very thing that was experienced as an incidence of VUCA from the outside acted as an internal motor and source of energy for the socio-political movement from the inside. Occupy acted like a large, global flash mob: setting out from each situation, it used the energy of those who united with others out of their own free will for that moment in time in order to express their own, individual aims and messages. The immanent diversity of voices provided an impetus for a great range of fields in the arts, culture, society and even economics and politics without being reduced to one or two central messages.
I am neither writing in support of the occupation of businesses, of course, nor do I want to abuse the Occupy movement for the purposes of capitalism. I do, however, think that aiming for multitude makes it possible to have it both: It can help make cooperation in businesses that has suffered from VUCA more effective and thus (economically) more successful while at the same time allowing people in business to act with greater sovereignty where they had hitherto experienced increasingly inhumane working conditions caused by VUCA.
In what ways, then, can multitude work as a form of cooperation in business? I believe that the fundamental question that arises in this context is: Should I force the many in their individual situations into my uniform format of cooperation or should I design a format of cooperation that optimally fulfills the many in their individual situations? The sheer presence of people does not translate into work success. Obligatory events are rarely productive. Motivation, engagement and the resulting quality of work grows, on the other hand, with the degree of freedom to chose.
My colleagues and I have been working together and in consultation with more open minded client organizations to design events in such ways that the participants are able to act as multitude. In doing so, we may use established formats such as Harris Owen’s Open Space or new ideas from urban development. We obviously shape our design to closely fit the given topic. What always remains, however, is the basic idea of taking the multitude as a cue: not to understand the participants as a unity who will act in conjunction on all issues, but to allow diversity regarding personalities as well as forms of participation in the event. Obligations are reduced to a minimum (reducing push factors), while we try to make the event as attractive as possible for the participants (increasing pull factors). The event is conceived as a platform that the participants can connect to. The moderators provide only as minimal a frame as possible, and the participants can and indeed have to organize themselves. We fully trust in emergence: the spontaneous development of new qualities out of the interaction of individuals.
Let me give you a concrete example of how this multitude-lead cooperation can take place: We were working on an encompassing organizational development project that necessitated synchronization of the existing concept with the internal project group, whose members fulfilled different capacities in the organization. Usually, we would have organized a workshop during which the entire project group would have worked together on this synchronization for two entire days. The SYNNECTA project group (Marc C. Berger, Anja Kulik, Dr. Andreas Lindner, Thomas Meilinger, Michael Stiegler and myself) decided to use a different, alternative multitude concept: We installed a so-called Open Office at a central spot, within which the concept status was visually displayed with posters and other media. The project group members were invited to visit the Open Office at any time convenient to them in the course of the given two days in order to offer their perspective on the concept. The only participants who were continually present in the Open Office were the internal project leader and two consultants. All project group members did indeed come to the Open Office in the course of the two days and engaged in a lively and focused discussion on the project status. Some participants came for several short stints, other only once (but stayed for longer), and yet others stayed for the whole day – this resulted in constantly shifting constellations for the discussion. During »idle periods«, the Open Office team processed what had happened during the discussions, focused the experiences and discussed further steps to take with the next participants. The quality of this Open Office workshop output in no way suffered when compared to that of a conventional workshop. At the same time, however, the client experienced increased efficiency. The individual participants never failed to be fully focused while in the Open Office, as they had chosen the time that was right for them for this activity. At the same time, they had saved time and capacities, which from the business point of view obviously translates into money.
This format does, however, massively raise the demands on the moderators: In response to the set-up’s volatility, they must react to the situation and the given constellation of participants with a high degree of flexibility. In order to handle the unpredictability of the course of events, the moderators have to work with fuzzy visions and must be able to withstand the process’ high degree of openness. They have to keep a keen eye on the constantly changing, complex interaction of those who are involved in the discussion and the new arrivals joining in. In order to do so, they have to be even more able than ever before to provide an empathic, intuitive and analytical assessment of the situation and react to interventions with fast decision making. At the same time, they need greater methodological competence and a differentiated toolkit. They need to find and keep up the right balance between confident attraction and trusting release, between challenge and support. This will result in the right, attractive flow that allows the multitude to develop its potential as the many as many.
I am not asking for the dissolution of all teams in businesses, nor for an abandonment of all conventional cooperation in the form of planning, responsibility and community! Not all tasks or challenges can be adequately met with the multitude as a form of cooperation. At the same time, however, I do want to propose focusing on the potential of the multitude in business in order to open sensible, real »free spaces« and thus raise valuable efficiency. Where people are able to act in open movements as the many, we can make use of emergence. When we trust in that and try to surf the wave of the flow, the multitude will transform its own VUCA qualities all by itself into the stability, security, simplicity and clarity of good results.
Johannes Ries
29. April 2014
Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! (…)
Don’t be one of multiple, be multiplicities! (…)
Be quick, even while standing still! (…)
Don’t bring out the General in you!
The psychiatrist Félix Guattari and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze formed this imperative in their cryptic 1980 mammoth oeuvre A Thousand Plateaus, which is one of the most important reference works of contemporary philosophy today.
I recently outlined the concept of VUCA on this blog; it describes an increasingly virulent challenge in business that has recently been a frequent topic of discussion. In another contribution, I looked to China and introduced an alternative strategic approach that may be more adequate for handling VUCA. In this contribution, I will address the question of what defines a VUCA resilient organization.
Even though philosophy is frequently regarded a view from the ivory tower, it can often serve as a seismograph for the future issues of the real world. Positioned at the avant-garde as it is, philosophy often (unknowingly) seeks the answers for the challenges of tomorrow’s business world. Following on from this hypothesis, I will test the above quotation for its uses with regard to successfully handling VUCA today.
Deleuze and Guattari used an analogy from botany to differentiate between two different approaches and types of organization: root versus rhizome.
The root: An organization devoted to root thinking always forms a clear structure and hierarchy. It has a centre and is constructed for the long term. I grows vertically: like a tree whose root strands grow together into a central trunk, this organization directs all its function lines towards the top leadership. A root system cannot be divided, as each root strand is necessary for the survival of the next. When a tree is severed at a given point, all branches connected to that point will die – in the worst case that will be the entire tree. In the same way, individual parts of a root organization cannot exist independently from the centre and the other function. Root thinking is always focussed on the original source, stable existence, steady status and the proper entity.
Deleuze and Guattari contrast this with another, less well-known, botanical form of life:
The rhizome: Rhizomes are growths with a so-called stem system. While root, stem and fruit can clearly be differentiated in most plants, rhizomes grow as systems of root stems in which there is no difference between shoot and root. The bamboo, ginger and the ground elder are well known examples of rhizomes. Their reproduction is vegetative and thus easy and fast: their wide-spread subterranean creeping allows new shoots to emerge over ground at the most unexpected places. A rhizomatically oriented organization is accordingly focussed on a widely cast network of relationships that connects all its members. It does not have a centre, not least because its stability is momentary and given only for each situation. An organization rhizome is subject to constant change, continuous restructuring, displays extremely fast and horizontal growth. As it consists of individual parts that can constantly re-connect in new constellations, a rhizome can be severed at any time and any place: it will react immediately and restructure into a form that can continue to survive. Rhizome organizations are focussed on their potential, understand themselves to be in constant flux, concentrate on action and becoming and celebrate their multiplicity and heterogeneity.
How does this connect with our business world in its VUCA state of emergency? Organizational anthroplogy and business culture research have long pleaded for attention to be paid to the implicit rules in the informal business culture next to official business structures, hierarchies and processes. These implicit rules are usually formed informally, such as in old boys’ networks, in water-cooler chats, while gossiping at the photocopier, talking during a cigarette break or over lunch at the canteen table. Here we see the hidden rhizome in business culture at play; frequently, it will be at odds with the official root hierarchy. Organizational anthropology has advertised the potential inherent in a public and conscious discussion of the subconsciously active, implicit rhizome rules in organizations.
Against the backdrop of VUCA discussions, we can go even one step further by proposing the following hypothesis: When Deleuze and Guattari created their rhizome image over thirty years ago, they suggested a mindset and organizational philosophy that makes it possible to react better to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. As rhizomes are by definition in constant flux, they are much better able to adapt than roots are. They are more agile. A rhizomatic network of relationships is basically interactive and uses swarm intelligence, thus profiting from its own heterogeneity and complexity. Networks always communicate in a rhizomatic manner: messages spread at a speed that could never be reached in a hierarchy. Such viral communication can prove faster, more effective and more suited to reaction than communication that passes along the »official« channels. A rhizomatic organism that contains and maintains multiplicity within itself reacts to ambiguity with much greater tolerance and sovereignty than a closed, homogeneous unit that knows only one path.
The idea of the rhizome allows us to imagine an organization as a living organism. This precisely matches the pleas made by the new approaches of business oriented organizational development that have recently been published:
Connected Company: In 2012, Dave Gray contrasted the Divided Company and the Connected Company: The former is defined by hierarchy, division of labour, specialisation, stability and predictability in stable environments. The latter is distinguished by holarchy (holistic independence of the parts), fractal work units, autonomy, flexibility and adaptiveness in uncertain environments. The Connected Company consists of a service-oriented platform that does not direct the so-called pods, but optimally supports them in their independent (but connected) customer-focussed actions.
Communities: Also in 2012, Jörg and Rüdiger Müngersdorff published their plea to recognize the potential of communities that cut paths beyond the organizational chart boxes and lines in each organization and use it for organizational development and Change Management. For this purpose, it pays to connect the organization’s bridge people. This term describes network brokers who are well connected and have access to several communities that communicate via stories as in a campfire community.
Beta Organization: Niels Pfläging coined the term Beta Organization in 2013 to describe an organization able to deal with complexity. While »old« alpha businesses rely on dependencies, departments, management, fulfilment of duty, maximisation, planning, bureaucracy, status, power and directives, a beta organization will focus on coupling content, cells, leadership, results culture, accuracy of fit, relative goals, participation, preparation, consequence, purpose, intelligence and market dynamics.
Light Footprint Organization: Charles-Edouard Bouée outlined the Light Footprint Organization also as recently as 2013. This organization is able to optimally adapt to its fast changing environment and the fluidity of events by being set up as a modular loose alliance of largely autonomous, multi-disciplinary teams. Here, Bouée has issued a plea for more decentralization, pragmatism, opportunism and openness for experiments. Well-trained and optimally equipped small and agile teams that cooperate intensively according to their paradigm of reciprocity: This, he says, are the guarantors of success for businesses that have a future in the VUCA world.
Dual Operating System: John Kotter’s book XLR8 (Accelerate, 2014) is only a few days old: in it, Kotter considers how organizations can withstand the continuous acceleration of the VUCA situation. He sketches a Dual Operating System, which relies on the speed, adaptability and innovative potential of networks in organizations next to the safeguarding, stable and reliable hierarchy. Kotter hopes that well-connected change agents will provide businesses with a greater willingness to change and ability to adapt.
These five examples from the current discourse on organizational development show the potential of philosophy (and other avant-garde disciplines on the margins such as, e.g., contemporary art) for successfully handling VUCA. Translating the opening quotation by Deleuze and Guattari into the context of business (in presumption of approval by the organizational developers cited above), it may read:
»Network integration, diversity, agility as well as the reduction of authoritative structures and mindsets are the most important keys for a VUCA resilient organization!«
Johannes Ries
