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Adhocracy: Organisational Structure without Structure

Adhocracy

AdhocracyWhen did bureaucracy become a dirty word? Almost certainly when the idea of adhocracy emerged.

The two are polar opposites: radically different ways to co-ordinate an organisation.

But, while the concept of bureaucracy goes back to the nineteenth century; adhocracy is new. But maybe not as new as you think.

Continue reading Adhocracy: Organisational Structure without Structure

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Henry Mintzberg 2: Management Thinker

This is our 250th weekly Management Pocketblog.
We’re looking forward to the next 250!

In last week’s blog, we started our exploration of Henry Mintzberg, Gadfly Generalist. In this second blog, I want to examine two other aspects of his work: the way organisations are structured, and how they think strategically. But first, I feel the need to add in, gratuitously, another of Mintzberg’s more memorable quotes.

Mintzberg Delayering

Mintzberg on The Structure of Organisations

Mintzberg has visited this topic twice: in his 1979 book, The Structuring of Organisations, and then again, in 1989, in Mintzberg on Management. His earlier work identified five archetypical organisational structures or types, which he later revised to six.

  • Entrepreneurial Organisations are small, informal, with loose allocation of roles, but frequently strong leadership from a single chief executive.
  • Machine Organisations are excellent at repetitive tasks like manufacturing, placing efficiency of process at their heart, and formalising everything.
  • Diversified Organisations create a central administrative function to serve a range of operating units that are more or less autonomous. The degree of autonomy seems to vary in cycles with the current cycle creating a high degree of centralisation. See the earlier article, Kenichi Ohmae: Irrational Strategy.
  • Professional Organisations might also be called knowldege organisations. They use the skills and knowledge of their highly trained workforce to deliver fairly standardised services.
  • Innovative Organisations are flexible, informal and multi-disciplinary, allowing them to adapt and innovate. Mintzberg saw these as increasingly succeeding over competitors in the future.
  • Missionary Organisations have a clear mission that provides the basis for strategic choices and the motivation for employees.

Mintzberg on Adhocracy

I am going to make more of this than it may strictly deserve, as it is just one of very many topics on which Mintzberg writes. But it is one that interests me, especially with the emergence in recent years of the concept of holacracy, which seems a natural successor.

The term was, I think, first coined by Warren Bennis and then taken up and popularised by Alvin Toffler in his book, Future Shock. An adhocracy is a way of governing an organisation, not through formal structures, but through informal networks in which individuals take on the roles that are needed at the time. Such organisations are fluid and undocumented and unstructured knowledge has a high value.

Mintzberg developed these ideas, advocating small scale, temporary organisations coming together within the larger whole, to deliver a project, or one product or service, or to serve one customer. He saw two models:

The Operational Adhocracy, which works on behalf of it clients, like service businesses such as consulting

The Administrative Adhocracy, which comes together to serve its parent organisation.

Both of these models are excellent at creating adaptability and reacting to changes in circumstance. Consequently, both are poor at strategy building, because members have little investment in the adhocracy’s long-term development.

Mintzberg on Organisational Strategy

Mintzberg has made several influential contributions to thinking about organisational strategy too. His most notable influence has been, like Ohmae, to advocate non-linear, creative thinking over formulaic, analysis-driven strategy development. Once again (see last week) Mintzberg’s HBR article on the subject is very widely read and, once again, the enterprising reader could find a copy notwithstanding HBR’s copyright if you chose to. His books on the subject include: Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994), The Strategy Process (1996), Strategy Safari (1998), and Strategy Bites Back (2004). Many of these are in revised editions and remain valuable today.

He sees three major pitfalls in traditional strategy making and rejects any assertions that our volatile, uncertain times are anything special – try telling that to people in Stalingrad during the Second World War, he says. All people at all times have seen their world as complex and uncertain.

Mintzberg’s three pitfalls are:

  1. Assuming that we can predict discontinuities. We tend to assume, implicitly, that the future will flow from the past and that changes will arise from trends. This is a theme that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has recently made his own, with his best selling book, The Black Swan.
  2. Planners are often detached, in the ivory planning towers, from daily realities. They are focused on the hard data and its analysis and miss out on the soft information that would alert them to big shifts. This says that operational managers need to be highly engaged in any strategic work.
  3. A belief that formal strategy development can follow a linear process. Instead, he argues, creative, divergent thinking is needed, which can make links outside of the logic-chain, subverting established categories and dogmas.

So, to end this exploration of Mintzberg’s thinking, one last, telling quote.

‘The real challenge in creating strategy lies in detecting the subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.’


Pocketbooks you might enjoy

I am a little loath to include a book on the process and tools of strategy, but it is a good book and I have included it alongside others on creative thinking!

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Henry Mintzberg: Gadfly Generalist

Henry Mintzberg is one of today’s great management thinkers, whose work is characterised by breadth, rigour, and iconoclasm. His work has so much breadth and depth that I have decided it merits two blogs, rather than one.

In this first blog, we’ll look at Mintzberg the man, and his earliest work on the nature of managerial work. In the second blog, we will look at two further big themes in his professional work: how organisations are structured, and how they create strategy.

Henry Mintzberg

Brief Biography

Henry Mintzberg was born in Montreal in 1939 and graduated from McGill University in Mechanical Engineering in 1961. He then went to work for the Canadian National Railways for two years in Operational Research, but quickly gravitated to an academic career. He won his doctorate from the MIT Sloane School of Management in 1968, and returned to McGill, where he is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies. For much of the time, he has split his teaching and research time between there and INSEAD, the international graduate business school, based in Fontainebleau, in France.

He is a prolific writer with 16 books and over 150 articles and monographs to his name. Most recently, he has focused on a more politically oriented critique of western society and business, taking the extremes of capitalist thinking to task, much as the west took the extremes of communist thinking to task in the 1980s. His pamphlet, Rebalancing Society, is available from his website.

Mintzberg is notable as a gadfly, critic and iconoclast who is outspoken on many issues and highly quotable in the way he speaks and writes (an example is below). But he is thoughtful and rigorous too: when he disagrees with another academic or commentator, he rarely engages in an attack, but rather he gathers his data carefully, before mounting a strong – often devastating – counter-argument.

Mintzberg MonkeyMintzberg on Managerial Work

Mintzberg’s first book was The Nature of Managerial Work, published in 1973. It was followed by one of the all time most popular Harvard Business Review articles, whose tile described Mintzberg’s thesis well: The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact (this is one of many classic HBR articles, that, while protected by copyright, the enterprising blog reader can probably track down).

In his earliest academic work, Mintzberg set out to discover what managers actually do with their time: not what they should do, nor what they say they do. His managers went all the way up their organisations to CEOs. His results put the lie to grand theories of management behaviours – most notably Peter Drucker‘s metaphor of manager as orchestra conductor. Instead, what he found were managers constantly juggling interruptions and distractions, spending very little time on any one topic. Their big projects are delegated and all they can do is spend a few minutes here and there, engaging with one of them, before moving onto something else.

Most managers I know would, firstly, recognise this description and, secondly, fear that this is dysfunctional – not at all what they should be doing. Mintzberg gives them the confidence that they are not alone. He also found that much of what managers did in the early 1970s was ‘old fashioned’ and I suspect it still is: a lot of their time is spent dealing with people, talking, chatting, even gossiping. This gathering of ‘soft’ information is the basis of their decision making as much as or even more than the formal documenting, analysis and careful consideration that theory would prescribe.

Out of all of his observations, Mintzberg catalogued ten managerial roles, which he grouped into three clusters.

Interpersonal Roles

  • The Figurehead, whose role is to represent the team, division or organisation, formally. Often a merely symbolic role, but more frequently, a political one.
  • The Leader, whose role is to co-ordinate,unify, and motivate the team.
  • The Liaiser, whose role is to build up and maintain a network of contacts within and beyond their organisation.

Informational Roles

  • The Monitor, whose role is to gather and evaluate information from all sources.
  • The Disseminator, whose role is to transmit the information across the organisation and to their team members.
  • The Spokesperson, whose role is to give information to the outside world, from within the organisation.

Decision-making Roles

  • The Entrepreneur, whose role is to design, initiate, and propagate change within the organisation.
  • The Disturbance Handler, whose role is to deal with the unexpected.
  • The Resource Allocator,whose role is to make decisions about how the organisation’s resources can best be deployed.
  • The Negotiator,  whose role is negotiate for resources internally and externally.

The first thing that strikes me is that there is little here about getting things done – the job of a manager is to manage: not to do. The second thing is how much of this is reactive to events – very little of this smacks of careful consideration and planning. The risk here is one of superficiality and quick fixes, so a manager must guard against these, by learning to be adept at spotting what is important from among the vast amount of distracting dross.

Finally, I cannot help worrying about ‘the magic number trap’. Here we see a perfect ten roles. I do hope the younger Mintzberg – now the rigorous gadfly – did not succumb to the temptation to simplify in search of neatness. What roles may he have missed, or conflated?

Next week… Part 2: Henry Mintzberg: Management Thinker

If general management is your thing, you may like…

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