Flexibility vs fixedness
It seems appropriate to start an article about flexibility by talking about yoga. A lot of yoga poses are about stretching out the body. Stretching only happens when one point is fixed and another point moves. To make a yoga pose ‘work’, it’s equally important to pay attention to the stationary part as it is to the moving part. To become more flexible, something has to be fixed.
In organisations there is often a tension between things being fixed and things being flexible.
Bureaucratic organisations are characterised as ‘rigid’. They like things to follow exactly the same process every time. There may be some contexts in which this is still an effective way of doing things, where work really is mechanically repeatable. But in a lot of contexts, and particularly in knowledge work businesses, this is not the case. Very few things fit an exact template, and the ability to respond creatively is what leads to a high quality output and what makes the work satisfying to do.
We therefore tend to think that knowledge workers should have the maximum possible flexibility in their work. This leads us to the idea of self management. When I first encountered this concept, I thought it meant that if you were self-managing then nothing should be imposed on you. You should have total freedom to determine how do to your work, and that anyone imposing any rules on you was micro-managing.
My view on this has changed over time, and now I see that some things must be fixed in order for other things to be flexible.
The best example of this I can think of is to do lists. One of the things I like most about Holacracy1 is its insistence that everyone in an organisation has to have a written list of projects and next actions. It’s up to you how you do this, but you have to have one.
Why do I like this so much? Because it provides a great way to start valuable conversations.
If I was your manager, and we were making a physical product, I could easily stand and watch the work happening. I might notice, if I was good at my job, that you have to turn your body every time you finish a particular kind of widget in order to put it into a bin. This action might be so familiar to you that you don’t even notice it, but it’s subtly increasing the strain on your body. I could help frame this for you as a problem to solve.
If I’m your manager and we’re in a knowledge work organisation, it’s very hard for me to know what you are working on. I cannot support you in places where you are getting stuck but aren’t noticing it. I also can’t spot when you have come up with an innovative way of doing things that would be worth sharing with your team. I can’t be an effective coach because I’m missing the details.
This problem is solved if I insist you have some kind of written to do list (like a project pinboard, for instance). In some ways this is making things more fixed - I’m requiring you to maintain a visualisation of your work. But this also provides you with more flexibility to do your job without me interfering, because I don’t need to keep asking you for updates on what you’re doing. Instead, we can look at your workload together and ask interesting questions like:
“Looks like this one project here has been stuck for a while - what’s happening with that?”
“A lot of things got finished since we spoke two weeks ago. Do you have any idea what caused this?”
“Oh, you’re working on a similar outcome to someone else - have you talked to them?”
“This project is very important. Can we talk in more detail about what you think the end goal is?”
Or we can look at your workload, and see that everything is running smoothly, and I can leave you to it. Removing the phase of interrogation to get to that shared view of the state of the work has a huge benefit in terms of how free you feel.
A methodology for running organisations with a very high level of distributed authority.