Machine and organisation: The Self-Managed Model of Organisation

This is an essay requesting a new Operating Model for human organisation adopting fully integrated design of the human as creator, leader, and partner of ‘machine’. Machine is not an object but a complete experience involving externalised materials formed by human skills and energies and expressing human intellect. Machine is entering an autonomous era and requires previous human models of organisation to transit towards something akin to this autonomy.

The existing management and political concepts of organisation are instrumental and arcanely human. That may seem strange to offer, since it might be ‘accused’ of being obvious. However, if science is an attempt to explain the world it must, as it does in other ‘disciplines’, encompass the non-human world.

Unfortunately, this is resolved as human world and natural world. This is a preposterous bifurcation as humans were produced by ‘nature’ and are of ‘nature’. There is no ‘human world’ as such only humans within ‘the world’ [accepting ‘the world’ as a human artefact].

In any event my primary point here is that the human organisation is the human way of engaging in more effective ways with the environment just as ants or other social animals do.

Humans over human time have ‘created’ machines. This ‘preposterous’ model posits humans as separate from the machine when in fact humans created the machine. Machines are of humans. Both humans and machines are of nature.

The ideology of being ‘man-made’ is used to cover-up the fact that humans are a part of nature and that there is nothing permanent about human existence that gives logic to a separated ontological or epistemological platform for existence. ‘Human’ has interacted with other parts of nature and between them ‘machine’ has been created. Machines do not exist without humans and humans do not exist without the evolutionary record and trajectory of ‘nature’.

As transhumance fans propose humans have produced machines as part of the transformation of ‘nature’, specifically for some [R Kurzweil], of humans. The human ‘desires’ the machine as part of evolution. Externalising human intelligence to create new forms of human inspired tools and components.

Components of what? Of a new future with a new set of forms possible including a new human form. We make actually existing objects and relationships daily. They can be components of greater systems. We do not know ultimately what these components may harbinger.

History as legacy and distraction:

These previous /old organisations are led by what are referred to as ‘managers’ of all status and standing. Including what are referred to ‘rich’ investors / shareholders. Their cultural model is the Dominant Partial View [DPV] of history. This model argues that key elites created a new nirvana, and they are those elites and ‘deserve’ the ‘lions share’ of the ‘riches’.

That model contributed to the improved condition of more humans in relative terms over time and then plateaued. Certain physical and cultural obstacles to human life have been overcome involving food supply, personal safety, sheltering /housing, communication/education, and health span management. Although at different times these improvements have been marginal.

In cultural terms however the DPV has become the bottleneck on evolution of human society. At present DPV cadres are seeking to re-establish the hierarchical model of control to narrow interest group reward. This is preparation for human tumult in which DPV must be overcome and replaced with a Shared Unifying View [SUV] that creates a sustainable view of human organisation.

AI/RPA: machine influences the human

The AI / RPA based organisation offers a near at hand change to introduce new organisational forms.

Designed as End2end with all parties integral. Scalable and flexible to accommodate different rates of progress away from DPV led organisations.

Immanent capability for design informs ways of thinking about possible alterations in organisational form. Some radical ideas that come to my mind-

• Zero managers only leaders. Lead, provision, envision and do.

• Self-acting roles interfacing 360 degrees mutually enabling process flow.

• Zero workers only members/partners. End wage relation and initiate standards for living without challenge.

• Support areas sourced in AI built shared operating models.

• All roles are 100% service providers in own right thus directly connected to value.

Trust: the holy grail

Trust is enhanced by automation and 100% transparency of process and shared rewards.

Trust today is the bourgeois concept of organisation is a ‘delegated’ permission. Delegation is the basis of participation in bourgeois organisations and passes for democracy. Delegation is a trap and a paddock for exercising a tamed animal.

Delegation is not trust but the transfer of actions within a power source relationship [DPV] that governs that relationship. The evolution of the bourgeois form of delegated trust is driven by the control required by capital to maximise cost efficiency and revenue growth. That means control of all actions and decisions along the business process.

AI is progressively automating business processes and remove much of the delegated space and thus changes the form of trust that is required. Thus, actors are machines and decisions are algorithm led.

Trust is now a partnership bargain between actors. Investors and others [supply chain partners / labour organisation or resource provider/technology partner] enable an automated and digitally managed process to provide needs [services/products] to end users.

The Non-ideological model is an optimised system without human governance in the daily routines. It is a model we can only strive to achieve. Our expanding knowledge continuously reveals a new layer of ideology, and the horizon of science expands with it.

Today’s contest within our economy is around finance. The finance led economy is a legitimate historical fact. Denying its legitimate right to existence denies understanding. As a species we have created relations and forces of production evolving to the state we are in.

Darwinists, physicists and others tell us the human is the form of existence that evolved to propagate our biochemical receptors, our core biological make up. It is posited this can morph into other forms. What is it about human life we should be sustaining? Human organisation is an evolutionary act expressing best in class attempts to sustain human existence.

If we do not understand human evolution our organisations will reflect that. Much of what passes for organisation analysis is the soap opera version of human expression. It is an existential act leading to existential outcomes which have low species being knowledge. At present human organisation is a form of contest with other beings and amongst human beings. As a species we have developed the thesis that the survival of the fittest is the only interpretation that matters.

We ignore the historical context that suggests this is what has been but may not always be as things change building on historical gains. It also ignores that the teleological capacity of the human is an evolutionary fact and changes the dynamics of evolution. Evolution is not a mechanical /chemical process but a more holistic process with social species level dynamics. The human has created the machine and software, arguably the basis of new forms of being.

AI and RPA offer new forms of organisation that radically alter current thinking. They can integrate the potential of the machine and software with human capability. In the process human social relations will be altered.

The Weberian social democratic organisation is no longer fit for purpose. It is too slow, too expensive and requires excess negotiation. A benign and efficient organisation trajectory is already embryonic, and our futures lie in the pioneering of new organisational models. This will require all social actors to engage to offer their energy and commitment.

What does the maturity model look like? This might help create trajectory for existing businesses. I suggest it is assisted by using the SMMO concept as that expands our reasoning into a permanent evolving set of social relations with no end.

The future of the organisation and some design constraints

I have outlined some aspects of organisation history and it limits. The outcome is an ongoing strand of thinking about a model I am calling the Self-Managed Model of Organisation. The title is not clumsy by design but reflective of being descriptive and not hubristic. It should also allow in my view for the fact that no person, can define it, and indeed it requires all parties, whether passively or actively, are engaged.

SMMO:

The SMMO concept is a reflection on the history of human efforts to describe, and in part design, organisations to achieve purposes of a varying nature over different time and space parameters.

Business organisation in particular is in constant flux due to ongoing contestations over the macro and micro beneficial effects or the dysfunctionality produced.

The SMMO concept observes that all efforts at organising are valid, and all reflect some level of social relationship building. In human history, in the main, they also reflect power and ideology to assist the perpetuation of specific models of business organisation based on property rights.  

SMMO, like some historians, supports a thesis that this contestation will remain and always offer the threat of radical change / revolution / dissolution until the level of contestation is such that it is marginal and no longer capable of such disruption. More relevantly that the issue of contestation is displaced by shared collaboration of human struggles with existence and what is referred to as ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’.

Rather than posit a ‘correct’ model SMMO supports the approach that unifying the shared outcomes as a best possible outcome for all concerned is both a basis for maximum agreement and for ongoing knowledge/learning based improvements over time.

The suggestion here is that there are always constraints in considering ideas for proposing a new organisation that is designed to improve on the current model[s] and is recognisably reaching a status of a unifying arrangement designed to engage and provision a maximum satisfaction of ‘expected’ outcomes.

SMMO is grounded in the view that there is a ‘customer’ [purpose] and the satisfaction of that customer [purpose] is the only source of truth about value. The exchange transaction is a truth test. SMMO proposes therefore that if the value of an activity is not clear to the customer it is likely to be of challengeable value and contain waste.

This being said it is accepted that at any state in human time no single organisation is likely to be without instability and contestation. Thus, there are constant requirements to review and re-design. those efforts are constrained by various limitations.

Constraints:

1. Technical and social interfaces incomplete- an organisation exists in a complex setting with many potential interfaces. For Profit Organisations tend to see these are barriers and cost burdens. Not-for-profits see no barriers and accept all interfaces thus at times not reaching deadlines of overconsuming / running out of resources.

2. Inclusion / exclusion- organisations are not able or interested to see who is prevented from joining or succeeding. Additionally, they privilege some cohorts more than others. If we join an organisation there is a level of engagement that makes that participation productive. If that level is not positive on balance that must generate unsustainable dysfunctionality which directly produces waste.

3. Active / passive participation- complex organisations, control-oriented management and organisation cultures tend towards passivity via bureaucracy and codification. Initiative and innovation are suppressed or at least corralled into silos. Overhead is large and designed around control. Solutions to complexity have been more complexity or workarounds both adding cost and waste. Active participation is a challenge because there is some requirement in many circumstances to achieve stability thus ‘cut-off’ on creativity / innovation. That requirement comes from other passive sources like external stakeholders and final customers.  

4. Failure demand / legitimate work- many organisations engage in ‘activity’ that is in fact waste. Thus, customer service, quality check/inspection, security, aspects of HR and OD, aspects of accounting, brand development and marketing are often ways to present justifications for excessive cost and failures. AI has increased the scope for this. Passive bureaucracies create work to control not eliminate waste. Trust and problem solving at the point of pain/gain is debated not acted upon. Multiple hand-offs and upward referral are designed into operating models and meetings are the pastime of middle and senior managers.

5. Human and non / human exchange- humanity is not a visitor to earth but a product of earth. All matter and beings are valid inhabitants of earth. After millions of years the human is recognising that consuming matter is an equation not a magic trick. All of our actions have consequences. Today there is a lot of public agitation around destruction of the earth by humans. A lot of actions have been taken to ‘fix’ things and lot more may follow. Humans increasingly must reflect that in the future design of the ‘organisation’.

6. Measured and unmeasured value- some financial metrics are held aloft and presented as the obvious measurement of human success. Sea levels, Seagulls, garden weeds and granite rock neither agree nor disagree. Looked at scientifically it is questionable if financial metrics have much value at all. I can grow a potato and eat it and share them if there are many. I use what is currently referred as ‘my time’. The simple point is that there is not ‘need’ for a financial metric. There may be a valid and valuable reason for it but at present such metrics are the provenance of boardrooms and financial services. We measure what some people want to measure and do not measure what those same people do not value. There is an underlying contest over what is worth measuring.

There are no doubt other aspects which it will be useful to learn of.

New models of business organisation have mushroomed over the past decade or so. While no single model has become the new standard there are themes involved in the departure from old models.

The argument here is that while the constraints exist, they reflect the ongoing need for developing new models.

Design constraints are in effect the challenges to meet if we accept the constraint as a valid goal to be overcome. In the human world it is a legitimate or at least validated behaviour to deny validity to some constraints, indeed, to deny they exist.

SMMO is an existentialist perspective on organisation and that means there is not a correct organisation only the one that exists. That is a challenge to those thinkers and commentators who posit a specific ‘best model’ approach.

Leaders who can accept the SMMO can constantly evolve their design, social relations, and technology to expand the purpose of human existence. That leader will be someone who accepts increasingly the goal of unifying views within the social organisation is a sustainable route with maximum efficiency and less use of energy on contestation.