Saturday, January 16, 2021

Hyperconnected Organization Structure

The future of organizational design should be fluid enough to streamline information flow and flexible enough to achieve business autonomy.

The digital organization is like a living system that keeps evolving, often flatter structures will help to improve cross-functional communication, speed up organizational response to changes, enforce business flexibility, inspire bold innovation so that they can respond to the challenges of a more complex, interconnected, and interdependent business world. 

Metaphorically, the highly adaptive digital organization with the following characteristics is just like the chameleon which has a laterally flattened body and its skin changes color for constantly adapting itself to its environment. 

Hyperconnected organization has a flatter structure that comes with greater empowerment and decision-making in the hands of managers and employees: The digital organization has a mix of physical and virtual structures, encourages great autonomy, “self-generated” engagement, self-management, and self-renewal. The goal is to create a workplace in the way people can relate to themselves and to their experience of the environment and others around them. A self-organizing team has all the right skills to make the right architectural and design decisions, has full authority on the practices, processes, tools, engineering methods they would like to use to build the products or services with the faster development cycle.

In a dynamic, hyperconnected and hyper-diverse environment, the digital leader’s role is to empower their people, encourage creativity, autonomy, and mastery. They know the team will deliver the best outcome and give them the freedom to do it on their way. At the company scope, organize a self-managed digital organization to define your circles, roles, and authority through the members of your organization, empower people, nurture trust, and harmonize the working environment. The high degree of the organizational self-management capability reflects its maturity to be disciplined to do the work well and accelerate its performance.

The strength of flatter, networked structures, particularly built upon diversity causes ‘energic friction’ and drives creative tension: Many command-control working environments with overly restrictive hierarchy are silo, static and tedious, there is no energy in the room because people are afraid of being themselves and saying anything which might cause conflicts. In an open, hyperconnected and creative work environment, there is energy between people, meaning they are not afraid to say things that will help the business improve and innovate. Diversity and flat, networked structures enable the rapid coalescing of the complementary knowledge, skills, and resources needed to solve the problem or capitalize upon opportunities as they arise.

In these working environments, the diverse viewpoints are welcomed, even if they seem to conflict, but conflicts can be handled wisely. if the working environment with delightful interaction is stimulating and challenging, and then the brain can thrive from new stimuli to generate new ideas. The “energetic friction” caused through the constructive conflict of ideas, values, interests, etc; once resolved leads to co-creating knowledge, of something new leading innovation and growth. This friction provides the organization with positive energy, filter out the negative vibe and maximize the collective human potential.

Flat organizations need horizontal growth to keep employees motivated and encourage cross functional collaboration: Technically, organizational design (structure, policy, etc) must be adaptable, take advantage of the latest digital technology platforms & tools, to break down functional silos, create proper Job rotation, improve people engagement and productivity. Flatter structures help to speed up organizational response to changing markets by breaking down silos and enforcing cross-functional collaboration, driving scalable performance, and enabling potential maximization.

It’s important to develop the process of a corporate pulse that identifies where the pulse/passion/motivation/ commitment of the organization lies, and who embodies it. Let people explore where their energy is and then, align the energy to work at hand, and motivate them to think and do things innovatively, and align their talent and career goal with the strategic goals of the organization. High mature organizations provide the space for people to develop their capabilities, exercise their creativity, and unleash collective potential.

The future of organizational design should be fluid enough to streamline information flow and flexible enough to achieve business autonomy. These organizations can give up command and control to adopt a culture of learning and innovation via flatter structure and removing barriers of communication, providing learning and development opportunities in-house that contributes to high employee engagement. Either individually or collectively, people can gain enriched working experience and build nonlinear professional skills, and ultimately, develop a cohesive capability portfolio, to improve digital proficiency, and orchestrate unique competency of the company.





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