This paper was originally produced as a contribution to the “Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge”, which was aimed at management innovators from around the world to share their most progressive practices and disruptive ideas around three goals:
● Making organizations more inspiring and engaging with everyone aligned by a deeply-felt sense of purpose to inspire and unleash imagination, initiative, and energy from every quarter.
● Developing an outside-in orientation that eliminates the gaps between “sense” and “respond”, to inject the voice of the customer and other relevant stakeholders into every decision, and to make the insights and observations of every individual—from edge to edge—matter.
● Managing without managers to reduce the performance drag of top-heavy management structures, replace “manager-management” with a more agile self- and peer-management, and replace rigid hierarchy with a vibrant social system.
Many of us have experienced the frustrations of working inside organisations: the lack of inspiration and engagement; the widening gap between sensing early and responding quickly; and the constraints of top-heavy management structures and administration. The impact of these frustrations has created unprecedented stress to individuals, whilst suppressing competitive and innovative growth, which creates even further stress to us all. The arch-enemy to the democratisation of the organisation is the enterprise silos that protect all those that do not want transparency or are simply too afraid to adapt. The pent up frustrations of so many people is ready to vent against the dark side of silos. Such an emotive outburst en masse when combined with the emerging shift towards the Social Enterprise, being advocated by leading cloud players, could lead to more change to the enterprise in the next five years compared to the past thirty years.