Spinuzzi tilts2011

Loose Stories about
Loose Organizations
Clay Spinuzzi
University of Texas at Austin
clay.spinuzzi@mail.utexas.edu
Twitter: @spinuzzi
spinuzzi.blogspot.com

Tuesday, January 4, 2011 1

About Me...

Iʼm an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas, Austin. My research involves conducting workplace studies: going into a workplace, observing people as they
work and interact, interviewing them, gathering copies of the texts and tools they use, and building a comprehensive picture of how they circulate information. Iʼve written two books (above)
and several articles about these studies.

Currently, Iʼm interested in how changes in technology and in organizations have been changing how people produce and circulate knowledge in loose organizations. The more I study these
changes, the more I conclude that ...

Alvin Toffler was Right...

Alvin Toffler was right. Youʼve heard of Alvin Toffler, yes? Heʼs a futurist, and he wrote bestsellers such as Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980), and Powershift (1990) about changes
he saw in society. He has a reputation - well earned - for making some wild predictions. Like anyone who tries to predict the future, Toffler got plenty of things wrong, but he foresaw a lot of
things correctly.

Adhocracies
“man will ﬁnd himself [sic] liberated, a stranger in a new
free-form world of kinetic organizations. In this alien
landscape, his position will be constantly changing, ﬂuid, and
varied. And his organizational ties, like his ties with things,
places, and people, will turn over at a frenetic and ever-
accelerating pace.”

“managers are losing their monopoly on decision-making”

1970, p.125, 140
For instance, he predicted in 1970 that work would be reorganized from departments to projects, attacked by transient teams of specialists: knowledge workers, people whose job was to
produce and analyze knowledge rather than to grow or make things.

In these lose organizations - these “adhocracies” - cross-functional teams change in composition and their leadership shifts during different stages and different projects. Each unique project
requires a unique set of specialists.

1990, p.8
Related, he predicted that knowledge work would become the preeminent form of work in our economy. And since knowledge work is characterized by adhocracies, more knowledge work
led to more adhocracies.

1980, p.186
New technology, he foresaw, would spur these changes. Take the death of secretarial pools. Tofﬂer looked at personal computers in 1980 and predicted that soon secretarial pools would
disappear as executives typed their own documents. Word processing was a fundamental change in how people produced texts - a change that fundamentally changed organizations,
making adhocracies easier to enact by partially decoupling them from the bureaucratic apparatus.

Alvin Tofﬂer was
Almost Right

So many of Tofﬂerʼs predictions panned out extraordinarily well. But to me, the most interesting predictions are the ones he ALMOST got right: the ones that are plausible, but happened
differently because of one thing he overlooked. The most pertinent:

1980, Ch.16
The “electronic cottage,” in which people would exit ofﬁces and go back to work in their own homes.

“Soon we may see the rise of movements demanding that
all work that can be done at home be done at home.
Many workers will insist on that option as a right.”

“Put the computer in people’s homes, and they no longer
need to huddle. Third Wave white-collar work ... will not
require 100 percent of the work force to be concentrated
in the workshop.”

1980, p.203; 199
Tofﬂer saw that with more and more work being knowledge work, people could install computers in their houses and perform their work from home - i.e., telecommute.

“We might also see groups of home-workers organize
themselves into small companies to contract for their
services, or, for that matter, unite in cooperatives that
jointly own the machines. All sorts of new relationships
and organizational forms become possible.”

“neighborhood work centers”

“dispersed work centers”

1980, p.205; 200; 205
And yes, perhaps theyʼd want to get out of the house sometimes, so maybe theyʼd go to local coops and associate loosely. But their choices would be limited. Why?

Because they would need a network connection. And where would they get it?

A satellite “makes it possible
for each company to have, in
effect, its own electronic
postal system.”

1980, p.190
From the mega-corporations that employed them. Because only giant corporations could afford to loft their own telecommunications satellites into orbit to connect their employees! So,
although Tofﬂer envisioned more adhocracies, more project-oriented teams of specialists, these would be enabled through resources that only massive corporations could provide. They
might not need secretarial pools, but Tofﬂer expected that they would generally need centralized infrastructure.

What Alvin Tofﬂer Missed

This made perfect sense in the absence of three basic technological changes:

1. Pervasive and cheap Internet connections delivered through independent telecommunications companies ...

2. Powerful mobile computers, affordable to individuals ...

and 3. Mobile telecommunications, inexpensive enough that even tweens could afford them.

These three technologies have opened new possibilities for organizing work - loosely.

A third space

MOBILITY. Theyʼve allowed people to work in “third spaces”: coffee shops, libraries, parks, hotel lobbies, McDonaldʼs, etc.

BUSINESS business

SCALE. Theyʼve opened up telecommuting and mobile work to small businesses, not just big business: freelancers, partnerships, contractors. Theyʼve enabled virtualized organizations. And
theyʼve accelerated the transition to project-oriented work - and adhocracies.

“the new production system relies on a combination of
strategic alliances and ad hoc cooperation projects between
corporations, decentralized units of each major corporation,
and networks of small and medium enterprises connecting
among themselves and/or with large corporations or
networks of corporations.”

Castells 2000, p.96
FRAGMENTATION. Theyʼve allowed more work to be outsourced. Increasingly, companies retain their core functions, but they contract other jobs.

So all these changes, and others, encourage and support adhocracies, in which specialists come together for a specific project, team up to fulfill it, then disperse until the next job. These
teams are transient, unstable, and continually reconfigured. But how do these teams assemble and work in practice?

Let me tell you about three case studies, all in Austin.

Adhocracies within an
Organization:
The Case of “Semoptco”

Case 1: The case of “Semoptco.” How do adhocracies work inside an organization? To ﬁnd out, I studied the work of search engine optimization specialists at a web marketing company.

Search Engine
Optimization
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of
improving the volume or quality of trafﬁc to a web site or a
web page (such as a blog) from search engines via ‘natural’
or un-paid (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results ...”

Wikipedia, “search engine optimization”
Whatʼs SEO? The deﬁnition is above. When people want information, they increasingly turn to Google and other search engines to get it. “White hat” SEO is a way to identify peopleʼs
queries and use legitimate techniques to make your site rank high in the search results. “Black hat” SEO, aka “snake oil,” has the same goal but uses improper techniques.

For example, say you want to plan a trip to Disneyland, so you Google “hotels near disneyland”. You probably wonʼt click through more than a couple of pages of results. So businesses want
to promote their sites to the top of the search results. And you, the customer, want the most relevant results. Everyone wins!

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/hidden-
gay-slur-search-terms-get-campaign-site-blacklisted.ars
But SEO is sometimes associated with “snake oil,” underhanded tricks such as hiding white text on a white background. These are improper, and for the most egregious tricks, search
engines will de-list the site - the death penalty for a website. See the story on this slide.

Semoptco doesnʼt use “snake oil” techniques.

Projects at Semoptco
Launch: Kick off campaign, examine needs, formulate keywords
and goals, plan goals.

•
Account manager and 1-2 specialists

•
Small set of standard milestones

•
About 4 weeks

Maintenance: Analysis, reporting, meeting, link building.

•
Primarily a specialist; “lone wolf”

•
Weekly, monthly, sometimes yearly cycles

•
Periodic coordination with account manager

•
No milestones - but long-term performance goals and
constant problem-solving

So what does it do? Basically, you have a pool of SEO specialists and a smaller number of account managers. When a new customer comes in, a 2 or 3 person team is assigned. For
launch, they follow a four-week set of basic milestones. Then they go into maintenance mode: the SEO specialists work as “lone wolves” to improve SEO and to continue setting goals.

But hereʼs the thing. In this industry, things literally change every day. Search engines tweak their ranking algorithms, other sites attract links, news items can roil the results. And SEO
specialists donʼt get a formal education. How do they get this work done?

Flexibility through
Constant Customization
“Innovation is the primordial function” (Castells 2003, p.
100)

“The Internet is the essential tool to ensure customization
in a context of high-volume production and
distribution” (Castells 2003, p.77)

“[Projects are] all very different” (Stacy, Account Manager)

Bear in mind that SEO is a customized service within a fast-changing space. Writing about Internet businesses, Manuel Castells emphasizes these characteristics of innovation,
customization, and fast-paced production. And so does Stacy, the account manager quoted here. So Semoptco had to organize adhocratic teams to execute ﬂexibly, to customize, and to
innovate. It did that with loosely organized teams - lots of them.

Project teams
Project teams, consisting of an account manager and 1-2 specialists.

Apprenticeship teams
Apprenticeship teams, in which more experienced people mentored less experienced ones within their departments. These were not about commanding or assigning, these were about
showing people the ropes. Halfway through my study, SEO apprenticeship teams were replaced by ...

Support teams
Project teams
Support teams, which focused on formally coordinating the work of SEO specialists. A senior specialist would coordinate with and mentor junior specialists - but coordination didnʼt mean
control, because the senior specialist did not function as a manager.

Functional teams
Project teams
Then we have Functional teams: all people within each department. Departments maintained contact and shared general knowledge, such as new techniques, challenges, and tools they
discovered. They told each other how the landscape of SEO changed.

Values teams
Project teams
Values teams were teams drawn across all departments to enact three general values of the company. They pulled people out of their specialties and put their general qualities to work on
different company-wide challenges.

Taco clubteams
Project
Finally, the Taco club: Otherwise unassociated people from different departments met on Wednesdays to eat breakfast tacos together - and to get to know each other.

Aggregate networks
Project teams
These many teams or networks formed an aggregate network in which everyone knew everyone else and a little about their specialties or capabilities. They functioned in a nonsupervisory
context, overlaying the existing department-based supervisory hierarchy. By enabling workers to form new associations on the ﬂy, the aggregate networks allowed for ﬂexible structures and
loose organizations within the company. Itʼs like an incubator for adhocracies.

Extending the network
“I’ve got friends in med school.”
(Daria, Senior Search Specialist)

But wait, thereʼs more. Since specialists had to constantly customize their customersʼ websites for different searches, they sometimes had to draw on resources outside the company to
generate the best solution. For instance, Daria was working with a team that was trying to optimize a medical site aimed at doctors. What keywords would this kind of client search for? Daria
didnʼt know, but she knew how to ﬁnd out: By probing her personal networks OUTSIDE the organization.

Adhocracies Outside an
Organization:
The Case of “GD1” and
“GD2”

And that brings us to our second case. How do adhocracies work outside an existing organization? The three technologies that make adhocracies mobile, scalable, and fragmented - mobile
computers such as laptops, widespread Internet access, and mobile phones - also enable a small business to acquire the capabilities of a much larger one with very few resources.

A case in point: two graphic design businesses being run out of the proprietorsʼ homes.

Two Graphic Design Firms...
GD1: Sophie, a graphic designer in her mid-thirties working out
of her home office.

•
Quit job at large publisher when her son was an infant.

•
Specializes in print publications.

GD2: Bob and Tom, two graphic designers in their early thirties,
initially working out of Bob's condo.

•
Met at design firm.

•
Specialize in identity systems.

Both must assemble flexible, recombinant federations of
subcontractors for every project rather than relying on stable
teams.
An associate and I visited two such home-based firms. “GD1” was a sole proprietor working out of a spare bedroom of her home, which she had turned into a home office. “GD2” was a
partnership: two guys working around the kitchen table of a condo. Both would pick up a job, then subcontract parts of it out to freelancers.

Think of freelancers as operating in a “pickup” economy in which people reach out through their personal networks to assemble todayʼs team of specialists, to ﬁnd contractors, to be
contracted. The proprietors at GD1 and GD2 would pick up a job, then subcontract for skill (other specialists: web developers, photo retouching, copywriting) and capacity (other graphic
designers who can do work that the proprietors donʼt have time or bandwidth to do).

These loose organizations - temporary, adhocratic “federations” - are small, light, ﬂexible, mobile, and customized for each job.

n
Adhocracies

So these are adhocracies to the nth power - all specialists, formed to swarm a job, then disperse.

Now, this is an uncertain living. The proprietors arenʼt getting rich, and they constantly have to seek jobs and ﬁnd subcontractors to work on them. So why do they do it?

Why start their own
business? Autonomy
“I don’t want a client on our roster where I couldn't
go to a meeting in jeans.” - Tom

“But Tom and I just need to decide, do we want to
grow a business or do we just want to design? Cause
it's like they’re two different things.” - Bob

“[I seek] respectful, productive relationships with clients
that value efﬁciency and professionalism the way that I
do.” - Sophie
In a word, autonomy. They want to have a say over how they work, what they work on, when and where they work - and importantly, who they work with and for. They want to assemble their
own loose organizations.

But in a pickup economy, how do you ﬁnd your team? How do you network?

Assembling
Adhocracies
They developed networks of contacts through previous work
with larger organizations.

They established starter networks of contacts.

They established trust through experience.

They sought subcontractors who don’t need supervision.

Outside organizations, mobility and fragmentation are competitive advantages. But scaling is tough: You need a substrate of contacts to serve as potential subcontractors, you need to grow
that network of contacts, and you need to be able to trust them. Done right, a small business can achieve ﬂexibility and swiftness with a low managerial burden. GD1 and GD2 tackled this
challenge in different ways.

At GD1: Sophie explicitly characterized her subcontractors as ...

... "friends." She didnʼt want to subcontract anyone if sheʼd feel uncomfortable having them visit her home or attend her parties. And in fact, if someone didnʼt work out for a given job, she
wouldnʼt ﬁre them: sheʼd just tell them, the job is over, send me your stuff. That way, she could retain them for jobs for which they were better suited, and she could keep their goodwill. After
all, they were friends - and they might subcontract her someday.

In contrast, at GD2, Bob and Tom did not position subs as friends; rather, they described some as ...

... "douchebags." In their second year, they decided to hire employees so they could keep more production inside the business.

For both businesses, though, proprietors absolutely had to network. They had to constantly assemble adhocratic teams for each project, and since a given subcontractor might not always be
available, they had to ﬁnd and be on good working terms with multiple specialists. How do you network in a pickup economy?

Adhocracies beyond
Organizations:
The Case of Coworking

That brings us to the third and last case study. Knowledge workers who donʼt need face-to-face teaming - think of those graphic designers, web developers, copy writers, but also
telecommuters, entrepeneurs, and consultants - these knowledge workers are mobile. They donʼt need to work anywhere in particular. They can work out of their homes if they want. But
they canʼt easily network from their homes. So they start to go crazy in that “electronic cottage” Tofﬂer predicted.

So how do they network? Increasingly, itʼs through that third space, that coop that Toffler almost got right. People without offices find themselves meeting in places like coffee shops. But
coffee shops are noisy, unpredictable; you canʼt get a table;

you canʼt maintain conﬁdentiality. You donʼt know who else is there. You havenʼt been able to develop trust. And you need a place where you can develop trust if youʼre going to work
effectively in an adhocracy.

Coworking

“Coworking is the social gathering of a group of people,
who are still working independently, but who share values
and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from
working with talented people in the same space.”

Wikipedia, “coworking”
For the past two years, Iʼve been visiting such spaces - coworking spaces in Austin. In these spaces, people work in relatively unstructured locations with unstructured schedules, share
resources, form friendships, barter services, serve as tech support and emotional support for each other, subcontract each other, mentor each other, form businesses, and above all,
network.

Serving ...
• “Mamapreneur, papapreneur.” - Laura Shook, Soma Vida

• “People out here are roaming because they have to.” -
Andrew Bushnell, Cospace

• “30 to 40 year olds ... who want to get out to the ofﬁce
because the kids and the dog don't understand that they're
on a conference call” - Liz Elam, LINK Coworking

• “Freelancers tend to do stuff virtually .... But then one of the
beneﬁts of having this space is you get to sit down next to a
group of people and work on projects face to face.” - Dusty
Reagan, Conjunctured

Coworking spaces serve different people, groups and industries. They might include freelancers, small business owners, long-term contractors, entrepeneurs, telecommuters, mobile
professionals (sales, consulting, trade show coordinators), and even small businesses of 2-4 people. And sometimes these spaces even function as incubators: small businesses form and
overlap.

Aims
• Work-life balance: “Our work space allows you to have
dedicated time to concentrate and accomplish tasks, while
working within a community of entrepreneurs, free spirits
and individuals looking for more balance” - Soma Vida
website

• Mentoring: “We just want to sit next to this guy and just
soak up everything he leaves behind [about running a small
business]” - Andrew Bushnell, Cospace

• Collaboration: “I'm not going to let you go be on your
island.” - Liz Elam, LINK

• Swarming: “A project gets dropped in, we can swarm to kill
it, disseminate, and keep ﬂowing.” - John Erik Metcalfe,
Conjunctured
They have different aims. And notice that these aims all have to do with the shift to adhocracies:
I can work anywhere, anytime. When do I stop?
I work with specialists on inconstant projects. Who can mentor me?
I can work with and draw on anyone. How do I get a chance to do that?
I have a project; letʼs team up and knock it out.

Commonalities
• “People have different social needs ... being human, you need
some social interaction.” - Cesar Torres, Conjunctured

• “That's the one thing the Internet social networking, all of
that stuff you cannot replace face-to-face.” - Liz Elam, LINK

• “So really the community aspect of it is what's made it be so
easy for us to keep growing. Because everyone keeps feeding
it.” - Andrew Bushnell, Cospace

• “I think it makes people reach their potential more when
there's that supportive container, than when you're kind of
spinning your wheels in your own isolated bubble.” - Sonya
Davis, Soma Vida

But they share a commitment to connectedness, networking, collaboration, and entrepeneurship - again, all of which are marks of a shift to adhocracies.

A new urban space
“The individualization of working arrangements, the
multi-location of the activity, and the ability to
network all these activities around the individual
worker, usher in a new urban space, the space of
endless mobility, a space made of ﬂows of
information and communication, ultimately managed
with the Internet.”

Castells 2003, p.234
As corporations continue to outsource non-core functions and as knowledge work becomes more prevalent, expect to see more coworking spaces - and more variations on adhocracies, more
loose organizations enabled by electronic communication.

Photo credits
Slide 6: CC, Waikay Lau (seychelles88), http://www.flickr.com/photos/seychelles88/361460377/
Slide 8, 17: CC, Kevin Fox (kfury), http://www.flickr.com/photos/person/107899274/
Slide 11: Image credit: NASA, http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/142548main_image_feature_505_ys_full.jpg
Slide 13, 16: Public domain, OCal, http://www.clker.com/cliparts/2/4/e/
2/1208185285896971921coredump_Glassy_WiFi_symbol.svg.hi.png
Slide 14, 16: CC, Ryan Jones (ichibod), http://www.flickr.com/photos/ichibod/2073251155/
Slide 15, 16: Public domain, http://www.pdclipart.org/albums/Telephone_and_Cell/mobile_phone_22.png
Slide 36: CC, Ed Yourdon (yourdon), http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourdon/3823194254/
Slide 40: CC, toastforbrekkie, http://www.flickr.com/photos/toastforbrekkie/3894711099/sizes/o/
Slide 41: CC, aye_shamus, http://www.flickr.com/photos/aye_shamus/2883012011/sizes/o/
All others: Spinuzzi

Slides will soon be up at spinuzzi.blogspot.com

Photo credits

Spinuzzi tilts2011

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