The Schizophrenic Organisation
Stuck in two minds...
“When any great design thou dost intend, think of the means, the manner, and the end.” — Sir John Denham 1
When I set up my independent consulting practice in 2001, I didn’t have to think very hard about the business name.
Most senior executives of that era were focused on designing their organisations to be efficient and aligned, whilst mostly paying little more than lip service to creating conditions for cultivating innovation, adaptiveness, and agility.
At that time, I’d already been fully focused for the previous decade or so on helping forward thinking executives unlock both these attributes in their organisations, seamlessly integrated into a single coherent culture to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. 2
So Aligned Agility was the obvious choice of name.
Back then, organisations were advised by mainstream academics and consulting firms to bolt agility onto their existing business as a separate entity, creating something dubbed “The Ambidextrous Organisation”. 3
Instead of a single coherent culture, Ambidextrous Organisations were supposed to operate a hybrid two-handed mashup — one hand aligned to exploit existing capabilities, and the other hand free to explore some new stuff for the future.
Coming from an open innovation lab with a deeply embedded culture that integrated both exploit and explore into a coherent whole, this seemed an odd way to go about things.
It was pretty obvious that it would produce unnecessary problems at internal interfaces, risking more mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities.
But however misguided, the approach was popular.
The senior executive mantra of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” made them reluctant to risk disrupting existing exploit activities predicated on the basic assumption that an organisation is essentially “a machine for producing profits”.
Furthermore, profit-focused executives were reluctant to embrace too much explore activity, and to keep any new exploratory ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking well away from the main money-making machinery.
Another factor reinforcing this bolt-on approach to innovation was the buzz around Lockheed’s then fabled Skunk Works — a relatively small and secretive operation that had created the highly innovative P-38 Lightning, U-2 spy plane and SR-71 Blackbird.
Skunk Works, and similar environments such as the open innovation lab here in Cambridge where I worked from 1983 to 1995, operate from a fundamentally different assumption, seeing the organisation as “a human community for shaping its future by creating continuous new value”.4
“Well-oiled machine” and “creative human community” are fundamentally different metaphors, mindsets, or paradigms.
Or, in Sir John Denham’s words above, their means, their manner, and their ends are completely contradictory.
So, how then did Lockheed’s Skunk Works create such breakthrough innovations?
That’s because there’s a world of difference between:
an R&D unit like Skunk Works creating new explore products that then get handed off to the exploit business, which is retooled to manufacture them — and,
continuously experimenting with new ways of creating new value throughout the organisation, which dynamically and adaptively reconfigures itself to seamlessly integrate explore and exploit capabilities as a natural part of its normal, everyday, business-as-usual activities.
Unfortunately, where senior executives saw ambidextrous, the people doing the day-to-day value creation work experienced schizophrenic — the split personality of an organisation with two fundamentally incompatible subcultures of “machine” and “community”, each having vastly different means, manners, and ends.
Attempts to create Ambidextrous Organisations simply perpetuate the Double Disconnect — between Sense Making & Decision Making (Disconnect #1) and Decision Making & Action Taking (Disconnect #2) — that stifles, smothers, and strangles the emergence of organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Focus instead on eliminating the Double Disconnect and you get the benefits of integrated exploit and explore without cobbling together a schizophrenic monster.
Find out more about the Double Disconnect and how to address it below.
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My website provides a range of free resources to help you make the shift for yourselves, by yourselves, from “organisation as machine to be designed and operated” to “organisation as human community for shaping its future by creating continuous new value”. 5
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Sir John Denham (1615 – 1669) was a Dublin-born poet educated at Trinity College, Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, London. The quote is line 185 in Of Prudence (1668).
I cut my teeth doing this work from 1987- 1995 at the world-class open innovation lab Cambridge Consultants and from 1995-2001 at its then parent company Arthur D. Little.
When I started my private practice, the mainstream organisational discourse was all about how to bolt innovation onto existing operations. This idea is inherently unworkable due the inherent incompatibility of exploit and explore organisational metaphors. Here’s an HBR article on it from 2004.
This reflects the transformational insight of my former colleague Dr Peter Senge that leadership is “the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. Find out more here.
For example check out the FREE videos, FREE articles, and FREE download of the Five Fatal Habits report.