Introducing a New Series: From the MW Coaching Library
The Organizational Shift Toward Autonomy, Decentralized Decision Making, and More Fulfilling Work
When I synthesize information in my coaching library, I like to organize by topic as if I’m putting together a syllabus or “mini-course” for a particular theme or idea. I’m not interested in the “one best way” or the “only way.” I want to give my clients, present and future, a variety of perspectives and strategies that they can pick and choose from, while adding in their own ideas and insights. This week I’d like to take a different turn with the blog and share more of that “library work” publicly. Something I hope to do more of in the future.
Without further ado, here it is!
Self Management: The Organizational Shift Toward Autonomy, Decentralized Decision Making, and More Fulfilling Work
Part I: Introduction
As a coach, I’ve been fundamentally interested in the following questions: How do we make work better? What systems of management and ways of organizing work might make work more universally fulfilling and also generate more effective organizations? Put more bluntly: How could work suck less and create high levels of performance? I suspect that these questions have been lurking beneath the work from home versus in office debate. It’s a lot easier to debate where we’re working than actually rethinking how we reorganize an entire company’s system for organizing work!
It’s worth noting that these are not new questions. Peter Drucker, the legendary management theorist and coiner of the term “knowledge work,” outlined the problem eloquently in his 1967 book, The Effective Executive, writing:
“The knowledge worker is not poverty prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair. Just as the economic conflict between the needs of the manual workers and the role of an expanding economy was the social question of the nineteenth century in the developing countries, so the position, function, and fulfillment of the knowledge worker is the social question of the twentieth century in these countries now that they are developed…We will have to satisfy both the objective needs of society for performance by the organization, and the needs of the person for achievement and fulfillment.”
“The knowledge worker demands economic rewards too. Their absence is a deterrent. But their presence is not enough. He needs opportunity, he needs achievement, he needs fulfillment, he needs new values.”
And yes, you read that right. These words were written in 1967. Shocking how relevant they feel in 2025, isn’t it?
The words are relevant, of course, because we still haven’t seemed to crack the code on the problem Drucker so fortuitously called out. Sure, it would be better if we had highly engaged workforces, less meetings, weren’t drowning in emails, had less bureaucracy and stifling hierarchy, and had more teams that trusted each other and collaborated effectively. But how? All the various trainings, improvement programs, team events, culture building exercises, new meeting formats, etc seem to have only gotten us so far. Perhaps this is all there is. As Aaron Dignan wrote in his book, Brave New Work, “We know the way we’re working isn’t working, but we can’t imagine an alternative.” The alternatives are the focus of this piece. It turns out that various blueprints and philosophies already exist in many companies around the globe - you just might not have heard of them.
How did we get here?
The primary diagnosis for why the world of work feels less than optimal is the view that we are still largely using systems inherited from the manufacturing era and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s theory of scientific management. Taylor’s work was focused on minimizing variability and inefficiency and finding the “one best way” for factory workers to follow. A major impact of Taylor’s work was the division of thinking work and doing work, which led to a managerial class whose focus was giving orders (the deciders) and a worker class whose job was to follow said orders (the doers). Though work may look very different today, Dignan argues that we’re still operating from the blueprint laid in that era contending, “We still tell people what to do (and how to think). We still demand detailed plans before every initiative. We still focus on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. We still use the budget as a weapon.”
In short, we’re still using an organizational system for work that was not designed for the modern era. It’s no wonder that we haven’t seen lasting change from the various improvement programs, even those deployed with the best of intentions. As Brian Robertson writes in Holacracy:
“...despite the power of these new-paradigm ideas and techniques, I routinely see a huge obstacle to their deployment: when they’re applied in an organizational system that's still conventionally structured, there’s a major paradigm clash. At best, the novel techniques become a ‘bolt-on’ - something that affects just one aspect of the organization and remains in continual conflict with the other systems around it. A great new meeting technique helps empower a team, for instance, but those team members are still constrained by a power structure at play outside of the meeting and throughout the rest of the company. At worst, the ‘corporate antibodies’ came out and rejected the bolted-on technique, a foreign entity that doesn’t quite fit the predominant mental model of how an organization should be structured and run. In either case, the novel practice fails to recognize its full potential, however promising, and we don’t get much of a paradigm shift in the organizational system.”
It’s important to note that this is not the first time that our organizational models for the world of work have needed (and gone through) a paradigm shift. For roughly every 100,000 year history of humanity, we have gone through successive stages demonstrating leaps in our cognitive, moral, and psychological abilities for dealing with the world. In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux argues that what is often overlooked is the reality that for each shift to a new stage, humanity also invented a new organizational model for work. Most of the working world today is operating from what Laloux calls the “achievement-orange” paradigm in which the organization is viewed as a machine (aka the scientific management/factory driven philosophy of Winslow Taylor). While “achievement-orange” has allowed room for more creativity and innovation in how things are done versus earlier stages (think the strict hierarchies of feudal work), Laloux contends that this paradigm is still largely defined by management through command and control. He argues that we are once again undergoing a shift in how work is organized toward a paradigm he terms “evolutionary teal.” A defining characteristic of this paradigm is a shift toward much greater worker autonomy and reduction in traditional “management” layers.
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