Michael Lissack
This inclusion creates coherence by ensuring all voices can shape the col- lective understanding. Create context coherence across boundaries. Organizations must maintain alignment across different business units, geographies, and part- ner ecosystems. Consumer goods company Unilever implemented its "Connected 4 Growth" operating model, which creates consistent team structures and decision processes across its global operations while allow- ing for local adaptation. This approach creates coherence across organi- zational boundaries. Creating the right context means designing spaces—both physical and digital—that enable coherence while accommodating diversity, dis- tance, and change. Instead of controlling context, effective organizations provide the infrastructure that enables coherent self-organization across distributed teams. Step 4: Turn people loose and then get out of the way The trend toward autonomous, self-managing teams has accelerated dramatically. Organizations recognize that command-and-control ap- proaches cannot keep pace with the complexity and speed of today's busi- ness environment. However, autonomy without alignment creates chaos rather than coherence. Autonomy represents a paradox at the heart of complexity man- agement: How do organizations maintain coherence while distributing decision-making? As management thinker Peter Drucker noted, "The best way to predict the future is to create it." For organizations, this creation increasingly happens through empowered teams rather than centralized direction. Three key shifts have transformed how organizations approach autonomy: Autonomy has become structural rather than exceptional. Organizations like Haier have reorganized into micro-enterprises that function as autonomous businesses within the larger ecosystem. This
306
Made with FlippingBook. PDF to flipbook with ease