We Are All Becoming Agents
Flat organizations need people who behave with agency. Individual change precedes organizational change.
I saw a great post from Brandon Sammut yesterday and it got me thinking more about how org design is a hot topic among the AI chatterati. I've been an org designer for over two decades, so this is a popcorn moment for me! AI brings a huge opportunity for reshaping how we organize and operate.
My first principle of org transformation is that individual change precedes organizational change. First someone has to envision the new shape and then others have to accept and adopt it with their behavior. Over time organizations can influence behavior, but change always depends on individual behavior. A culture is the sum total of individual choices and actions.
Becoming flat is a good structural move for innovation and agility but there's a catch: people in flat organizations must behave with agency. The irony is chewy.
I like playing with words and tracking how they've evolved. I think ancient meanings leave a residue even when the current context cause them to drift into adjacent usage.
Agents used to be the people we'd go to for travel, or insurance... or spying. Their independent expertise helped us get perspective without conflicts of interest from the supplier. The ancient root word ag means to drive (as in herd sheep) and in Latin: the capacity to act. Ag is also the source root of axel, agitate, and strategy. All associated with driving or moving in some way.
The agency challenge for most of us corporate (part of the body) people is shifting from a more passive employee mindset to full self efficacy. Psychologist Robert Kegan defines this as a developmental step in adult maturity he calls, the subject to object shift. We don't need permission to make this shift, but our org context might frown upon it, causing inertia.
When considering new org structures, remember it goes beyond layers and spans. To create behavior change the lever is our individual readiness to become self-authoring… the exact thing we're now worried compute agents are figuring out, so we're arming up to lock them down.
The first push back on agency is that companies will lose control. I've had more than one CFO tell me they need "one throat to choke" for operational discipline. That is a simpler model, and the best attribute of a hierarchical structure. But control can be managed successfully with other techniques. Especially with the immense compute power we can harness today.
Agency alone is a bit scary and messy… it could mean everyone is going everywhere all at the same time. But if it's designed, aligned, and orchestrated, it brings more power and responsiveness than a top-down, command and control approach that depends on a single point of leadership. In today's conditions, it could be the competitive difference maker.