Are people just a pool of skills?
No managers, just tools?
Excerpt from book: https://publishizer.com/the-deconstruction-paradigm
Available for pre-order now.
Since pretty much every industry has been disrupted by a new mindset and its tools, what about its processes and people?
Since the industrial revolution, people have been put in silos of single skill expectations and vertical value creation. The problem is that our world has deconstructed itself into a model that more easily creates value horizontally, rather than vertically. This means our vertical job labels and team structures are becoming more ineffective and meaningless by the minutes. Why is that and how can we move forward?
It took us a long time for our tools to catch up with our new mindset.
We have now enabled us to use those new tools to explore what we can do with this new mindset. Through these tools, we can focus back and enable all the skills we previously were asked to ignore. Today, a positive opposite of the single skill robots they made us into during the industrial revolution as appearing rapidly.
Henry Ford’s de-skilling was a brilliant idea. Instead of hiring a thousand highly skilled and expensive workers, he hired cheap single-skilled people for his mass production factories. He had split one of a worker’s natural two aspects off. The theoretical and constant learning mindset became disconnected from the hands-on execution aspect of a profession. Management would do the thinking and learning part of the business. He even split the execution aspects of a worker into smaller and smaller pieces. More people have known less ever since.
This enabled mass production in the absence of robots. We were the robots (include Kraftwerk pun here). Most companies are still designed with this de-skilling principle in mind.
We have schools that are still mapped after factories to create factory style single-skilled workers, but we are facing a new challenge.
The robots are here! Machines exist that are creating a low-cost production scenario people previously could only dream of. We can now efficiently mass-produce in such small batches, that startups have been overtaking big companies regarding product innovation. Today we have 1000 apps that automate and communicate with and for us and create a single person into production and organisational centre.
Me listing all the apps and platforms I used to write my book and run the crowdfunding campaign alone would fill the rest of the article.
Learning how to code an Arduino or how to set up your server online is a task for a 5-year-old these days. Knowing that most of those new skills have only come through in the last few years, there is now a growing question on what does it take to become literate and experienced in a new skill at all.
Back in the .com era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, I saw lawyers, historians and psychologists learn HTML and start being web designers within weeks of dropping their old job or study subject.
As I am writing this, I am concluding a one-year transformation project for a big telecom company where we created new skills and capabilities within a few months and created new dynamic teams, where role labels often did not matter much. Ironically, even the existing role titles often did not reveal the real underlying capabilities or their quality levels.
It did not hinder progress and success in the project. Have a look at your LinkedIn profile and the average amount of skills listed. Would you be able to turn that into a single role title?
It sounds futile to still think like this. Companies like IDEO have had fluid roles and responsibilities from project to project for years. This idea is beautifully explained in Tom Kelley’s “The Ten Faces of Innovation”. There, people are considered to have two or more capabilities that they can prioritise on given the project’s team context. Contextual teams are not new. In Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” from 1972 he envisions the company of the future to have temporary teams that can assemble given the contextual need of a business problem.
This is where we are today. If we would put all startups of the world in a room wouldn’t they account to that pool of flexible multi-skilled people, who organically self-managed themselves into teams, which are drip fed funding and evolve or fail and then disassemble after the task is done?
The essence of what we tried to achieve during our one-year transformation project was often described as a pool of capabilities that should be flexible enough for the business to activate when needed.
Can we create companies that function like this?
What operational and financial layer do they need to scale?
What percentage of a company could work like that and what percentage would have to do the repeatable tasks that haven’t been automated yet?
The above excerpt is a draft from Marcus Kirsch’s new book currently available via pre-order:
Subscribe and get sneak previews here.
http://www.thedeconstructionparadigm.com
