Networked Structure

Work as a Network of Teams to Organize Through Multiple Connections and Effective Communication

It’s time to question how we have done business. The hierarchical approach to running a business is perfectly designed to create many of the painful challenges and frustrations that we experience in our daily work life. We need a fundamentally different approach to how we structure our businesses and organizations. We need to design a flexible, interdependent network of teams, share power and control, and move away from the rigid pyramidal business structures that we have inherited.

In the past there were big and complex tasks that required many people working on them. The 'transaction costs' involved to get coordination between people was high, so the concept of a Manager was introduced. As the number of Managers increased, a Manager of the Managers was created... and hierarchies formed. This resulted in order, clarity of authority, rank, and power. They reinforced a single primary connection: manager to worker, and enabled a command and control style of leadership that was terrifically successful during the industrial era.

Today, technology and connectivity has increased our ability to self-organize, collaborating more easily across internal and external organizational boundaries. It is no longer necessarily true that coordinating through a Manager is more effective than people self-organizing. Working as a network allows us to organize with many different kinds of connections, and increased autonomy.