Looseness can be a virtue as well

It is a truism that most employees complain about their employer. Perhaps one common concern that many seem to voice is the feeling of insignificance, or worse, alienation from the organisation.

This flies in the face of the mantra that ‘employees are the greatest asset'. While this may be the public profession, in the post-Enron, post-Lehman era, more organisations are working to make themselves ‘individual independent'. The buzzwords today are systems, regulation and control.

Today's zeitgeist is compliance. This approach is however, based on a fundamental lack of trust in people. It arises from a deep-rooted assumption that employees are basically lazy, unwilling to work, and need to be made to work in a particular way. This ends up in complex systems with other processes to control these, and yet more to ensure compliance.

When working on a deal with someone in a large conglomerate known for its tough compliance regime for the last ten years, he said: "Please, do not ask me to get you an approval on this deal in the next 14 days at least."

"Why? We really aren't building a space ship here?" I joked. He gave me a cold look. "Honestly, we have discussed this matter threadbare and both of us know that it is good for our organisations. But I will need it to go through various departments to get their approvals on it.

"I doubt if most of those people are going to read it, but we have to follow the system."

Edward de Bono in his book Simplicity says organisations evolve towards complexity when they should strive to work towards greater simplicity. This is because new systems, features and functions keep getting added.

Few people really decide to redesign a system from scratch in order to ensure it is simplified. Thus he says, "As a ship's hull attracts barnacles, so all processes attract complications and additions, which add little of value."

The recent book by Martin Thomas called Loose examines this issue comprehensively. He believes the future of business is in letting go, not greater control.

Illusion of control

A centralised hierarchical system made sense in a world in which information and knowledge were scarce commodities and could be tightly controlled. Business leaders in tight organisations suffer from an ‘illusion or possible delusion of control.' Tight control results in a paralysis of analysis affecting decision-makers, who find comfort in accumulating vast amounts of market and customer data, but are then so overwhelmed that they are incapable of making any decision.

The age of certainty driven by economics and science is no longer sustainable. According to Richard Reeves, director of the think-tank Demos: "Economics will emerge from its own crisis with more humility and greater openness to a wider range of theories, approaches and sources of data."

Some extreme views suggest planning has become passé. According to Alistair Deyburgh of Akenhurst Consulting, forecasting is ‘an activity that is at best useless and at worst counterproductive.' What is needed is to ‘stop forecasting uncertainty, start managing.'

In such a world, an organisation lacking flexibility and not harnessing the combined creativity of all its constituents will find the going tough. The loose organisation meanwhile is speedy, responsive and agile.

The writer is a consultant basedin Dubai.