Is your company autistic?
Most of us work for companies without really stopping to wonder why. Organisations are good for individuals because they allow us to specialise and the collective to be more productive, such that each of us can do tasks that interest us and together we can get more done.
We all have something to gain from working collectively with others. The question becomes about with whom, how we can work together most productively, and in a way that maximises the return for effort.
Communication among company participants is, of course, key. Both at a tactical levels (particular tasks in a process) and at a process and strategic level, deciding what tasks to do and towards which high-level goals.
My Organisational Design professor at the Rotman School of Management alikened the challenge of a good organisational design as getting sufficient communication between parts of the brain.
Today’s BBC article on Autism reminded me of what we see in many companies: an inability to make adequate contact with the outside world, to synthesise events, and react in an agile manner towards accomplishing our goals. The article’s discovery was that in autistic brains the connections are not properly spread across the cortex: in some places there are too many connections and, in others, not enough.
Possessing intelligence (wiktionary) (answers.com) at the human level relies on communication within the brain.
Collective intelligence relies on communication between parties.
The trick is getting the right balance of connections. How do these connections form in the brain? Are they strategically formulated by a decision making responsible for reporting to some all-powerful central node? Or is this function distributed across all areas?
I’d posit the latter. The brain connections emerge in response to stimuli that each parts receive. In isolation these connctions make little sense, but as cascades the stimuli self-organise to give the brain intelligence.
Internal communication is vital. In a single brain and in an organisation. But not just “communication” but emergent, self-organising, communication. Communication that continually restructures the way we as individuals and we as organisations look at, and respond to, the world.
So next time you think the company you work for is misguided, consider for a minute: did you give your input? Did it make an impact? Is your organisation an effective innovator such that it can relay such communications, consider it in context, synthesize your idea with those of your colleagues and provide a means for sufficient support and alignment for your ideas to be turned into workable actions?
Without continual adjustment your organisation will become misaligned with the needs of the market. And without a culture of voice and participation your people with great ideas will lose hope, and, in time, your organisation will lose those high-value workers.
Forms of communications such as wikis and blog, and forms of collaborative idea restructuring such as conceptmapping and wikis provide a new level of communication and self-organisation. They can help your firm become more self-aware and can distribute the strategy making functions across all workers.
Loving family and communities provide great benefits to individuals unfortunate to have autism. The market just abandons companies with such traits.
If your company seems to be missing the point of collaboration it is setting itself up for failure. Today’s competitive pace is faster than ever, and no industry is immune.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:22 am
the thing, in the end, has to do with power.
sometimes there´s no point in collaborating because, ultimately, there is no correlation with the benefits. as an adaptive species, the feedback has to be real for us to engage in mind-broadening and all that extra work.