The Future of Management Has Already Arrived – Part V: Wiki Management

by Rod Collins

 

Today’s managers face a difficult and unprecedented challenge: The world is changing much faster than their organizations. Every industry, without exception, has been overtaken by an accelerating pace of change that shows no signs of letting up any time soon. In a world where change is constant, it’s not surprising that many managers feel overwhelmed by what appears to be a completely unmanageable state of affairs.

However, there is a small but growing group of vanguard companies that are thriving in this time of great change. While most companies have had to trim their sails to weather the storm of the Great Recession, this small group has experienced relatively smooth sailing with steady growth, increasing profits, and the creation of new jobs. The vanguard group, composed of companies that we love engaging with as consumers, includes Amazon, Google, Threadless, Valve, Whole Foods, and Zappos, among others. What separates these vanguard companies from their traditional counterparts is that their managers understand a fast-changing world is not necessarily unmanageable—it just needs to be managed differently. That’s because, with the rapid emergence of the Digital Age, we suddenly find ourselves in a new world with a completely different set of rules. The managers of the vanguard companies are thriving because they have mastered these new rules, and in so doing, they have completely overhauled the fundamental disciplines of business management.

I call this new world the wiki world and the new management model used by the leaders of the vanguard companies use to master the new rules Wiki Management. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for “quick” or “fast” and aptly describes the new set of management disciplines designed to help managers keep pace with accelerating change. Wiki Management assumes that the most effective organizations are highly connected, self-organized collaborative networks that leverage the power of collective intelligence to achieve extraordinary results. When we closely examine the organizational behavior of the companies that are practicing Wiki Management, we discover that these enterprises are built around five very different disciplines that are rarely, if ever, practiced in traditional businesses. These five disciplines are:

1. Understand What’s Most Important to Customers. In a hyper-connected world, the best companies are customer-centric. Their people clearly understand that they work for the customers, not the bosses. Accordingly, they build their strategies around what matters most to customers and design their processes to give delighting customers priority over pleasing bosses.

2. Aggregate and Leverage Collective Intelligence. In a knowledge economy, organizations are fundamentally intelligence systems. Today’s most intelligent organizational leaders no longer leverage individual intelligence by constructing functional bureaucracies; they cultivate collaborative communities with the capacity to quickly aggregate and leverage their collective intelligence. These enlightened leaders fully understand that nobody is smarter and faster than everybody and, as they build their organizations, show a clear design preference for building networks rather than hierarchies.

3. Build Shared Understanding by Bringing Everyone Together in Open Conversations. Companies that successfully manage at the pace of accelerating change understand that the most powerful organizations are those that have the ability to gather the whole system in one place. By bringing everybody together and creating innovative processes to expand the conversations and effectively integrate diverse points of view, they have the rare ability to co-create a powerful shared understanding that drives clarity of purpose across an entire organization. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, managers are increasingly discovering that shared understanding is far more effective that compliance in fostering organizational excellence.

4. Focus on the Critical Few Performance Drivers. The most effective leaders know that management is about creating the future. And when they are good at creating the future, they never have to explain the past. That’s why smart leaders don’t focus on outcome measures; they focus on the driver measures that create the outcomes. If you want to manage at the speed of change, it’s far better to lead than to lag.

5. Hold People Accountable to Their Peers. The secret to mastering the unprecedented challenges of the wiki world is to make sure that no one in the organization has the authority to kill a good idea or keep a bad idea alive. In the best businesses, leaders aren’t bosses; they’re catalysts and facilitators orchestrating collaborative networks. The leaders of these networks consistently achieve extraordinary results because they understand holding people accountable to their peers rather than to supervisors is the great enabler of the collaboration necessary for speed and innovation.

If traditional managers want their organizations to have the capacity to change as fast as the world around them, they will need to embrace the new reality that managing great change is only possible if they change how they manage.  They will need to accept that a nineteenth century management model is unsustainable in a twenty-first century world and, like the successful leaders of the vanguard companies, redesign their organizations as collaborative networks. To learn more, I invite you to read my new book, Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).