Rethinking organisation technology

How to hire unconventionally using open-ended roles and negotiated joining

Hello friends,

October is one of the best months to be in Marseille. The summer crowds have vanished, it is warm (but not hot) in the day and cool (not cold) at night, the days are still long-ish, the beaches are comfortably full, and restaurant and bar staff no longer look shell-shocked. Also, it is well-known that early fall is a good time to be at the markets and in the kitchen.

Last time here, I wrote about organisational design as a technology for uncertainty work. The simple insight here is that how organisations choose to do things is how organisational design happens. Seemingly trivial details like what hiring process an organisation uses determines what it becomes as much as a grand reorganisation plan developed by a consulting company.

The crustily democratic Plage des Catalans at an optimal utilisation level.

So we should be thinking hard about what conventional “best practices” actually do to organisations. And we need to be asking whether there are unconventional approaches that are more appropriate to the uncertainty work that is increasingly unavoidable. My book, The Uncertainty Mindset, does exactly this. I’m now writing up short versions of the book’s unconventional approaches to hiring, goal-setting, and motivation.

Unfrozen from the start

The first of these short pieces is about uncertainty work and how to hire and develop roles differently using open-ended roles and negotiated joining — a few snippets below.

Uncertainty work is now everywhere. An organisation must do uncertainty work to succeed against competitors when new technology disrupts its old industry (e.g., when RNA therapeutics upended drug development) and or even its new industry (e.g., when generative AI’s surging popularity upended FAANG machine learning strategies). This is how innovation and technological change happens. Organisations must also do uncertainty work when they’re disrupted by extreme weather, contagious diseases, and unexpected outbreaks of wars, revolutions, or protests. This is how large-scale social and cultural change happens. Uncertainty work is not about dealing with mathematically calculable risk. The most important work today is uncertainty work — which is not the same as “risk-management.”

Conventional hiring methods work well when things are stable and predictable but they create organisations that are too rigid to deal well with uncertainty work:

With conventional hiring methods, employees expect clear and stable roles, creating organisations that are “frozen” and inflexible from the start. Using open-ended roles with negotiated joining is an unconventional way to build an organisation that starts unfrozen and is good at uncertainty work that isn’t well-understood yet, where rules and operating environments are always changing and being disrupted.

As soon as true uncertainty (not just risk) shows up, organisations need a fundamentally different approach:

Organisations doing uncertainty work need to be unfrozen from the start, by adapting the approach used for hiring in two ways:

1. Making roles open-ended by explicitly setting expectations during and after hiring that individual roles are flexible and negotiable, and the mix of components in each role (role-components) will probably change over time.

2. Enabling role-negotiation instead of selection during initial hiring and ongoing development by building low-stakes, frequent tests and evaluations of role-components into everyday work.

Using open-ended roles and negotiated joining together benefits both employees and the organisation as a whole:

With open-ended roles and negotiated joining, employee roles are pieced together from many successful microtests that validate role-components. These organisations naturally have employees whose roles continually shift in small, unpredictable ways which benefit the organisation. These organisations are unfrozen from the beginning, and they’re more likely to respond to uncertain environments by evolving and adapting organically.

Design principles for implementing open-ended roles and negotiated joining in organisations.

Read “Unfrozen from the start.”

Conversations on not-knowing

Tomorrow (Thurs, 19 Oct): Episode 10 of my monthly discussion series is about how the four types of not-knowing — actions, outcomes, causation, and values — affect each other over time, and how to build a toolkit for dealing with this. The short pre-reading is here and unpacked a bit below. More information and tickets here.

The fountain: True uncertainty is fundamentally different from risk and behaves different too. We need a different mindset, action approach, and toolkit for relating to it appropriately. I lay out some of these ideas here as a foundation for the next few essays (and episodes in the monthly discussion series on not-knowing).

Talk to me about setting goals

I’m starting some new research on how people set strategic goals in uncertain environments. Please get in touch (you can reply to this email) if you’re involved in team/org-level goal-setting and are open to having a short conversation about it. (Don’t worry: No pre-work! I’m just trying to see broad patterns at the moment.)

Seoul!

I’ll be there November 6-12, to give a talk about using uncertainty to find new business models at the World Coffee Leaders Forum. Please send me lots of suggestions of Cool Things to See/Do/Eat/Drink and Neat People to Meet.

Uncertainty and regenerative agriculture investment

A few months ago, I did a podcast episode with Koen van Seijen on uncertainty and investing in regenerative agriculture. We talked about risk vs uncertainty, how time-driven uncertainty and value-driven uncertainty affects investment decisions, and doing many small things vs a few big things — topics which have also been coming up in my monthly discussion series on not-knowing.

The industrial port of Marseille, from one of the sea walls.

See you next time,

VT