I Have a Dream: Transparent Companies and Shared Leadership

A dream can become the most powerful instrument for sharing a certain vision of life with others. By evoking a dream, we can also make the most effective call to action; a call capable of initiating a profound change in reality. This is what Martin Luther King (MLK) did in his famous speech on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington. Even today we remember that memorable message with which he explained to the world that all human beings should have the same rights and opportunities, regardless of their race:

“I have a dream: my four young children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream TODAY.”

It is impossible to emulate MLK’s prodigious rhetoric, full of urgency, meaning and emotion. Each speech has its time. But perhaps we can use this formula to transmit our vision of reality and the future with passion and enthusiasm, and to urgently propose the changes that society needs.

The question I ask myself, and that I want to share with you, is this: What do we want our organizations – business, social, and political – to be like in the future?

The Dream: Organizations Made for People

In my dream – which you surely share – I see organizations tailored to people, as in the Renaissance canon, and not the other way around. Flexible and transparent companies, associations, unions, political parties and NGOs, based on open and participatory structures. Humanistic organizations, in which everyone has the opportunity to participate, to contribute the best of themselves to generate economic and social value. Organizations in which we can share knowledge to build, together, Collective Intelligence. Organizations, in short, in which we have fun, we are passionate, and in which we are able to deploy all our talent and all our creativity.

A beacon of hope

Getting to a place is much easier when we have some visual reference, a kind of “beacon of hope”, as MLK called it. That is one of the main roles of the dream: to guide our steps. I believe that if we make an effort, we are all able to “envision” – to see mentally – these new organizations that we have described. And that is the first step to move in the right direction.

The starting point is the knowledge of the current reality. When MLK was exposing his dream, he was fully aware of the human rights situation in his country. “We must face the tragic fact that the black is not yet free,” he said. Those were different times, but we too must now be able to rigorously analyze the situation in which we live.

Where are our organizations? Of course, they are very far from meeting the requirements we have mentioned in our dream. They are opaque, bureaucratic, inflexible and hierarchical. They base their operation on the traditional “command and control”, so information only flows from top to bottom, and decisions are made at the top of the pyramid. And what is worse: they are deathly boring organizations, capable of killing the passion and creativity of our collaborators. This starting point allows us to know everything we should NOT do, where we should NOT advance.

New Organizational Structures: Organizations 2.0

When we talk about Organizations 2.0 We’re not talking about technology, but about a new and improved version of the organizations we have today. Technology isn’t even the most important thing. Change goes much further. It’s about embracing a new worldview. We must build new agile, open and flexible organisational structures, in which innovation and leadership is a job shared by all.

Only in this way, by incorporating innovation into the daily functioning of organizations, will we be able to react quickly to changes, and we will be able to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in a market like today’s, open and global, with hardly any barriers to entry. Only by creating More open organizations and human, more participatory, we will get our employees to unleash all their talent and creativity. That will be the only way to
Attract and retain new digital talent
.

Transparent companies

The new demands for transparency are causing the collapse of many organisations – economic, social and political – unable to adapt their closed and opaque structures. We have recently seen an example of the effects of transparency on the institutions, when for the first time in its 300-year history, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, has resigned over the MPs’ spending scandal. But under no circumstances should we understand transparency as a threat, because it is actually the solution we need. The Transparency of a company It consists of assuming that today everything is known, that today everything is in plain sight, and that it no longer makes sense to hide and dose information, much less hide in the offices of an opaque organization. Customers, users and citizens have all the information at their fingertips, and that is something we must count on. In fact, this is one of the few certainties we can offer: in the same way that transparency has created more efficient markets, transparency in organizations will help us create more efficient, fairer and more sustainable organizations.

Shared leadership

Efficiency and scalability are still important, it is true; but in the current scenario they no longer occupy a central space when it comes to creating value. Today, the key is to share knowledge. And the real emerging values that will mark the future of organizations are agility, collaboration, transparency, authenticity, and people’s creativity.

The leader at the top of the pyramid, capable of knowing everything, no longer exists. He is a figure that only made sense when the markets were stable, and we were able to predict them. Today we must make the most of the new forms of communication that web 2.0 offers us to move towards a Shared Leadership, which stimulates and encourages the participation of all our employees. It is clear that today, in the face of such a complex reality, the leader cannot be the only decision-maker.

Breaking the “shackles” of the previous legacy

If what we have no longer works, it is clear that we need to break with the customs and mental schemes that have brought us here. And that may be the hardest work. MLK called for breaking the “shackles of discrimination”, which 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, were still in force. The problem was in the minds of many people, in their way of seeing and understanding the world.

Although on a very different level, our economic and social model does not escape the weight of tradition either. It is based on the same beliefs and principles of management that were devised more than 100 years ago. Then they emerged to respond to the needs of the Industrial Age, and in a way they succeeded. But today the needs have changed. The fact is that we continue to emphasize labor and capital as the basis of value creation processes, and so it is impossible for us to respond to today’s challenges: collaboration and human capital management. If our organizations are going to be naked in the face of the growing transparency that forces the internet, the sooner we begin to clean it up and adopt the values of integrity, authenticity and collaboration, all the better. To change, we need to break with the powerful legacy of decades of orthodox management.

The fierce urgency of now

In his speech, MLK places special emphasis on the need to face change without delay. This is what he calls “the fierce urgency of now”. In a crisis as profound as the one we are experiencing, change cannot wait. The situation requires us to move towards a new model of growth. Paralysis, the temptation to sit back and wait to see what happens, is one of the main threats to change. That is why it is essential that we abandon, as soon as possible, our Comfort zone. Change is urgent. The time for change is NOW.

From dream to reality

Once the dream is set, it is time to give it a definitive boost. MLK had a great tool: the unstoppable force of a growing social movement. We too will have to take advantage of all the available resources to put our dream into action.

In this sense, we have excellent news: right now, we already have the necessary tools to build those new organizations we have dreamed of. The technological platform – Web 2.0 – is fully available and operational. Through it we can build transparent and participatory organizations, in which information flows freely in all directions. Using the new collaboration tools, we can build shared knowledge; we can create new models of value creation that are much fairer and more sustainable. Transparency, agility, participation and open communication make up an environment conducive to talent and creativity. And, why not, also for fun.

We already have the tools, so the “only” thing we need now is to change our vision; to change our way of thinking, seeing and understanding the world. It will not be easy. In fact, this is the most difficult challenge, because it is our mental schemes that have brought us here. But that is essentially the leadership of the future. The leadership we need to build those organizations tailored to people. The organizations that, together, we have dreamed of.

I recommend that you read and listen to Martin
Luther King Jr.’s original speech
, delivered on August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.