Redarchy – Beyond Hierarchy

One of the biggest challenges organizations face in the face of uncertainty is how to organize themselves to interact with the new reality and stay competitive when change is discontinuous and the future is less and less an extrapolation of the past. The book is a key reflection on the changes that the new times are bringing to organizations of all kinds, from the business to the political sphere. The central thesis is that it is no longer possible to address the complexity and uncertainty of our time using the hierarchical structures inherited from the past. To face the new challenges, organizations must seek a new balance between hierarchy as a guarantor of predictability and control, and netarchy as an engine of innovation and growth. It is becoming increasingly clear that we need new organizational models for the coordination of collective efforts in the new Era of Collaboration.

We therefore have to face up to the need for new organisational structures and the fact that the new management imperatives are not achievable only with the hierarchical, highly centralised and bureaucratic structures we have built up so far. It will take some time before practices and attitudes change to reasonably incorporate the new means of social communication into our lives, our institutions and our values. The more we cling to traditional hierarchies of power, the further we move away from the enormous possibilities that the Network Society offers us to create economic and social value in a sustainable way.

The book is a very entertaining and thoughtful essay on these issues. It addresses the key issues that will decide the future of our organizations in the Age of Collaboration:

• What are the fundamental questions that will define the future of our organizations? Is it possible to coordinate human effort without sacrificing people’s creativity and passion? Is trust a viable alternative to control in the management of our organizations?
• How to resolve the clash between personal needs for freedom and autonomy and the organizational needs for prediction and control? How can we give our organizations a new social dimension that allows us to connect with the collective intelligence of our organizations?
• How do we avoid getting caught up in our past experiences? How to build the new maps to navigate uncertainty? How do we plan when we can’t anticipate the future? How do we stay competitive in instability?
• How does redarchy impact leadership? What is the new role of the leader as a Social Architect?

“We need guides for the new times. This, “Redarchy,” is one of the most valuable I know.”

Juan Carlos Cubeiro Head of Talent at ManpowerGroup

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The Redarchy Manifesto is a list of ten critical challenges facing our organizations in the pursuit of this new balance. Each point in the manifesto draws attention to a specific challenge of the new Era of Collaboration.

1. More Purpose, Less Rhetoric

In most organizations the reality of their values does not live up to their rhetoric. We say one thing and do another. Most companies claim that people are their most important asset, but the truth is that their fundamental concern is to maximize shareholder wealth, which is unacceptable if we want to mobilize human energy. Today’s young people want their work to be life, to have meaning.

The problem is not in what we say as managers, but in what we do. We talk about giving people more autonomy, but decisions are still made by a few; We talk about flattening hierarchies, but we haven’t changed their power structures; We talk about giving more transparency to our organizations, but the decisions remain opaque. Clearly, the real problem is not in what our leaders say, but in what they do.

2. More Collaboration, Less Competition

Collaboration has become the key to taking another step forward in the level of productivity of our organizations. It is through collaboration that we can implement new ways of working, breaking down vertical silos and new ways of relating to customers. So much so that, today, an organization can only be truly competitive if it takes full advantage of the tools and models that the Age of Collaboration puts at our fingertips.

The new social media and the mental models that accompany them allow us to approach customers in a different way and help us to enhance the internal communication of the organization; It makes it easier for us to strengthen relationships and engagement, to find and retain the talent we need.

Open innovation can only thrive in redarchic organizations based on trust and with a high level of transparency among all the agents involved.

3. More Emergency, Less Planning

In a disruptive environment such as the current one, experimentation is the new planning. Real strategy in organizations is not something that is planned, but emerges as a result of experimentation and the search for alternatives in a future that is already here.

Just as deliberate planning relies on leaders to set goals and develop 3-5 year plans and strategies to achieve them, emergent strategy emerges from every link in the company. The Emerging Strategy is aimed at responding to change, experimenting and achieving the best results with the means available. It requires the company to continuously generate a wide range of hypotheses, test them based on minimal viable projects, scale the most successful experiments, and discard failed experiments. The emergent strategy is not the prediction strategy, it is the discovery strategy.

3. More Trust, Less Control

Command control management styles reinforce power struggles and a general culture of paranoia, and while they are designed to ensure a high level of compliance and predictability, their cost is very high in terms of the autonomy, creativity, and commitment of the people who make up the organization.

Command and control systems reflect a huge distrust of employee engagement and competencies. Collaboration can only thrive in an environment of trust and transparency, these values are essential to connecting people emotionally with the organization.

Lack of confidence demoralizes and fear paralyzes. Adaptability, innovation and commitment require a work environment where information is shared, diversity of opinions can be expressed freely, courageous questions are asked and risk-taking behaviors are promoted.

In the network, control is carried out on the basis of the transparency of individual contributions and the evaluation that the other members of the network make of your own contributions.

4. More Innovation, Less Fear

In this new context, we can no longer base our strategies on a mere continuous innovation of our products and services to ensure their competitiveness in the market. It’s no longer just about defending our position in the market; Today it is equally important to explore new opportunities, experiment and expand into new markets.

The innovation process always involves a dose of improvisation, so it is important that the organization tolerates it, especially during the initial phases of ideation and prototyping. It is also important to have creative but persistent people who fight to make things happen despite internal resistance. It’s important to be fault-tolerant and work on an emergency basis, creating the environment that makes it possible for new experiences to happen naturally rather than trying to plan and control every step of the process.

One of the great advantages of redarchy as a natural architecture for innovation is that it naturally tends, like markets, to allocate resources according to their real capabilities and motivations, so that people end up in the positions with the greatest contribution to the organization.

6. More Influence, Less Authority

The need to prepare for a digitalized world has highlighted the need for new leadership models. In the Age of Collaboration, the new role of the leader as social architect will be to find the necessary balance between the productivity needs of organizations and the purpose needs of people.

This new type of leadership will be exercised on the basis of influence, authenticity, personal credibility, and added value that the leader brings to the community, and not on the ability to accumulate positional power.

Redarchy is led by authentic leaders, people with the ability to energize and broaden the community rather than manage it from above, which requires a great capacity for personal credibility to connect with the collective intelligence of the organization, mobilize and coordinate human efforts.

7. More Community, Fewer Borders

The Social Web allows us to engage, create, and learn collaboratively in open, trust-based structures. The boundaries of our organizations are becoming liquid. Decision-making processes should be free of bias, and should draw on the collective knowledge of the entire organization.

Functional “silos” do not add value to organizations and the traditional organizational pyramid must be complemented by an emerging networkarchy where status and influence correspond to added value and contribution to the community. New business models are increasingly based on informal networking, mass collaboration, and production ecosystems that transcend organizational boundaries.

8. More transparency, less opacity

The Age of Collaboration is shredding at accelerated speed, and forever, the curtain that has always hidden the reality of organizations from public view. However, there are still few companies willing to accept and handle this new scrutiny. For most, transparency is a costly and disruptive element that threatens their survival.

Transparency is a new force that is triggering, right now, profound changes in all areas; changes that will definitively affect the future viability of all organizations.

The redarchy has revealed to us a crucial aspect: the validity of our reputation and value proposition of our organizations is “just a click away”, as never before, from the customers and users of our services, who can issue their verdict, positive or negative, instantly.

9. More dialogue, less imposition

“The market is conversations.” This phrase, repeated ad nauseam by hundreds of converts, and which is the basis for understanding how customers are changing, still rings new in many organizations. Customers want to talk to real people, with faces and eyes that truly represent organizations, and not have their ears shouted in the ears as traditional advertising does.

In the network, we can all actively participate in conversations with our colleagues, with our customers, and with our suppliers. Only then will we be able to know what to do and what to stop doing; what new products and services our customers demand; and what kind of organizations we should design to attract and retain new digital talent. It is these conversations that allow us to cultivate collective intelligence and create economic and social value.

10. More Redarchy, Less Hierarchy

The social web doesn’t show every day how social media makes it possible to coordinate human effort without sacrificing people’s creativity and passion. And at the same time, they make possible new open organizations where ideas can compete on equal terms, people can contribute in the areas that interest them most, authority is in line with the value that is brought to the organization, and leadership and innovation is everyone’s job.

While hierarchy has given scalability to our organizations, its cost has been high in terms of initiative and creativity. Today, thanks to social technologies, there is an alternative: redarchy.

Every day, new organizations emerge on the Social Web capable of scaling without the need for hierarchical and centralized management control. New social technologies allow us to address complexity without the need for large hierarchical structures, which makes us think that in the not too distant future we will be able to overcome the historical paradox of management between control and trust. We will be able to build scalable and efficient organizations without incurring the high cost of centralized bureaucracies.

Preparing our organizations to face the future requires providing them with attributes very similar to those we see every day on the social web. Redarchy as a new emerging order in our organizations is not based on the power and authority of the formal hierarchy, but on the relationships of participation and flows of activity that naturally arise in collaborative social networks, based on the added value of people, authenticity and trust.

Redarchy, as a complementary structure to hierarchy, not necessarily exclusive, makes possible new frameworks of contribution in organizations, not necessarily linked to occupying positions of power and authority in the organizational chart, but to the credibility and added value of people. Redarchy is incompatible with the arbitrary and personalistic use of power, and with the use that many people have made of bureaucracy for their own advantage. These abuses destroy value, create unjust organizations, and demotivate people.

In fact, I believe that most of the conflicts between redarchy and hierarchy will arise along the line that separates those who want to preserve the privileges and power of extractive elites from those of us who aspire to build a world that is less power-oriented, more just, equitable and sustainable.

This is the true boundary between redarchy and hierarchy. Which side are you on?

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