Biological Organizational Model

In a high frequency competitive socio economic environment, at the heart of any organization’s performance will be its leadership’s ability to commit to evolving a set of cultural attributes, which will define its ability to continually renew itself to stay in tune with, if not stay ahead of the changing industry landscape. In order to attain such a state it will require organizations to (not comprehensive) adopt and continually refine five key functions:

1. High speed sensing and learning function: In an accelerating knowledge intensive environment, which is vulnerable to sudden disruptions, an important function an organization must continually develop is its ability to sense and learn from the emerging trends; in large extent increasingly an organization’s capacity to win competitive games will be determined by how sharper and smarter is this function relative to its competitors. In turn corporate leaderships should aspire to cultivate a culture of intellectual ferment that is enduring and self-energizing, and truly celebrates “the spirit of inquiry” and cultivate the courage for “imaginative leaps”.
2. Integration function: Organizational mechanisms, both formal and informal, that enable cross-pollination and/or cross fertilization of new trends/thought streams in turn enable germination of ideas within an organization, across business units and the corporate center, to enhance an organization’s ability to drive new advances, will need to established. Integration mechanisms should also facilitate collaboration with the innovation centers external to the enterprise such as technology vendors, partners and academia/national labs.
3. Distributed leadership function: An organization’s ability to develop and empower executives to make bold decisions (based on analytical rigor) and to inspire teams close to day to day operations, will determine how it speedily responds to rapidly evolving opportunities and/or competitive threats. CEOs must pay considerable attention to cultivating a leadership culture that
   • ensures everyone in the company feels genuinely responsible for their domain of influence – from immediate areas of interest to the widely accepted precepts of protecting the natural environment and meeting social obligations,
   • engenders a high degree of commitment to performance, so that every one across the value chain at all levels of the organizational hierarchy naturally manage their individual and collective performance with a Kaizen spirit (continuous improvement) – to continually seek higher levels (benchmarks) of productivity of assets and resources (hard and soft) worldwide,
   • goes beyond incremental improvements and searches for and implements big game-changing shifts with the potential to revolutionize the industry.
4. Activist function: It represents a discipline that will provide an organization with the ability to challenge status quo and move out of comfort zones to find new sweet spots. This function must help executives challenge current value creation thesis and business model in structuring new choices accordingly organize myriad of ideas/conceptual breakthroughs into discrete, new and meaningful innovation platforms. Executives responsible for such a function should, as a matter of course, assess outcomes from a range of experimental perspectives, while ensuring that specific micro and/or mega forces that are triggering and driving the trends in the environment are continually examined in relation to current business model.
5. Adaptive function: This function must be embedded in organizational units so that both corporate center and business units have the flexibility to make rapid organizational adjustments in terms how resources are mobilized and how the reporting lines are rewired; so that when required a company has the ability to switch from one game plan to another game plan in navigating through an increasingly turbulent competitive environment. Particularly in those industries where rapid convergence of technologies are increasing the likelihood of unforeseen outcomes leading to sudden disruptions, the adaptive function must keep the innovation process alive, in turn often serendipitously expand the possibility of specific outcomes.

Partha Ghosh believes that leadership of companies must examine alterative ways organizations could develop a multiplicity of cultural attributes which will together determine an organization’s ability to regenerate itself in the process seed and nurture new possibilities, while developing the capacity to evaluate uncertainties to cultivate the courage, not to avoid but navigate through risks.

Accordingly, Dr. Ghosh believes for organizations to achieve their full potential they will need to shift from a mechanistic command-and-control model to a self-enriching, adaptive biological model (Exhibit below). This would improve the management of knowledge as enabled through organizations’ learning, information processing and knowledge (creating, sharing and filtering) management capacities and capabilities. Each process is self-enriching when managed correctly, and self-consuming when managed poorly.  It is important the CEOs and their leadership teams, help their immediate environment invent new organizational mechanisms which “involve and inspire”, are “knowledge enriching” centric, and not “command & control” and/or “ego”-centric”.