Change Clinic
Why Management is Dispensable
Was offered by Niels Pflaeging, Founder, BetaCodex Network
This session set a Dynamic Tone for the 3 day annual conference at the beginning of May in Denver Colorado
Business, markets, and society have changed, but the principles, the methods and concepts for structuring the work, organization design, leadership, and performance management haven’t, by and large. Functional and divisional structures, rigid sales quotas, fixed performance targets, allocations, individual employee assessments, so-called “pay for performance”, budgets, variance analysis, autocratic decision-making and micro-management from the top – these techniques from the industrial age are still widely established standards. But are they still adequate? And if not, how can we adapt our organizational models to the ever-changing environments of the information age and do things better?
In this workshop, participants will gain a profoundly new understanding about how organizations work and about how to design them for this age of complexity. This workshop will contrast the wide-spread mechanistic mental models inherited from the industrial age with models derived from complexity sciences and contemporary psychology. It will present the so-called “Beta Codex”, a robust alternative to command-and-control, and indeed, to management as we know it.
Niels Pflaeging will discuss how any organization, by moving beyond command and control, and by abolishing the mindset of management, functional organization, fixed targets, budgets, and bureaucratic hierarchy, can become sustainably more successful and profitable. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss how the transformation towards an organization model for the knowledge economy really works and how people in organizations can be unleashed from the burdens of bureaucracy – freed from management and dis-empowering structure.
Participants will be introduced to research from the Beyond Budgeting and BetaCodex movements, which include case study research and learnings from diverse sciences that are frequently ignored by academics and practitioners alike.
”Transformation from the codex of management to the codex of decentralized networked leadership is about a new, far more productive way of dealing with people, organization design, and performance.“
Additional content:
AND
www.betacodex.org/node/1316 www.betacodex.org/node/1354
Session format/types of participant interaction proposed for this workshop:
- There will be no use of PowerPoint during the workshop, nor will there be a speech by the facilitator followed by a Q&A. Instead, the session will be structured around a large selection of coherent, but not entirely pre-set “thinking tools” that enable the group to reflect, discuss and modify assumptions and mental models about leadership, organizational structure and change
- The presenter will also share case examples, scientific context, consulting experience and personal insights
- The workshop method guarantees building a strong, shared conceptual foundation, as well as intense interaction among participants
- Session setting will include a circular/semi-circular setting and the use of flip-charts