Designing organisations as ‘selfless’ collectives

In any collective endeavour, the most common barrier to smooth functioning is the ego. The ego in this context can simply be defined as a strong sense of individual identity that dictates to the individual that he is separate from others. Protecting this identity and serving its demands at the expense of larger goals of the collective creates conflict. The interplay of identities in a collective determines its ability to achieve what it has set out to do. The complexity of this interaction increases rapidly as the size of the collective increases.

What is the ideal state that could be visualized in this situation? The ideal state would be a frictionless collective that proceeds towards its goals with minimal conflict arising out of individual identities, while each individual contributes exactly what he is meant to contribute. Such a collective could be termed as a Selfless Collective. Achieving such a perfect state is impossible, yet it is possible to design systems in such a way that selfless behaviour is the natural response of participants in the system.

Complexity Reduction

One easy way is to reduce complexity by reducing the size of the collective. It is relatively easy to assemble a small group of people which is highly aligned. However, the only issue with this approach is lack of scalability. Complex initiatives inevitably involve the coordinated efforts of a large number of people. This explains why nimble footed start-ups that thrive on innovation eventually often lose steam as they scale up. The second way to reduce complexity is by reducing the layers in the organizational hierarchy. Technology may have to play a role here through collaborative tools that free up individuals from administrative tasks.

Self-organizing teams

One way to facilitate the creation of a selfless collective is to let the collective assemble itself. Self-organizing around goals may automatically lead to the ‘self-selection’ of individuals who are highly aligned with each other, and more importantly with the common goal in question. This runs counter to the prevailing idea of top down design of teams. The main challenge here is to design the organization in order to facilitate such self-organization wherein individuals assemble around initiatives freely, and then disband and choose their own paths. The success of the open source movement in software proves that such collaboration supporting designs are both possible, and efficient.

Non Egocentric Rewards

A fundamental paradox of traditional rewards is the disproportionate degree to which it fosters the archetype of the 'hero', a special person who deserves a lot more credit and therefore rewards than others. However, it is quite easy to see that a system designed entirely around heroes eventually becomes an obstruction to getting things done. Individuals start aligning behaviours to appearing as heroes versus getting things done. This may partly explain the move away from bell curve based performance assessment that is being witnessed of late. A system designed around non ego centric rewards would reward collective achievement with a higher weightage than individual achievement.

Conflict Resolution Structures

It may also make sense to create institutional structures designed specifically to address conflicts. Hierarchy based escalation and conflict resolution, which is the current approach to resolve conflicts, while offering rational solutions to roadblocks, does nothing to resolve underlying identity clashes that could be the root cause of the issue. What may be needed therefore is a more formal structure for conflict resolution where specialists guide conflicted parties to mutually acceptable outcomes.

The essence of all this comes down to two design principles that can help create a selfless collective - the first is to allow people the freedom to choose their contribution areas to the collective based on their unique talents and orientation, and second, design the system such that people automatically behave in non-egocentric ways. Needless to say the goal is to not create a conflict free collective. Certain kinds of conflicts are actually very useful - for instance creative conflicts are an extremely important part of problem solving and must be encouraged. A frictionless collective may well be utopian, but designing systems for minimizing friction is important.

The writer is a corporate strategy professional.

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