Ever since the dawn of modern management with pioneers such as Henri Fayol and Frederick Winslow Taylor, our organizations have been constructed in a way that made them resilient to change. Organizations were about process, productivity, efficiency and a linear way of working. There was no focus on engagement, inspiration or innovation. Health and wellness? Give me a break. Employees were literally timed with stop watches to see if they could shave seconds off of their tasks. This was the mentality of organizations in the early to mid 1900s, and it is the same mentality that plagues our organizations today. If you think about it, factories are perfect places for robots to work; unfortunately we didn’t have robots decades ago so we had to use humans to perform those monotonous tasks. Today, we do have robots and they are coming to take the jobs that were designed for them to do to begin with. Factories don’t change and they don’t innovate -- they simply excel at repeatable tasks. If your organization thinks of itself like a factory it will die. The robots and AI we keep hearing about are precisely designed to take these jobs, the ones that can be codified, written down in steps, repeated and yes...automated.
Laboratories on the other hand are a very different kind of animal. In labs you test ideas, you experiment and use data to make informed decisions, you are coached and mentored, and you embrace failure. Organizations like Adobe give employees $1,000 to build prototypes of ideas or concepts. Whirlpool allows any employees within the organization to go through a structured ideation process to either improve a product or create a new one. At LinkedIn and AT&T, employees can literally pitch executives their ideas to get funding much the same way a start-up founder would pitch a VC. There are many examples out there of organizations that are doing these types of things. The goal being to bring that entrepreneur mentality inside of the organization to create intrapreneurs. This is the type of approach that is required of organizations that want to be able to attract and retain top talent.
Every business leader I speak with, and I speak with many, is trying to focus their efforts on shifting their culture from factory to lab. In a world where the workplace is changing as fast as it is, we can’t afford to have organizations that think of themselves as factories. Labs adapt, factories die.
Jacob Morgan is a keynote speaker, author, and futurist. To see his videos, podcasts and articles, or to subscribe to his newsletter, visit TheFutureOrganization.
