Leverage Weekly #52 - Finding equilibrium
tl;dr - People adjust organizations from within; this can be harnessed
Organizations are mechanisms for coordinating people. It might sometimes seem, therefore, that designing an organization just involves understanding the people and wiring them together in the right way. In some general sense, that is true. In practice, however, the people change and the organization changes, and whatever wiring you try to put in place may be reorganized by the people as they go about their daily business.
Designing an organization, therefore, is a process that must be repeated over and over until the system achieves a certain equilibrium. It’s possible to imagine an organization created correctly in one shot, with no need for subsequent modification. In reality, however, (1) the people will change, (2) the external world will change, and (3) the people will behave in surprising ways and change the organization itself, even if they and the world are staying mostly the same.
Last week, I wrote about how an organization’s schedule serves as a central coordination point for all of its activities. One my main points was that when creating schedules, it’s very important to take into account different people’s work styles and idiosyncrasies, especially if you want to help them to be as productive as possible. Even if you do this well, however, and also successfully sync the schedule with the outside world, you’ll still find people subtly changing the schedule. Meeting A keeps being rescheduled. Meeting B routinely turns into a meeting about topic C, which wasn’t its original point.
In some cases, an organization can stray from its stated design for a bad reason. In that case, greater organizational discipline, and perhaps some rewiring to support that, is called for. In other cases, however, the people are changing the organization for good reasons. Rather than simply sticking to an original plan, it’s useful to investigate the reasons that an organization is changing. These reasons can prompt a revision to the design, resulting in a system that makes the organization more effective overall.
Now, it may seem difficult to have a group of people all simultaneously adjusting an organization and have this not become a mess. What if they all change the organization in different and incompatible ways? The answer is that an organization’s natural internal changes can either reinforce its structure or lead to its dissolution. This is depicted in Oliver’s diagram above: you have a research group that slowly dissolves if left to itself, and dismantles one type of structure that could be applied, but retains its cohesion and effectiveness with another type of structure.
What determines whether the people in an organization improve the structure or dismantle it? It depends on how close the structure is to being “right,” i.e., fitting for the people and the goals and circumstance of the organization. If the organization is 90% of the way there, people’s small adjustments will help to take it the remaining 10%. If the organization is too far from being right, the adjustments will degrade the organization, with the people getting stuck in the structure and confused by it in the process.
Imagine a landscape with different attractors on it, like “think tank” or “academic lab” or “traditional C corp.” A given organization is somewhere on the landscape. If it is close enough to one of the attractors, it will slowly naturally adjust and change itself to fit the organizational blueprint or design represented by one of the attractors. If it is too far from any attractor or caught between several, the organization will evolve randomly or be pulled in multiple conflicting directions.
The small adjustments that people make to an organization are often beneficial; however, they also don’t always fit together perfectly, even if they are based on good reasons. As a result, it is often necessary for central planning and design to come in, seeing what changes are being made, determining how the organization needs to be modified overall, and then making those changes. In this way, the information that members of the organization are putting into the system can be recognized in a way that takes account of the organization as a whole.
People adjust organizations from within. This can be harnessed.
After a few weeks of post-retreat, the Leverage team is now settling into its routine. Oliver and I worked on a proposal for a potential new client, while Oliver made some cool diagrams that helped to display the way organizations will or won’t dismantle their own structure. Melinda researched guidance on hiring and, as always, kept operations running smoothly.
Most of the team’s effort is now going into the Quantum Biology Institute partnership. The immediate challenge is hiring. The Institute needs a lead biologist and an experimental quantum physicist to be in charge of the optical aspects of the microscope. (Clarice is in charge of programming the central control system; Ale is in charge of magnetics.) Oliver, with his experience as a recruiter and depth of knowledge from studying organizations, is taking point. Already, there is a functional recruiting pipeline with candidates being interviewed and we expect hires to follow shortly.
When there’s time, Geoff and Melinda have been working on the Annual Report for 2024. The process of assembling information for that turned up a small anomaly, both somewhat funny to us and also a great illustration of organizations adjusting themselves off of the original design. In this case, it looks like the unanticipated change was a good one.
In particular, as Melinda was preparing the financials for the annual report, it became necessary to list Leverage’s “functions,” which are the areas of activity that are not naturally spread across the programs and initiatives. Throughout 2024, we made various changes to the functions, adding Design and moving Fundraising under Operations. Or at least, we tried to. The change didn’t stick, however, as evidenced by the fact that Melinda just naturally divided up our time under Leadership, Engagement, Culture, Operations, and Fundraising, essentially dropping Design and breaking Fundraising back out on its own. After some discussion, we concluded that this was right.
Does it matter whether Leverage’s functions are listed properly? Is there really a fact of the matter about whether Design is “really” a function or whether Fundraising should or should not be a function on its own? Our answer is yes. Organizations are machines made of people. The functions of Leverage as an institute are part of its wiring diagram. Get the wiring wrong and people will be confused. Set everything up right, connect all the people and pieces of the organization in the right way, and all sorts of benefits follow. On that, more next week.
Geoff