09 Jul 2012, By Stephan Schwab
The Stoos movement is bound to change or even replace management from the Industrial Age with a better way.
What started in January 2012 as a meeting of a diverse group of twenty one people, including senior executives, business strategists, managers, academics, and lean/agile development practitioners from four continents, has grown to a conference with 130 people in attendance.
In Intrinsic motivation based on 4 Drive Theory I had a conversation with an engaged group about human nature and why we are they way we are. According to 4 Drive Theory humans possess a drive to acquire, to bond, to learn, and to defend. Interactions between those drives define our behavior. Once a person is unable to satisfy all four drives in a balanced way the person is unhappy and will perform poorly. Thus organizations should provide an environment that allows its members to fulfill this basic need.
Stefan Haas led the workshop Management and corporate culture hacking to find cracks in organizations in order to develop hacks to change things. People developed ideas for changing management and took those with them to try them within their organizations. In the workshop Sociocracy: new governance structure for organizations I learned that Sociocracy has been recognized by the government of the Netherlands as an alternative organizational structure that allows companies not to establish a works council, which otherwise is required by law.
Frequently the organizational environment is shaped by tools. In Organizational culture and the influence by tools on it I introduced the audience to Activity Theory and we explored the influence of time tracking tools onto organizational and personal behavior. Depending on the implementation of the tool it can be used to provide more freedom to people or force them to loose sight of the overall goal by just focusing on simple tasks in a robotic fashion.
Niels Pfläging declared Management dead. According to him Management died in the 1970s but is kept alive like a zombie. In a session filled with passion we learned that management as proposed by Frederick Taylor for the Industrial Age separated thinking from doing and thus created organizational structures shaped like a pyramid. The thinking happens at the top and all the doing, with ever increasing specialization, at the bottom. Niels proposes an organizational structure in the form of a peach that has a peripherie and a center. Instead of making all decisions in the center small groups in the peripherie decide as they have the closest contact with the market and the customers.
Participants of the Stoos Stampede have started to organize satellite events in their regions and agreed upon the need to participate in management conferences in order to take the message to those who are unlikely to attend an "agile event". For many the Stoos Stampede provided confirmation that they are not alone lest crazy in their thinking that tayloristic management is actually preventing people from working. Now there is a movement bound to change that on a global scale. Participants believe that a new way of running organizations will help to get out of the repeating economic crisis we've seen over the last few years.