A holy trinity of theories — developing a cosmic theory of organisation

When I travelled around India years ago, I was amazed at the variety of Gods that were on offer. There was blue-skinned Krishna, god of love and compassion, Lakshmi, the four-armed Goddess of wealth and prosperity, Durga, the 8-armed mother goddess and countless others. Each individual devotee would have their own favourite they would make offerings to.

It’s not so different with management theories. There’s a plethora of theories about how to build and run an organization — X & Y theory, human relations theory, Servant Leadership, Scientific Management, systems theory and hundreds more, and each has their devotees.

I admit that my brain struggles with all this diversity. Which is the “better” god or theory? What’s the difference between them?

From one perspective, it doesn’t really matter. Many people find that having a god (or theory) to follow really helps, as a guiding light to lead them through darkness and troubles. It doesn’t really matter which God (or theory), just find one that calls to you and stick to it.

But for someone like me, that isn’t enough. I want to see the whole picture — a cosmic view, not just a partial view. And it has to be elegantly simple — useful and broadly applicable, without being too complicated.

In Hindu mythology the holy trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva has always appealed to me. The idea is that they represent the three cosmic functions, like so:

- Creation (Brahma)

- Maintenance (Vishnu), and

- Destruction (Shiva)

There is something elegant and appealing about this this cosmic trinity. Wouldn’t it be neat if we could find an equivalent in management theories?

In a spirit of provocative playfulness, I would like to suggest what the holy trinity might be — theories that help us explain how organisations are created, maintained and destroyed.

Firstly, creation.

I am really taken by Peter Koenig’s work on source (I learned about this work through Tom Nixon, who is a passionate and articulate adherent). The basic idea is that any enterprise, project or event always goes back to a single source; the person who gave the spark of life to an idea and had a compelling vision that wanted to be realized. Such person, who acts as a type of guardian, always has an intuitive sense of how the project or enterprise should develop. If that person is ignored, trouble will sooner or later emerge. The guardianship of the project doesn’t need to remain with that person for ever — there can be a handing over to someone else.

Despite my reservations (I don’t like the idea that one individual carries so much weight) I find this a very powerful theory, one that helps explain a lot of behaviour I have seen in the last 30 years of working with organisations. There is a good introductory article on source here.

What about maintenance?

First I note that maintaining an enterprise requires structure. Without structure, there is no organisation, simply an ephemeral thing that is gone in a moment. Structure embeds patterns of power and patterns of behaviour so that they last.

Structures, historically, have often served as instruments of oppression and domination. Think, for example, of the great northern city of St Petersburg, which has a beautiful old centre with many fine buildings. It would have been impossible to build such a city, situated in a swamp, without structures that organised hired or forced labour to build the city for Tsar Peter. Thousand of workers lost their lives in the process.

Yet domination or oppression are by no means an inevitable result of organisation and structure. The loss of liberty you feel when surrendering to a structure can be more than compensated by a sense of being securely held and of working in partnership with others.

A powerful theory about structure is Frederic Laloux’s theory of the evolution of organisations (set out in his 2014 book Reinventing Organisations). Laloux points to the emergence of new types of structure that, almost miraculously, both help to maintain order (a steady state), whilst at the same time encouraging freedom, creativity and responsibility (dynamism).

Such structures can be considered “dissipative” (a term coined by Russian chemist Ilya Progogine). Examples are whirlpools and cyclones. In such structures, symmetry emerges spontaneously. The individual parts that make up the structure constantly change yet the structure, from the outside at least, remains in steady state. Another example is the human body. Over a seven year period, every cell in our body changes — yet we are still recognisably the same person, albeit a bit older (and, for some of us, more grumpy!).

Laloux’s work points the way to the emergence of new, more evolved organisations with robust structures within which people come and go, acting with considerable autonomy.

Destruction is maybe the hardest to consider objectively. Few people like to ponder death and destruction — certainly not of their own person or organisation. We know deep inside that over time it is inevitable yet we feel, illogically, that if we don’t talk about it perhaps it will leave us alone! Yet Shiva, God of destruction, has an absolutely vital role to play in organisations. Without destruction of the old, there is no room for the new.

Maybe the best, most useful theory that I am aware of is set out in Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma”. He described how established organisations struggle with disruptive innovation (the kind that can kill off entire industries) because they are too well adapted to the old types of technology that made them successful in the first place. It was Microsoft, the upstart, that developed the operating system, not IBM, Tesla that is leading the way in electric cars, not GM or Ford.

The key lesson from the Innovator’s Diliemma is that disruptive innovation will always come from the outside and will be treated as a threat to the established structure (a threat is exactly what it is).

To avoid this trap, there are three clear options:

– acquire another company that is better adapted to the new technology;

– create pockets of innovation within the organisation where the usual rules don’t apply (examples include Skunkworks in Lockheed Aircraft during the war and, more recently, Giffgaff in Telefonica);

– cultivate a spirit of freedom within the organisation (drawing, perhaps on Laloux’s work) so that individuals don’t feel the same constraints as they would in traditional organisations.

What if we could bring those three theories together? We might come up with a grand cosmic theory of organisation. Something like this:

– an individual (the source) comes up with an idea, and attracts others to support it (Koenig).

– Structures emerge to maintain the idea and take it forward — an organisation emerges.

– The organisational structure evolves (Laloux) and reaches a point of maturity where the individuals within it are given significant freedom, and some of them become the source of new ideas.

– If the structure is mature enough, these new ideas may attract others, and flourish within the organisation. Eventually, as the new idea leads to destruction of other parts of the organisation, resources and people transfer within the organisation from the old to the new.

– However if the organisation is not mature enough, it gets lost in internal struggles (Christensen) and eventually dies (thank you Lord Shiva!).

Since nature abhors a vacuum, out of the destruction of the old will come new ideas, given birth to by new sources. And so the dance continues

Elegantly simple, or grossly simplistic, or just plain wrong? What do you think, oh reader? If no-one comes up with any fundamental objection, I might try to develop this cosmic theory further :-)