Complexity is one of the main problems that each and any organizations are dealing with today. “Galaxies” helps organizations to deal with complexity by introducing a new structure and a management system based on sciences that explain how complex systems are working as well as software to support the new system. But complexity is an abstract concept and when I was asked what are the specific problems (that organizations are facing today) Galaxies aim to resolve, I understood that’s a great question that deserves a dedicated post.
We believe that Galaxies is resolving problems, not symptoms! There are many symptoms that we see at work, but those symptoms are just the tip of the iceberg that we see. below the surface, all the main real tough problems exist. Those problems exist for many years. The symptoms might change over time, but the root problems never changed, they just increased over time. using a different analogy, those problems are growing like an avalanche that one day is going to go down the mountain and destroy everything in its way.
Those are the common symptoms that most of organizations experience and the core problems that cause them:
| Symptoms | Problems |
| lack of innovation | – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Central control |
| Never discuss problems internally | – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Motivate by fear and money – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team |
| Issues kept internally | – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power |
| Conflicts between departments | – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power – Analyze the company as a machine – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give) |
| Politics, cooperation | – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give) – Central control – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power |
| Poor communication and feedback | – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – the false belief in independence – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power |
| Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it (no initiative) | – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give) – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team – the false belief in independence |
| unequal workload | – Analyze the company as a machine – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give) – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team |
| Challenges with customer support and satisfaction | – Analyze the company as a machine – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give) – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power – Central control |
| Absence of clear direction | – Analyze the company as a machine – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team – the false belief in independence – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power |
| Poor participating in meetings | – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team |
| Poor decision making | – Analyze the company as a machine – Integrity, thinking A, say B – Silos (departments & Roles) – Motivate by fear and money – Focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give) – Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy trump team – Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power – Central Control |
Instead of focusing on the symptoms we put our emphasis on problems. Let me explain to you how Galaxies is resolving the above problems by using the main concepts of our management system and structure as we defined in this post and Galaxies proposed principles. It’s worth to mention that each one of those core problems is well known, but ignored due to the effort needed to change mental models created by organizations in the last one hundrad years.
- Integrity, thinking A, say B: Few are the people that will say in meetings or face to face interaction what they are really thinking. People will share what they really think in any informal interaction but will keep their mouth shut up or say what they believe will make other people happy. We propose resolving integrity with implementing radical true, radical transparency and radical self-awareness principles. We also believe that no central control and no management are key for making a safe place for people to say what they think.
- Silos (departments & Roles): Our operating system of No-Silos is our solution to this problem. We believe that we need to structure the organization based on functions needed to reach the organization function. Those function should be composed of hybrid expertise and knowledge, that used to be in the old departments. We proposed to replace the siloed departments and hybrid functions.
- Motivate by fear and money: We propose that people will be motivated by a clear purpose, that the organization and each function within the organization should have. We also propose to provide autonomy or freedom (reached by self-management and self-organized functions) to each function and people. To motivate and reward people for their common effort we suggest that everyone in the organization should be compensated based on the company revenues and not based on a fixed salary. Learning from mistakes also encourage and motivate people not to fear from failures and always try new things.
- focusing on business (what I can get) not Communities (what I can give): Galaxies system and structure is tuned to create communities that work hard and enjoy the fruits of their effort based on the individual effort and contribution. From creating common Purpose (goal) for the company and each function, through enabling people to define their contribution level and all the way to incentives and structure that encourage group work, Galaxies focus on communities. We believe that focusing on communities create a robust organization and successful business, but not the other way around.
- Individualism, the hero and the lone cowboy: Everything that I mentioned about communities applied to replace individualism, hero and lone cowboy with a team as the basic unit for success. Multifunctions teams also encourage teamwork. when a group composed of people with different backgrounds, they need to relay more one on each other comparing to homogenous teams.
- The false belief in independence: Based on chaos theory and complex adaptive systems Galaxies recognizes the interdependencies between any two elements in the system. interdependencies are captured in the function level to ensure people know and understand interdependencies. interdependencies are also defining the feedback within an organization and serve one of the main measurements to determine if people are following the contracts they agreed to follow.
- Central control: By definition Galaxies system id decentralized organization, with distributed decision making, and autonomy to any group or people. Almost all the system concepts and principles are trying to ensure that central control is not needed. The most relevant are: Common purpose is the glue of the company, not executives. No steering committees and governance bodies, internal and external feedback loops steer the company. Clear definition of each group and people responsibilities and assets needed to be managed, to reduce the need for managers. Self-management and self-organized groups.
- Hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power: Hierarchical structure is good structure when the hierarchical element serves the sun element. Galaxies system try to eliminate hierarchies of rank, entitlement, and power by Implementing: decentralized system and autonomy. Promoting self-management and self-organized teams. Compensation is transparent and defines by your functions, not a manager. The systems identify people struggling to perform their contracts, not other people. Conflicts resolved by a vote that factor merit in relevant competencies and expertise.
“Galaxies” is also trying to resolve other problems that are less common, such as:
- Conflicts between people resolved by HR instead of by the involved people: Self-awareness and self-management as well as breaking the traditional department silos enforce and encourage people to address issues by themselves.
- Many decisions are based on cognitive bias: Our principle that push people to fight cognitive biase with data, when implemented, reduce significantly cognitive bias and also improves decision making.
- Many people feel that they can contribute more with the knowledge and experience they have but aren’t related to the job they hired to do: Our system enables and encourages people to fill multiple functions. Each function required different expertise and knowledge. Multi-function approach allows people to contribute in different ways and to learn new fields.
- People want to be part of an organization but can’t commit to full time. Galaxies enable people to pick the number of functions they want to fill. Anyone can select to work from several hours to any hours that he wants as a result of the number of functions he is filling.
- Groups and organization reach a certain level and stuck at that level until they fall apart. We required that each group will have a dedicated function responsible for the evolvement of the group. From our system point of view, when a group gets into equilibrium (no changes), it starts the decline process. Therefore we will enforce any group to change by releasing all people that are filling functions in a group that is not evolving.
- One way to motivate people and organize work is not a fit for different groups within the organization: The autonomy that our system required for each group and the self-organize principle enable each group to define the best system that works for them.
I hope that this post helped you to understand how Galaxies can help you in a more tangible and practical way. If you want to learn more or implement our management system, we will be happy to help you.