There are two main axile that you can look at how organizations organize (and motivate) people. One is who is managing the individual (X), and the second is who is organize teams or groups (Y).
On the left side of “who is manage individuals” we can find managers (other individuals), on the left side we will find the individual himself (self-management). Between those two options, there are endless options. The midpoint of people management will be flat organizations where people partly manage by others and partly by themselves.
We’ll see the same endless opportunities spread on “who is organizing teams”. From the top where it will be an individual outside of the team (manager), to the bottom where it will be the team organized by the team. The midpoint of this scale is a delegation, where the lead of the team (which is part of the team) have the ability to organize the team.
Visually it will look like that:
There are four groups that will usually occupy each quadrant. majority of organizations will be on the quadrant where people are managed by people and groups organized by management. Startups will be more common on the quadrant where people are managed by themselves and teams are organized by themselves. On the quadrant that depicts centrally organized, but self-managed the population will be remote workers (such as sells teams). The quadrant that depicts hierarchy but the more self-organized group will be dominant by the non-profit and volunteering organization.
The best place to be is in the middle and this the trend in the last 5 years. Any solution that finds the combination of two opposites will be better than a solution that attracts toward one option. It doesn’t really matter to which organization your group belongs to; you want to bring it more to the center.
Not all the organizations will fit the center. some will be attracted to the ends of the model, this distribution is needed for improving and adopting new models. The current model where most teams exist on the edges and a few in the middle will keep on changing in the next five years.