Bureaucracy is plagued with inherent blind spots. Because bureaucracies leverage the individual intelligence of elite experts by giving them command-and-control authority, they often kill the human spirit of the many, which may explain why Gallup’s worker engagement surveys consistently find that only about a third of employees are actively engaged in their work. This troubling metric is a clear signal that most organizations are not healthy workplaces. This is problematic because unhealthy workplaces kill not only the human spirit, but also the capacity for innovation. This is further compounded by the reality that experts are rarely innovators. Instead, experts are highly knowledgeable about the way things have been done in the past and are often heavily invested in the status quo. This tendency often causes experts to be blind to future possibilities that may challenge conventional ways as happened when John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster’s in the late 1990’s, turned down the opportunity to buy Netflix, dismissing the budding interest in the internet as completely overblown.
This is spot on. We know many businesses now that the leader’s decentralized themselves and made the system transparent then ran the system using collective intelligence.
This is spot on. We know many businesses now that the leader’s decentralized themselves and made the system transparent then ran the system using collective intelligence.
We wrote about it several times. We should talk.
https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/fix-any-business-using-human-swarm?r=7oa9d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web