Every organization declines to Coordination Chaos, unless Leadership knows what to do.
Is your organization stuck? You have many parallel projects ongoing, but nothing moves. Everyone is waiting for information, resources, or decisions. You spend your time in endless meetings, planning, and rework. And the business slumps.
Below you will find links to articles about the detailed symptoms, root cause analysis and remedy.
Learn Coordination Chaos in 4 minutes.
This is serious
Nokia Mobile Phones fell from 40 BN revenue and 9 BN profit to zero in five years. Coordination Chaos was critical in the collapse of productivity. Research suggests a key role to Management by Fear, which easily follows from Coordination Chaos.
Figure by Christian Sandström
Are the signs of Modern Taylorism rampant in your organizations? Are you stuck in it's overwhelming vicious circle? Are silos, invisibility and powerlessness so familiar, that it is difficult to imagine a better way.
Management thinkers have given their warning. Allen Ward, Konosuke Matsushita, Clausewitz and von Moltke, Joseph Tainter, Chris Argyris and Gary Hamel explain the same pattern from different perspectives. See the wonderful video by Yves Morieux of BCG. A continuous stream of articles in management publications bring up the seriousness of the phenomenon.
The logic behind Coordination Chaos.
Specialization to Role, Function, Task, or a Technical Component seems to be efficient. Unfortunately this by definition creates fragmented organization, queues, uncontrolled growth, heavy coordination - and Waterfall processes. Please see also Bas Vodde explaining the danger of asynchronous dependencies and how to avoid them.
Are you everyday decisions building an Agile Learning Organization or aTayloristic one? Systems Thinking shows beautifully, how the practical hard Actions of the Leadership creates either one.
Control Mechanisms in Organizations explain how Bureaucracy grows inevitably in a fragmented organization. How can you avoid the Tayloristic trap of "Define better roles and responsibilities."
Doing the right things takes courage.
Actionable Fearless Leadership builds feedback mechanisms in the organization, for technology, customer and the organization itself. And the response is integrated back to reality continuously.
You are the Fearless Leader. You can make your practical everyday decisions to work towards the Agile Learning organization. But to build a well working system is a greater job. Our Consultation page explains how.
Get More with LeSS. It leads towards a sustainable meaningful work.
Check our next Certified Less Practitioner course!