unSILOed Podcast with Greg LaBlanc | EP414
May 1, 2024
Could the secret to organizational success be as simple as going back to basics?
Gene Kim and Steven Spear’s new book, Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification presents practical, grounded research on organizational management and design. Gene is the chair of the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit and Steven teaches at MIT Sloan.
Episode Quotes:
Three mechanisms of a successful organizational design
38:39 The reason why we had to create the word ‘slowification’ is that we have a lot of adages for slow down to speed up or stop sawing to sharpen the saw, and the absence of the word prevents us from doing it or thinking it. (38:46) But the whole notion is creating time to be able to solve tough problems not in production but in planning and practice. To solve architectural problems, not during the normal sprint or what have you, but actually making time for the architectural spike or the period of technical debt reduction to enable people to do their work easily and well.
What the term ‘slowification’ means
23:07 One of the reasons we affiliate with each other and live in groups is to avail ourselves of this process of social learning, but in so doing, we expose ourselves to other risks—for example, the risks of infection, the risks of violence, and so on. So natural selection over time has balanced these costs and benefits and yielded, I argue, a structure of networks that obeys the principle that the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. Otherwise, we would live separate from each other. We wouldn’t form networks.
The wrong way to measure success
A lot of these metric-driven organizations, the pit they fall into is they don’t account for the return on investment of discovery. They measure activity but not accomplishment.
The great advantages of technology in management education
And now, because we can do education at a distance, we can do asynchronous education, we can have education which is interspersed with either structured experiences or just natural experiences that people have. We can now actually teach one by one as needed as ready situation where information is pulled from the instructor to time and place and situation where it’s needed, rather than being forced by the instructor in a formulation that the instructor thinks is right but may have nothing to do with the readiness of the student.
Guest Profile:
Their Work:
Steve’s Book:
| Steven Spear DBA MS MS Principal, See to Solve LLC Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Author, The High Velocity Edge |
| Click here for sample chapters from The High Velocity Edge • leadership and crisis recovery (chapters 9 and 10) • accelerating development of break through technologies (chapter 5) |