Social and Entrepreneurs

As you will soon see in our Humanize book, one of the principles associated with social organizations is being decentralized. In the book, we talk about having a decentralized culture as a cornerstone of being open. Human organizations push the limits on a decentralized culture. It’s not that all hierarchy is dismissed, but open organizations understand the value of a flat hierarchy that enables more action.

Of course, most of today’s organizations are quite centralized. Just look at our org charts… But here’s an interesting twist. All organizations started out as entrepreneurial ventures, even if that was years and years ago. They are founded by someone. And in the early years of an organization, it is the founder that drives the culture. But in those years, the founder is quite literally the owner of the enterprise. This actually skews these organizations towards more centralization. It’s the owner’s assets on the line, so they get to make the decision, right? We may not realize it, but this ends up skewing the culture towards centralization. We defer to the owner. We defer up the chain of command.

So it turns out that our spirit of entrepreneurship may actually be a cause of the centralized cultures we now live in. This seems odd, because creating an “entrepreneurial spirit” in your organization would imply a bit of decentralization and letting people do their own thing. So what does this mean?

It means if you work in a new or small organization, you probably need to pay more attention to this centralization issue (and the other elements of our book, for that matter) than you think you do. It may feel fairly open with just a few people in decision making roles. You can all get around the conference table to decide things if you need to, right? Yes, and that is pretty open, but you’d be surprised how quickly you back into centralization without realizing it. It is critical to make these topics more visible, earlier on. It’s like conflict–waiting until it gets bad is a terrible idea. Handling it early when it doesn’t seem like a big deal is the best way to handle it.

So as you go about your business as an entrepreneur or leader of a small organization, pay attention to how the way you run things now is going to impact people down the road when your organization has grown beyond its entrepreneurial roots.

Tagged as: decentralized, humanize