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CHAPTER 1 SUMMARY
In the organization models of the 20th century, the most powerful management tools thinkable were hierarchy, power, control and a monopoly on knowledge. But in a time when the information society has become such a dominant player, these tools have lost much of their significance. Whether you like it or not, organizations are increasingly being run from the bottom up, rather than top-down. We will need to learn how to operate in a world where these new laws and opportunities dominate. And this is exactly what easycracy facilitates. Easycracy has no respect for existing organization structures. But thats not to say that its the equivalent of anarchy. It is not a political pamphlet, its a way of working for both individuals and organizations. Including the traditional manager.
The problem
Virtually every problem in todays society is essentially one of bureaucracy. There are enough individuals available to provide the solutions, but the successful execution of these solutions is still being sabotaged by a stifling web of bureaucracy: rules, protocols, procedures, hierarchies and a lack of collaboration.
The solution
Easycracy is a new way of working, organizing and collaborating in the 21st century in compliance with the existing rules, but making smart use of the opportunities everyone has easy access to thanks to information technology 2.0. Easycracy is the best form of bureaucracy, and the least complicated. And the wonderful thing about it is that you can put it into practice straight away. Whether youre a department head, or a policymaking civil servant, a sole trader or a volunteer at your local sports club. You dont have to wait till the next elections or the upcoming management team meeting. Easycracy is a way of working.
We tend to do things in the old familiar way. We typically work with organization models that were thought up in an era pre-dating the information society. An era that was characterized by inaccessible, security-protected information. Knowledge is power' and hierarchical organization structures were the logical result of this way of thinking. But now that information has become so accessible, these traditional hierarchical organization structures have become a great deal less logical. And if it's true that knowledge is power and who ever doubted that? then haven't we all become powerful, now that we all have access to that knowledge? It's not only the bureaucratic rules that are getting in the way of progress. At least as important are our own deep-seated habits. We are acquiring new insights, new powers, new possibilities, but we can't always get to grips with them precisely because we are so used to falling back on our old ways of thinking and familiar ways of working. Easycracy is therefore just as much a process of awareness. We have to get used to the idea that managing an organization top-down is quite different from managing it bottom-up. And the question is: will there be a 'top' in easycracy and in the near future? Collective intelligence, sharing knowledge in smart ways, radical transparency, openness, connecting, swarms these are typical of the themes in today's modern organization structures where we are no longer thinking in terms of bottom-up or topdown. Easycracy is much less linear in character and strives to link all these themes together.
increase their effectiveness. Someone who doesnt want to reinvent the wheel, but wants to make use of the opportunities that are already there. Easycracy is not specic to a certain type of organization. Government or industry, it doesn't really matter. Just as bureaucracy dominates in both government institutes and large commercial companies. For an easycrat it doesn't make any difference whether the easycratic way of working is applied in a non-prot environment to resolve a social issue, or in the context of increasing the market share of a multinational listed on the stock exchange. And neither is easycracy linked to ranks or classes. Anyone can be an easycrat, from the CEO to the youngest waiter, from minister to civil servant. Easycracy runs right through all existing hierarchies. Via countless formal and informal networks, contacts exist between the high-ranked and the low-ranked within the existing hierarchical structure. Individuals communicate with each other and these contacts impact not only the decision-making process, but increasingly and with ever more signicant consequences directly on the implementation of new initiatives.
ALLIES
Changes are essential. With their innate desire for change, easycrats can therefore become natural allies of the conservative, traditional manager. Because both are pursuing the same goal making sure that the organization continues to make a useful contribution, so that the organization will have a viable future.
An indirect benet for the traditional managers is that the easycrats are not out to pull the rug from under their feet. Because those in power are often deeply suspicious of change-oriented powers within their organization. In the 20th century management theories, hierarchy played a crucial role.
Organizations were managed top-down. The knowledge and information that form the building blocks for making well-reasoned decisions were restricted to those at the top of the hierarchy, and talented and ambitious employees often had to deal with this resistance within the organization structure. To make a useful contribution to the advancement of the organization, they also needed access to the information building blocks. And to get that access, they rst had to climb up the hierarchy. And to be able to climb up the hierarchy, it was often necessary to saw through the rungs of the ladder supporting the people already occupying positions higher up in the hierarchy. Improving the organization was often the underlying (idealistic) goal, but the rat race in the hierarchical structure became the means of achieving that goal. In today's society, those methods are outdated. The information technology age has resulted in the
majority of information becoming transparent and freely accessible. In many organizations employees have free access to computer systems and databases that contain a wealth of information that is required for justifying and elaborating on new ideas and strategies. And what's more, today even an intern at a multinational will probably have access to an enormous amount of business data. Any intern with analytical skills and a creative mind who wants to extract knowledge from computer systems can sometimes distil more and better-quality information from databases than the CEO of that same company. Additionally, the impact of freely accessible information is often underestimated. Because today's ambitious, talented employees now already have all the information building blocks they need, they no longer have to waste time and energy climbing the hierarchical ladder but can just start doing what they want developing and executing new ideas that can improve the organization, from the bottom up. That's where the easycrat gets his satisfaction by making a meaningful contribution and making himself useful. That's much more important than his official place in the hierarchical structure. Status and salary have become relatively less signicant (something we'll go into in more detail later). So those in power have little to fear from the easycratic powers in the organization. Quite the opposite in fact, because the easycratic powers help to keep the organization a going concern in a rapidly changing world, they are in fact helping to protect the position of those in power.
RESISTANCE
Additionally, an important role in easycracy is played by the more traditional type of manager by
offering resistance! An organization that never changes is doomed, but too much change isn't healthy either. Although improvement is by denition a change, not every change is necessarily an improvement. The key to success lies in maximizing the changes in an organization that result in improvement and minimizing the changes that don't lead to improvement. Offering resistance to less successful initiatives from the bottom up will become a real task for the manager in an easycratic organization culture. That means that such initiatives will not be vetoed or held back, as would happen in a bureaucracy, but that the proposers of such initiatives will be assisted in perceiving their disadvantages. A new plan never appears out of thin air. Quite often it's a response to an undesirable situation. If a new plan has unforeseen drawbacks, this doesn't automatically mean that the whole plan will have to be trashed straight away. With some modications, it can still often lead to an improvement in the organization.
SWARMS
An important element of the easycratic way of thinking is the belief in the power of swarms and in collective intelligence. This is a topic we'll go into in more detail in chapter 3. The easycrat is convinced that the holder of power doesn't have a monopoly on knowledge. But neither does the operational employee. The best decisions are often the ones based on all the knowledge present within the organization. And the best organization is the organization that makes optimum use of all the knowledge available.
An organization is a swarm of people that has access to all kinds of knowledge and, taken together, this represents the human capital of an organization. Not making full use of this human capital is a form of economic waste that is comparable to the inefficient use of other production factors, such as raw materials or machines. A farmer who leaves half his land uncultivated or has too many tractors lying idle in his shed will be far less productive than a farmer who does make efficient use of his production factors. There is absolutely no reason to assume that the same doesnt apply to a company
that doesn't take care of its human capital. And yet this is exactly what happens in hierarchical organization structures. The very nature of
bureaucracy means that a lot of knowledge remains unused within an organization. Decisions are predominantly taken in the top levels of the hierarchy, whereby the views on a particular problem are often too restricted. If the top of the hierarchy considers the material too complex, and is of the opinion that there is not enough relevant knowledge available, external experts with the specic knowledge will generally be hired in. There's nothing wrong with experts of course, but in their xation to raise their own prole, they tend to adopt extreme viewpoints. There's hardly any topic imaginable where there aren't two camps of experts, scrambling over themselves with diametrically opposite visions and opinions. If every organization were to work like this, we'd hardly notice. Then it would be like the Olympic high jumpers all using the straddle technique. It's an exciting contest and everybody seems to jumping to great heights, until one change-minded athlete thinks up a different technique. Then it becomes immediately obvious that everyone could have jumped higher using that innovative idea. Perhaps this is a rather obvious metaphor, but many organizations copy their competitors, or continue working as they have always worked. If all airlines are accustomed to sending tickets to the customer's home, and then letting them wait in endless queues at the check-in desk, it gives the impression that all airline companies work efficiently. Until one of them (usually a newcomer to the market) has the bright idea that all paper tickets are actually redundant documents, in view of the fact that a passenger list with names that can be ticked off already exists. And that checking in is much easier online, so that the customers no longer have to wait an hour in the queue. As soon as one provider in the market introduces an innovation, the differences become painfully clear and all providers in the market typically switch quickly to the new way of working. Just like all the high jumpers who adopted the Fosbury Flop in a short space of time.
investments to set workable initiatives in motion for tackling major and minor problems of all kinds, and to implement improvements. This can be done both inside and outside existing organizations, either cutting through the existing bureaucracies, or manoeuvring neatly around them, in the grey areas.
BUT WHY?
An effective improvement will usually be quickly duplicated by others. So what benet is there to being the rst to implement it? Everyone has adopted the Fosbury Flop and they're jumping higher than ever but the gaps in level havent changed. So why should we worry ourselves about this issue?
Good question! But even though innovations are picked up quickly enough by others, the pioneers continue to benet for a fairly long period. The rst one to successfully introduce an innovation will get an image boost. They gain the sympathy of their customers, sympathy on the labour market and a reputation for being a popular organization to work for. And they will even get sympathy from the supplier side as a desired partner to work with, because the image of an innovative organization will also rub off on the supplier. This image advantage usually persists for a long period, even when all competing organizations are delivering the same products using the same production methods.
A far more important reason for pursuing improvement than image boosts is the threats emanating from the outside world. Many innovations originate from outside the organization, from players in other sectors. The traditional airline companies have copied the innovations introduced by newcomers to the market and are working more efficiently than ever. But despite this increase in efficiency, the competition has never been so erce due to these same newcomers. What if the traditional companies had thought up these same innovations themselves much earlier? If they had made better use of the existing collective intelligence within their own organization, those newcomers would very likely never have entered the market.
It's an ironic paradox. Based on the (understandable) need to maintain the position they have gained, organizations develop a spider's web of bureaucratic procedures and rules. But that same bureaucracy has a suffocating tendency, it makes the collective intelligence inert, hinders improvements and thus serves to attract new players to the market, who then start to undermine the
positions already acquired. And things will run their course. There must be a better way the easycratic way.
lifehacking Individual
politics Society
Concern
Collaborating Mobilizing
Do it!
In practice
Theory
Pragmatic Initiatives
Figure 1.1 The differences between lifehacking, easycracy and politics With lifehacking, the individual rst learns the art of working smarter, applies this to easycracy and then extends it. Within formal and informal networks, sharing, communicating and mobilizing are essential processes. Within networks, knowledge is offered and spread but also acquired with the aim of effecting improvements, developing innovations, or at the very least initiating the rst steps to improvement. This is possible within organizations, but also alongside organizations. And always in an active and pragmatic way. Easycracy is a vision on working and organizing, lifehacking offers the smart tools required to facilitate this.