Crowdsourcing is the future of management and organisations that fail to embrace this “management 2.0” model will become increasingly irrelevant, according to leadership guru, Gary Hamel.
Speaking yesterday at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s annual conference in Manchester, he described old management 1.0 methods that focused on conformism, standardisation and formal hierarchies as a “busted flush” that had to be “replaced from the bottom up” – and he believed that HR were just the people to do it.
But in order to adapt to a world of constant change, it was vital to challenge old beliefs and rethink core principles, the director of the Management Innovation Exchange and visiting professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School said.
The idea was to take the “technology of management” and find ways to meld it with the most “adaptable and innovative” thing that we as a species had ever created – the social web.
Such an approach would involve balancing apparent polar opposites such as the act of ‘evaluation’ with the concept of ‘folkonomies’ or the act of ‘organising’ with the idea of ‘social networks’.
“According to Max Weber, the ideology of management is controlism and so it was a given that you’d create stable, reliable organisations. But that’s just table stakes and it doesn’t create value in a changing economy,” Hamel explained. “If you want adaptable, innovative organisations, you need to give people the freedom to think, take small risks, experiment.”
Such an approach would mean decentralising power, making it “legitimate to hack management processes” and taking away “the management monopoly on resource allocation” to enable the funding of good ideas.
It would also mean allowing “communities of passion” based on advocacy and activism as well as natural hierarchies based on influence to form as they did on the web. “You have to give everyone a voice to change management approaches,” Hamel pointed out.
The idea was that every individual was “inspiring, innovative and the like already”, but traditional management processes had tried to go against nature and make them into semi-programmable robots in the workplace. “Our challenge now is to make them human again in order to create success in our organisations,” Hamel concluded.
