Which forms of operational structure support the most productive, innovative and healthy organisations?
Looking back from future years, we will likely see that one of the greatest industrial trends that was catalysed by the Covid-19 pandemic was the normalisation of remote work. Many conventional businesses with colocated offices were forced to reconfigure their working practices for a suddenly socially-distanced world. However, we entered this disruptive period along with an existing subculture of organisations that were already evangelised to the Church of Remote, and had developed highly adaptive processes for it. Furthermore, it looks likely that the pandemic produced a swathe of new Remote converts that have no desire to return to the office, at least not full-time.
The removal of colocated office life has had many industrial and social benefits, including increased productivity, reduced business costs, and lifestyle improvements, yet it has also yielded concomitant problems such as feelings of isolation, household relational friction, strains on legacy operational systems, and the loss of the proverbial "water-cooler conversations" that arose from in-person collisions. Tackling these issues effectively seems largely to come down to the purposeful implementation of various interpersonal strategies that are better suited to remote-work environments. We address some of these collectively in the Cooperative Behaviours section.
Beyond simply trying to replicate traditional industrial operations in the absence of an office, we can also consider more radical and systemic corporate restructurings. We can look to examples, both old and new, of organisations that are effective in their sector yet have no need for some of the most basic traditional components, such as a formal hierarchy of authority, management layer, or a centralised source of direction, wealth or resourcing. And while unconventional structures such as self-management and cooperatives have existed for many years, the Internet Age has generated new decentralised and digitised flavours of org chart to choose from. More than ever, we can question the fundamentals of what words like company, business, organisation and team mean.