The Helix Organization and Beyond

The matrix doesn't work well anymore.   So I think there should also be stronger integration to knowledge and decision making.  And linkages to machines and data that represent knowledge.  There will always be outages in what people know, or can do.   Can a knowledge graph of data and agents fill in the gaps?  Detect the gaps?  Organize the solution?

The helix organization
In McKinsey
By Aaron De Smet, Sarah Kleinman, and Kirsten Weerda

Separating people-leadership tasks from day-to-day business leadership can help organizations strike a better balance between centralization and decentralization, reduce complexity, and embrace agility.

The CEO of a major global business, deeply frustrated, took time out recently as a large company-wide reorganization was stumbling toward its conclusion. Hard as he and his top team had tried, he told us, attempts to make collaboration and empowerment an enterprise-wide reality were foundering. Although he had been determined to ensure resources were reallocated across the group more dynamically, people and money remained doggedly stuck in slightly revamped silos. Tensions between the group’s central functions—such as finance, HR, and IT—and the group’s decentralized businesses were continuing to rumble. As he gazed at a new organization chart on his laptop, he scratched his head while trying to make sense of the complex collection of solid- and dotted-line reporting relationships floating across the screen.

As our business environment has become more complex and interconnected, we seem to be replicating that in our organizations, creating complex matrix structures that simply don’t work anymore.

The CEO in question is actually a composite of several with whom we’ve had different versions of this same conversation. Their frustrations, in turn, are similar in spirit to concerns we hear almost daily from many other senior executives. As our business environment has become more complex and interconnected, we seem to be replicating that in our organizations, creating complex matrix structures that simply don’t work anymore. We are overreliant on the same management tools for organization structure that we’ve been using for decades, namely hierarchical org charts with solid- and dotted-line reporting relationships.

There are no easy answers to deep-rooted organizational dysfunction. However, we’re increasingly convinced that there is a simple, exciting, and effective structural model that can replace complex matrix structures and help leaders across industries and geographies who struggle with confused roles and labored decision-making processes, and who feel they are failing to move quickly enough to exploit new market opportunities.

The “helix,” as we’ve dubbed it, is not a new idea. It has been around for decades in professional-service firms and in parts of some large global companies, and more recently in many agile enterprises. But until now, it has lacked a name and clear definition, and its power to unlock organizational bottlenecks and to strike a better balance between centralization and decentralization has never been properly articulated. It is seldom implemented at significant scale, and many organizations that initially embrace it slide back to more traditional (and often less effective) structures. That’s no coincidence. For reasons we will discuss, successfully adopting the helix requires management mind-sets and a talent infrastructure that many businesses do not currently possess.    .... "