Helix Model for Future Proofing Organizations

Unaware of this method.

Future-proofing the organization the ‘helix’ way

The German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen is reinventing a key division. Its head of transformation explains how separating the company’s people leadership from its product lines improves both.

By Kirsten Weerda,    McKinsey

The German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen is reinventing a key division. Its head of transformation explains how separating the company’s people leadership from its product lines improves both.

Balancing flexibility and stability is the goal of any organizational structure. In fast-changing industries, flexibility supports the mastery of technological shifts while stability provides the much-needed efficiency to scale them up. Yet, too much flexibility breeds inefficiency or even disorder. And too much stability invites inertia and bureaucracy. Locating the sweet spot is elusive. Julian Fieres and his team are trying to find it—and bring the organization along with them.

Fieres, the head of transformation, strategy, and sustainability at ZF Friedrichshafen AG (ZF), Electrified Powertrain Technology division, is in the thick of a transformation involving two newly merged business units that together account for 30,000 employees and $10 billion in annual sales. Rather than combine the divisions in the usual way, however, ZF shook up the management hierarchy by separating people-leadership responsibilities from the task of running the product lines that form the traditional heart of the division. The result is a “helix” model featuring two parallel lines of accountability—a “dynamic axis” for the product lines themselves and a “stable axis” for the people, capabilities, and functional domains that support them. As with other agile organization models, the helix allows people and other resources to be shifted much more flexibly across product lines, helping ZF to compete in the fast-evolving landscape of e-mobility. ... "

Expanding AI's Impact with Organizational Learning

I participated in the below study, they make the point that it will be available only for a short time.  Here is the start of the document:

MIT Sloan: EXPANDING AI’S IMPACT WITH ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Most companies developing AI capabilities have yet to gain significant financial benefits from their efforts. Only when organizations add the ability to learn with AI do significant benefits become likely.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Register to download the full report   *Registration Required .... 

Only 10% of companies obtain significant financial benefits from artificial intelligence technologies. Why so few?

Our research shows that these companies intentionally change processes, broadly and deeply, to facilitate organizational learning with AI. Better organizational learning enables them to act precisely when sensing opportunity and to adapt quickly when conditions change. Their strategic focus is organizational learning, not just machine learning.

Organizational learning with AI is demanding. It requires humans and machines to not only work together but also learn from each other — over time, in the right way, and in the appropriate contexts. This cycle of mutual learning makes humans and machines smarter, more relevant, and more effective. Mutual learning between human and machine is essential to success with AI. But it’s difficult to achieve at scale.

Our research — based on a global survey of more than 3,000 managers, as well as interviews with executives and scholars — confirms that a majority of companies are developing AI capabilities but have yet to gain significant financial benefits from their efforts. More than half of all respondents affirm that their companies are piloting or deploying AI (57%), have an AI strategy (59%), and understand how AI can generate business value (70%). These numbers reflect statistically significant increases in adoption, strategy development, and understanding from four years ago. What’s more, a growing number of companies recognize a business imperative to improve their AI competencies. Despite these trends, just 1 in 10 companies generates significant financial benefits with AI.

We analyzed responses to over 100 survey questions to better understand what really enables companies to generate significant financial benefits with AI. We found that getting the basics right — like having the right data, technology, and talent, organized around a corporate strategy — is far from sufficient. Only 20% of companies achieve significant financial benefits with these fundamentals alone. Getting the basics right and building AI solutions that the business wants and can use improve the odds of obtaining significant financial benefits, but to just 39%.

Our key finding: Only when organizations add the ability to learn with AI do significant benefits become likely. With organizational learning, the odds of an organization reporting significant financial benefits increase to 73%.

Organizations that learn with AI have three essential characteristics:

1. They facilitate systematic and continuous learning between   ..... " 

Imperatives for Intelligent Organizations

Reading, not sure I completely agree with the premise.  What rules really?  OK,  Our better understanding of the patterns in business we can leverage.  Still a good piece.   And from SAS/SMR , relatively quite credible.  Our use of SAS thinking made us strong from the beginning.  More intelligent organization, certainly.

How AI Changes the Rules
New Imperatives for the Intelligent Organization
Many leaders are excited about AI’s potential to profoundly transform their organization.

According to our recent survey of more than 2,200 business leaders, managers and key contributors, "63% of respondents overall said they expect AI to drive dramatic or significant organizational change."

Are you ready for what’s coming? Read the full MIT SMR Report, How AI Changes the Rules: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Organization, to learn what’s needed to prepare for – and benefit from – AI.

Paper is here.

Transforming Organizations

My own observation is that this is very haphazardly done. This piece looks at key variables.  But how do you make sure these variables are addressed, measured and adapted?   You need a Model to guide you.

What does it take to transform corporate organizations? New research reveals the variables that matter most.  ...    from McKinsey

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.    .... "

Towards an Analytics Academy

We kind of did this during an earlier AI era.  It worked early on, but was not connected well enough to the needs of the company, and expectations of it being democratized did not work because there was not enough support.  And the technologies had not matured enough to make them work for us, so many of the capabilities went back to more tried and true analytics.  Which were still very successful.  While the magic existed in the hype, it did not suffice in practice for continued application.

The analytics academy: Bridging the gap between human and artificial intelligence  By McKinsey

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the defining business opportunities for leaders today. Closely associated with it: the challenge of creating an organization that can rise to that opportunity and exploit the potential of AI at scale.

Meeting this challenge requires organizations to prepare their leaders, business staff, analytics teams, and end users to work and think in new ways—not only by helping these cohorts understand how to tap into AI effectively, but also by teaching them to embrace data exploration, agile development, and interdisciplinary teamwork.

Often, companies use an ad hoc approach to their talent-building efforts. They hire new workers equipped with these skills in spurts and rely on online-learning platforms, universities, and executive-level programs to train existing employees.

But these quick-fix tactics aren’t enough to transform an organization into one that’s fully AI-driven and capable of keeping up with the blazing pace of change in both technology and the nature of business competition that we’re experiencing today. While hiring new talent can address immediate resource needs, such as those required to rapidly build out an organization’s AI practice at the start, it sidesteps a critical need for most organizations: broad capability building across all levels. This is best accomplished by training current employees. Educational offerings from external parties have limitations, too: they aren’t designed to deliver the holistic, company-specific training or the cohesive, repeatable protocols essential for driving deep and lasting cultural changes, agile and cross-functional collaboration, and rapid scaling.   .... "

Institutions that last Ten Thousand Years

We had early interaction with some of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, which was very thought provoking.   Here an interview with its Exec Director in the Edge:

How to Create an Institution That Lasts 10,000 Years
A Conversation with Alexander Rose

We’re also looking at the oldest living companies in the world, most of which are service-based. There are some family-run hotels and things like that, but also a huge amount in the food and beverage industry. Probably a third of the organizations or the companies over 500 or 1,000 years old are all in some way in wine, beer, or sake production. I was intrigued by that crossover.

What’s interesting is that humanity figured out how to ferment things about 10,000 years ago, which is exactly the time frame where people started creating cities and agriculture. It’s unclear if civilization started because we could ferment things, or we started fermenting things and therefore civilization started, but there’s clearly this intertwined link with fermenting beer, wine, and then much later spirits, and how that fits in with hospitality and places that people gather.

All of these things are right now just nascent bits and pieces of trying to figure out some of the ways in which organizations live for a very long time. While some of them, like being a family-run hotel, may not be very portable as an idea, some of them, like some of the natural strategies, we're just starting to understand how they can be of service to humanity. If we broaden the idea of service industry to our customer civilization, how can you make an institution whose customer is civilization and can last for a very long time?

ALEXANDER ROSE is the executive director of The Long Now Foundation, manager of the 10,000 Year Clock Project, and curator of the speaking series' at The Interval and The Battery SF.  ... " 

Rethinking Sales and Marketing

Have always been interested in how resources are delivered, and a big part of that is how the resources are organized and classified for useful application. 

Rethinking The Sales And Marketing Organization  By Dave Brock in Customerthink

We continue to organize our sales and marketing initiatives around what makes us more efficient or old views of how customers buy.

Classically, marketing’s focus is on creating interest and awareness, then driving demand.  The work toward MQLs, turning them over to sales, hopefully as SALs, saying “Good luck and godspeed!, we caught ’em, you skin ’em.”

Sales picks up the process, SDRs call to qualify the opportunity, they hand the lead to an account manager who gets more information, the customer is handed over to a pre-sales person for a demo, then someone else try to close them.

The overall marketing/sales assembly line takes customers through this linear process, all oriented to moving the customer through a buying decision.

Of course there are variants to this, there may be an account focus or orientation, there may be some sort of nurturing loop for customers that are not ready to buy, but as soon as we can we want to drop them into our marketing and sales assembly line.

Except our assembly line/linear customer engagement model doesn’t reflect how our customers buy.  Our customers aren’t engaged in a linear buying process, in fact, when we start mapping it, the process is very complex.  It’s a series of starts, stops, changes, reassessment, abandonment, restarting, stopping, going backwards, restarting, changing scope, adding new buying team members, more changes………

But we aren’t structured to be able to respond to the customer’s chaotic buying process.

How do we rethink things to have half a chance of intersecting the customer wherever they are at and trying to move them forward? .... "

Scaling Knowledge

Interesting question.   Ultimately we must scale to operation.  What are the challenges?  In part the knowledge within the org charts, and what are the implications for decision makers.

Scaling Knowledge
The hardest thing about scaling a company is communication.

The more people that work at a company, the more nodes in the network, the more links between them. In a completely decentralized network, the number of connections is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. In a hierarchical network, each node is only connected to X peers, which limits complexity but also significantly decreases the flow of information. The reason why messaging platforms like Slack are so important today is that they reduce communication friction, allowing companies greater flexibility and/or greater throughput in how they design their communications network architectures. Or, in people-speak: their org charts.

If you’ve ever been at a company that has grown from 20 to 500 employees, you will have felt this process in your lived experience. What were once impromptu conversations turn into scheduled meetings. Your calendar starts to come under pressure. You simply spend a greater percentage of your time saying or typing words to other people.

There are three types of knowledge that people within a company need to communicate to one another.  ... "

Implementing and Sustaining Organizational Change

Back to a topic I have been following.  Its process that sustains business, but also the organization and resources that support the process ...

How to implement and sustain organizational change

The fundamentals of change implementation are crucial for not only top-level executives but also frontline managers who are involved in the day-to-day work. ... 

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey senior implementation leaders Blake Lindsay and Nick Waugh speak with Simon London about the hard work of implementing and sustaining change in organizations—a priority that needs attention from the executive leadership and the frontline managers of each team. ... " 

Organization as a Network of Conversations

Can better organized conversations create intelligence?

Organization as a network of conversations.

In MIT Sloan Review

" ...  In 2004, when Brad Mills became the CEO of Lonmin, the British mining company operating in South Africa, it faced a depressing future. It was so rife with conflicts among management, labor, the local community, and dysfunctional organizational silos that it was hard to discern any collective vision for the company at all. So, as one of his first acts, Mills brought together 100 leaders from the company, along with unions, tribes, and the local community, to participate in a two-day-long designed conversation. The goal of the engagement? To envision a new, compelling future for Lonmin and its stakeholders.

Mills appealed to what the assembled representatives had in common — their humanity — promoting the idea that people can create something exciting by working together as human beings. During the next two days, conversations turned from initial animosity toward what they could build together. The stakeholders began to see themselves — their interests as well as their potential contributions — in Lonmin’s future.

Mills’ approach relies on a uniquely powerful perspective that is rare among executives: the ability to see an organization as a fundamentally linguistic entity. From this vantage, conversation is the primary organizing principle of organizational management. By “conversation,” we mean any linguistic means of communication, ranging from speaking and listening to writing and images. Put simply, a company is the sum of all corporate dialogues, what we call a “network of conversations.”

Conversation in the Leadership Context

Researchers have noted that compliance-based, command-and-control organizations are less viable in today’s global, pluralistic business networks where commercial success may depend on collaborative value creation with partners and customers. The “network of conversations” framing is a logical extension of this perspective. It points toward a fundamental corporate reality: Conversations, whether acknowledged or not, are going on all the time; unacknowledged conversations, however, are not being managed or led. Managers assume that passing along memos, directives, and policies constitutes “conversation,” but often these become mere “topics” of the real, informal conversations that are already occurring in the larger network. Recognizing and managing conversational networks can enrich and accelerate diverse information flows.

This ubiquity of conversations makes the “network of conversations” perspective not only powerful but also an imperative for managers and leaders. While there are many ways to classify conversations (functional, legal, gossip, etc.), we want to highlight three fundamental conversational dimensions — leadership, managerial, and individual — to show how they can be aligned for greater organizational performance.   ... "

Contextual Assistants Needed

O'Reilly piece on the challenge of contextual chatbots. And beyond the need to keep track of past conversations and plan future goals.

The next generation of AI assistants in enterprise
Chatbots are just the first step in the journey to achieve true AI assistants and autonomous organizations.   ... By Alan Nichol  

" ... However, chatbots are not the end game. We know from working with Fortune 500 companies there are powerful examples showing that state of the art chatbots can work and actually do help companies generate additional revenue or save costs. Our mission is to work toward true AI assistants that make it possible for customers to express what they want, in their own terms, without a human on the other end.


AI assistants can be applied both for direct customer service and within the operations of an organization. AI that understands customers, context, and that can be proactive will lead to automation of many repetitive tasks. ... "

New Tech Altering Business Organization

Interesting claim, though don't quite agree yet.   The tech is still valuable procedural and operational augmentation,  and not structural change.   Can see it leading to that though to drive more value.

AI, VR And AR Are Transforming Business Organisation
New research from CompTIA suggests that AI, blockchain, VR and AR are instrumental in the modernisation of global businesses.  By Kevin Joyce   in VRFocus

Amid a wave of hype around emerging technologies, three specific trends are showing the potential to help businesses transform the way they operate, according to a series of research briefs published by CompTIA. To varying degrees, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are becoming a more prominent technology in the digital operations of organisations, the publications reveal.   .... " 

On the Amazon Machine

Have now had a number of interactions with Amazon, at several levels.  Worth understanding their unusual organizational structure.

More on the Amazon machine, by Ben Evans.

How Amazon's decentralized operating structure and small, independent teams that use common internal systems, are integral to the company's unending scalability  —  When you look at large manufacturing companies, it becomes very clear that the machine that makes the machine is just as important as the machine itself.  .... " 

Organizational Management

Good podcast, back to the notion of 'chasing shiny objects'.

What every leader needs to know about organizational management
Leaders of organizations should beware chasing the next shiny object and instead focus on practical, time-tested topics that have proved to bring success..... 

There’s so much lore around management and organizational leadership that it can seem nearly impossible to decide what tactics, advice, or best practices to follow. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey senior partners Scott Keller and Mary Meaney speak with McKinsey’s Simon London about the ten timeless—and thoroughly researched—topics in management that they have found to be the keys to leading organizations to success. ... " 

Culture for a Digital Age

From McKinsey. Good piece, though I think that there is value in diversity of culture as well, even outside these proclaimed boundaries.

Culture for a digital age
Risk aversion, weak customer focus, and siloed mind-sets have long bedeviled organizations. In a digital world, solving these cultural problems is no longer optional. ..."

Shortcomings in organizational culture are one of the main barriers to company success in the digital age. That is a central finding from McKinsey’s recent survey of global executives (Exhibit 1), which highlighted three digital-culture deficiencies: functional and departmental silos, a fear of taking risks, and difficulty forming and acting on a single view of the customer. .... " 

Corporate Transformation

Transformation with a capital T
By Michael Bucy, Stephen Hall, and Doug Yakola

"....Transformation is perhaps the most overused term in business. Often, companies apply it loosely—too loosely—to any form of change, however minor or routine. There are organizational transformations (otherwise known as org redesigns), when businesses redraw organizational roles and accountabilities. Strategic transformations imply a change in the business model. The term transformation is also increasingly used for a digital reinvention: companies fundamentally reworking the way they’re wired and, in particular, how they go to market.

What we’re focused on here—and what businesses like the previously mentioned bank and basic-resource companies need—is something different: a transformation with a capital T, which we define as an intense, organization-wide program to enhance performance (an earnings improvement of 25 percent or more, for example) and to boost organizational health. When such transformations succeed, they radically improve the important business drivers, such as topline growth, capital productivity, cost efficiency, operational effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and sales excellence. 

Because such transformations instill the importance of internal alignment around a common vision and strategy, increase the capacity for renewal, and develop superior execution skills, they enable companies to go on improving their results in sustainable ways year after year. These sorts of transformations may well involve exploiting new digital opportunities or accompany a strategic rethink. But in essence, they are largely about delivering the full potential of what’s already there .... " 

Four Case Studies for a Data Driven Organization

 In the MIT Sloan Review:   Four case Studies for Data Driven Orgs

Organizations across the business spectrum are awakening to the transformative power of data and analytics. They are also coming to grips with the daunting difficulty of the task that lies before them. It’s tough enough for many organizations to catalog and categorize the data at their disposal and devise the rules and processes for using it. It’s even tougher to translate that data into tangible value. But it’s not impossible, and many organizations, in both the private and public sectors, are learning how. ... " 

Considering Rebel Talent

Let Your Workers Rebel  by Francesca Gino
Employee engagement is a problem. To fix it, encourage your workers to break rules and be themselves. We’ll show you who does it right and how you can too.

Longer Career Models

A look at exended and multiple careers, from the view of the company and individual.

In the HBR: What Happens When Careers Last 20 Years Longer?  by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox