Three Fundamental Organizational Types
What type of organization do you have? What type do you want?
All models are wrong, but some are useful. With that obligatory nod to Box, here goes.
Westrum’s organizational typology (original paper, tech-focused explainer) can be a bit abstract in describing organizations as:
Pathological
Bureaucratic
Generative
In my opinion, a more practical and nuanced view that still conveys the spirit of the original is:
Personality-driven
Process-driven
Systems-driven
Westrum anchors on outcomes and works backward to behaviors, while I find it easier to go from cause —> effect instead. Westrum also (inadvertently?) creates a sense of mutual exclusivity among the types, while I prefer a model that is inherently visible as shades of gray. Finally, Westrum has chosen names that carry strong positive/negative connotations, whereas I think each of these three types has a legitimate place, however small, in your organizational toolbox.
tl;dr
Personality-driven organizations are disempowering and lack resilience. A team will not do its best work and is immediately vulnerable when there are changes, especially to leadership. However, people with strong personalities — if well-intentioned and competent — may have a significant role to play as a potential first step in rebuilding a broken organization or one that needs to be revived or revivified.
Process-driven organizations are disempowering but do have some resilience. Given that processes fundamentally are about efficiently accomplishing work, a team will do good work if its processes are well-designed and appropriate, and if the environment does not demand frequent adaptation. Teams with good processes will be resilient to changes in leadership for at least some time.
Systems-driven organizations are empowering and resilient. Given good systems, teams do their best work even in dynamic environments and will be resilient to all kinds of changes including changes in leadership. A key attribute of a good system is that it enables the organization to build or change processes and to outlive personalities.
Personality-driven
Key question: what would X do?
Use when: (and only when) you need to give an organization a jolt
Depends on: a well-intentioned and competent leader
Watch out for: the jolt becoming a cult and descending into tyranny
Biggest weakness: you can only jolt once or twice
Personalities lead with power or charisma. Strong personalities can help rouse organizations from a stupor and create the initial burst of energy needed to rebuild organizations that are asleep or, worse, broken. That’s… pretty much it. Personality-driven organizations have no other features that redeem them from their serious shortcomings.
An organization that’s in the dumps doesn’t have grassroots energy to tap into, and it wouldn’t have ended up in the dumps were it not for ineffective leadership and middle management in the first place. An energetic leader who can inject new ideas and catalyze action through the force of their personality can provide a much-needed jolt of energy. Such leaders can be defibrillators who restart an organizational heart that may have stopped beating. Defibrillators? Really? Yeah, really, because they don’t always work and definitely can’t be a long-term strategy to keep a heart beating.
But be careful, even a well-intentioned and competent leader will lead to a failed organization if they don’t evolve the organization out of a personality-driven structure and culture. A less than competent or, much worse, a less than well-intentioned leader will create organizational tyranny if the personality cult persists. Such leaders end up creating the pathological cultures that are the worst of Westrum’s typology.
Good leaders will adapt from being personality-driven (if necessary) to building processes to, eventually, building systems.
Example
Apple had been practically given up for dead. A wiser Steve Jobs, on his return, completely revitalized it without changing its essential identity. His first years back were probably strongly personality-driven. But seeing how well Apple has continued to do after Jobs’ demise is a clear indication that the organization built strong and resilient systems of success.
What about Elon Musk’s companies — will they survive him?
Process-driven
Key question: how?
Use when: you want to improve efficiency, reduce costs, reduce errors
Depends on: the work being well-defined and highly repeatable
Watch out for: ossifying, mindless processes
Biggest weakness: only works in stable environments, no long-term resilience
Processes make work more efficient. Processes help reduce error and minimize the cognitive load of completing a task. Processes also facilitate automation, which can improve completion speed and cost. Processes are visible, therefore observable, and so can be improved over time. The most useful processes emerge out of tasks that need to be done (rather than a priori definition), and may close the loop by becoming “best practice” or “standard”.
However, processes can unintentionally become mindless or labyrinthine, which (as anyone who’s worked with me knows) is one of my primary professional fears and something I worry about a lot :-(
When processes ossify into ends, rather than means towards ends, we end up with Westrum’s rule-driven bureaucratic cultures.
Example
Can’t come up with a good one and can’t talk too much about my personal experience! Perhaps GE in its heyday? Six sigma and all that?
Systems-driven
Key questions: what? why?
Use when: anytime!
Depends on: clear vision, collaborative culture, competent and motivated team
Watch out for: lack of observability
Biggest weakness: takes time to design, implement, and iterate
Systems make work more effective and build resilience. Systems are the environments in which we make decisions and do work. The word “systems” here is used in the sense of complex systems, feedback loops, emergent behavior, and such. More precisely, it is about deciding what type of behavior we want to have emerge, and then designing and continuously tweaking our loops and buffers to keep the system moving towards that desired behavior. Our systems have many complex parts including notoriously finicky humans, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking that system == machine.1
Using this mindset can enable adaptive processes to be built or modified to handle new, previously unseen stimuli and requirements. Systems enable decisions on what to do, whether as strategy or as tactics.
Organizational systems are composed of values and priorities and such mushy things, so they often tend to be invisible and “cultural”. As such, they are difficult to observe and impossible to quantitatively observe.
Ironically, even if a system is intended to facilitate bottom-up and highly empowered decision making, it needs to be designed, supported, and monitored top-down. To put it more simply, even an empowered organization needs a leader who fosters and supports that empowerment. Riffing on a cliché:
The most indispensable leaders are those who strive to make themselves dispensable.
Good systems underlie Westrum’s generative cultures.
Example
This is an easy one… Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System.
Related Inspiration
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders by L. David Marquet bookshop.org
Camille Fournier is quite a bit more eloquent on this matter.