Future of Work: Organizational Structures and Creativity

A bad system will defeat a good person every time.- W. Edwards Deming

Now here’s an interesting thing: if you’ve ever dived — even a little bit — into the world of organizational structures and design, you’ll likely come across the word ‘creativity’ hovering somewhere in the vicinity.

Why Creativity?

Over the past decade, ‘creativity’, thankfully, has become much more accepted as a basic human trait, and much less of a quality accessible only to artists, designers, dancers, writers and musicians: so-called ‘Creatives’. Furthermore, it’s becoming apparent that when we humans are given autonomy—to make decisions and, on the flip-side, take responsibility for our activities—we are able to act in a more creative (and happier) fashion. Which in turn has a positive impact on our productivity and ability to get stuff done.

Lars Tvede (author of The Creative Society) has looked at creativity and innovation across nations, and discovered that pivotal breakthroughs and disruptions in science, art, music, engineering, mathematics, etc., throughout human history can be attributed to a number of specific environmental factors, one of which is the decentralization of state power. In each case, the innovators had a high level of autonomy. In fact, Tvede says, human creativity has always been at its best when we had small city states. Empires—with no exceptions—self-combust when they grow too large: look what happened to the Romans or the Ottoman Empire.

By way of contrast, we can look at the example of the Apache Indian tribes of North America, effectively a decentralized ‘org’ that remained unconquered for decades because the Spanish Conquistadors were unable to locate core tribal leaders.

This robust character is what Tvede terms ‘networked decentralization’. The key takeaway for organizations being: if you want your org to support creativity in its people, you need to find ways to decentralize, while maintaining connectivity.

Decentralization is the process of redistributing or dispersing functions, powers, people or things away from a central location or authority.