The rise of the business anarchist

If you work in a large organisation, no doubt you’ll have analysts everywhere; you may well be one yourself. You know who they are, what they do, what part they play: financial analysts, business analysts, process analysts, quality analysts and the like, keeping track of activity, performance, change.

But what about your business anarchists? Do you know who they are, what they do, what part they play, in managing the overall needs of the business? And how much your business depends on them?

And no, I’m not joking: every business does have a real need for its anarchists, every bit as much as its need for its analysts. For example, take a look at the list of ‘Six Essential Skills for Exponential Times‘, by brand consultant and social-media strategist Michelle Tripp (and also expanded on by Burton Group consultant Mike Rollings in his post ‘What to do when waking out of an EA induced coma‘):

• Skill #1: Rule-breaking – “Rule breakers will be ready to consider possibilities that others are told ‘don’t make sense’ or ‘aren’t the way things are done around here.’”
• Skill #2: Entrepreneurial – “Seeking out new opportunities and new ways of connecting and creating … finding them even when there isn’t an available mentor or an established path.”
• Skill #3: Self-Educating – “More proactive than ever in learning independently and not relying on structured programs … don’t sit back and wait to be taught … searching for information and charting their own educational course.”
• Skill #4: Bonding – “Bonding will be a matter of how much value you can provide to the people you’ve promised it to. … Those bonds can be through adding value to people’s lives through technology, information, guidance, validation, or friendship.”
• Skill #5: Revolutionary – “Revolutionaries are at the forefront, creating the future. … Brains that thrive on change, innovation and invention, high information uptake, and leveraging technologies are geared for the future.”
• Skill #6: Visionary – “Everything is changing faster than ever. … Having the skill of vision allows you to imagine what’s possible, imagine what’s next, and predict the needs and values of tomorrow.”

In short, the skills of thinking side-wise.

These aren’t the skills that we would expect from an analyst: far from it, in fact. In Cynefin terms, the tasks of an analyst sit squarely in the squarely in the domain of the ‘Complicated’ – calm, calculated, everything according to the rules. Which works just fine as long as everything stays much the same. But when the world changes, becomes uncertain – when we move into the Cynefin domain of the ‘Chaotic’, where the assumptions that underpin the analyst’s so-certain rules no longer apply – those analyst-skills may well be worse than useless, giving us nominal ‘right answers’ to what turn out in practice to be the wrong questions. That’s when we need a very different set of skills, to find out what questions we really need to ask. That’s when we need those skills above; that’s when we need people who are comfortable with the chaos and confusion of change. That, in short, is when we need our business-anarchists.

Don’t worry: we’re not talking about ‘kiddies-anarchy’ here – pointless disruption for disruption’s sake, or the classic student stupidity of “all property must be liberated, but don’t you dare touch my stuff!”. There’s no discipline there, no awareness of personal responsibility in a complex social context. Instead, each of those skills above have their own distinct disciplines, and, like the analysts’ skills, will rely on many years’-worth of experience to do well. The catch is that, as the Cynefin model demonstrates, the business-anarchist’s disciplines and experience are structurally different from those of the analyst – so if we try to measure them in the same terms as for the analyst, we’ll be in deep trouble straight away.

What we need from an analyst is depth of experience, in what marketers would call a vertical domain. Analysts are specialists – many years of practice in a single domain, steadily developing their skills and, especially, their speed at the work. As Cynefin shows, the core tactic is ‘sense / analyse / respond’, and the key driver is a kind of ‘outer truth’, with that ‘truth’ identifiable in concrete, repeatable terms. In that sense, the analyst’s performance is relatively easy to measure, and the tasks easy to monitor, too.

But what we need from an anarchist is breadth of experience – horizontal rather than vertical. Anarchists are generalists – many years of practice at connecting across multiple domains, cross-fertilising, creating conversations between them, linking different ideas and experiences via analogy and metaphor. Yet here the key drivers are principles or values, and, as Cynefin shows, the core tactic is ‘act / sense / respond’ – we have to do something to shake things up enough to sense what’s going on and which way to go. So performance is hard to measure, because there are no clear rules to measure against; and tasks are difficult to predefine, too, because by its nature much of the work deals with inherent uncertainty. Tricky…

Generalists are the ‘glue’ that hold the organisation together: without them, there would be no end-to-end processes, nothing of practical use towards the organisation’s aims. But another problem here is that the generalist’s experience in any single domain will necessarily be less than those of an equivalent specialist who’s worked only within that one domain: so the generalist will almost always come off worst in any single skill-for-skill comparison – often leading to some very misleading performance measures. Worse, if most of our measures are ‘vertical’ (as they usually are in large organisations), then, according to those measures, the more that generalists do their real work of ‘horizontal’ connection, the less they’ll appear to do – which again can lead to some very misleading ideas about performance, with less-skilled generalists appearing to do more work than the most experienced ones. Tricky indeed…

So when do you need those business-anarchists? Who on your existing staff would be good at this kind of role – or already is? How can you tell the good from the not-so-good? And what support would they need from you to do that role well?

When do you need business-anarchists, and for what purpose?

When the world is certain, you don’t need an anarchist shaking things up: that’s when you’d be better to stick to plain ol’ everyday analysis. But fact is that the business world is not certain – especially not at the present time, where stability is more the exception than the norm, and where the roller-coaster-ness of the ride sometimes seems to get rougher by the day. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to need people who thrive on coping with chaos – the business-anarchists.

The trick here is to identify what changes, and what doesn’t – which is where business-architecture and enterprise-architecture would come into the picture, because those are key tools to help you tell the difference. Where things don’t change, or don’t change much – and there’s still a lot of those, even in the most innovative business – stick to the analysis: don’t rock the boat just for the sake of doing so. Efficiency will always matter; so will operations excellence. Use statistics and the rest wherever appropriate. But remember that statistical analysis only works well when you’re dealing with large numbers of things that are exactly the same – or supposed to be the same: for example, by definition, Six Sigma makes little sense unless you’re dealing with literally millions of identical events. If the products or tasks have a high degree of inherent variance, or have any significant ‘one-off’ elements, you’ll need to apply anarchist-like approaches to those parts that change.

Who would do this work well?

Look for the natural generalists on your staff: the people who can get interested in anything, and like making connections between different domains, different levels of abstraction, different professions, different people. You need people with both breadth and depth, and intimate knowledge of your industry and context: outside consultants may help, but experienced ‘insiders’ usually have the most to offer.

Natural talents and tendencies  may help: for example, people with Myers-Briggs xNxP ‘types’ may tend to think and act in an anarchist mode by nature. But much more important is experience: people need to know ‘the rules’, and know them well, in order to understand how and when and why to bend them to make things work better.

What are the critical success factors?

Analysis depends on the quality of algorithms and data. By contrast, the business-anarchist depends on the clarity of the organisation’s principles and values, to act as the beacon or ‘guiding star’ in conditions of inherent uncertainty. Use a structured framework such as vision, role, mission, goal to aid in anchoring those principles into everyday practice.

As above, experience is a key factor here – especially experience across a wide range of domains, and at every different level of those domains. Unlike analysis, theory alone is not enough here: it also needs to be grounded in practice, in hands-on experience, yet also with enough awareness to be able to break out of the “do it the way we’ve always done it” trap.

And there also needs to be discipline in moving between the domains: a dilettante ‘scattergun’ approach to new ideas will not be enough, especially in developing sustainable business-anarchist skills over the longer term. (See here for a ‘cheat-sheet’ on moving between disciplines in a rather different set of skills: the domains may seem strange at first, but the same principles do apply even in everyday business.)

What support do your business-anarchists need from you?

In a context where things are inherently uncertain, we need to make it safe to fail, or at least safe to seem to ‘not-succeed’ in the expected way. Where ‘command and control’ would require everything to be ‘fail-safe’, here we need to allow for safe-fail – for ‘graceful failure’, for practice-space, for fallback to a known recovery condition, and so on. The purpose of an experiment is to learn, to probe into the unknown (the ‘emergent’ domain, in Cynefin terms) so as to arrive at some new understanding – so if we only allow so-called ‘experiments’ that will tell us what we already know, we fail before we start.

You will only get appropriate innovation happening within the business if you make it safe for people to ‘fail’. Simple as that.

Your business-anarchists also need protection in several different senses, often right up at the executive levels:

• business-anarchists must necessarily break the rules: to do their work, they will need official sanction to ‘break the rules’ appropriately
• business-anarchists and other generalists must often bridge across the silos, necessarily breaking through bureacractic boundaries: they’ll often need formal authority to do this
• by definition, cross-functional generalists will usually have multiple reporting-relationships, often skipping over or sidestepping the ‘normal’ hierarchies: they’ll need protection from possibly-disgruntled managers in order to do this

Hence another clear, simple point: you will only gain business value from your business-anarchists and other generalists if you make it safe for them to do their work.

And in the same way that, in Six Sigma and the like, everyone is an analyst, everyone needs to be an anarchist in their own way too. Many innovative companies allocate work-time for everyone to explore their own new ideas and new business practices: India’s Tata Group, for example, allot everyone an hour a day for personal experiments, whilst at Google and 3M it’s the equivalent of a full day each week. Sure, most experiments may well go nowhere: but those that do succeed bring huge returns that repay that ‘wasted’ work-time many, many times over – and it took a real ‘anarchist’ mindset to turned a ‘failed’ experimental glue at 3M into the almost immeasurable business success that is the ubiquitous Post-It® note.

So who are your business-anarchists? And how can you help them do their work, to help create your company’s success? A question that’s worth pondering in practice, perhaps…?