I was recently invited to on “on-stage” at BIF-5. They asked what I would talk about – here is what I wrote…
Cloud Leadership – Rich Antcliff, NASA Langley Research Center
We are in the midst of an experiment.
NASA Langley has been around for 92 years – a lot of bureaucracy builds up in that amount of time. At the same time, NASA’s mission requires tremendous levels of innovation to be successful. We are attempting to break the negative implications of this bureaucracy while taking advantage of the lessons learned and economies of scale it provides. In addition, we are a service organization to NASA, and are experiencing extreme pressure to reduce our resource drain on the larger organization – cut budgets, cut staff, etc.
The industrial organizational models of W.L.Gore and Semco have dramatically influenced our efforts. We have stolen liberally their ideas and concepts. However, what we have done is apply them within an unbending governmental organizational structure. We still have to live with all of the Office of Personnel Management and NASA laws, regulations and policies, but perhaps apply them differently.
So, we created Cloud Leadership. The title is meant to tickle your brain to think of cloud computing – as it is similar. The diagram shows our organizational structure. As you can see it is not your traditional hierarchy. The titles on the outside of the octagon represent our outward facing points of contact. This is what the outside world sees; to them it is very easy to access the services they need through what they consider a traditional pathway. However, inside the octagon is were the magic happens.
Inside the octagon
- there are no bosses, there are independent professionals, these professionals decide what they will work on. They form teams and they disband teams. They follow their passion. They lead!
- the POCs have access to all of the employees in the organization to meet the needs of our customers – however, the employees must want to help them meet that need
- there are no policies and regulations, just suggestions (we do follow the laws). We have a set of values that we agree on and live. If the “rules” get in our way we ignore them or change them – depending on the pain.
- there are no communication rules or pathways – everyone is expected to talk to everyone about everything if you want or need to.
- we work under forgiveness rather than permission. Mistakes are a part of learning and growing we expect them (hope for them).
- creative idea generation and execution is in their performance plans – which they write.
It is a work in progress, most of the workforce has worked in a traditional hierarchy all of their lives – they don’t know how to exercise this much freedom. We are learning together. The changes we are seeing are primarily in people’s attitude and motivation – and folks on the outside of the octagon are beginning to notice a change in our services. The savings of cloud leadership are also being retuned to the center to invest in long-term research.
PS – I’d love to get your thoughts, suggestions, rasberries – whatever!
3 comments
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October 1, 2009 at 10:33 am
Karen Dempster
What an awesome concept. Malcom Baldridge would love it!
October 28, 2009 at 7:55 pm
brendan coram
I was wowed when I read Maverick and I am wowed now.
I am curious about how strategic decisions emerge from the cloud. In particular I am curious about your use of common values and flexible rules. To my mind, you seem to be following an emergent approach based on a number of simple guiding forces.
A paper published by Eisenhardt & Sull described the concept of simple rules. Roughtly speaking, a business operating in this manner would define a number of visionary guiding rules (i) How to rules – the way we do things arond here, (ii) boundary rules – what we won’t do, (iii) priority rules – how to work out what to do first, (iv) timing rules – how to work together and not against each other over time, (v) exit rules – how to quit whilst you are ahead.
What are your thoughts on this and why can’t everyone do it? I note ricardo semler has impressed people wiht his success, but gained few followers prepared to implement this concept. Do we just prefer to try and predict what will happen rather than move forwards in the knowledge that we’ll figure it out as we go?
October 28, 2009 at 8:31 pm
richantcliff
Good questions, I’ll try to answer, but please remember this is an experirmnt in the early stages of trial – we don’t have it all figured out yet!
Strategic decisions – we will have to agree on what a strategic decision is. If a strategic decision is a decision that is aligined with our strategy, than all employee are empowered to make these decisions. If they do not know – they ask the leadership team, which is composed of the POCs. If you mean something else, please ask again.
We are still working on codifying our rules, but they certainly cover the scope of the categories you descibe (except perhaps exit strategy), however we do not have them seperated in these categories – it may be worth a good thinking to see how they are partitioned.
Why is this not more widespread? – The Gore folks have indicated that once the organization size gets over about 250 people this model breaks down – you can’t keep up the high level of communications required to make it work. They have responded by breaking all of their operations down to units of 250 or less. I think the other reality is that this model requires a significant amount of trust in your people not to take advantage of the freedom, and therefore the responsibility to deal with deviants from the agreed on norms.
That’s all I got for now