This article is part of a series that discusses the management book Humanocracy. The core of Humanocracy is made up of seven principles that are intended to provide orientation when you have to design organizations or act within them. This article deals with the first principle: the principle of openness.
Published in the series:
The core idea
With the principle of openness, Hamel & Zanini address the question of how organizations manage to come up with new ideas. For them, openness is a decisive success factor, especially in the context of strategy processes. According to the authors, openness can be enhanced if organizations succeed in establishing four habits (181ff.):
First, untested but powerful assumptions should be critically scrutinized. In treating such assumptions as hypotheses, you maintain the possibility of being able to refute them.
Second, we should be alert to change. It is not only important to sharpen our senses for trends and changes, but also to anticipate waves of change in order to be able to recognize counter-trends at an early stage.
Third, the flexible use of skills and resources is important. This means recognizing and developing a company’s core competencies in order to be able to combine them into new products and services when circumstances change.
Fourth, it is important to identify unmet customer needs. This is not necessarily about revolutionary innovations; sometimes it is enough to make customers’ lives considerably easier with small ideas.
Hamel & Zanini are essentially proposing the inclusion of as many different perspectives as possible. If different internal organizational perspectives are taken seriously, for example, strategy development no longer seems to be the task of top management alone. For the authors, this explicitly includes incorporating perspectives from outside an organization – from customers as well as from other key stakeholders.
Our considerations
We also think it makes sense to include a variety of perspectives, especially when we have a fundamental strategic realignment or a redesign of organizational structures. But it is important not to underestimate how robust assumptions, myths, and beliefs are in organizations and what intense defensive reactions can be triggered by questioning them.
How would the authors react if the importance of openness were to be called into question? We are not raising any substantive objections at this point, but merely pointing out that organizations and their members are typically focused on cohesion. And there are good reasons for this, especially as opening up to unknown perspectives will initially result in a greater degree of uncertainty.
How it could work
Myths, dogmas, and beliefs can be found in all organizations. Although they sometimes create identity, they always generate the security needed to act and interact without further understanding. So, it is hardly surprising that questioning assumptions, myths, and beliefs triggers a defensive reaction. If you do start such a process (for which there may be good reasons), you should think carefully about demystifying your organization’s own certainties and establish a limited process to ensure that more uncertainty can be permitted and dealt with for the foreseeable future.
To do this, it is important to start by identifying the myths and beliefs as such. Only then can they be discussed and criticized. This will have to be done tactfully so that everyone can save their face – both the (former) defenders of the outdated myths as well as their challengers. Appeals along the lines of “Tell me your honest opinion!” are unlikely to have much effect as long as there are no discourse arenas that are well moderated and ensure that opinions are understood objectively and processed productively. Whether such discourse arenas exist is a question of the specific design of the organizational structures and strategic processes. How productively these are then played out depends, above all, on how well the perspectives and interests of the main players are known and how wisely discourse is moderated.
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