book review by peter day
'The Three Ways of Getting Things Done' by Gerard Fairtlough
In 'Global Business' with Peter Day (BBC World Service, November 27th), the presenter questioned Gerard Fairtlough about the Triarchy Theory.
He began the programme with the comment that how business works or doesn’t is very important because we all have the nagging feeling that working life inside them could be better on two related levels. First, there is a general dissatisfaction over the way the hierarchy works. Second, there is a sense that people could work better.
He then outlined Gerard’s background and experience in business. Now that he is notionally retired, he is free to think about the business world and how best to build and shape and run business organizations. He has come to see that there are only really three ways to get things done in organizations. The first is hierarchy, that is a formal structure consisting of bosses and underlings. The second is heterarchy, where power is spread around and where there is no boss or everyone the boss. Finally, there is responsible autonomy – where you are encouraged to work by yourself but with a clear purpose and sense of responsibility. Gerard summed hierarchy up as knowing your work identity through the structure of ‘I have a boss, and he has a boss’, and so on. This is an inherited predisposition – that can be seen in the pecking order of alpha males in the animal kingdom. Whilst it may be natural, Gerard considers it to be corrosive to be part of any hierarchy, and he has begun to question the assumption that it is the only way.
Peter Day remarked that he could see why alternatives may work in small-scale businesses. However, hierarchy might seem to be the only practical way forward when small goes to big because of the inevitable loss of close contact. People think the alternatives will make you unproductive. And although he accepts that people don’t like hierarchy, they can’t see another way - especially in large companies.
Gerard pointed out that he had begun to see alternatives to hierarchy when he worked for Shell, especially Shell Chemicals – a company of about 5k people. He said that employees expect you to be dictatorial and interfering but he felt that he didn’t necessarily know better than the people working at the coalface, and that, as CEO, he might interfere in bad ways. Whilst he evidently knew some things pretty well, he found that by talking and sharing information and his own understanding with others, things got better. In a day by day way things changed for the better. They didn’t need to formally redraw the structural boxes and the lines between them. Restructuring, he asserts is itself a time wasting activity that reflects a hierarchical idea (i.e, that that restructuring is important). They didn’t waste time giving out formal authority, but talked a lot, involved a lot of people, agreed on what needed doing and then did it. That, he asserts, sums up the essence of the heterarchical process. It is the agreement, not the titles, that counts.
Day countered that if hierarchy is hardwired, this process goes against the grain. He asked whether people would naturally revert to type and blame the changes when things go wrong. Gerard agreed that, of course they would. In fact he thinks that it will take a long time to overcome our addiction to hierarchy. The changeover is not going to be easy or straight forward and may take as long a century or more to make it.
Day commented that he can see that the good leader can always decide to change away from the norm and reconstruct things according to the alternatives suggested by Fairtlough. But he wondered what would happen when the good leader moves on; surely then things slip back into the bad, old ways? And that means that things don’t fundamentally change, or that it will take longer even than the hundred years that Gerard proposed. On this point, Gerard made it clear that we should not think of getting rid of hierarchy as getting rid of leadership. Rather than you disperse leadership throughout the whole organisation. This is because everyone is a potential leader. Every task demands leadership skills. And he has found that people tend to rise to the task - to produce new ideas or to find solutions to problems when required, and if allowed. He has seen this in practice. Leadership comes from everywhere - except when hierarchy puts a stop to it!
Peter Day commented that one ‘clever person’ at the Institute of the Future in Silicon Valley has proposed the view of organisation as a net laid flat on the ground, where points form up from base level round particular opportunities, problems and issues. This model suggests a constant shifting and re-cohesion of the organisation in practice. He suggested that this view is ‘jolly difficult’ to hold on to. Gerard proposed that whilst networking and heterarchy models are similar, the difference between them is that, in a heterarchy, the point in the net isn’t picked up by hierarchical leaders (the bosses), it rises up of itself - because people cluster around the particular issue and sort things out. That is the difference. But Day suggested that this kind of flexibility isn’t the norm. People don’t think like that or see organizations like that. Moreover, he thought, people get defensive because they work for a specific department, and don’t think about it as working for the whole organisation. For example, you are in marketing or R & D. people see themselves as being contained in small boxes. This type of identification gets in way of flexibility.
Gerard said that this is known as ‘the silo mentality’. But he stressed that responsible autonomy - the third way of getting things done – means that if you can isolate off one function from other (i.e., give it autonomy within clear working parameters), you can use your autonomy against defined targets to get things done – and taking responsibility in this way is perfectly ok. However, the next step is to look at this in terms of a heterarchy of heterarchies. Whilst this may sound a bit complicated it is what you have when you crossover from one area to work together in another. He is not suggesting that every person in one function negotiates with every person in every other one, but that a representative ‘boundary spanner’ can go from his department to talk with representatives from the others until a problem is resolved, or until you find better ways of doing things. It is a question of working together on some things at some times. It is a question of awareness of shared, supporting responsibilities.
Peter Day then pursued what it means to work in a responsibly autonomous way. He gave the example of a secretly developed play station, not officially part of the company’s plans, that ended up ‘saving Sony’s bacon’ when it was finally put out publicly to the rest of the company. Is that what Gerard meant by how responsible autonomy might work? Gerard replied that, yes, but that this example was clearly not part of an established practice, but more probably a case of people picking up on a sense of how the company had worked at some time in the past - when it was at its most innovative.
Was that like in Japan in 1960s, asked Day? Gerard agreed that the working models in Japan, in which people in innovative groups were given vague guidelines and principles and told to get on with it, had created genuine innovation in a way that more controlled organizations failed to do in U.S. and Europe at that time.
Day said that they had been discussing practices within an organizations. But he now wondered what about outsider views of that might be? For example, he could see that share holders might not like it. Gerard said that there were always some who are open to these alternative ways of working. In Celltech he had found sufficient ‘sympathetic ears’ amongst the shareholders to run the company in a heterarchical way. Day commented that Celltech was one of few successful biotech companies. Gerard said that this was true, and that although the formal structure suggested a hierarchy, in practice, they had taken a heterarchical approach to get things done. Day wondered if the general acceptance of this came down to the fact that it was a ‘longview’ science-based company. Gerard acknowledged that this was so. The type of company had made it easier to do things heterarchically than in older, more conventional organizations. But he insisted that there are other organizations where heterarchy works – for example, in professional services, such as accountancy and law firms. At a partner level at least, their practice is predominantly heterarchical.
Peter Day went on to point out that the professional service world feels threatened by the increase in freelancers and that this tendency seems to push towards short termism and the dispersal of skills. Gerard agreed but said that freelancers represent the extreme end of heterarchy - no strict structure or permanent organisation. But even here, patterns of the different relationships persist in the contracts with freelancers. There are always rules, but in this case no permanent organisation exists, just as in the network example mentioned above. Responsibility to get things done is picked up and then disperses, only in slightly different ways.
Day pondered on this, saying that he couldn’t help thinking of the enormous energy that would be released if the desires and needs of employees could be aligned with the aims of the organisation they worked for – an ‘enjoyment in common aims’ – adding that these need to be close to the ‘point of delivery’. People don’t want to be in the middle. Because middle management is just the worst place work in. Gerard agreed that it is this mid-place that causes the most unhappiness, but thought that an alignment of the two is to some extent utopian. But, he insisted that bringing them closer together would diminish the dominance of hierarchy and would improve things for most people.
In the end, both Day and Fairtlough agreed that it is impossible to predict exactly what will happen in relation to organisational behaviour. Significantly, Gerard pointed out that heterarchical and autonomous practice is pioneering stuff that, at the moment, tended to attract the innovative and open minded. There might be a danger if these practices became more widespread they might become more humdrum. But he is also certain that in ridding ourselves of the tyrannical hierarchy and rebalancing organizations with heterarchical and autonomous practices must be better than maintaining the status quo of hierarchy.
(Taken from 'Global Business' transcript: BBC World Service 27.10.05)
If you have any comments or contributions to the debate that has been started by 'The Three Ways of Getting Things Done', please go to our Contacts page. If you would like to buy the book, click here.
Erasing Excellence: Examining the grip of centralised power 
Towards the Third Modernity: How Ordinary People are Transforming the World
