Point Your Arrow to the Right, Follow Along (NOT)

Several years ago, I was required to attend a 3-day Stephen R. Covey workshop (taught by one of his minions). It was a followup to his highly successful 7-Habits workshop. At the time, Stephen had just been named by Time as one of the world’s 50 most influential people and was a local celebrity. The training was boring; it consisted of an occasional 2-and-1/2 minute talk on videotape by the master, followed by sessions which were about as deep as my grandkids’ wading pool. One thing that did catch my eye was an illustration. It consisted of an arrow with a large body. Inside the large arrow were several small arrows. They were all pointing in the same exact direction (to the right). This illustrated how a well-oiled organization should operate.

I was tired of sitting and the arrow analogy made no sense to me. What organization in its right mind would want all of their little arrows (think employees) goose stepping in unison. Wasn’t the trainer describing an organization where most of the employees are brain dead? I thought maybe a little diversity of thought and opinion might be useful. My comment sent the construction portion of our Federal agency into hysterics. Suddenly everybody woke up from their trainer-induced stupor and let me have it. They didn’t see how an organization with arrows pointing in even slightly different directions could function. Since I’m a planner and most of the objections came from construction types, I thought maybe that would explain the differences of opinion; construction groups by their very nature are top-down oriented.

I personally would rather live in a more bottom-up organizational structure. Google has been getting a lot of publicity lately by allowing at least some their employees to spend 20 percent of their work time on personal (and perhaps more esoteric) projects. The thinking, I presume, is that these personal creative moments will spawn ideas which will in the future create improvements to products or maybe even new initiatives. I image that a break from certain work elements is also healthy. This, to me, is an example of how you can not only live with arrows pointing different directions, but also encourage arrow diversity. New ideas and directions become less threatening.

At the Federal agency where I work, there are 6 of us which are involved in a technology project (both hardware and software). In addition, we work with individuals from our Denver Office, 2 private contractors, and 2 universities. All members of the group are extremely driven and very intelligent. I am continually struggling with organizational issues. None of us has our arrow pointing in the same direction. And I believe that to be good thing. As projects develop we self organize into small groups (as small as 2). We have few meetings, and when we do, they don’t seem very productive. Our variety of organized mayhem, is at first, difficult on customers. But they eventually come to like it (or at least deal with it).

Each member of the group has his/her strong and weaker points. Universities are sometimes better at the theoritical issues and not as strong with applications. Our 6-man group is stronger with the applications and customer service. One of our contractor is a specialist in public relations and stays in touch with the desires of our customers. The other contractor handles the computer stuff that is difficult to do inside the government computer security syste. Hopefully each team member feels fully empowered to do his/her job. This lack of traditional structure has served us well, even during high-pressure projects.

Web 2.0 provides a wealth of tools and will continue to do so in the future. Innovations like blogs, wikis, IM, real-time monitoring, and even e-mail certainly can facilitate collaboration. Our extended group is spread throughout Utah, and as mentioned above, we rarely meet. In fact, we have never all met together as an entire group. We also rarely meet with our customers, although we are in frequent contact with them. Projects like Linux and Wikipedia provide useful models on how projects can be constructed outside the standard organizational structure. Each member of the government team I work with is encouraged to try new stuff, and is given the tools to do the job. However, I can safely say that none of our arrows are pointed in the exact same direction.

Recently I attended a session at SLC Sunstone on organizing small religious study groups. Those of us attending each described a socail group that we participate in. I know this will be hard to believe, but my non-work (quasi-religious) group seemed somewhat different.from the others. The session presenter suggested a bunch of rules for organizing your study group. For example, all should sign a commitment form (there is probably a joke here but I will let it go), the group should meet at regular times, the group should have officers, etc. When I suggested that this sounded a little to regimented for me, there were 2 comments. The first wanted to know if I had been a hippie. The second suggested that there had been a lot of work done on organizational structures and that the one being presented was best (and seemed to imply I needed to quit rocking the boat).

The presenter then stated that a less organized structure would never survive. I should have responded that I belong to several “dysfunctional” groups and we do just fine. We tend to self-organize around the specific interests of the various members. Some like to travel, some like to gamble, some like to play bridge, some like to walk, etc. But at most of our activities we spend a few quality minutes either praying, or discussing a quasi-religious topic, or expounding on what we are thankful for, or each reading a short inspirational quotation. We have been doing this for years. We are a diverse group, most of us only have a few things in common. Our arrows are all over the place.

Maybe all of the members of my various work and non-work group are running from the ridiculous regimentation in our lives.

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