Will companies with a future no longer have organisation charts?

Will companies with a future no longer have organisation charts?

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Above all, #Digitalisation has created one thing in many organisations: a new box. A CIO or CDO had to be appointed. A quick search on LinkedIn alone reveals more than 700,000 CIOs and CDOs. Just enter it in LinkedIn’s search! As so often, business leads the way. After a suitable delay, such positions also spring up in politics, ultimately growing into a separate digitalisation ministry.

Every new wave creates another CxO

Every new challenge and trend creates another portfolio, generally led by a CxO. Nowadays it is not unusual for a company to have a Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Diversity Officer, Chief Environmental Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Transformation Officer and more.

A newly appointed CxO establishes committees and meetings, issues guidelines, demands new data and tries to impose their own standards on others. The familiar fatigue continues: hierarchical organisation manifests itself in positions, minor posts and boxes. Feudal silo thinking everywhere!

Quite a few of us started at the bottom and dreamed of reaching the top: “One day, at the alumni reunion, I too will proudly present the CxO title on my business card.”

The Peter Principle, or the hierarchy of incompetence

That begins a sobering career goal and an even more sobering journey, whose nature often becomes apparent only later. Many of us know this.

Shortly after retirement, a former CFO once told me: “You know, Mr Zeisig, it’s very strange. Until six months ago, in my neighbourhood I was THE CFO of XY. Now I’m JUST PETER FROM NEXT DOOR!” The later this disillusionment arrives, the more bitter it is. Laurence J. Peter described it with biting humour in “The Peter Principle”, first published in 1969: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” I know quite a few CxOs who, once they reach the top, look down with surprise at the sometimes inhumane games being played in the boxes below.

Despite New Work, systems protect and reproduce themselves

Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organizations” and Gary Hamel’s recently published “Humanocracy” outline desirable visions of more humane organisations. The New Work movement adds its contribution. I recommend these as a guide to every startup that reaches Series A funding.

But what about established organisations? Over recent decades—in many cases over a century—traditional hierarchies have been turned inside out through countless reorganisations and battered by many a matrix.

The result is not just boxes, positions and supposed career dreams, but above all corporate cultures anchored deep in company DNA. Those repeatedly subjected to these upheavals have learned to cope and often resigned themselves to them: the next wave or reorganisation is sure to come. Laloux’s and Hamel’s desirable visions, and attending the next New Work congress, are not enough. Those who have reached the top often have too little time to read Laloux and Hamel, let alone implement their ideas. They have even less time to attend New Work congresses. When they nevertheless appear impressively as keynote speakers and pioneers, it is often only because a dynamic young assistant with “great leadership potential”—“C-level direct report” on the business card—has fired up the glossy PowerPoint machinery in the newly created staff unit within their CxO portfolio. Systems theory calls this autopoiesis: the system skilfully protects and reproduces itself!

Visionary evangelists alone do not help

It may sound sobering when I conclude as a pragmatic realist that we will have to live with traditional organisation charts for some time. Legislation and certain certifications alone prevent their disappearance, at least in Germany.

I therefore do not believe in organisational revolution, but I do believe in evolution. Change certainly requires a clear vision. Yet visionary evangelists alone often lack a connection to what already exists. Established companies need more pragmatic approaches to new, future-ready organisational forms.

Are you tired of organisation charts too? Write your wake-up call in the comments and look forward to my next LinkedIn article: a pragmatic way out of persistent organisation-chart fatigue.