Agile organising: a new structure for Elemental

In December 2016, Elemental launches its squares and circles. Our way of staying decisive and agile with a growing organisation. With this monthly blog, we share what we learn from this exciting experiment.

WHY AGILE ORGANISING?

In 2015 and '16, Elemental grew tremendously. With even an FD Gazelle as a result. To enable further growth, the team has expanded considerably. Super fun that growth. But it also causes growing pains. Because how do we remain entrepreneurial and agile as a company? And how do we ensure an engaged and motivated team? This requires change in the way we organise ourselves. That is a quest.

HOW TO CHOOSE A STRUCTURE?

Choosing a new structure is really about two questions:

• How do you distribute work across the team?
• How do you make sure you coordinate the work of different teams?

We have all been brought up with the idea that it is efficient to make tasks as small as possible and then divide them among several specialists. The idea is that this allows you to perform the task better and faster. Certain degree of specialisation is of course extremely useful, but if you look around you can see what happens when you overshoot this. Employees become subdivided into functional silos that have hardly any contact with each other, most of the employees have no idea what purpose their work serves and the customer gets further and further out of the picture. To coordinate the efforts of all these employees, a top-down structure of hierarchical layers, rules, budgets is quickly reverted to. The result: an excess of bureaucracy, a large internal staff and an inward-looking organisation. Not exactly agile and certainly not an attractive prospect.

The examples of how things can be done differently are well known. From Zappos to Spotify to the Dutch Buurtzorg. At their core, three themes always recur in the design of these organisations:

• The importance of autonomy for motivation and innovation
• Room for change must be ingrained in the structure
• A strong shared vision is the most effective form of coordination
• OUR ANSWER: CIRCLES & SQUARES

For our own design of an agile organisation, we compiled several ideas into a manifesto explaining our structure. From now on, we work in squares and circles.

1. AUTONOMY

We believe in the power of autonomous teams, so this is the starting point of our new structure. We have two types of teams. The squares form the foundation of our company. They are organised according to the strategic themes in which we distinguish ourselves: (1) Strategy; (2) Organisation; (3) Innovation and (4) the Strategy Factory. Squares are responsible for developing knowledge and new propositions with which we make our clients happy. Circles are for internal activities such as building our website, finding and employing new colleagues and an appropriate communication strategy. The teams are autonomous in making choices. We share progress and requests for help during review sessions in which the various teams are represented.

2. STRUCTURE IS A STARTING POINT, NOT AN END POINT

Flexibility is ingrained in our structure. It does so in two ways. First, we have chosen to think in terms of roles rather than functions. We got this idea from Holocracy borrowed. The important consequence of this is that people do not coincide with the work they do. This makes it perfectly possible for a particular role to change or disappear without it meaning a team member has to leave. In addition, it gives room for all of us to always do those things that make us happy. Because we want to learn something new or because we want to become even better at something. In this way, we are challenged to be entrepreneurial.

Besides flexible roles, squares and circles themselves are also flexible. We agree with Laloux agree that it is important to see our company as a living entity where teams change based on customer experiences. This means that the purpose of our teams can change and it can also lead to certain teams ceasing to exist if we ourselves are no longer enthusiastic about it.

3. SHARED VISION

The first week of January, we spent two days with the whole team to set up and launch the squares. It brought a lot of energy and a clear shared focus. The squares each formulated a purpose and made choices about new propositions and acquisitions based on that purpose. This purpose was then translated into a set of Objective & Key Results (OKRs) that will guide the year ahead. In short, no thick plans but a motivated team with clear focus and a shared ambition to learn very quickly.

The key insight so far: don't try to find the perfect design, as there is no such thing. Choose a starting point and make sure you keep the flexibility to keep evolving.

2017 come on!