By Janus Boye
Rachel Happe on stage at the Boye 2018 Aarhus conference
“The way we have always thought about strategy is very centralised and top-down. That’s controlling and directive - and leads to very detailed strategic plans. We need to move towards something lighter, that is driven by shared-purpose.”
When I spoke to Boston-based Rachel Happe, I was naturally hoping she would elaborate on her memorable remark from 2018 on how control is for amateurs. As you can tell from the opening quote, what unfolded was not just a conversation about control and communities, but a fascinating perspective on its impact on business strategies, organisational structures and how we collaborate. Many executives are really struggling to be successful because organizational models are out of sync with the speed of information.
Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable and strongly believes in the power of community to enable human potential. She is our expert of the month.
The world is networked now, but the organizational structure remains the same
In my conversation with Rachel, she started by talking about the incredible changes to our information environment that we now take for granted as consumers: Everyone has access to everyone else so the speed and immediacy of information are exponentially higher than it was when most organizations were started.
That’s really remarkable and has a big impact on organizations as we know it. To quote Rachel:
“It means that no one has control over what information is consumed or shared. That is also why misinformation gets spread so fast. The information that is believed is based on trust - not access. Organisations are structurally unprepared to address this change.”
Today when an issue or crisis comes up, it gets ingested by what Rachel calls an outdated organisational model designed to channel information to appropriate decision-makers. This once was the most effective way to process and respond to information, which also came through curated channels. Now, that hierarchy and channel management is a bottleneck.
It takes too long for an issue to make its way through organizational hierarchies and linear processes, get evaluated and discussed by decision-makers, carefully crafted by communications professionals, and then responded to by official representatives. This tends to be both a slow and an opaque process. Rachel has observed that what often happens is that before one issue is resolved and properly addressed, many other new issues arrive creating endless backups and missed opportunities. Organizational governance is constraining information flow, increasing friction and introducing new risks.
To quote Rachel:
“The system is broken and employees are stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed as a result. The instinctual response, based on decades of experience, is to try even harder to control the flow of and response to information, which is only making the situation worse.”
The solution is to remove governance and control - and empower employees to make more decisions as they come up, which increases the capacity to respond quickly and reduces the risk of crises popping up out of nowhere.
Visiting Rachel Happe in Boston Library in September 2016
Does the mission statement help?
To enable employees to act on information as they see it, the organization needs a way to ensure alignment so decisions have some consistency. That requires short, concise strategic positions that are easy to understand and communicate while aligning with organizational priorities. While thinking about the problem, Rachel started looking at corporate mission statements. Perhaps, she thought, if I was an employee, these would help me make good decisions?
In our conversation, she mentioned two examples. First, beverage giant Coca Cola which has this as their stated purpose:
“Refresh the world. Make a difference.”
Rachel’s initial response was that many things can be refreshing. What does it really mean? Might it be too broad and too general? Would it help an employee make a decision about which information matters? Probably not.
The other example from the famous automaker Ford. They state:
“We are here for one purpose, to help build a better world, where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams.”
Rachel considers this to be more helpful to an employee. It provides a propelling vision of the future - to make the world better - but critically it also communicates a boundary, which is to support people’s movement. For an employee, it means that as they consider opportunities and challenges, they have boundaries that help them decide on whether it is strategically interesting to Ford. Is it about mobility but likely harms the world? It is not a priority. Is it great for the world but unrelated to mobility? Also not an opportunity for Ford. If an idea or initiative is related to mobility and has the possibility of improving the world, it is worth considering. This statement, which is concise but includes key boundaries, helps employees focus their innovation power and respond to emerging information; considering only that which is meaningful to the organization.
How about where you work? Does your mission statement inspire you and provide boundaries?
Could the answer be found within community governance structures?
In her long experience of working with communities, the key difference between a corporation and a community is that communities have no control or authority over what people do. They are opt-in environments or as Rachel clearly said:
You can’t tell people what to do.
How do you then make communities productive? You have to align the organizational interests with those of the individual with a clear statement of shared purpose and shared impact, which is the heart of community strategy. Because communities must rely on intrinsic motivators to engage individuals, the strategy cannot be very lengthy and specific. Community strategy requires a lighter approach. Communities have to have a compelling reason to do something valuable together that can’t be done by any one stakeholder.
Shared purpose and shared value strategies compel people to collaborate - but on their terms. To operate effectively, those overseeing and facilitating the community cannot be controlling - people will leave. Instead, they need to facilitate trust and credibility between members of the community itself. That trust influences what people believe to be true and how they act on information - and creates a fluid, responsive, and evolving organization.
For companies to adapt to the information age, they will need to employ something closer to a community strategy, with all the changes to governance, leadership, and management that it implies. Some of those changes Rachel recommends organizations:
Hire people the organization will trust, that shares the organization’s purpose and values. The organization must trust employees to be competent in responding to whatever comes up at the edges with the organizational strategy in mind.
Remove complex hierarchies and governance structures - and push decision-making power to the individuals who see the issues.
Improve collaboration, particularly inside the executive suite, where today many executives are judged and measured on discrete rather than collective metrics. Those discrete metrics, while making responsibilities clear, are in reality often influenced by factors outside of one person’s control and it causes division and competition instead of collaboration.
Learn more about Rachel and her work
Rachel had a piece on marketing in Harvard Business Review in 2016: Calculating the ROI of Customer Engagement
In 2019, she did a podcast with Leading Learning: Cultivating Communities with Rachel Happe of Community Roundtable.