Chapter 4: Choosing Your Path?

“There are two path you can go by, but in the long run There’s still time to change the road you’re on” – Robert Plant, Stairway to heaven

Slums

No one wants to live in a slum¹: the unsanitary conditions, insecurity, etc. are the opposite of our aspirations. However, certain aspects of slums may interest us: a way of adapting as best as possible to space, maximum exploitation of the raw materials available, (and perhaps some very interesting communication effects to observe).

We find in the slum this natural faculty for energy optimization that we have observed in crystals as well as in termite mounds. We find there – unfortunately in anticipation – the raw material difficulties to which we are condemned in the coming years. Finally, another source of interest regarding slums: their capacity to be very large. Quite a few answers brought to those who are interested in large-scale organizations.

We perhaps find here at the organizational level (topology, form, architecture) what made Lean and agile successful: a necessity to optimize value, to manage resources, to apprehend the unexpected. Let’s be positive: the organic and spatial optimization of slums without the unsanitary conditions and insecurity, with meaning and wealth creation, would be an interesting target.

Ken Kibera slum

The lessons from Brazilian favelas

While researching information about slums, I came across a consolidated report on the subject of learnings related to the improvement of Brazilian slums: the lessons learned from slums that managed to get better. Reading this report: Slum upgrading lessons from Brazil² I nearly fell off my chair because I had the impression that the said lessons seemed to come straight out of a Lean/Agile organizational manual.

But listen rather:

How to make a slum better?

To get out of it, you need:

• Administrative autonomy

• Continuous training

• Diversity of habitats

• Incremental installation of water basins

• Proximity between housing and workplace

• Multidisciplinary team

• Step-by-step change

If we review these indications, we undeniably find the modern history of organization, and this culture of adaptation in complex environments that summarizes agility.

Continuous improvement (continuous training), empowerment of people (administrative autonomy) and groups; the ability to have feedback on finished things, hence the real autonomy, enabled by multidisciplinary teams.

We also find elements that we will address later: a change management approach that advances step by step, in small increments (the water basins), the proximity of actions (housing, work, team).

All this constitutes organizational elements on which is built the silhouette of the organization that we have described previously.

How to maintain a better state (in slums)?

Maintaining this organization (this slum) in good condition, the authors tell us, is:

• Encouraging socialization

• Problem solving must be decentralized

• Creation of communities

• Involvement comes from transparency

• Using real metrics

• The vision is collective, through consensus

• Incorporation of new heads, external perspectives

Here too we find precepts of agility that we have mentioned, and leads for the following chapters.

Again, empowerment of people (localized problem solving), real feedback (real metrics), an essential notion of transparency: for involvement, empowerment, feedback, the right to make mistakes, etc.; a shared vision (a clear objective).

And other elements to note: socialization, communities, injecting fresh blood.

Growing is not massifying, nor repeating

The size of slums is striking. It is often more a question of limiting them than of making them grow. But growing, getting bigger, is often the goal of our organizations (particularly in the competitive world where size reflects a certain “striking force” or a certain investment capacity. Even more common in this current major movement that wants to make agility the new way of proceeding (and which caricatures it and empties it of its substance), the question of scaling up an emergent approach is a key question.

What slums tell us on this subject, still in Slum upgrading lessons from Brazil³, is:

• Growing doesn’t mean getting bigger, massifying (scale up versus mass)

• Growing doesn’t mean repeating (scale up versus repetition)

• Perverse effect of cost reduction

Here we touch on two central and often poorly understood points of living organizations, two radically different things in our new paradigm: no repeatability, linearity and management by value (and not by costs).

No longer believe in linearity, nor in repeatability. The world changes too quickly and linearity or repeatability are an illusion (although sometimes I wonder if permanent change isn’t a comfortable way of not facing the real problems?). It’s difficult to handle emergence, we often accuse it of improvisation.

Regarding cost reduction, I will only cite this sentence (which I think is from Peter Drucker, but I’m not sure): if you follow costs, you generate costs, if you follow value, you generate value.

This absence of linearity and the primacy of value over cost are really not in our habits. It’s the return of risk and therefore – in a way – the end of conservatisms.

Structure and energy

If I thus observe the slum as the fruit of a letting go much more natural than organizations as we falsely think of them, I indeed obtain an organization that seeks to optimize energy, both that of raw materials and that released by its “components,” us, communication, involvement.

This organization is built following organic principles (pattern repetition, economic structure, “lazy,” intersections (twins), emergence (termite mound), takes organic forms (catastrophe theory, etc.)).

But this organization, to rise toward well-being (there is no question of having as an objective the misery and harshness of life in a slum – cruelty linked to the organic, natural aspect? –) follows a good part of the answers proposed by agility: empowerment, continuous improvement, shared vision, clear rules, feedback, primacy of value over cost, proximity, emergence, etc.

These answers for thinking about one’s organization differently, for thinking about a living organization, can rely on tools, approaches, know-how. But all of this is very much conditioned by what constitutes these organizations, their components, their elements, us.