Change Your Space, Change Your Culture: How Engaging Workspaces Lead to Transformation and Growth

Chapter 4What Every Leader Needs to Know about the Future

If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

—Richard Buckminster Fuller

If you would like to take a peek behind your company's curtain, Roland Openshaw can create a map of how your company really works. It is no secret that organization charts are fictional. No company operates as they are drawn. In a time when reporting lines were less blurred and cross-functional cooperation was rare, the organizational (org) chart provided logic for organizing work. Today, however, the org chart often just gets in the way of organizations encouraging cooperation and collaboration. Even though we give token allegiance to the chart, its vestigial power flexes the minute Sally from Marketing needs support from Bob in Sales to launch a new service. Then it comes alive, flexing its fading power over common sense.

Sally crosses boundaries easily, but Bob plays “by the book.” This fiction turns to friction that kills opportunities in a playground/workplace version of “You're not the boss of me!” Sally has to climb her chain of command to reach the diplomatic or command bridge capable of exerting force on poor Bob to play nice for the greater good.

What if Sally's company better understood how the proverbial sausage really gets made? What if her company's mental model of work looked like a network of relationships rather ...