Tippy Organizations and Leadership: Engaging an Organizational World of Vulnerability

Size and Deviant Impact

If the population of a specific species is very large then evolution is unlikely to occur, for in a large population there is an averaging out of differences among members of any one species. If the community is small then, according to Hardy-Weinberg, any differences will make a big difference.

Implications: Very big organizations tend to swallow innovations. Rosabeth Kanter (1990) wrote about this many years ago when she described the challenge of teaching giants (big organizations) to dance. She noted that there is a pervasive tendency for large organizations to be preservation-seeking bureaucracies. Unfortunately, this tendency is counterproductive in our volatile 21st Century world. As Kanter prophetically noted, large organizations must become more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic if they are to survive. They must become focused, fast, friendly and flexible. These organizations, in other words, need to be able to dance—and this seems to be ironically appropriate, given that they must survive in what Scott Page (Miller and Page, 2007; Page, 2011) describes as the Dancing Landscapes in which many of these organizations now operate.

The preservation-seeking bureaucracies described by Kanter seem to evolve from several fundamental principles regarding the size of systems. We have known for many years that an increasingly large proportion of a system’s resources (people, money, energy, conversation) goes into the maintenance functions of this system, as it grows larger (and as it grows older). As I noted in The Postmodern Organization (Bergquist, 1993), this general principle regarding systems can be specifically applied to organizations. A small organization will tend to devote a large percentage of its resources to the generation of specific products or services—whether it is producing chairs or offering hospitality services.

A large organization, by contrast, will often devote as much as 90% of its resources not to production or provision of services, but to the overall maintenance of the organization (management, communications, coordination, etc.).  As an organization grows larger (and older) it takes much more time, attention and people to hold the organization together—especially if the organization operates within a hierarchical structure rather than allowing self-organizing dynamics to prevail (an idea first promoted  by Ilya Prigogine and later described in greater detail by many chaos and complexity theorists and researchers, such as Scott Page and Steven Strogatz, and made accessible by Margaret Wheatley in Leadership and the New Science) (Prigogine, 1984; Strogatz, 2003; Wheatley, 2006; Page, 2011)