Vision at Scale
Organization as an organism
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
- Steve Jobs
💡Level Up: Respect the whole
Why do organizations even exist?
Simple. Primarily because we can do more together that we can do by ourselves.
Just like the different functions of our body work to support the greater vessel…
Or the different players on a team play their position…
…An organization is made up of individuals whose different perspectives and areas of expertise enable the organization to steer towards a greater level of impact.
But.. like individuals, organizations can easily fall into dysfunction.
It’s difficult enough to communicate to ourselves and interpret the signals of our own needs, let alone the signals of an organization and the customer it seeks to serve.
At an organizational level, lack of clarity or misaligned intention simply multiplies. Now, any bad habits that we exude as individuals are exuded at scale, rippling through the organization... sometimes to the point of no return. In an organization, clear communication in pursuit of an authentic purpose become even more paramount as the stakes get higher.
But most of us know this. The real problem is... maintaining a purpose-led organization is challenging.
As technology evolves, organizations mature, and culture continually shifts, the frameworks that we use to lead must continually adapt. But too often, we mistake approaches for fundamentals. We try to apply the latest tools and playbooks as a one-size-fits-all solution, only to find that nothing seems to stick - or only sticks temporarily. And it’s a tricky balance to strike, given the complexity and interconnectedness of a well-functioning system. Even if one leg of your approach is sound, you may wrongly interpret the approach as failing if another leg is missing.
Instead, to truly understand how to recalibrate an organization to retain its purpose-led startup energy at scale - shifting from a vicious cycle of resistance to a virtuous cycle of flow - one must understand how energy flows at a fundamental level.
Understanding the Organism
An organization is simply a function of (1) the individuals who make up the organization and (2) the leaders who influence how decisions are made.
This is just an order of magnitude greater than the way we work within ourselves. The same way we create inner alignment (between our conscious and subconscious, our desires and our actions, etc.), is the same way we create alignment across multiple individuals — essentially, energy moving in a guided direction.
So, to create a purpose-led organization, we must first understand what drives purpose at the individual level, so we can multiple it for the whole.
Purpose (or meaningful work) is made up of three fundamental drivers:
Vision: An individual’s conviction that a goal is worth pursuing
Individual personal visions will likely be much broader than a company’s vision, but the level of shared overlap will maximize sustained motivation
Path to Impact: An individual’s belief that they can contribute to this vision
This is the essence of an ownership mentality - asking what we can do to make a difference. Motivation will wane over time if we are overwhelmed by blockers in our path (ie. lack of direction, politics, bureaucracy, lack of resources, or space to focus).
Feedback/Reward: Some mechanism that allows the individual to feel a sense of progression
Even the most enlightened amongst us need short-term dopamine to stay on track in the pursuit of a larger purpose. Lack of momentum = lack of energy. Building in mechanics for healthy reinforcement is key to sustaining purposeful action in the long term.
While any of these elements could exist in isolation, it would be much more difficult to sustain motivation without all three acting in concert. Even the most ownership-minded of us can fall prey to weak incentive structures, while even the strongest of systems may not be able to lift someone up who isn’t ready to embrace their owner mindset.
Vision at Scale
As an organization scales, it becomes exponentially more difficult to keep individuals and teams activated as a part of the whole.
Consider this: you’ve just created your founding team (activation of the 1st degree). At the early stages of a startup, each of your leaders remain close to the nucleus. Decisions are made, feedback loops are frequent and tight, and there’s little room for schisms in thinking or purpose to emerge.
However, as the organization expands, new feedback loops form - both formal and informal. Conversations start to diverge from each other and silos begin to form. People start focusing on the wrong things (process, title/status, doomed ideas) and the organization starts attracting the wrong people.
When this happens, the key to maintaining purpose-led activation is to design the right feedback loops around the nucleus (the vision) and to keep each new layer of scale activated and attached to the nucleus as closely as possible.
The importance of attaching back to the core was highlighted recently by Brian Chesky (CEO of Airbnb), who reignited “Founder Mode” conversations when he shared how pulling in decision making helped him break down divisional politics and bureaucracy at Airbnb.
“I stopped pushing decision-making down. I pulled it in. I created one shared consciousness and I said, the top 30, 40 people in the company are going to have one continuous conversation.” - Brian Chesky
Similar sentiments have been echoed across the industry, with even major players like Amazon announcing goals to combat bloat and return back to core principles.
While the level and intensity of core attachment will vary by organization or context (ie. wartime vs. peacetime, nature of business), the fundamental principle remains the same: To move as a whole, we must be truly attached to the whole.
Scale is not simply the delegation of decisions, but rather, the delegation of context and thinking, such that others can make certain decisions as your proxy - a delegation that requires healthy feedback loops to maintain and clear mechanisms to course correct as needed.
Designing Your Loops
So, how do you design and manage core feedback loops from a fundamental perspective?
My recommendation is to do so in the same way your body delivers signals to your brain - based on urgency and health of the system as a whole. Holistic thinking is key.
What are our loops? What are the different conversations we’re having / problems we’re solving for?
What’s our loop frequency? How urgently do we need to stay aligned on these workstreams? (Ex. higher feedback loops during war-time periods, lower frequency loops for extended leaders to converge on the same wavelength)
Who’s looped in? Individuals who are integral to the respective end-to-end body of work and must think holistically (health of a function, cohesion within a strategic initiative, stewardship of the nucleus itself).
The highest version of this is your Executive Loop, which sits closest to the nucleus and is the steward of the ship. This feedback loop supports cross-functional input, but ultimately decisions are made by the CEO.
Next layer down are integration loops for key bodies of work that require end-to-end thinking: Strategic Initiatives and Functional Domains (ie. Engineering, Marketing, etc.). While this approach may vary by organization (and sometimes by workstream), I generally lean towards the approach of organizing vertically by Function and horizontally by Strategy, as Functions are less likely to shift (and therefore benefit from longer term thinking and health). One example Chesky highlights in his interview is his decision to move away from Host and Guest teams, which yielded a “hodgepodge” app. Instead, he reorganized his teams by function and focused on cross-team collaboration across a few key launches.
Emphasis on a few. Remember, the outside world experiences you as a single body - not as the disparate pieces of multiple minds.
Finally, integration loops for the Company. These usually take the form of All Hands or extended leadership forums and require less frequent loops, but are valuable for convergence of thinking and bringing further layers into the gravitational pull of the core. If these loops are done well, decision making is role modeled, and there’s a clear path for healthy escalation, important issues emanating from further layers can still travel quickly to the Executive Loop.
Sustaining Activation Takes Work
Remember to take your time. Activate each loop with intention and closure so that they remain attached to the parent body. Don’t spin too fast. Get one loop going at a time, focusing on the most important priorities. Broken loops compound debt, positive loops compound momentum.
Some potential challenges to watch out for:
Loops designed too tightly designed around a specific strategy - all the way down to execution. This is a trade-off: You move faster, but may also create solutions that are (1) not prioritized holistically or (2) impact functional area cohesion. Best suited for more contained workstreams.
Loops designed too tightly around goals. This may result in solutions that are not integrated / don’t make sense to the consumer as one (ex. multiple departments achieving a goal in their own way, or non-integrated solutions proposed by different goal squads).
Too many loops, or poorly activated ones. If not managed well, silos will emerge at scale - loops that have deactivated or detached from the core (and are no longer making decisions in line with the whole). This often happens when there’s no clear escalation path or review mechanism that allows teams to stay on track, a recipe for zombie projects or ideas that drift into the ether.
Over time, poorly designed loops will act like blockages, resulting in suboptimal decisions and unnecessary process that slow the organization down and are difficult to unwind. Purpose debt, if you will.
The Beauty of Returning to the Core
The beauty of keeping teams attached to the core is that you can move more quickly to meet a changing environment. With shared purpose as the guiding mechanism for decisions, it encourages teams to rethink old problems and recalibrate solutions.
Additionally, it can help you identify those who may not be ready to step into their ownership mindset. Flow is never just the result of the system or the individual - it is the harmony between the two bodies. Create the right system, and those who are ready to rise will. For those who aren’t (yet), it may be healthier for them to switch to an environment that can best serve them.
Consider how loops are currently structured at your organization (and perhaps even within yourself). Consider what blockages you may be inadvertently creating that don’t serve the whole. Consider what actions you’re taking driven by old signals.
Scale doesn’t have to mean politics, burnout, bureaucracy.
Scale can be the powerful elevation of the whole.
I hope you enjoyed reading. See you next time.