Unleashing Intellectual Capital

Citation

Hart Metzker, C. (2001), "Unleashing Intellectual Capital", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 14 No. 6, pp. 609-614. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2001.14.6.609.1

As an organizational change consultant, you have been asked to catalyze change in a company that is not keeping pace with its industry. Two divisions of the company are in combative competition with each other, their deadlines are routinely missed, and your most recent request for information in order to help the group was dismissed as unimportant to the bottom line. How do you begin to work with this organization? How does such an organization shift to develop voluntary collaborative networks to share knowledge and spark innovation for improved business results?

This organization is a classic example of what Charles Ehin refers to as a controlled‐access organization in Unleashing Intellectual Capital. A controlled‐access organization’s accumulated resources are controlled by one or a few select individuals, resulting in an environment of compliance and dependence. A controlled‐access context feeds members’ self‐centered drives, leading to distrust, competition and information hoarding; such an organization cannot thrive in today’s economy.

If an organization is to create an opening for the creativity and knowledge generation needed for success in today’s knowledge‐era market, it must move from the context of controlled access to a context of shared access, in which group members pool resources and share responsibility for their use. A shared‐access organization sets a foundation for a balance of self‐interest and other‐centered drives – altruism and reciprocity. Resulting trust and interdependence make room for potential knowledge sharing and out‐of‐the‐box thinking. Leaving behind the hierarchy – no matter how flat – for a shared‐access organization built with trust, commitment and shared vision is the key to innovative products and services.

Ehin constructs his case for unleashing knowledge and creativity – leaving behind the world of hierarchy and Frederick Taylor’s modern metaphor of the machine – by weaving together a history of human organization and bio‐logic. He points to the self‐organizing lifestyle of ancient hunter‐gatherers as the longest and most successful way of organizing humans have achieved. For more than 100,000 years, humans lived in bands of fewer than 150 people. Their leadership was situational, their relationships egalitarian. Individuals were at the same time highly connected and autonomous. An attitude of sharing prevailed – without more recent methods of preserving food and inability to carry food as the tribe roamed the land, tribe members immediately ate and shared what they hunted and gathered. This self‐organizing, reciprocal and adaptive lifestyle was effective for the survival of the human species for thousands of years. Ehin thereby refutes the notion that humans need hierarchy for survival.

Bio‐logic – behind interdependent and autonomous parts working synergistically to create a larger whole, rather than the logic of a centrally controlled machine, is also key to understanding how humans work best. How we behave in response to the environment is largely determined by our genetic make‐up, our human brain and our natural human drives. Ehin draws on recent studies of the brain and hormones, areas just now opening up to us because of new technology in brain scans, for implications on how we work together. Most fascinating is Ehin’s examination of the effect of hormones on humans working together. “We are physiologically incapable of developing and maintaining mutually beneficial voluntary collaborative relationships within groups much larger than 150 people” (p. 54). The hormones stimulated when we are face‐to‐face with people lead to trust and bonding, and possibly enhance pleasure and reduce fear. Large or completely virtual organizations cannot support physiological responses that are most needed for accomplishing work and for providing the trust needed for sharing knowledge and other resources.

To design and manifest an organization based on bio‐logic and human nature, Ehin suggests a “dynamic framework” of “four tenets for fostering human nature”: line‐of‐sight relationships, sense of community, common purpose and visualizing wholes. Line‐of‐sight relationships allow for the interactions whereby people build trust and share the tacit knowledge that eventually leads to new explicit knowledge. Closely linked to line‐of‐sight relationships is a sense of community, again found in groups of fewer than 150 people, in which trust and empathy prevail. A sense of community provides space for common purpose, which includes shared values, a shared vision and even common language. Closely related to common purpose, visualizing wholes – seeing the big picture and interrelated processes, rather than individual parts – helps group members understand where they fit in and how circularly their actions impact the organization as a whole and the organization’s behavior impacts them as individuals. An organization functions most successfully – and unleashes intellectual capital – when all four overlapping tenets are cultivated to reinforce one another.

Finally, in Unleashing Intellectual Capital, the author cites short case studies of organizations exemplifying the principles laid out in his book. W.L. Gore & Associates, the technology manufacturing company best known for its product GORE‐TEX (a membrane used in outdoor apparel and camping equipment), breathes life into Ehin’s four tenets for fostering human nature. Manufacturing plants of approximately 150 “associates” resound with an entrepreneurial atmosphere. Associates manage only themselves, communicate directly with any other individual in the company, and have shared responsibility for reaching the common goal of making money while having fun. According to Ehin, the now‐global organization has annual sales of over one billion dollars and 6,500 dedicated associates.

How can we use Ehin’s lessons for evoking change in organizations? By understanding what it means to be human and how we as humans work, we see how organizations with hierarchy and controlled access work against our human nature. We see, therefore, what we must do to foster collaboration. Leaders with vision and courage to work themselves out of a position of power into roles of voluntary collaboration, and to set the example of sharing by relinquishing control over resources, serve as pioneers in the effort to make changes. Reorganizing into self‐directed units of 150 people who work face‐to‐face – e‐mail is not enough!– allows our natural human drives to work for us instead of against us.

Ehin admits that building such an organization is not for the faint‐hearted or weak‐minded. To undertake such a change from controlled access to shared access is a long‐term project with no magical solutions. But are we and other members of an organization grown‐up enough to fully commit and to take our share of responsibility for both the successes and the failures? Are we strong enough to overcome the current paradigm? In addition to overcoming the challenge of moving from a deeply engrained model of hierarchy, we also need to move past our western glorification of the individual as hero or “lone star” for such a venture to work.

Further, Ehin specifies that self‐organized companies are not for everyone. But if our work organizations are fractals of our larger society, how do we self‐organize within our company, yet work within the environment of larger social and government hierarchies? Ehin does not address how we are to remain integrated people, self‐organized and non‐competitive within our work groups, while at the same time seeking to beat our competition in the outside marketplace. I finished the book wanting to hear more about the interconnectedness of the shared‐access organization and the controlled‐access world where the shared‐access organization resides.

He advocates instruments such as the Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator and rigorous multiple‐day interviews to make sure that candidates are worthy of a self‐organizing venture. Measuring personality traits and fitting people into separate classifications is a modernistic notion. Selecting candidates by personality preferences, particularly in individuated adults, does not seem compatible with finding people to invest in shared vision and values, and to create a cohesive, trusting work group – the goal of the selection process. Modern instruments do not seem up to the task of creating a postmodern way of working, making meaning of our relationships, and visualizing the wholes that Ehin purports. Changing our paradigm of how we work requires a change in how we get there. Conversation, generative organizational storytelling, and more circular, reciprocal ways that match the rest of Ehin’s model will be needed to get us started.

Perhaps Ehin’s greatest lesson in Unleashing Intellectual Capital is that he dares to say that a flattened hierarchy is not enough to change the paradigm. He prescribes self‐organization, talks about values and challenges both idea and language of employees as assets. “People in companies are not assets, but investors” (p. 8), Ehin asserts. Companies are well intentioned when they talk about employees as their greatest resources, but this language itself sets up an acceptance in behaving as though people are another “thing” in the system. Employees cannot be owned and moved around or swapped for another asset. Ehin’s calling it like it is – employees – people – are investors in organizations – will lead to new behaviors.

Unleashing Intellectual Capital holds implications for organizational change agents. Rather than acting in the role of a consultant solving an organization’s problems, we need to act as facilitators, coaches and partners. Our job is to facilitate learning – to help members of our organizations gain skills in communication and the art of persuasion to reach out to other team members, and to understand how various competencies – marketing, accounting, manufacturing, etc. – throughout the organization contribute to the overall organization. As coaches we must inspire confidence in all members to speak out with their good ideas and to cope with and adjust to the ambiguity that accompanies transition from hierarchy and controlled access to self‐organization and shared access to resources. And ultimately we must act as partners – servant leaders ourselves – setting the example for being responsible for our own actions, and sharing our knowledge and experience that leads to the knowledge generation and creativity – the intellectual capital that leads to successful organizations.