ShiftUp: The Versatile Organization

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Discover management trends of the future.

What comes after Management 3.0, SAFe, and the Spotify Model? Well, it’s not hard to see in which direction the world is moving: organizations that consist of networked individuals who work from anywhere, who form teams on the fly, who aim for objectives and achieve results, and make that a whole lotta fun for themselves. Such an organization can do anything!.

Dynamic Teaming with Networked Individuals
All organizations need business agility and continuous innovation. But if you work exclusively with dedicated teams that always need to go through forming, storming, and norming stages before they can finally perform, you’re out of luck. That’s neither agile nor innovative. The accelerated pace of change in the world asks for more fluidity of work structures and a switch from dedicated teams to dynamic teaming.
In our new connected age, we need networked individuals who can team with each other on the fly and who can fluidly collaborate and form flexible team structures depending on context. With dynamic teaming, a business is better equipped to become a continuous learning organization. However, this demands a culture of transparency and psychological safety and new approaches to collaboration, motivation, and performance.
Hybrid Workplaces of the Future
After a year of lockdowns, Covid-19 policies, and many people working from home, organizations call workers back to the office. But not everyone, and not all the time. In hybrid workplaces, most team members are at the office for a limited number of days and hours of the week. Some work only from home. Some only at the office. And many spend their working time at clients, coworking spaces, or coffee bars.
But how should organizations manage that? When should everyone be at the office? How often should team members meet in person? What are the consequences for security, diversity, and performance? Can we still have static teams in a world of networked individuals? And how do we optimize creativity and productivity with team members spread across the country?
OKRs, KPIs and the North Star Metric
Objectives and Key Results seem to be the new Holy Grail. Many organizations are embracing the new goal-setting framework that was invented at Intel and popularized by Google. At the same time, most organizations are unwilling to let go of their Key Performance Indicators. After all, how can you achieve objectives without targets and incentives?
And then there is the North Star Metric: the highly focused approach commonly used by startups and scale-ups to get high-performance, agile teams aligned around a single team-wide metric. And if this technique works for young businesses, then why not the larger ones? And does goal setting even work when people are dynamically teaming and switching between contexts?
Motivation and Gamification at Work
For many years, organizations have wondered how to motivate their workers. Average employee engagement has been low for decades, and no employee engagement program seems to have a lasting effect. But it doesn’t have to be like that. There are plenty of examples of organizations with very motivated and engaged workers. Many of them, deliberate or not, rely on principles and practices that we also find in gamification.
Gamification is all about applying concepts and techniques from good game design. The purpose of games is to give people a great time while doing some activities together. How is that any different from working together as a team? But beware! Gamification comes with a dark side. We need to avoid addiction and unintended consequences.

- What are the post-pandemic challenges in the workplace?
- How can we perform well with stable and flexible teams?
- How do existing methods and frameworks need to adapt?
- How do we motivate teams in post-pandemic workplaces?
- How do we boost and measure performance in the future?