Self-management is the way

In traditional companies, such as health companies, power is very concentrated. Individuals above distrust those below because they believe that if they allow them the autonomy they will blow their budgets and, as a result, professionals have simply become rigid gears in the machine with virtually no room to make decisions. For their part, politicians always find reasons to distrust managers in case of any budgetary deviation or up-tick in citizen unrest - waiting lists for example. Managers, fearful of their predicament, concentrate power in a few subordinates to maintain tight control of objectives whilst rejecting any innovations from those below due to suspicion of increasing expenses or creating scandals.

Could we organize ourselves in a different way?

Frederic Laloux, in "Reinventing Organizations", a revealing book, at least for me, invites us to rethink the way we manage companies. The age of the internet, he says, has precipitated a new vision of the world that contemplates the possibility of a distributed intelligence instead of a vertical hierarchy. According to Laloux we should be able to invent a more powerful and meaningful way of working together if we would change our belief system.

In the first part of the book, the author makes an evolutionary analysis of the way in which humans organize companies, which I found colourful and insightful, and that is why I have prepared a summary (for more details I recommend going to the tables that are at the end of chapters 1.1 and 2.3):