It is now unanimous among the biologist that during last five mass extinction events the species with specialization suffered the most, while survivors were more generalized. A generalized species doesn’t complain much about food to eat and place to live; as a result, it endures during the significant natural catastrophe. In biology, the rule of the game is diversify-or-die.
For a business, the economic uncertainty due to disruptive technology has the same impact as an extinction event. The company in such period must move away from specialization toward a more generalized organization model. A generalized organization can adapt its macroeconomic environment rapidly, hence providing the company with the opportunity for diversification.
The digital transformation gives business the vital manoeuvrability in a difficult time. But to achieve a successful transformation, a company needs an agile culture first. And to develop agility, the company must adopt a generalized structure.
Agile culture and Digital Transformation goes hand in hand.
Any quick research will lead to the belief that agile culture is about process simplification or get rid of them completely. Such understanding is mostly false. There are reasons, often historical, why an organization develops a process-oriented culture. The process gives a company the vital fluidity in a static microeconomic condition (for example -pure supply-demand fulfilment). But as the world becomes more connected, the macroeconomic forces (for example -investment, technology, regulation etc.) become more dominant. Such forces are often dynamic and disruptive and unlike seasonality they are unpredictable.
The process-oriented work culture results in the specialization within an organizational structure. In a traditional organization, each team specialized in doing a specific task with unmatched technical skill. And processes define the functional boundary between teams for any workflow.
Let’s take one example to be concrete-
In the telecom industry, the 5G is considered a disruptive technology. The 5G has on two mandatory standards to comply with -the 3GPP and ETSI.
It’s the ETSI specification of NFV that cries for agility. On the one hand, as per NFV specification, 5G core-network must be virtualized. On the other hand, the SDN (not mandatory and ETSI yet) specify the programmability in the network.
Virtualization and programmability are nothing new in telecom; they are major skills belongs to the IT domain, whereas the 3GPP-IETF-IEEE networking belongs to the network domain. It is now evident that, for all practical purposes, mixing skillsets between IT and Network will be the worst of both domains, not the best.
So the questions arise, how a specialized telco team can acquire skills belongs to different domains? Put in another way, how a specialized team be more generic to adopt -let’s say the 5G? Is there any magic process to achieve this?
Surprisingly, the answers are quite simple if you think for a while. Replace all process, one of one, with collaboration. Processes are periodic, usually triggered by an event -such as predefined business demand. Processes fly in the face of CI/CD, where a continuous flow of requirements and solutions must go back and forth between the teams. Collaboration, on the other hand, is continuous and natural to human behaviour; it allows teams to come together out of necessity, lets them brainstorm and get the job done.
The modern population of 7-billion humans came from an estimated 10-thousand hunter-gathers during the last ice-age. Human as a species was on the verge of extinction. What saved them? Process or Collaboration? I think, by now, its simple to answer.
Collaboration is the biological survival instinct of human.
For completeness, the alternative to specialization is not multi-dimensional skills. As an evolved species, human has limited cognitive capacity for acquiring a skill, and it is slow. There are exceptions, but an exception cannot be the rule. Growth and survivability are not a one-man show. And, an organization is about people and the right mindset.