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I’m a big fan of approachable science. Neil Degrasse Tyson and his podcast StarTalk is something I watch when I can. In a clip recently he spoke about how atoms want to move, and because of this cold doesn’t exist. Moving atoms = heat, and a force must make the atoms slow… so we aren’t creating cold, we are removing heat.
In the style of Product I prefer, the org design goal is a mix of harmony and autonomy. The opposite is chaos and control.
What is the natural state? And what to do we have to remove in order to achieve the other state?
Harmony vs Chaos. Like atoms, humans working together to achieve a common goal likely bends towards chaos. However we exert control to remove the chaos. So harmony doesn’t exist… the removal of chaos is true.
What about control vs autonomy. There is no question that the natural state of a human is to do what the human believe is right… in other words autonomy. So there is no such thing as control… just the removal and absence of autonomy usually by way of rules and beuracracy.
So the org design goal of high autonomy and high harmony are in natural conflict with one another.
I hope we can follow this concept as I think there is something here that explains why transformation into the org design of empowered product teams is so hard. Does it require an impossibly delicate balance of naturally opposing forces?