CHAPTER 10

The Project Pioneer

“It’s all so simple, Anjiin-san, just change your concept of the world . . .”

—So said the Japanese lady to her confused British lover, shipwrecked in the novel Shogun

In his introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne wrote that “There are some people who begin the Zoo at the beginning, called WAYIN, and walk as quickly as they can past every cage until they get to the one called WAYOUT, but the nicest people go straight to the animal they love the most, and stay there.”⁷⁵ Without claiming to be a nice person, I must admit that this is the organizational beast I love the most—at least to write about, if not to work in. I don’t need that much excitement, thank you.⁷⁶

(Logo for the Project Pioneer)

None of the organization forms discussed so far is capable of sophisticated innovation, the kind required of a high-tech research lab, an avant garde film company, a factory that makes complex prototypes, even a hockey team determined to beat a stronger opponent. The Personal Enterprise can certainly innovate—if the chief is so inclined—but usually in simpler ways, while the Programmed Machine and Professional Assembly are performance organizations, not problem-solving ones. They are designed to exploit standardized products and procedures, more than invent new ones. The Project Pioneers are the explorers of the modern world, staffed with intrapreneurial experts who collaborate to create novel outputs—ones that open new territory.

Let’s come back to diagnosis, as introduced earlier. There is none to speak of in the Programmed Machine, which tends to respond to expected stimuli automatically. It is limited in the Professional Assembly, which prefers to pigeonhole user needs into established categories. We can sometimes see more open diagnosis in the Personal Enterprise, for simpler problems. But it is in the Project Pioneer that we find diagnosis in its full flowering, as open-ended problem solving, to encourage the development of fully customized solutions.

Sports as Projects

In football, the quarterback (or coach) calls the pre-programmed play and the players respond accordingly. In baseball, the way the ball is hit usually determines how the play unfolds. In hockey, basketball, rugby, and soccer, however, when a team picks up the puck or ball at its end, nobody quite knows how the play will unfold—the players included, who have to collaborate spontaneously to outwit their opponent. It’s like a new project every time.

The essence of these sports is to take advantage of the situation at hand, including the strengths and weaknesses of the players on both sides as well as the opportunities that open up. Of course, there can be surprises in the other sports too, but they tend to be the exceptions more than the rule. In a project organization, expect the unexpected. No scorecard to fill in here, as in baseball—what would the categories be anyway? And in hockey, who could write that fast? (Soccer is like hockey in slow motion, while baseball has been described as watching the grass grow.)

Robert Keidel has written that “basketball is too dynamic a sport to permit the rigid separation of planning and execution that characterizes football. . . . Quoting one famous player: ‘Your game plan may be wiped out by what happens in the first minute of play.’ Success . . . depends on the ability of the coach and players to plan and adjust while in motion.”⁷⁷ Of course, there are times when one player does it all. But mostly, these are intensely collaborative team sports: indeed, there can be as much beauty in the passing as in the scoring.

Adhocracy

The Project Pioneer is depicted in the logo for this chapter as a web— namely, a network of open-ended mutual adjustments. If, at the limit, the Personal Enterprise can be described as autocracy, the Programmed Machine as bureaucracy, and the Professional Assembly as meritocracy, then the Project Pioneer is adhocracy.⁷⁸

Years ago, I submitted an article for publication that used the word adhocracy.⁷⁹ From the editor came this question: “What’s adhocracy?” I didn’t quite understand: I thought the description was clear enough. Anyway, I fixed it up a bit and resubmitted the article. Back came this reply: “We’re ready to go, just one last question: What’s adhocracy?” “Wait a minute,” I pleaded, “we’ve been through this already.” The editor looked over the comments she had received from her colleagues, and when she came to “Is this the lack of structure?” I suddenly understood. The problem lay not with adhocracy but with bureaucracy. To many management consultants, government officials, and corporate CEOs, let alone magazine editors, the Programmed Machine is organization. Adhocracy must therefore be disorganization.

Not at all. Top-down control, unity of command, strategic planning, formalization of procedure: the Project Pioneer violates all these tenets of the Programmed Machine. But if we turn all this on its head, we get, not the lack of structure, but another structure, no less viable in its own context: the Project Pioneer.⁸⁰

Basic Structure of the Project Pioneer

The Project Pioneer, like the Personal Enterprise, has a loose, organic structure, but whereas the latter coordinates largely by the direct supervision of a chief, the Project Pioneer relies for coordination on mutual adjustment within and across its teams of experts. It does so to achieve difficult innovation. Years ago, when I approached a company that used this structure, asking for a copy of its organization chart, I received this reply: “We would prefer not to supply an organization chart, since it would change too quickly to serve any useful purpose.” I never asked that question of an adhocracy again!

Here we find little technostructure, not much beyond using budgets and schedules to try to keep the projects on track—no easy matter. On several occasions I have been invited to do workshops in such organizations, to legitimize the notion of adhocracy. My favorite question has always been: “Who’s the most miserable person in an adhocracy?” This was inevitably followed by a brief silence, then growing laughter as everyone looked at some poor soul cowering in a corner: the controller, of course. Someone has to keep the lid on all the volatility.

Support staff do, however, figure prominently in the project organization, but not as in the machine and professional organizations. Here is where many of the experts are housed, in specialized units, to be deployed on the project teams to add their knowledge—for example, a scientist in research to a team developing a new product. Hence, the support staff are not off to one side, to speak only when spoken to; they are part and parcel of the project structure. With everyone pitching in on those teams, how is line to be distinguished from staff anyway?

Not only is the distinction between line and staff blurred in the Project Pioneer, but so are all the formal distinctions of conventional organizations. This enables the experts to move freely about the place, as do basketball players on the court. Accordingly, the project organization is selectively decentralized: power flows to whoever can deal with whatever is necessary at the moment, managers and nonmanagers alike.

The connecting of the support staff is an indication of the extensive use of matrix structure in the Project Pioneers. Hence, managers abound in these organizations: functional managers, integrating managers, and especially project managers, because the project teams have to be kept small to facilitate coordination by mutual adjustment.

But the managers of the Project Pioneer tend not to manage in the conventional sense. They connect more than control, especially across the teams. In other words, they coordinate by mutual adjustment more than dictate by direct supervision. Indeed, they, too, often work as regular members of the project teams. Some years ago, when I was observing the chief operating officer of a large hightech software company in France, he joined the meeting of a project team. When I asked why, he explained that the team was developing some new software that would set a precedent for the company—in his words, it was “the beginning of a strategy”—and therefore needed his active participation.⁸¹ As we shall discuss in Chapter 11, strategies emerge in project organizations through this kind of grounded learning.

To summarize, the Project Pioneer functions as an organic mass of operating experts, line managers, and staff specialists who work together in ever-shifting relationships on ad hoc project teams.

Conditions and Kinds of Project Pioneers

Project Pioneers tend to be found in environments that are both complex and dynamic, from high technology to guerrilla warfare. The complexity requires experts, and the dynamism requires teamwork among them.

Notice that most of the examples used in this chapter thus far are in industries that have developed since the latter part of the twentieth century, many of them in high technology. We live in an era of adhocracy, at least for much of what is new in our world of organizations. Hence the literature has come up with many labels for this form (see box).

There are permanent adhocracies that reorganize from one project to the next, and temporary adhocracies that engage in one major project and then disband—such as an Olympic Organizing Committee. There are also operating adhocracies that undertake projects for outsiders, and administrative adhocracies whose projects serve themselves. Thus, a jazz quartet is an operating adhocracy: it plays creatively for its audience, just as a design studio develops new products for its clients. Companies in gaming, on the other hand, undertake a steady stream of projects to bring new products to the marketplace, even if they manufacture them in machine-like structures, or outsource this manufacturing altogether. In other words, administrative adhocracies sell the products, not the projects. Aircraft manufacturers do likewise, although when they customize a corporate jet for a particular buyer, they are functioning as an operating adhocracy. The logo for this chapter shows these two forms of Project Pioneers, one with the projects in the operating core, the other with them distributed across their administration.

Adhocracy also appears, in the administrative form, when a machine organization that automates its operations shifts toward the project form. As described in Chapter 6, with machinery replacing the people who were doing routine operating work, the focus of the organization shifts to skilled specialists who collaborate in teams to design, develop, and maintain that machinery.

Mention should also be made here of extended adhocracies, which further blur the boundaries of this form. Being so flexible, Project Pioneers are inclined to welcome outsiders on their project teams, for example to use their specialized expertise. Not infrequently, they also outsource some aspects of their projects entirely, as do aircraft manufacturers with the design and fabrication of the engines for their new planes. (We shall return to this outsourcing in Chapter 20.)

The Cons of the Project Pioneer

We have discussed the pros of the Project Pioneer at some length; the cons are perhaps less appreciated than those of the other three forms, thanks to it being in fashion. Even for this reason alone, these cons deserve more careful consideration.

The Project Pioneer is no utopia. It has its strengths, in its place, like the other forms, and its faults beyond these. In particular, the ambiguities of the project organization can be unnerving, and too much efficiency can be sacrificed for the sake of effectiveness.

Ubiquitous Ambiguity

It has been said that if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the ambiguities, get out of the project organization. We all appreciate novelty, but so too do we crave stability. An unrelenting pace of change can get to people after a while, as can the opposite. In January everyone is working frantically to finish a project; by March they are playing cards for want of work. Boom and bust. Can we blame those who crave the steadier life of a Professional Assembly, or a CEO who grabs an opportunity to mass produce a particularly successful product and be done with all the innovating?

Even within ongoing projects, there can be considerable anxiety. Will it work? What if the necessary creativity doesn’t materialize? Who belongs where in the abstruse matrix structure? All this can be a breeding ground for conflict. But with power so diffused amid the ambiguities of the project organization, political games arise naturally and focus can get lost.

Inefficient Effectiveness

Project Pioneers are not much good at doing ordinary things; they relish the extraordinary. But novelty is messy and can be time-consuming. Squeezing the teams to be efficient, or taking away their slack, can kill their creativity. The Project Pioneer gains its effectiveness by being inefficient. With a variety of people having to function in ad hoc teams—operators, line managers, and staff experts, inside and outside the organization—much time has to be spent on communication. That’s not efficient. Moreover, to be innovative, people have to learn together from their mistakes, and this means being able— even encouraged—to make mistakes and have the time to correct them.

A meeting of the team is called about some unanticipated problem. It gets defined and redefined. Eventually solutions are generated, debated, and discarded or embraced. All this while alliances are building amid hard bargaining. Finally, a decision emerges—that in itself is an accomplishment—although it is likely to be late and modified later, eventually to prove pioneering.

Expect to see a lot more of adhocracy!