Goals and Limits of Deconstruction

Deconstructing the assignment can offer several advantages. Understanding them provides the rationale that helps you decide how small to deconstruct.

First, deconstruction can better allow you to give the assignment to the most qualified person. For example, the assignment of search engine optimization might be embedded in the job of web marketing designer, but might be better done by someone who specializes in such optimization. Second, deconstruction allows you to give the assignment to the least-cost worker. If a highly paid engineer is doing a few hours of administrative work each week we should see if there is some way to deconstruct the job and send that administrative work to a low-cost freelancer. Third, deconstruction allows you to better adjust assignments to reflect volatile workloads.

Retailers like Gap, Inc., Starbucks, and Target may have vast variations in customer traffic in their stores throughout the day, so it makes sense to have workers come in for short shifts. Many of those workers don't use their retail job to fill up their workweek. Rather, their retail job supplements other work they do. If a retailer were to conceive of their associates' work simply as a 40-hour-a-week job, they would miss the chance to engage workers willing and able to work fewer and more volatile hours. For Starbucks, this can actually be a competitive advantage. Starbucks endeavors to be a place where folks kick back and linger, relax, laugh and converse. Starbucks wants customers to hang out and feel a bond with their barista. The workers (known as “partners”) who want to work odd hours at Starbucks often do so because their other work is to be performers who rehearse during the day, or writers and graphic artists who prefer to paint or write during a large portion of their day, and do their Starbucks job at other times. In this case, Starbucks' partners are employees, not freelancers, but the work is optimally deconstructed into time periods that fit the right worker population.

Deconstruction raises the question of what we must forever keep together and what we may render asunder. At some point, elements of the work must be connected and happen together. You cannot write a poem by contracting out each stanza to a different free agent. If you use independent programmers to write a piece of code, it must eventually interface properly with all the other code in the system. The nuances of striking the proper balance are a part of the new work of leaders. How far should you break work apart?

The discipline of deconstruction will undoubtedly develop, but these questions seem likely to prove useful in breaking the assumption that assignments must always be grouped into jobs:

• Can we break the assignment into pieces that have tangible outcomes?
• Can we break off low-value added assignments from high-value added assignments and send each to the best person to do it?
• Can we isolate the pivotal element of the assignment, where doing that one piece really well will have a huge impact on the end result, and assign it to the very best talent in the world?
• Can some assignments that a talent platform specializes in (Tongal for commercials, Topcoder for programming) be deconstructed based on what that platform has learned about packaging assignments after seeing hundreds or thousands of similar projects?

Here are some reasons to deconstruct assignments less:

• The gain is too trivial: There is an upfront cost to deconstruction. Maybe specialists could do pieces of the work faster and cheaper, but if the gain is small, they won't compensate for the upfront cost.
• The elements of the assignment are too intricately connected: In many cases, how task A needs to be done depends on how tasks B and C are unfolding, and vice versa. For example, renowned architect, author, and innovator Christopher Alexander talks about the constant trade-offs he made in building the Eishin high school campus just outside Tokyo, saying he could not have one person making decisions on the construction of classroom building while another made decisions about the gym because they all had to fit in a harmonious whole. At a less esoteric level, cost overruns in one building would have to be compensated by savings in another.¹

Here are some reasons to deconstruct assignments more:

• A specialist can do a piece of the assignment far better than a “generalist”: Any paralegal could check a trademark for you, but they are unlikely to do it as well or as quickly as someone who specializes in trademarks. Talent platforms redefine the meaning of a specialist. At the global scale of a talent platform, you can find not just any trademark agent, but one who has recent experience in exactly the trademark issue you need to resolve. This super-specialist will provide better quality. They will also do the work faster, which means they will probably be cheaper.
• Engaging a large number of workers makes your regular employees more productive: Deconstructing assignments can make it easier to engage a very large workforce. If a large number of blueprints need to be checked for certain factors, you might deconstruct the work into a routine check, done by regular clerks, and more advanced analysis, which can only be done by engineers. An army of clerks can quickly do the bulk of work, saving the scarce engineers for only the work that needs them.
• To disperse the assignment: Deconstruction is often necessary to disperse work in time and space. For example, if you have work that could be done well by people who work from home, then you first need to break it into manageable chunks before you can disperse it to this workforce.
• To gain agility: In Built to Change: How to Achieve Sustained Organizational Effectiveness, Ed Lawler and Chris Worley argue that structuring by jobs makes the presumption that the organization is static.² If assignments can be deconstructed, then the organization is more likely to take change in stride.

Deconstruction Driven by Growth

Organizations have been addressing the issues of deconstruction, recombination, and coordination since they began. Consider the example of the HR department of a small business as it grows. Imagine a business with about 100 employees. They have an HR manager who's responsible for recruiting, training, compensation, and employee relations, among other things. The HR assignments feel tightly bound together. She knows what training is needed because she recruited the employees. In her work in recruiting, training and employee relations, she develops such deep insight into the jobs and people that she can develop and manage a fair and effective rewards system. Everything fits together.

Then the company grows to 200 people, and she just doesn't have the time to “know” the talent anymore. The first deconstruction involves an assistant to do the administrative aspects of the job, such as scheduling interviews and assembling training material, hoping that she can pass down enough work to fit 40 hours a week.

The next deconstruction occurs when the company gets bigger still and requires one manager to handle just recruiting. Earlier, the HR leader believed this function was too closely bound to the overall assignments of people management to be pulled out, but now the volume of the recruiting assignment and of her own other work makes it a logical choice. However, to work well, deconstruction must avoid creating silos, or situations in which the recruiter only hears about hiring needs at the last minute or after getting to know the new hire well, fails to pass that information on to her colleagues.

As the firm grows, assignments that were formerly part of the self-contained job of the HR leader continue to be deconstructed and parsed out. Soon, the job of HR leader becomes one of integration, with separate functions for training, compensation, employee relations, and so on. At each stage of deconstruction, we can divide work on the basis of a functional area (for example, all the tasks in recruiting fit together) or by level of work (for example, all clerical tasks are put together).

Thus, deconstruction is not completely new, but the world beyond employment creates new opportunities to deconstruct and coordinate assignments that are increasingly smaller and dispersed. Leaders must bring more rigor and discipline to a deconstruction process that traditionally might simply happen organically as a byproduct of growth.

Deconstructing and Reconstructing by Necessity: The Lean Entrepreneur

Lean entrepreneurs often are reluctant to add employees. A lean entrepreneur recognizes that as soon as he hires an employee, he has a mouth to feed, a set of legal obligations to fulfill, a junior to direct and mentor, and potentially a long-term commitment that will be expensive to break. Lean entrepreneurs avoid the employment contract as long as possible. Some who have successfully grown a business once with employees, and have the opportunity to do so again, say, “Why on earth would I want to take that burden on?” Fortunately, the choice is not as stark as give up on growth versus hire employees; there are options such as outsourcing, alliances, and free agents to help drive growth and profits.

Lean entrepreneurs may farm out clerical or specialist work, either by outsourcing or contracting with free agents. They may get a free-agent bookkeeper to do the accounting for just for a few hours a month, and hire a virtual assistant, perhaps one they found on Upwork to handle clerical work. They may form alliances with professionals in closely related fields so that they can handle bigger projects. Chapter 2 described Smith & Associates, where the associates were simply people Smith could call on when needed to help with bigger assignments. Smith may consider these associates friends, allies or subcontractors, but they are certainly not employees or partners.

At what point does pushing work outside the organization fail? There is no obvious upper limit. Certainly a 1:1 ratio of employees to free agents is manageable, but why not 1:2 or 1:4? How could Instagram, with only 13 employees, be sold for $1 billion? With Instagram, almost all the work is done by the unpaid users of the service. The same could be said for Google, whose vast wealth depends on hundreds of millions of content creators the company neither pays nor manages, or Apple, with its vast network of applications developers.

Compared to the “deconstruction driven by growth” case, the lean entrepreneur case is one of systematic recombination of elements, but only when necessary to the coordination requirements. If successful, lean entrepreneurs find the right balance of deconstructed and combined work, and just enough coordination to tie them all together.

Deconstruction through Projects

An alternative way to approach deconstruction is to look at work as a series of projects. In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin argues that knowledge work never belonged in jobs in any case. He feels companies took the model of industrial-age work, where stable well-defined jobs made sense, and misapplied that structure to knowledge work.³ Martin argues that knowledge work is naturally organized into projects and you see this embodied in how a professional services firm works. This perspective of “project work” is a special case of deconstruction. Just as with tasks and microtasks, organizing the assignments as projects will be much easier in a world of free agents, alliances, and talent platforms.

Projects have a finite time span, and often sit uncomfortably within the world of jobs, but very comfortably in the world of deconstructed assignments. An ideal project uses just the right mix of talent for just the right period of time. As we have seen, trying to achieve this with regular full-time employees can be risky, and raises the question of what those employees will be doing after the project ends. Hollywood, of course, is all about projects and a whole set of standard procedures have evolved in the industry so that it's relatively easy to pull the right people together and negotiate the work arrangements such as pay and accountability. Each sub-specialty on a movie set knows where they fit into the project, making coordination easier. Leaders should take notice: It is possible to run an entire industry with surprisingly few regular full-time jobs and employers, when the organizing principle is the project. Also, the Hollywood model works because it sits upon an ecosystem of structures such as the Screen Actors Guild that provides insurance, pensions, matching services, and so forth. Equivalent structures may not yet exist in your industry, but they are evolving quickly.

Final Thoughts on Deconstruction

For the leader, envying the lean entrepreneur who can build a project-based/deconstructed company from scratch, the question is whether she should run the process in reverse. An existing organization with hundreds or thousands of employees obviously can't just start over, and organically grow by deconstructing, dispersing, and detaching the work assignments. The leader may recognize that her business is burdened with high overheads and rigid structures to the point that the talent platforms are stealing their customers. Survival may depend on deconstruction.

Deconstructing your organization could occur through several steps. You might outsource whole departments. You might use contingent workers rather than employees for some assignments. You might encourage your managers to deconstruct individual jobs a piece at a time, tapping the talent platforms and free agent world. As more elements of work are pulled out of jobs, a department will begin to collapse inward. The work that took 20 people can now be done by 10, and perhaps one day that will become five. The ideal speed of execution will depend on the unique dynamics of the particular business. As a leader, are you sufficiently aware of those dynamics, so you can take the organization exactly where it needs to go?

The Role of Intermediaries in Detaching Assignments from Employment

A significant factor driving work to be detached from employment is the emergence of what some have called “labor market intermediaries.”⁷ Intermediaries stand between the individual worker and the client organization that needs the work.

“Intermediary” is an umbrella term and includes a disparate array of organizations.⁸ They include membership-based organizations such as professional societies and guilds, public-sector organizations, and educational institutions that educate and place workers, as well as an expanding class of organizations that offer services for a fee, such as information exchanges (job boards), search firms, temporary help agencies, outplacement services, and professional employer organizations (that act as the employer of record). We would also include the Talent Platforms as one of the most important intermediaries.

They are important because they take over some of the tasks traditionally handled within the employment relationship. For example, an executive may look to a search firm to navigate their career, rather than the HR department of their current employer. Similarly, a free agent may look to a Freelancers Union for health benefits rather than seek employment to provide them.

In the example of the search firm, that executive is not quite as firmly attached to her current employer because the intermediary is doing the important work of planning her career. In the case of a Talent Platform like Upwork the employment relationship between the free agent and client organization is completely severed, so Upwork meets many of the needs of the free agent including learning, career planning, and getting assignments.

Intermediaries make it easier to dial up detachment because services that were formerly only available through employment are now available via the intermediary. Some free agents look with puzzlement on employment offers that offer little compared to what they can get on their own via one or more intermediaries.

Rethinking the Purpose of the Employment Relationship

Whenever the need arises in a small company to get more work done, the first instinct is to ask, “Where can we get this done?” rather than, “Should we hire more employees?”

AppMakr is a company that builds smartphone apps, and they have taken detaching work from employment to the extreme: they have no employees. We asked AppMakr cofounder Jay Shapiro how many workers they have, and he said, “We have around 60 active contractors working with us at the moment, but that could just as easily be 200 people at another time. Unlike traditional headcount where you hire a person for a permanent full-time role, we have lots of people we have hired for a particular skill, to work on a particular project for a couple of hours/weeks/months, and then we both move on. It's one of the joys of being task-oriented, rather than role-oriented, in your HR approach.”

AppMakr shows that you can turn the “detach from employment” dial to the maximum to create a successful small company. Indeed, we should say that the company is successful precisely because they turned the dial to the extreme. Shapiro notes that a fully detached model may be easier to manage than a traditional model that attaches the assignment to employment. That's because if you try to mix the models, with some of the workers being employees and others being detached, then detached workers can feel left out. If everyone is detached from employment, then the whole culture adjusts to fit detached assignments.

One reason detaching the assignment seems natural for small companies but hard to imagine for big ones is that when a company is built on an employment model, all structures and processes are designed to work with employees. For example, an established firm may have a specific way it handles performance management, and until you have worked for the company for several years, you won't be good at it. A company built on a “detach wherever possible” model probably needs a simpler, more generic performance management system that's easier to use with free agents, contractors, or platform-based freelancers. Indeed, it may need no performance management system at all, if the intermediary provides performance management.

To lead the work requires some interesting decisions. A retailer could decide that they want to design the work in a way that draws on long-term learning by store managers and employees, with lasting relationships with the customers that patronize the store. That design fits a model where the work is not detached from employment. Often, this happens not because of a decision to attach the assignment, but due to an assumption that the work must be done by employees, because it always has. What if the retailer detached the work from employment? If they wanted to use a pool of free agents to staff the stores, they would design the assignments so that shop assistants don't need as much product or customer knowledge. The role of a store manager (that might well be embedded in a traditional employment relationship) is to manage that pool of detached free agents.

Even if you need work done by people who act much like employees, they need not be your own employees. Often, with recruitment process outsourcing, the recruiters are on-site, exactly like a regular full-time employee. However, the company does not need to manage the person, worry about their career, or provide the tools they need to do the job—that is all handled by the outsourcer.

One argument posed against detachment is that some roles require long-tenured employees to develop firm-specific knowledge. Yet, even here, can you assume that regular full-time employees will stay longer than free agents or other nonemployees? In a world of increasing job mobility, retaining workers may actually be more effectively done through an ongoing relationship with a free agent or outsourcer. That ongoing relationship may simply mean that the free agent or outsourcer is given a project from time to time, but such a relationship stretching over years or decades creates the continuity and firm-specific know-how that the organization would normally have created through employment.

When to Detach and When Not to Detach

So, there are good reasons for leaders not to assume that work must be attached to an employment relationship, and they should at least consider the options. Sometimes the employment relationship is a good option, sometimes other relationships are a better option. Leaders need to be sufficiently clear about the pros and cons, so they can make the right choice.

Here are some reasons to detach less:

• A stable core: Organizations may feel they need a core of people fully committed to the organization, and that attaching the work to employment best facilitates that commitment. Even talent platforms like Upwork have employees, and within that group some will be the core who stabilizes the company. One might even say the core employees are the company.
• Lower transaction costs: It may be easier to assign tasks as needed to a team of employees, rather than incur the cost of packaging assignments that can be detached and the price negotiated. In fact, the British economist Ronald Coase argued that these transaction costs were the original reason organizations existed. Coase pointed out that having to negotiate every transaction was expensive, and employment is a kind of blanket agreement whereby the employee agrees to do the work the manager assigns, day by day.
• Careers: Careers can be development tools. When organizations require specific expertise that takes years to build, and can't be purchased outside, internal careers may be the best answer. Attaching the work to an employment relationship is often the most effective way to give both the worker and the client confidence that their investments in that specific expertise will eventually pay off.
• Community: Some organizations strive to operate as a community, such as some family firms where workers are seen as part of the extended family, co-ops where employees are also owners, and others. Attaching work to employment relationships may best capture that community spirit.
• Societal laws and regulations: In many countries, regulations require companies to make employment relationships with workers who work a certain number of hours, are under the authority of the organization, and so forth. Until such laws evolve to provide protections to arrangements that are detached from traditional employment, organizations may be wise simply to embed the work within an employment relationship.

Here are some reasons to detach more:

• Workers of higher quality, or lower costs. As we have seen, the workers that can do an assignment at the lowest cost or at the highest quality are increasingly not available nor interested in the obligations that come with regular full-time employment. To tap those workers may require detaching the assignment from the employment relationship.
• Flexibility: Regular full-time employment can be rigid in ways that may severely limit the options for workers and their clients. Detaching the assignment from the employment relationship can unearth more options. For example, the contests that platforms such as Tongal and Topcoder run usually exist outside the employment relationship. As we saw, workers at Tongal and Topcoder submit their work, the best submissions get chosen to go further, and the bulk of the rewards go to the few chosen submissions. While contests can certainly be a part of employment relationships, the uncertainty about which workers will advance through the contests would often strain an employment relationship, by making rewards much more uncertain for workers who expected more consistent and predictable paychecks.
• Shifting risk: Attaching work to employment places greater responsibility for the workers' welfare with the employer. A world of increasing uncertainty makes it more difficult for the employer to predict the future well enough to take on such responsibility. Witness the virtual demise of defined-benefit pensions, in favor of defined contributions plans that largely rest with the individual employee. It may be best for both worker and the client to detach the assignment from employment, and shift both the risk and the responsibility to the worker themselves (a free agent) or to another employer (in the cases of alliances and outsourcing, or other intermediaries).

The Case of Agents at JetBlue Airways: Low Deconstruction, High Dispersion, and Moderate Detachment

JetBlue is famous for having success in an industry where the vast majority of players struggle. One of their innovations is in how their phone agents work. These agents carry out the “assignment” of taking customer calls and providing advice and assistance. Typically, airlines frame the decision as a choice between hiring regular full-time employees for an in-house call center versus using an outsourced call center, possibly employing lower-cost workers located outside the United States. The in-house model constructs the assignment as a traditional job, collects the workers at a call center with fixed hours, and attaches the work to a regular full-time employment role. Similarly the outsourced call-center option constructs a traditional job, collects workers at a call center, and uses an employment relationship—but in this case the employment is between the agent and outsourcer, not the agent and JetBlue.

Instead of either of these options, JetBlue created a hybrid arrangement. They kept the assignment largely intact, with little deconstruction, except a small amount needed to monitor the work remotely. The big change was to dial dispersal way up, by dispersing the assignment to the homes of the workers. They kept the assignment attached to an employment relationship, but they increased the “detach” dial a bit, by making the arrangement part-time. In essence, they created stay-at-home phone agents that were part-time employees. For JetBlue, this allowed them to tap a highly qualified and motivated set of workers that would simply not be available through either regular full-time employment or outsourcing. The ideal agent for JetBlue was a college-educated mother in the midwestern United States working part time. Such workers had excellent English, an American demeanor that was familiar to most JetBlue customers, were savvy with remote technology, and had a strong work ethic and predictable if unusual hours (as any mother with children can attest). These workers wanted the benefits of employment but could not accommodate the logistics of working at a central call center at fixed hours.

JetBlue found a better way to get work done by turning the dials just the right way and creating the infrastructure and processes to manage that work.

The Case of Foldit

Foldit (fold.it/portal) is an online video game where players figure out how to fold a virtual protein structures to meet certain objectives and parameters. Foldit was born out of an attempt to deal with a decades-old problem in biochemistry: how to determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins. A protein is just a long sequence of amino acids, and biochemists have long known how to determine that sequence. The problem is that knowing the order of amino acids does not tell you much about how the protein works; what matters is how that long sequence folds up into a three-dimensional structure. Higher scores are earned by “packing the protein” (avoiding empty spaces where water molecules can penetrate), “hiding the hydrophobics” (surround water-sensitive parts with protective layers), and “clearing the clashes” (avoid placing parts too close together because two atoms can't occupy the same space). A solution is scored based on how well it “minimizes biophysical potential energy,” and by an expert review. New puzzles come out every week and players strive to get the best score.⁹

Determining how proteins fold is an incredibly difficult mathematical problem, and one way to solve incredibly difficult mathematical problems is to throw as much computing power at them as you can muster. A cheap way of harnessing computer power is distributed computing, where the problem is deconstructed and bits are sent out to individual computers. One of the first wide-scale uses of distributed computing was the SETI@home project, which had people with PCs downloading programs to help search signals received by radio telescopes for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Foldit started in much the same way, creating Foldit@home, which allowed thousands of people to share spare computer time on their home PCs to unravel the mystery of protein structures. The protein-folding algorithm was automated; it simply used the collected computing power on people's PCs.

One feature of the Foldit@home program was a screensaver that could be displayed on the PC, showing the computer trying to fold the protein. The humans hosting the program on their PCs were a mix of scientists, graduate students, or just interested amateurs. They started writing in, saying, “The computer is going down a dead end. What it's trying is never going to work.” This gave Dr. David Baker, who leads the Foldit project, an idea: Why not let people try their hand at folding the proteins themselves?

Thus was born the video game where people could take a protein and try to fold in up in various ways. The players are motivated by the bragging rights and personal satisfaction in solving a problem that eluded the computer, and has benefit to mankind.

The Foldit program has achieved important scientific results, including ones that may one day lead to a cure for AIDS. An article in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology listed Foldit Contenders Group and Foldit Void Crushers Group as two of the authors.¹⁰ In three weeks, the gamers solved a thorny retrovirus enzyme structure problem that had eluded scientists for years. The solution could have significant implications for the treatment of diseases like AIDS.

The universities that benefit from this work dialed deconstruction very high, by taking the job of research scientist, and isolating the particular task of protein folding. They dialed up dispersion very high, by locating the work in a game that could be played from anywhere at any time. They dialed up detachment very high, by relying on volunteers with no employment relationship to the work. The results suggest that this was probably the only way to tap into the relatively few talented protein folders in the world who could solve the problem.