Beyond Organizations: New Models for Getting Things Done
Leadership and Administrative Skills
Mark Platten
County Director
CSU EXTENSION
Woodland Park
Abstract
The purpose of this presentation is to explore how current organizations are a social technology – a means for getting things done, creating economic value, and maintaining social order and cohesion. We are witnessing the emergence of new organizational forms and ways of getting things done. These organizational forms are more fluid, porous, and distributed. They are often less stable and predictable than industrial era organizations. Enabled by a new set of technologies, these new ways of organizing are forcing us to re-think legacy management structures and approaches. Wikipedia, Uber, Airbnb, and many other efforts are signals of networked, distributed, open-organizational technologies that are rapidly overtaking and replacing the ones we've relied on for the last several centuries. Not only are the structures and flows of organizations being transformed in this new environment, their function and purpose are, too. I’ll look at the drivers of change over the past 40 years including access, context, and intelligence. Next I’ll explore how we’re getting things done in this new, disruptive environment including: resource allocation, boundaries, planning, synchronization, recruitment, compensation, and scaling. We’ll look at each one of these areas and where Extension might benefit, or be left behind depending on how we’re able to adapt. From there we’ll explore the five skills individuals will need to thrive in future organizations. These five skills include: make yourself known, befriend artificial intelligence (AI), build your tribe, share risks and assets, and make sense of big data and be able to share what is relevant and accurate. The final phase of the presentation will cover the four components of successful organizations as we approach the third decade of the 21st century. These include how the organization learns and adapts, how we incorporate AI to work on our behalf, how well we understand the needs of our employees and clients, and how creative we are encouraged to be. My intent is to create lively conversation regarding how Extension could envision itself to lead, rather than respond to the changing business environment and plant the seeds of possibility of what, and who we could be.
Authors: Mark J. Platten
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Mark J. Platten County Director, Colorado State University Extension, Colorado, 80863