Top Down

This feature only applies to episodes with transcripts, which is a small number at this time.

Gary Hamel on busting bureaucracy for good

...seemed to me that we were at a point in time where organisations were facing challenges that lay outside the performance envelope of the bureaucratic top down model, which we all know ofand have grown up with. And yet there were few alternatives on the horizon. I think there are more now than there were the...more
...uman hierarchies on any given subject. There are people who know more than others. So that's just inevitable. But the idea that you'd have one single top down formal hierarchy as a way of organising human beings is not a law of physics. That's a choice that we made at a particular point in time when adminis...more
...away?' And he found 39 individuals who said, 'yeah, let's try that'. And purposely, they didn't start out with some very detailed model. It wasn't a top down program, because we don't really know how to do this. And for the first year, they had very little communication across these 39 leaders because they...more
..., because the irony is, if you want to build a self- managing organisation, and you want to empower people, I don't think you can start by empowering top-down a new model. You have to create a process of discovery where people can find that they can engineer it themselves and adapt it as necessary. And one ...more

Jos de Blok on Buurtzorg and the virtues of humanising, not protocolising

...his neighborhood where they were working. We heard it also from others that where other organisations were starting command and control strategy; so top down, it's crisis, now we have to put clear protocols on everything. And we said, no, we should ask the teams what they need in their daily work, how they...more
...And in fact I think that a lot of organisations are creating damage for a lot of people by all the restrictions, by all the protocols, by all the the top down directions. I see Buurtzorg as a kind of a living organism where everybody is organically connected....more

Michael Y. Lee on lessons from researching self-managing organisations

...capable and motivated to manage themselves, so as in, if you need senior employees who can lead without necessarily using and leveraging controlling, top-down authority. You need junior employees or less senior employees who can run with responsibility, exercise authority, but do so in a responsible way. A...more
...tructures, wanting to be more empowering to make sure that their direct reports are feeling engaged and motivated. And so these traditional, I think, top-down approaches to management, even in hierarchies aren't working and have probably never worked. And so I think these are in many ways, the same principl...more

Beetroot’s founders on purpose, self-management, and shocking people with trust

... on an individual, like peer to peer level because that feedback needs to happen everywhere between different people in the organisation, rather than top-down. Yeah, that's something we work on. It's something that is maybe one of the more challenging parts for us and maybe partly because (and you know thi...more
...ctually think on the other end, that approach gives that opportunity as well because growing in this way means that you don't grow just based on some top-down strategy, but you grow in parallel in many different parts of the organisation at the same time....more

Aaron Dignan on being complexity conscious and people positive

...nan: I think there's a lot of barriers, actually. I mean, the first one is that one of the byproducts of working in a fairly, you know, hierarchical, top-down bureaucratic way, in a market that prizes never ending growth, is that you're very busy and you don't even have time to think. And so most people are...more
...Lisa Gill: And what are your thoughts about how organisational change needs to change. Those top down, 'plan everything out' strategies of change just don't work anymore. So what is the alternative? Organizational change is hard. But what are some thi...more

Buurtzorg and the power of self-managed teams of nurses

...da, and talking about what it was like for her to start the first Houten team. They talked about the transition from working in a large, traditional, top-down, hierarchical healthcare company, to suddenly being responsible for starting a new team from scratch and finding patients and deciding how they were ...more
...ladies give about no leadership. I can't be sure if that's just a language thing. Maybe they meant no management, you know, the kind of stereotypical top-down behaviours that we associate with managers anyway. In any case, I think my interpretation, or maybe my belief in general is that there is leadership ...more

Anna Elgh on self-managing teams and shifting conflicts at Svenska Retursystem

...ganised, that feel that it's not really efficient right now - we need to do some changes. And the hard thing now is not to fall back and start taking top down decisions, to really continue to be in this even though we see such positive effects that some teams, other teams must find their way. I can just go...more

Frederic Laloux with an invitation to reclaim integrity and aliveness

...t I found so inspiring, like Nicolas Hennon and this sort of wholesale environmental reinvention, or the way Decathlon is doing it is that it’s not a top-down sustainability programme. But they were just encouraging everyone in the organisation to go and do an experiment. And so we’re really bold and really...more

Bill Fischer and Simone Cicero on Haier and the entrepreneurial organisation

...people to be successful? Because yeah, I can imagine when you’re entering into Haier, chances are you know you’ve had an experience of a traditional, top-down organisation. It also often the case with these kinds of organisations that the people who really thrive are people who are either young and don’t ha...more

Jorge Silva on horizontal structures and participatory culture at 10Pines

... different way. And it's really powerful. Lisa Gill: Yeah, I've heard that before: that if you get people who haven't been corrupted by a traditional top-down organisation, it's in some ways easier for them to integrate, and they don't have so much to unlearn. Jorge Silva: Yeah, right. Right now we are work...more

Peter Koenig on source, money and consciousness

...his podcast with people about this paradigm shift from parent-child dynamics in organisations to more adult to adult, and part of that is not just a 'top-down' transformation, but also a 'bottom-up' transformation, (if I can say that way, which is also a little bit outdated). But in a sense, the people who...more

Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and the future of work

...did we learn from that? What else could we try? And what contributed to that not working?” AE: And what people don’t realise is that often plain old top-down management isn’t working but we don’t know it because no one’s speaking up about the parts not working. ...more