Vertical Mechanisms of Control: The Evolution of HR

The architecture of many modern organisations is rooted in the iron and steam of Victorian engineering. Massive pillars: mechanisms of control, exerted by the organisation over the individual. HR, despite it’s best intentions, despite it’s desire to change, is all too often experienced as formal control and reprimand. IT is experienced as controlling and punitive. L&D is experienced as compliance and abstract intervention. Not in every case, but all too often.

What’s the alternative? The Socially Dynamic organisation will be restructured to be both scaffolded and facilitating: it’s answer won’t be ‘no’, but rather ‘how’. It will have a deeply embedded ability to be curious, to question, to listen. It will enable and facilitate, not command and control.

How we will find it?

We won’t. We need to build it. Starting today: because if we don’t build it, if we don’t transform our own organisations to be both Socially Dynamic and fairer in the ways they engage their community, they will be swept away by the tide of change, by the new, democratised and liberated pioneers.

No matter how large the rock, how deep the foundations, how long the legacy, nothing will ensure survival so much as the ability to evolve, to become truly dynamic, to become facilitating.

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