Abstract: It’s the year 2025 and our long-time CEO has just made his last decision. Earlier today our CEO announced that with support of the Board of Directors, we will be eliminating our management hierarchy and departmental structure to better distribute decision making and promote self-management. A company of 10,000 people distributed around the world with revenues of $1 billion annually, this change has already sparked many important questions such as “how does this effect the way I work today?” The CEO has asked us, a group of employees representing all aspects of the company, to come up with a plan to implement his final mandate within 90 days. Now we must figure out what this means for us, our customers, and ultimately the future of our company.
This is no ordinary workshop. No PowerPoint presentation. No talk. Rather, this will be an experimental storytelling game. Taking a highly possible situation, we’ll experiment with how it might play out in the real world. Working in groups, you’ll be given complex problems to solve, such as how do we support employees who don’t want to participate in the change, what happens to those in management roles, and how do we make sure customers don’t get forgotten throughout the change. Groups will collaborate during the session to paint the picture of what such a transition might look like, including the actions we could take to make the transition smoother. Join me as we reimagine the future of work by playing with it first.
Learning Outcomes: - Explore creative ideas on how to begin removing the traditional management structure from an organization and the associated implications
- Understand how to use storytelling and alternate reality game play to experiment with different ideas before implementing them
- Contribute to a publicly available body of knowledge on how organizations can begin approaching a flat/no management structure (the ideas gathered during the session will be added to an online wiki that can be leveraged by anyone around the world exploring these ideas)
