When you read the title of this article out loud, you may have been taken by a slight worry : what, are we going to give all power to teenagers ?! Don't panic, adhocracy is a way of organizing work that is particularly adapted to unstable and complex contexts. Its two main assets : multidisciplinarity and flexibility. We explain everything to you.
In the face of rapid change
The notion of adhocracy, built on the Latin phrase " ad hoc ", was born from the pen of the sociologist and futurologist Alvin Toffler in 1970. That year, he published The Shock of the Future, an essay devoted to the effects of change on individuals and societies. And to note that in contexts of rapid change, the level of stress rises dizzyingly and a feeling of disorientation leads us to irrational behaviors, in the sense of being unsuitable for the situation. Thus, when everything is moving around us, even though we need to get our bearings, we tend to change our minds incessantly, to multiply the opportunities to make choices (and therefore mistakes), to rush into novelty, to modify our social relationships, etc.
Bureaucracy is no exception to this heating up of the search for solutions in response to the uncertainties produced by change : process is added to the process, from control to formalities, from intermediate steps to phase sequencing, from silos to perimeters, from reporting to indicators, etc. In other words, the dynamics of change produce paradoxes : we constantly oscillate between helpless agitation in the hope of following the movement at all costs and annoying rigidity in an attempt to keep control despite everything.
Thinking about the future from the real
To get out of it, Toffler tells us, we need to review our working methods when we are in a period of turbulence and transformation... And above all, above all, not to let the bureaucracy take over the structuring of the organization alone. The latter would indeed tend to think of change with a conceptual point of view, too far from reality. It would thus produce, as Michel Crozier highlighted in 1963 , incomplete systems, partly incoherent and depriving of the opportunities for innovation brought about by change, in particular by sterilizing creativity.
The first bet of adhocracy is that the present contains the future. It is therefore a question of detecting it in our reality rather than inventing it from scratch. To perceive the manifestations of the future in the present, it is essential to tame their complexity and to do so to combine points of view.
Adhocracy in practice
Adhocracy is therefore by nature multidisciplinary. It requires bringing together " experts " from different disciplines, different professions, different approaches. By " expert ", we do not necessarily mean academics or authors of reference works; Rather, they are people who have in-depth experience of their profession, who have a long memory of the company's history, who know the informal workings of the company by heart (as is often the case with assistants, among others). The meeting of their points of view allows us to access a finer vision of today's reality and the concordances that emerge in the apprehension of tomorrow's reality.
Adhocracy operates in " project mode". The " experts " form a working group formed around an identified objective. For example : adapting to this or that evolution of society, to this or that technological innovation, to a transformation of workspaces, to a given business problem, etc. The general functioning of the group is horizontal, within a pre-established framework that must guarantee everyone the equal opportunity to participate, to be heard and to be considered in their words. This framework may provide for leadership functions if necessary, but without these overlapping the hierarchy intended by the organization. We can also imagine alternative forms of leadership to the project management model, for example with rotating supervision (the members take turns taking on the mandate of leader of the working group) or with an independent third party responsible for advancing the group work.
Adhocracy is adjustable. Throughout the deployment of the project, reality retains its full place. As a result, the hazard, the unexpected, the incident that disturbs the model in the process of being set up are welcome in the discussion. Adhocracy is agile and solution-oriented : it adopts reality and responds to it, but never denies it or tries to shoehorn it into pre-established processes. She works specifically on redesigning processes, making models more flexible, and including diversity and complexities in organizational structures. Thus, it takes very seriously resistance to change, which is not seen as conservative manifestations or excesses coming from those who prevent people from going round in circles, but as real signals of the need to prolong the work of alignment.
Adhocracy is temporary, by definition. It is made to lead the transitions from one state to another. The working group is dissolved once the objective of providing an appropriate solution to the problem submitted to it has been achieved, provided that the environment in which it works is otherwise stabilized. To this end, it is desirable that the working groups be able to continue their activities for a specified period after stabilization. They thus make the final necessary adjustments to their project, always taking into account the reality of observable facts.
Designed to cope with change, adhocracy is a method also used to create the conditions for innovation. Forms of this can be found in certain intrapreneurship programs or in task forces dedicated to the design of new products to meet emerging needs.
