Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  These changes, moreover, are increasingly far-reaching in power and scope. Says Professor L. E. Greiner of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration: "Whereas only a few years ago the target of organization change was limited to a small work group or a single department ... the focus is now converging on the organization as a whole, reaching out to include many divisions and levels at once, and even the top managers themselves." He refers to "revolutionary attempts" to transform organization "at all levels of management."

  If the once-fixed table of organization won't hold still in industry, much the same is increasingly true of the great government agencies as well. There is scarcely an important department or ministry in the governments of the technological nations that has not undergone successive organizational change in recent years. In the United States during the forty-year span from 1913 to 1953, despite depression, war and other social upheavals, not a single new cabinet-level department was added to the government. Yet in 1953 Congress created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1965 it established the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1967 it set up the Department of Transportation (thus consolidating activities formerly carried out in thirty different agencies,) and, at about the same time, the President called for a merger of the departments of Labor and Commerce.

  Such changes within the structure of government are only the most conspicuous, for organizational tremors are similarly felt in all the agencies down below. Indeed, internal redesign has become a byword in Washington. In 1965 when John Gardner became Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, a top-to-bottom reorganization shook that department. Agencies, bureaus and offices were realigned at a rate that left veteran employees in a state of mental exhaustion. (During the height of this reshuffling, one official, who happens to be a friend of mine, used to leave a note behind for her husband each morning when she left for work. The note consisted of her telephone number for that day. So rapid were the changes that she could not keep a telephone number long enough for it to be listed in the departmental directory.) Mr. Gardner's successors continued tinkering with organization, and by 1969, Robert Finch, after eleven months in office, was pressing for yet another major overhaul, having concluded in the meantime that the department was virtually unmanageable in the form in which he found it.

  In Self-Renewal, an influential little book written before he entered the government, Gardner asserted that: "The farsighted administrator ... reorganizes to break down calcified organizational lines. He shifts personnel ... He redefines jobs to break them out of rigid categories." Elsewhere Gardner referred to the "crises of organization" in government and suggested that, in both the public and private sectors, "Most organizations have a structure that was designed to solve problems that no longer exist." The "self-renewing" organization, he defined as one that constantly changes its structure in response to changing needs.

  Gardner's message amounts to a call for permanent revolution in organizational life, and more and more sophisticated managers are recognizing that in a world of accelerating change reorganization is, and must be, an on-going process, rather than a traumatic once-in-alifetime affair. This recognition is spreading outside the corporations and government agencies as well. Thus The New York Times, on the same day that it reports on proposed mergers in the plastics, plywood and paper industries, describes a major administrative upheaval at the British Broadcasting Corporation, a thorough renovation of the structure of Columbia University, and even a complete reorganization of that most conservative of institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What is involved in all this activity is not a casual tendency but a historic movement. Organizational change – selfrenewal, as Gardner puts it – is a necessary, an unavoidable response to the acceleration of change.

  For the individual within these organizations, change creates a wholly new climate and a new set of problems. The turnover of organizational designs means that the individual's relationship to any one structure (with its implied set of obligations and rewards) is truncated, shortened in time. With each change, he must reorient himself. Today the average individual is frequently reassigned, shuffled about from one sub-structure to another. But even if he remains in the same department, he often finds that the department, itself, has been shifted on some fast-changing table of organization, so that his position in the overall maze is no longer the same.

  The result is that man's organizational relationships today tend to change at a faster pace than ever before. The average relationship is less permanent, more temporary, than ever before.

  THE NEW AD-HOCRACY

  The high rate of turnover is most dramatically symbolized by the rapid rise of what executives call "project" or "task-force" management. Here teams are assembled to solve specific short-term problems. Then, exactly like the mobile playgrounds, they are disassembled and their human components reassigned. Sometimes these teams are thrown together to serve only for a few days. Sometimes they are intended to last a few years. But unlike the functional departments or divisions of a traditional bureaucratic organization, which are presumed to be permanent, the project or task-force team is temporary by design.

  When Lockheed Aircraft Corporation won a controversial contract to build fifty-eight giant C-5A military air transports, it created a whole new 11,000-man organization specifically for that purpose. To complete the multi-billion-dollar job, Lockheed had to coordinate the work not only of its own people, but of hundreds of subcontracting firms. In all, 6000 companies are involved in producing the more than 120,000 parts needed for each of these enormous airplanes. The Lockheed project organization created for this purpose has its own management and its own complex internal structure.

  The first of the C-5A's rolled out of the shop exactly on schedule in March, 1969, twenty-nine months after award of the contract. The last of the fifty-eight transports was due to be delivered two years later. This meant that the entire imposing organization created for this job had a planned life span of five years. What we see here is nothing less than the creation of a disposable division – the organizational equivalent of paper dresses or throwaway tissues.

  Project organization is widespread in the aerospace industries. When a leading manufacturer set out to win a certain large contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, it assembled a team of approximately one hundred people borrowed from various functional divisions of the company. The project team worked for about a year and a half to gather data and analyze the job even before the government formally requested bids. When the time came to prepare a formal bid – a "proposal," as it is known in the industry – the "preproposal project team" was dissolved and its members sent back to their functional divisions. A new team was brought into being to write the actual proposal. Proposal-writing teams often work together for a few weeks. Once the proposal is submitted, however, the proposal team is also disbanded. When the contract is won (if it is), new teams are successively established for development, and, ultimately, production of the goods required. Some individuals may move along with the job, joining each successive project team. Typically, however, people are brought in to work on only one or a few stages of the job.

  While this form of organization is widely identified with aerospace companies, it is increasingly employed in more traditional industries as well. It is used when the task to be accomplished is non-routine, when it is, in effect, a one-time proposition.

  "In just a few years," says Business Week, "the project manager has become commonplace." Indeed, project management has, itself, become recognized as a specialized executive art, and there is a small, but growing band of managers, both in the United States and Europe, who move from project to project, company to company, never settling down to run routine or long-term operations. Books on project and task-force management are beginning to appear. And the United States Air Force Systems Command at Dayton, Ohio, runs a school to train executives for project management.

  Task forces and other ad hoc
groups are now proliferating throughout the government and business bureaucracies, both in the United States and abroad. Transient teams, whose members come together to solve a specific problem and then separate, are particularly characteristic of science and help account for the kinetic quality of the scientific community. Its members are constantly on the move, organizationally, if not geographically.

  George Kozmetsky, co-founder of Teledyne, Incorporated, and now dean of the school of business at the University of Texas, distinguishes between "routine" and "non-routine" organizations. The latter grapple most frequently with one-of-a-kind problems. He cites statistics to show that the non-routine sector, in which he brackets government and many of the advanced technology companies, is growing so fast that it will employ 65 percent of the total United States work force by the year 2001. Organizations in this sector are precisely the ones that rely most heavily on transient teams and task forces.

  Clearly, there is nothing new about the idea of assembling a group to work toward the solution of a specific problem, then dismantling it when the task is completed. What is new is the frequency with which organizations must resort to such temporary arrangements. The seemingly permanent structures of many large organizations, often because they resist change, are now heavily infiltrated with these transient cells.

  On the surface, the rise of temporary organization may seem insignificant. Yet this mode of operation plays havoc with the traditional conception of organization as consisting of more or less permanent structures. Throw-away organizations, ad hoc teams or committees, do not necessarily replace permanent functional structures, but they change them beyond recognition, draining them of both people and power. Today while functional divisions continue to exist, more and more project teams, task forces and similar organizational structures spring up in their midst, then disappear. And people, instead of filling fixed slots in the functional organization, move back and forth at a high rate of speed. They often retain their functional "home base" but are detached repeatedly to serve as temporary team members.

  We shall shortly see that this process, repeated often enough, alters the loyalties of the people involved; shakes up lines of authority; and accelerates the rate at which individuals are forced to adapt to organizational change. For the moment, however, it is important to recognize that the rise of ad hoc organization is a direct effect of the speed-up of change in society as a whole.

  So long as a society is relatively stable and unchanging, the problems it presents to men tend to be routine and predictable. Organizations in such an environment can be relatively permanent. But when change is accelerated, more and more novel first-time problems arise, and traditional forms of organization prove inadequate to the new conditions. They can no longer cope. As long as this is so, says Dr. Donald A. Schon, president of the Organization for Social and Technical Innovation, we need to create "self-destroying organizations ... lots of autonomous, semi-attached units which can be spun off, destroyed, sold bye-bye, when the need for them has disappeared."

  Traditional functional organization structures, created to meet predictable, non-novel conditions, prove incapable of responding effectively to radical changes in the environment. Thus temporary role structures are created as the whole organization struggles to preserve itself and keep growing. The process is exactly analogous to the trend toward modularism in architecture. We earlier defined modularism as the attempt to lend greater durability to a whole structure by shortening the life span of its components. This applies to organization as well, and it helps explain the rise of shortlived or throw-away, organization components.

  As acceleration continues, organizational redesign becomes a continuing function. According to management consultant Bernard Muller-Thym, the new technology, combined with advanced management techniques, creates a totally new situation. "What is now within our grasp," he says, "is a kind of productive capability that is alive with intelligence, alive with information, so that at its maximum it is completely flexible; one could completely reorganize the plant from hour to hour if one wished to do so." And what is true of the plant is increasingly true of the organization as a whole.

  In short, the organizational geography of super-industrial society can be expected to become increasingly kinetic, filled with turbulence and change. The more rapidly the environment changes, the shorter the life span of organization forms. In administrative structure, just as in architectural structure, we are moving from long-enduring to temporary forms, from permanence to transience. We are moving from bureaucracy to Ad-hocracy.

  In this way, the accelerative thrust translates itself into organization. Permanence, one of the identifying characteristics of bureaucracy, is undermined, and we are driven to a relentless conclusion: man's ties with the invisible geography of organization turn over more and more rapidly, exactly as do his relationships with things, places, and the human beings who people these ever-changing organizational structures. Just as the new nomads migrate from place to place, man increasingly migrates from organizational structure to organizational structure.

  THE COLLAPSE OF HIERARCHY

  Something else is happening, too: a revolutionary shift in power relationships. Not only are large organizations forced both to change their internal structure and to create temporary units, but they are also finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their traditional chains-ofcommand.

  It would be pollyannish to suggest that workers in industry or government today truly "participate" in the management of their enterprises – either in capitalist or, for that matter, in socialist and communist countries. Yet there is evidence that bureaucratic hierarchies, separating those who "make decisions" from those who merely carry them out, are being altered, side-stepped or broken.

  This process is noticeable in industry where, according to Professor William H. Read of the Graduate School of Business at McGill University, "irresistible pressures" are battering hierarchical arrangements. "The central, crucial and important business of organizations," he declares, "is increasingly shifting from up and down to 'sideways.'" What is involved in such a shift is a virtual revolution in organizational structure – and human relations. For people communicating "sideways" – i.e., to others at approximately the same level of organization – behave differently, operate under very different pressures, than those who must communicate up and down a hierarchy.

  To illustrate, let us look at a typical work setting in which a traditional bureaucratic hierarchy operates. While still a young man I worked for a couple of years as a millwright's helper in a foundry. Here, in a great dark cavern of a building, thousands of men labored to produce automobile crankcase castings. The scene was Dantesque – smoke and soot smeared our faces, black dirt covered the floors and filled the air, the pungent, choking smell of sulphur and burnt sand seared our nostrils. Overhead a creaking conveyor carried red hot castings and dripped hot sand on the men below. There were flashes of molten iron, the yellow flares of fires, and a lunatic cacophony of noises: men shouting, chains rattling, pug mills hammering, compressed air shrieking.

  To a stranger the scene appeared chaotic. But those inside knew that everything was carefully organized. Bureaucratic order prevailed. Men did the same job over and over again. Rules governed every situation. And each man knew exactly where he stood in a vertical hierarchy that reached from the lowest-paid core paster up to the unseen "they" who populated the executive suites in another building.

  In the immense shed where we worked, something was always going wrong. A bearing would burn out, a belt snap or a gear break. Whenever this happened in a section, work would screech to a halt, and frantic messages would begin to flow up and down the hierarchy. The worker nearest the breakdown would notify his foreman. He, in turn, would tell the production supervisor. The production supervisor would send word to the maintenance supervisor. The maintenance supervisor would dispatch a crew to repair the damage.

  Information in this system is passed by the worker "upward" through the f
oreman to the production supervisor. The production supervisor carries it "sideways" to a man occupying a niche at approximately the same level in the hierarchy (the maintenance supervisor), who, in turn, passes it "downward" to the millwrights who actually get things going again. The information thus must move a total of four steps up and down the vertical ladder plus one step sideways before repairs can begin.

  This system is premised on the unspoken assumption that the dirty, sweaty men down below cannot make sound decisions. Only those higher in the hierarchy are to be trusted with judgment or discretion. Officials at the top make the decisions; men at the bottom carry them out. One group represents the brains of the organization; the other, the hands.

  This typically bureaucratic arrangement is ideally suited to solving routine problems at a moderate pace. But when things speed up, or the problems cease to be routine, chaos often breaks loose. It is easy to see why.

  First, the acceleration of the pace of life (and especially the speed-up of production brought about by automation) means that every minute of "down time" costs more in lost output than ever before. Delay is increasingly costly. Information must flow faster than ever before. At the same time, rapid change, by increasing the number of novel, unexpected problems, increases the amount of information needed. It takes more information to cope with a novel problem than one we have solved a dozen or a hundred times before. It is this combined demand for more information at faster speeds that is now undermining the great vertical hierarchies so typical of bureaucracy.

  A radical speed-up could have been effected in the foundry described above simply by allowing the worker to report the breakdown directly to the maintenance supervisor or even to a maintenance crew, instead of passing the news along through his foreman and production supervisor. At least one and perhaps two steps could have been cut from the four-step communication process in this way – a saving of from 25 to 50 percent. Significantly, the steps that might be eliminated are the up-and-down steps, the vertical ones.