Leaders, executives, and managers can face the new normal with confidence knowing that there’s a new way for teams to work more productively. It’s called “pods” and it has been proven to deliver improvements of 30% or more in factors like productivity, quality, and employee satisfaction.
Managing Just Got Easier
We humans evolved an efficient way of working together centuries ago — an organizational model that may be our best approach to today’s fragmented and uncertain new normal. It’s called the “pod” model, and it describes a small, established team of people who are adaptive and largely self-managing.
The pod model helped propel us all the way from the Stone Age to modern abundance until it was cast aside a little over 100 years ago to make way for the machine-driven hierarchical mindset of the Industrial Revolution. But recently, thanks to the writings of systems scientists like Peter Senge, a new wave of collaboration and productivity has started to rediscover the ancient successes of pods, freeing up managers to achieve more with their teams by actually doing less.
What Was Wrong With the Old Model?
Today’s predominant model for managing comes from machine-based organizations (factories) that used an “assembly line” method of manufacture. Departments were born out of the need to train people to keep up with the machines, and managing consisted largely of setting the standards for how fast people should work in order to maximize company profits, or to avoid being fired. Managers were enforcers of a strict process in a rigid production system.
If that feels dehumanizing, you’re right — the factory methods did little to embrace the best in human skills and behaviors. But in today’s world of complex knowledge work performed by skilled workers, departments have become less essential. Since the 1990s pod-based ways of working have become more common, the most prevalent being Agile software development, a small teams (pods) method for running big projects. Pods are also in favor because they are a more flexible structure, enabling greater organizational agility and inclusion to meet the quickly changing demands of a more-digital marketplace.
What is a Pod?
A pod is a self-managing, cross-skilled group of people that can adapt and flex to tackle a wide range of simultaneous projects, often serving a range of internal stakeholders or clients. But how big or small this group is, has a significant impact on how successful a pod will be. Researcher Robin Dunbar first coined the idea of natural group sizes in the 1990s, having studied effective group populations throughout human history. His conclusions suggested that humans have evolved to work in groups but that certain sizes are optimal to certain types of activity.
In our experience, self-managing pods require a level of trust and communication efficiency that is difficult to maintain past fifty people in size. And on the other end, small groups of five or fewer people (or even ten) are naturally self-managing, but they lack the ability to scale into larger work or have significant parallel activities. We’ve discovered that pods of between 25 and 40 people deliver the optimal diversity of talent along with the ability to handle multiple streams of work.
These optimal self-managing pods of 25–40 people outperform the more traditional hierarchical approach by about 30% across a range of factors, including innovation, quality, productivity, employee satisfaction, and speed of delivery.
Our Work
Over the past decade, our company, AgencyAgile, has worked with almost two hundred knowledge-based organizations to implement sophisticated pod-based organization models. Initially we focused on advertising and marketing agencies because they are organizations that run on disruptive innovation — the work they do is different every time, and often the way they do it (process) changes as well; the traditional departmental-machine model is entirely unsuited for them. In our early days of working with them, we used Agile — a way of running very simple pods for software development. But very quickly we learned that ideas like Dunbar’s natural group sizes really do make a difference — we developed a richer model for these very complex agencies, but the result was a framework that works for other types of organizations too.
We continue to be amazed at how much better pods work than departments, and how quickly. From early on in the transformation process, teams started to observe measurable improvements in productivity, quality, and employee happiness, and they ran far better. But what we didn’t anticipate was the degree to which, during the work-from-home chaos of the pandemic, these companies resoundingly agreed that the disruption of their business would have been far worse had they not already shifted to pods. Its natural way of interaction clearly surpassed the department-machine models, and this will be a lesson that will carry over quite naturally into the atmosphere of the new normal.
But What Does This Mean for Managers?
Embracing the pods model means shifting from this hierarchical, department mindset and eliminating the concept of managing through power, replacing it with management through consensus. This is an enormous opportunity for managers, giving them greater opportunity to understand and truly lead their teams in ways that are far more in tune with the expectations of today’s workplace. Managers who embrace the pods model will be surprised how much easier managing gets. This is very similar to the benefits of work delegation, in which learning the skill of handing off work to another person frees you up to do better, higher value tasks.
Less managing is a good thing, especially in this era of Covid-shifted workplace models. If anything, traditional managing got harder to do with work-from-home and certainly hybrid work-home situations will be only marginally easier. Workers that can coordinate without hierarchy go faster than those who must work through it — research has shown that the frequency and speed of hierarchical decision-making are major factors in organizational productivity.
A Model for the New Normal
We believe pods are an ideal model across a range of workplace models. They clearly outperformed hierarchies before Covid, as well as during the work-from-home period. We also believe that the old machine-driven model will be increasingly more difficult to manage with distributed and hybrid workforces and virtualized activities. Regardless of whether team members remain co-located in the same building, are distributed across the country, or a hybrid of both, pods offer a model that improves performance and creates cohesive, productive groups, precisely what is needed for the evolving challenges of managing organizations.
Jack Skeels is an award-winning entrepreneur, think-tank researcher, leadership coach, and consultant, and brings together decades of business research, cognitive and behavioral science, as well as practical lessons learned from agile management, into a set of simple lessons on how to understand managing, and manage, in a whole new way. Visit AgencyAgile.com
Photo courtesy Darren Nunis (@dnunis) via Unsplash
