Machines & Architecture

Let’s start with a historical narrative about a cartoonist names Rube Goldberg. Mr. Goldberg popularized an entertaining way to exhibit overly complex contraptions designed to perform simple tasks in very convoluted and indirect ways. He was inclined to make satirical commentary on modern technology.

Most of us have seen versions and examples of “Rube Goldberg Machines” online, or in less common instances, in person. I recently stood in the baggage claim area of an airport that had an 8-foot-high and 4-foot-wide enclosed rectangular glass box standing up on end, containing a Rube Goldberg Machine. It was fascinating to watch.

These contraptions can seem chaotic and random but also rhythmic and entrancing at the same time. These “machines” generally operate on a series of trigged chain reactions making use of basic machine operations such as levers, pulley, inclined panes, wheels an axels, wedges, and screws. Each operation transferring energy to complete a goal of some kind. Usually mechanical, such as delivering a series of colored balls through a sequence of movements that can go in any direction, up, down, or sideways.

There are three core characteristics of a Rube Goldberg Machine:

1.    Simple tasks completed through a complicated sequence of events or actions.

2.    Every action triggers the next action like dominos falling in interconnected fashion until the end of the simple task.

3.    Built for amusement, highlighting the art and beauty of ingenuity and the absurdity of unnecessary complexity.

The construction of a Rube Goldberg machine requires you start with the desired end or outcome that you want to achieve and work backwards through all the steps that are required actions. When set in motion at the beginning, each action will trigger one after the other in reverse order. Often made of a variety of materials, a series of chain reactions are built. Adjustments are often required, and it takes trial and error to configure accurately and fine tune the process from beginning to end.

Here comes the application segment of this conversation. If you are standing outside the glass box of your organization, staring at the “machinery” inside, what do you see? What sequence of events have been designed and put in place using the basics of organizational machinery? Where does it start, end, and what outcomes does it generate? Unlike levers and pulleys that will perform the same exact actions millions of times in the exact same way, people machinery in organizations is much more variable, or I’d say, almost always variable. This becomes a challenge when we place a layer of mechanical and repeatable factory thinking over human behaviors. It makes for a fascinating space to study and lead but be prepared for some disappointment and confusion when our trust in templates, SOP’s, and control mechanisms like “management” and “accountability” fail to deliver the expected outcomes.

Organizations are fundamentally a grouping of people gathered around a vision, mission, and a product of some kind. The way in which those attributes are activated will be highly varied. If you open three different chocolate chip cookie companies in three different cities, they would all take on vastly different ways of working, communicating, and functioning. They all make cookies but that might be the extent of common ground. Many different parts are connected to serve a singular value, benefit, or outcome via varied types of functions and mechanisms. It’s common that individual mechanisms take on a centralist view, meaning that each part sees itself as the most important part or central piece of value but fails to properly perceive the interdependencies on the mechanisms that come before or after it.

Understanding how to orchestrate the diversity and variance of people inside organizations requires an architecture to move from unmanageably complex to effectively simple. The standard form of mechanisms like templates, processes, and standard are tools to help bring order like the physics of levers, pulleys, and wheels but the presence of humans in the equation requires something opposite of a Rube Goldberg Machine. Where the Rube Goldberg Machine takes something simple and make it complex, people architecture serves to take the complexity of people and orchestrate it to simplicity. Without people architecture, your organization can look like a Rube Goldberg Machine that keeps looping through activities repeatedly without much forward movement or the right outcomes.

The nature of machines is to repeat actions to the same outcomes, and they are static by design. In organizations, we want repeat actions but there is always a need for dynamic change to satisfy always moving outcome targets and orchestrate diversity and variation. If you are trying to grow, transform, or create meaningful change, as rewarding as a Rube Goldberg Machine can be to watch, that approach will keep your organization in a box of repeating actions but won’t be the impact and value to others you need it to be. Is their satirical humor in most organizations today? Absolutely! It’s only human, but people architecture can give you that ability organizationally to move beyond the glass box and create your own symphony of actions that move you to the future you really want and need.