Imagine a world…
Your team is a small, autonomous unit, a “pod” with diverse skills, perspectives and backgrounds. Your manager spends most of their time attending to human relationships, coaching, trust and communication. They’re no longer the gatekeeper of rules and instructions. AI takes care of the routine tasks like tracking performance and scheduling tasks, reporting up the line and disseminating information around the unit.
You may already be seeing this kind of world over the horizon as the nature of work shifts. You may also have heard of POD teams in agile project management. What may be different is that your pod, in this world, has a great deal of autonomy, responsible for working on particular projects, services, relationships or products over the long term. It’s not fixed inside a particular departmental structure that constrains who can give permission or allocate resources.
Podding is an emerging way of designing organisations, a response to rapid changes in…well, everything. Companies are finding that traditional designs do not allow enough flexibility for organisation or individuals to flourish in turbulent times. Of course, as with anything new and funky in organisation management, the small companies and tech-based industries are the early adopters. How to put it to work in large organisations is still emerging, although some have started, and found that clear and effective top leadership is essential to a pod-based system. Some might say that the nature of teams is changing anyway, that they’re no longer clearly-bounded and stable, but flexible groups brought together for specific things. The pod concept takes that further and decouples the pods from many of the traditional decision-making structures.
So why is this more than a business school fad, or a post-Musk nightmare of unregulated misaligned mischief-makers? It’s rooted in fairly recent insights and research in psychology, in turn rooted in neuroscience. Smaller groups enhance the effectiveness of social connection hormones and mirror neurons, enhancing the trust and psychological safety that are essential for effective team performance. For practical purposes, the sweet spot is around 4-12 members for a really high-collaboration environment. Alignment with an organisational need and clear goals provide assurance to the organisation, and clarity and motivation to the pod members.
It's a lovely paradox that even as AI relieves humans of some work, the human factors are becoming yet more important as people and organisations need to be innovative, with change engineered in. More than ever, employees need a sense of belonging and meaningful work. Managers, relieved of the need to spend half their time moving information around a screen, can pay attention to that, which will be a relief to some but possibly not all.
So imagine…
If your work was organised in a pod, what would its purpose be in the University? Who would be in it? How would it feel to work this way?
What would you as a leader, manager or pod member need to learn, change or give up to operate in this new world?
References.
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