05 March 2011

Democratization of Organization

There are two ways of getting things done - in your own way, dictatorially and in the way others like. With the machines, you can be dictatorial meaning that you decide when the machine has to produce products. Switch on the power, boot up the machine, make sure that all parts work in unison and the product is produced. It is a continuous system where the output is predictable. But in the place where human beings are involved and the factor of motivation/passion more appropriate than fear, democratization or knowing what people have in their mind becomes absolute need. Human beings are discrete systems and they become quite unpredictable as mind and emotions are involved. 

There are two reasons why you democratize anything. First is due to the fact that you cannot make decisions or you don't feel responsible for something that is going to happen and the second reason is that you want to democratize to align your people towards the vision - may it be vision of a company or a country or the mankind. The first reason actually paves way to collective irresponsibility (like the climate change where everyone talks but no one does anything) and the second approach involves a lot hard work (likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin  Luther King). In order for effective democratization to become reality, first we have to accept that we can achieve it after a lot of failures. Initially, people tend to misunderstand the process of democratizing before understanding it completely which at the initial stage results to a lot of failure. After the initial failures and if you rally around your people during the failures, the democratization takes shape and becomes effective.

What are the signs of effective democratization? If you have at least few souls who give back far more than what they take back and if the ratio of number of souls that give back to the number of souls take back increases as the function of time, then you are staging yourself for better democratization.