Adhocracy
The Basic Idea
Imagine strolling into your work office around 10am, wearing jeans and a T-shirt – and it’s not even a Friday. You sit down at a communal table instead of a designated desk and start your work. In the corner, you see your colleagues on their laptops sitting in bean bags, and other coworkers taking advantage of the cereal breakfast bar. One of your bosses comes up to you, also wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and reminds you of the office ping-pong tournament happening this Friday. He tells you he just stocked up the Friday beer fridge in preparation for the event.
That scenario might sound vastly different to your own experience of going to work (in a pre-pandemic time), but those work environments do exist for some. The relaxed, startup-like environment often goes hand-in-hand with a particular kind of business management style: adhocracy.
Adhocracy management emphasizes individual initiative, which means there is limited formalization of employee behavioral expectation.1 That is why employees might be allowed to wear what they feel comfortable in, work hours that are suited for their work ethic, and why a boss might feel more like a colleague than a superior.
In an era where we all try to model incredibly successful Silicon Valley companies, more and more businesses are embodying adhocracy. It is the opposite of bureaucracy, which relies on clearly defined rules and hierarchies. It is thought to be the most suitable forms of management for our fast-paced, ever changing modern world.
Any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results. In an era of accelerating change, organizations, and national economics, most likely to succeed are those with the ability to adjust and adapt … [T]his sort of innovation must become a way of life for business organizations across the board. What is needed is an environment that fosters the use of an ad-hoc problem-solving technique, in effect, an -adhocracy- that functions outside the often initiative-stifling bureaucracy.
– Business management practices expert Robert H. Waterman Jr.’s book Adhocracy: The Power to Change2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
