New School IT

Cogs or Cells: Is your company a creaky machine or a living organism?

• System of Discplined Adaptability Inc. • Season 2 • Episode 1

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Cogs or Cells: Is your company a creaky machine or a living organism? 

Rethinking that question could be the key to advance your career.

What if that metaphor of feeling trapped in a massive, creaky corporate machine is completely wrong? What if your company actually functions more like a living organism: messy, adaptive, and surprisingly biological in its behavior? And why could that make a difference in your career?

In this eye-opening episode, we challenge the traditional mechanical view of organizations and reveal how seeing your workplace as a living system can transform your career trajectory. We explore five fundamental aspects of organizational biology that explain why companies behave less like predictable machines and more like complex organisms: purpose (the DNA that drives behavior), resources (the nutrients that fuel growth), flow (the circulatory system that moves value), connections (the neural pathways that coordinate action), and accumulations (the energy reserves that provide resilience).

This biological perspective explains perplexing workplace dynamics: why handoffs between teams break down, why changes face resistance, and why some workflows never seem to improve despite obvious inefficiencies. Most importantly, it reveals how a few strategic "tiny tweaks" can create enormous positive change. Learn why Amazon discovered that just 100 milliseconds of extra page load time cost them $3 billion in revenue, and how this principle applies to every workflow in your organization.

Whether you're leading a change initiative or simply tired of organizational dysfunction, this episode provides a powerful new lens for understanding workplace challenges. By recognizing the biological nature of organizations, you'll develop the insights needed to navigate office politics, reduce resistance to your ideas, and position yourself for your next promotion. Don't miss the upcoming second episode where we'll dive deeper into the patterns, pitfalls and politics that make change feel risky, and how to overcome them safely.

Ready to see your organization with new eyes? Listen now and discover why the key to your success might be recognizing that you're not a cog in a machine, but a cell in a living system with the power to heal, grow and evolve.

Speaker 1:

Hey team, breathe. This organism's got groove. Tiny tweaks daily make mountains move. Patterns are patterns. We play it smart, save for success and promote at heart. Hello, this is New School IT. How can I help you?

Speaker 2:

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me for this special two-part series of New School IT. I'm your host, roland. The purpose of these two episodes is to give you a new way of looking at your own work and at your company that can make you stand out safely and move up, if that's what you want. Episode one is Cogs or Cells. Is your company a creaky machine or a living organism? Rethinking that question can be the key to your next promotion. Episode two will be Patterns, pitfalls and Politics, decoding the Unspoken Dynamics in your Company. You can learn to read the hidden resistance to your ideas and that promotion.

Speaker 2:

Today I want to prove to you that we're not really part of a boring machine made of org charts and faceless processes, but that we're actually part of a complex, messy and, let's be honest, sometimes neurotic living organism. Once you start seeing your company this way, a lot of head scratchers and tricky issues suddenly make sense. You might even feel a little bit better about all those meetings on your calendar. This episode is about the basics we have to cover. We're going to talk about what drives everyone in the company besides panic, how things flow inside it, including those delays that create the fire drills and bucket brigades, what tends to pile up besides all of the emails in your inbox and what eventually stumbles out the other end as a product or a service, and then some other things. In the next episode, we'll then explain how inertia, resistance, vicious cycles and other weird patterns can get in the way of the right thing. So whether you're in the middle of a change initiative or just tired of some things that should be in a better place, don't miss this series.

Speaker 1:

Please hold.

Speaker 2:

Okay, let's build the foundation Purpose. We all had to work each day, do our part in what feels like a huge creaky machine, and try to keep things moving by repeating the same processes, though the processes actually don't really work smoothly most of the time, and there's always some sort of unforeseen event that suggests we're not really part of a predictable machine. But, as far as the basics go, our daily grind eventually rolls up into the product or service somebody finds useful. That's purpose. All that work by so many people in the endless writing and reading of emails, the chats, the reports, the budgets, the meetings, waiting for someone else's stuff, the stuff that happens automatically All of it only makes sense when you step back and ask what is it really for? You know, besides the fact that we're all going through it together, to make sense of it, you need to start with purpose. Through it together To make sense of it, you need to start with purpose. Every person, every team, every function and the company overall has one. Yes, profit and paychecks are part of that, but purpose is really bigger. Without bringing value to whoever needs your product or service or your work, the profit and the paychecks ultimately stop. So not only do you need to benefit a purpose greater than yourself to be successful.

Speaker 2:

The clarity of purpose also matters. A clear purpose lets you and your team align with others, and everyone understands their specific contributions. I've always found that a lot more empowering than just showing up and praying that you're doing the right thing. A fuzzy purpose, on the other hand, causes a lot of confused emails because it creates delays and tensions. But there's even more. An important difference is stated purpose and actual purpose. For example, a team's stated purpose for a handoff to the next department might be to give them what they need to be successful. But if they're actually just dumping a pile of files on the next team gift wrapping laundry, but hey, that's their problem now the real purpose is just to get it off their plate. The actual purpose is what drives behavior and actual results off their plate. The actual purpose is what drives behavior and actual results and every once in a while, an office legend.

Speaker 2:

So the first thing that makes your company act like a living organism is driven by whether the outcome is valuable to someone else, whether that is clear to everyone involved and whether everyone shares the same purpose. It's a bit like that inner dialogue that happens when I have to decide whether to cook dinner at home or just order takeout. Is it more important to save money and eat healthy or to save time and avoid the hassle? And if I add my spouse and a couple of kids to the debate, it becomes less about food, money or health and just more about keeping the harmony not a machine, but a living organism, just like at work. How can this perspective be useful to your career? When you know to look for it, you might recognize how different goals are the reason that a project got stuck. Instead of playing a blame game or having a frustrating handoff, you could start a dialogue between both teams to align on. Hey, what does a valuable outcome to the team receiving our work look like? This would help both teams and make the bosses happy.

Speaker 1:

Please hold.

Speaker 2:

Okay, what comes next after purpose Resources? To achieve a purpose, everyone draws in specific types of resources you personally, your team, your department, even your company. They are money, the lifeblood, people, the other lifeblood, but also a source of more problems information, the other lifeblood, and also the source of misinformation and problems related to that infrastructure. That's the physical and the digital plumbing that everything works on, and materials, the building blocks of anything you can actually touch. The factory team, for example, is quite different from the marketing team, but both have a flow of those five resources that are needed in the right amount, at the right time and in the right place to make sure someone else gets something that they find valuable. Think about launching a new feature. That marketing team gets a budget from leadership, customer data from sales and the feature specs from the product team. The five resources also have to flow between teams and functions like a food chain in an ecosystem. In the end, it's the flow of these five resources that creates the value for someone else. That keeps me employed.

Speaker 2:

Purpose sets the direction and decides the right mix, and you probably get a sense for how important a powerful, clear and shared purpose is. It's like a family road trip. You need gas, snacks, maps and the right people in the car, but unless everyone agrees where you're headed, you're going to waste time, money and patience. That's why a company behaves less like a predictable machine and again more like a living organism, full of people, choices and interactions that have to move in harmony.

Speaker 1:

Please hold.

Speaker 2:

But moving on to the next part, how do these resources flow and why does that matter? To get that right time, right place mix of the five resources, we combine them into work that flows cross-functionally between teams across the whole company, including your personal inbox, to-do lists and quarterly objectives. When the work flows smoothly and everyone and everything is in sync, results happen. So what do we look at to make sure our organism has good flow? Flows can be clean and steady or messy and irregular. They also vary in density and volume. You know how dense 10 long email responses are when each feels like a project, versus 10 short ones that make a ton of progress in a few minutes, or the 13 chat messages you could ignore but actually enjoy because they're funny memes. Here's an example of volume. Do you need to enter the same information into four different forms for approvals from four different departments? Or? I think it would certainly help at least your own flow to be smoother if there was one shared standard request to fill out for everybody. Some flows go one way, like a television ad, while other flows come with feedback, like a customer support call that ends with a survey that asks you to rate your experience on a scale of one to. Why did I even bother? So what flows into your team are the resources, and what flows out of your team and all of the other cross-functional teams is most obviously something that someone with money or power needs at once. Something that someone with money or power needs at once. For your company, it's the main service or product that its customer pays for. For you, it might be the report your boss urgently needs. For your team, it might be the project you're doing together for finance. But that's not all. At the end of the flow through your company, the resources divide again. Money flows out to pay suppliers and employees and banks and shareholders. People leave, voluntarily or not. Information flows out through all kinds of digital channels or media coverage or even leaks and hacks, and materials flow out not just as finished goods, but also as waste and byproducts.

Speaker 2:

Of all workflow qualities, the one with the biggest potential impact on everything and everyone is latency. What's latency? It is the same as delay. No, good question, because it's not. Think of delay as arriving late, even when you hurry, and think of latency as planning to be on time, but arriving slowly. Everyone knows delays are bad, but once workflows between two teams actually deliver an outcome. Very few focus on reducing the time baked into everyday flows because, hey, it works.

Speaker 2:

Why fix something that's only mildly frustrating? Why is that a problem? Think about it this way your team might be doing everything right, but if the handoffs to or from other teams could happen sooner, everyone's still losing. Why, while you might be celebrating your part being done, you can't see the invisible costs that are created between the teams? Built-in delays are like an open invitation for a competitor to swoop in and grab the revenue that's left on the table.

Speaker 2:

Here's a real-life example. This one's extreme, but real. Amazon reported that just a 100-millisecond increase in page load times cost a $3 billion loss in revenue for them. That's a latency that lasts less than a blink of an eye, but at Amazon's scale, it adds up to a massive cost. The point is this the cost of slower-than-possible flows affects everyone, from the top down and back up. That invisible cost impacts your team's budget, your bonus pool, and has an invisible effect on your own career.

Speaker 2:

Smooth flows across teams, just like purpose and resources, decides whether your effort pays off or gets lost in an invisible delay.

Speaker 2:

It's like the TSA line at the airport when the line moves, you breeze through, but if you're stuck waiting, even if you showed up on time, you can still miss your flight. See again how companies behave less like predictable machines and more like organisms. It's like the latency of the blood moving with every heartbeat, even at the far edges of your body, delivering nutrients, antibodies and oxygen to your organs and taking away the waste from consuming these resources. How can this perspective be useful to your career? When you start to see how money, people and information actually flow, or materials or the infrastructure how they actually flow or get stuck between teams, cross-functionally or within a function, you'll instantly understand what's slowing things down for a customer or the next team in the chain. These handoff points are easy to spot, and if you then approach the other team and say, hey, how can we improve our workflow together? You're not just a problem solver, you're building a reputation as a natural leader across boundaries.

Speaker 1:

Please hold Okay.

Speaker 2:

We've got purpose, we've got resources and we've got flow. What else? Connections the flow has to pass through something. Connections the flow has to pass through something. In companies, that happens most obviously through the cross-functional connections that allow work to move from one team to another. Purchasing buys raw materials, sales gets finished Products on shelves, marketing makes sure the right people are motivated to buy, and every resource in between and around them flows through an incredible mesh of countless connections between people, between teams, between functions, between companies, moving left to right and back, and moving up and down and back again. There are so many of these connections that it's better, compared to the 8,000 miles of blood vessels in your cardiovascular system than the 400 feet of pipes in an average single-family home. Here's how to develop a real-life perspective on the five types of connections in your daily work.

Speaker 2:

Work is connected to structure. Sometimes it's boss to employee, the traditional way, sometimes it's peer to peer, which is the let's figure it out together way, but it can also be across functions like finance and marketing, and up or down a few levels, skip levels, or even with outside groups like partners and vendors. Everyone's involved. Work is also connected through dependencies. I want to use a chaotic restaurant kitchen as an example, like the bear, if you watched it. Sometimes work is independent, like cooks prepping ingredients at their own station and ignoring the chaos around them because they don't need to be involved. Sometimes work depends on being shared, like an all-hands-on-deck drill to chop vegetables at the same table. Some work is dependent on a specific sequence the dish can't be plated until the salmon's cooked. Yet all of the dishes for table five have to come out at the same time. Can you hear the frantic shouting and the mild panic? And then the most intense dependency is when chefs are bouncing ideas of each other. Taste this too acidic. Add cream? No wait, that's wrong. Start over. Actually, what if we dice the shallots instead? Yes, chef, no chef. Why are we like the chef? By the way, this type of iterative dependency, while most intense, also produces the best results for creative work and innovation.

Speaker 2:

Work is also connected through controls. Controls show up as thresholds, rules, constraints. Some are formal, like a spending limit that turns every purchase over $1,000 into a budget justification project that creates work. Others are informal, like friendly feedback from a colleague that makes you go wait, was that a suggestion or a passive-aggressive kick in the groin? Controls include policies, norms, standards, and they create or limit work. You know the quick task between you and two colleagues that turn into a week-long email chain with 12 additional people. That's control, connecting work.

Speaker 2:

Work is also connected through uses. Sometimes work is connected through inclusion, bringing things together, like working with another team for a special project. Other times work is disconnected on purpose through exclusion, like information. Only directors and above can see in action. Flows can also be connected by combination uses, like the 2,700 components that make an iPhone. And finally, some flows are connected to exhaust a resource, like the ingredients that go into a hot sauce or, in the case of people, hey, when did we run out of coffee?

Speaker 2:

Work is also connected through timings. That's the fifth one. Sometimes work happens in bursts. Other work happens as a continuous stream. The bursts could happen often or occasionally, like a daily check-in versus a quarterly review. Some work needs to be synchronized, like everyone showing up to the meeting at the beginning of the shift. But other work happens when you can't get to it, like that conversation you're having over text.

Speaker 2:

So if resources are the lifeblood of the company and these connections are a circulatory system, then how can this perspective help your career when you start to observe how your team's work flows through these connections, you'll inevitably feel more patient with delays and problems. You'll understand that you can't fix complex issues. Work flows through these connections. You'll inevitably feel more patient with the LASEN problems. You'll understand that you can't fix complex issues with a single silver bullet. Instead, by appreciating that so many different connections affect the flow, you can take a steady journey of small incremental improvements. It might take you two years of hard work to become an overnight success, but it will be because you and your collaborators took one small step at a time, ultimately making a real difference in how quickly and how well things get done when you add it all up.

Speaker 1:

Please hold.

Speaker 2:

Okay, on to the last bit, to show how your company acts like a living organism. Accumulations Along the way flow produces not just outputs but also buildups. Here's a simple analogy a bathtub. When the faucet flow matches the drain flow in and out at the same rate, then the water level doesn't change. If you open the faucet more, it creates more buildup In flows faster than out. If the drain flows faster, the water level goes down.

Speaker 2:

For your company, one of the most important buildups is its earnings. Obviously that's what makes the company flush with cash. In HR it might be a total headcount, for supply teams it might be inventory on hand and for sales teams it might be total order volume. But there are also less obvious examples, like one related to people Culture accumulates as employees adopt norms, share beliefs and develop habits together. Related to information knowledge accumulates as employees gain experience. The opposite is called brain drain. For a reason Related to materials waste accumulates when inefficient processes don't get fixed.

Speaker 2:

In real life you can observe accumulations by their amount in allocation. Like your team has a $1 million budget and some of it is allocated to headcount, some to training, some to travel, or it's composition and turnover. Think of a pet food store. The composition is 10% beef, 10% chicken and 10% salmon. Food and the fresh food stock needs to move within four weeks, otherwise it spoils Composition and turnover.

Speaker 2:

The key point about an accumulation is that the larger it is, the more resilient the team becomes to outside influences. That's good news when it helps the team cope with a downturn, but it's a challenge if it evolves to resistance when change is actually needed. A team with a huge budget will be less likely to implement changes to their ways of working than a team that's fighting for survival because their resources are drained. How is this? Like a living organism, our bodies store energy as fat reserves to help us survive hard times, but they can also weigh us down or make us resistant to change, because it comes with effort. A company isn't a machine where you just swap out parts. It's a living system where buildups shape how it adapts. What does this mean for your career? If you can recognize where your team has built up too much or too little, you'll understand why change is hard in some places and easier in others. That insight helps you choose where to push, where to support and how to make progress without being crushed by the weight.

Speaker 1:

Please hold.

Speaker 2:

That's it for the episode. Again, purpose, resources, flows, connections and accumulations Together to show why your company behaves less like a predictable machine and more like a living organism. When you start to see things this way, the daily grind of meetings, emails and handoffs suddenly makes more sense and you can see where small changes might actually move the whole system forward. In the next episode we'll go deeper into the patterns, pitfalls and politics that make change feel risky. We'll show you how to navigate those dynamics safely and how to make progress that gets you noticed. If you've ever felt stuck in slow flows or held back by office dynamics, you won't want to miss it. If any of today's ideas hit home, or if you want to explore how Soda can help your company move faster with less risk, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out and let's chat. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in episode two.

Speaker 1:

Hey, team, breathe. This organism's got groove. Tiny tweaks daily make mountains move. Penn is the partners. We play it smart, safe and success. A promoted heart Work's not a machine, it's alive. It's smart, safe for success. A promoted heart work's not a machine, it's alive, it's wild. Each spark of purpose makes the day worthwhile.

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Roland Hoffmann

Host