Ori Brafman is a multiple New York Times bestselling author who specializes in organizational culture, leadership, change management, and conflict resolution. He is a Distinguished Teaching Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business focusing on improvisational leadership and the ethical use of artificial intelligence. In addition, Ori advises Fortune 500 companies and all branches of the U.S. military, in addition to the Obama White House, the National Academy of Sciences, NATO, and YPO, among others. Ori’s popular titles include “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations” and “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior”. He is the founder and president of Starfish Leadership and co-founder (along with author and wellness expert Tom Rath) of the Fully Charged Institute.
The potential upside of chaos.
Coming out of pandemic, on top of what was already a fast-moving period of digital transformation, organizations of all kinds have been forced to reexamine business as usual. As a result, Ori believes we’re experiencing the tidal impacts of decentralization, distributed power, and increased polarization based on individual values. “It’s a super-interesting combination,” says Ori, “and, I think, very empowering to a lot of folks.” He draws a parallel with Europe pivoting from the Black Plague to the creative flowering and social reconfiguration that followed in the Renaissance. “I wonder whether all of this chaos that’s going on around us today is potentially going to lead to a renaissance that we can’t really imagine,” says Ori. He believes we’re in a fertile period of reimagining the role of institutions and a reckoning with a pervasive loss of public trust. What does that mean? How does that change leadership behaviors? Things can be upended for the better, says Ori, pointing to the example of solid advances made socially and in the workplace since the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Even my 20-year-old college students are taking stock of what’s going on. It has empowered individuals in a lot of ways,” he says. And organizations will be called upon to respond.
Defining The Starfish and the Spider.
Ori’s book, “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations”, offers two different organizational paradigms. Where “spider” organizations are more hierarchical, with a CEO in charge, “starfish” organizations center on a network of catalysts. The former tends to have siloed departments while the latter is organized around circles and abides by shared values, as opposed to simple command and control. There can be extreme “spiders” (very top-down) and extreme “starfish” (terrorist networks). Ori’s book argues that if a spider’s head is cut off, it dies. Meanwhile, if you chop off part of a starfish it can morph, regenerate, and go on. Examples of a “starfish” culture range from Alcoholics Anonymous to Wikipedia to the Tea Party, which basically “used starfish as their Bible of how to start a political movement,” says Ori. Blockchain currencies are also frequently referenced as a “starfish” model, as are movements from Occupy Wall Street to democratic protests in Hong Kong. “I think you’re seeing (the formula for decentralization) everywhere,” he says. “I don’t think I even imagined just how much the world would change in the last six years.”
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Decentralization: Wikipedia versus Encyclopedia Britannica
Ori illustrates the concept of decentralized organizations as a contrast between Encyclopedia Britannica, which historically was generated by a small group of experts, as compared with Wikipedia, which offers a low bar to entry that enables crowdsourcing of contributors. Pandemic has accelerated recognition – and integration – of the power in autonomy. There is also a hybrid model, in which leadership deliberately empowers employees to be effective and productive. “So you maintain the hierarchy for the things that hierarchy is very efficient for, but you enable ‘starfish’ where it’s more efficient,” says Ori. We tend to centralize the ‘how,’ and decentralize the ‘what’ when it should be the opposite: Be very specific about the work and then distribute the means, empowering individuals to execute. There will be impacts on labor, but if you cling to a “spider” model and your competition adopts a “starfish” approach because it’s a more efficient way to conduct business, “you’re like the poker player who doesn’t know who the worst player at the table is … and they’ll eat your lunch.”
About the Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.
Ori explains his work in the realm of behavioral economics, which culminated in his book, “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.” He has looked at how people operate – and make decisions – on each node of decentralized networks. Generally, people don’t behave in a classic economic fashion. They behave based on emotions and on psychological forces that we need to acknowledge, says Ori. So, he has examined factors like loss aversion, the notion that we experience the pain of a “loss” much more intensely than we feel the joy in a “gain.” People will often go to extremes to avoid a potential loss, not only because it registers acutely but also because of sunk cost bias. “Once you’re bought into something, once you’ve already started on the path, it’s very difficult to quit,” says Ori. “We are invested … and have too, too much of an attachment to it.”
Interrupting the runaway train.
A continuous liability within any organization is the reluctance people feel to speak up to others in a position of authority. The risk of upsetting the status quo or a path already laid is powerfully dissuasive. But, says Ori, it’s possible to disrupt the default to sycophancy by deconstructing the dynamic. When it comes to team decision-making, he says there are four fundamental roles that people play within a given group:
· Initiator: the person who offers up an idea.
· Supporter: the person who validates that it seems like a great idea.
· Observer: the person who neutrally registers what’s going on.
· Blocker: the person who negates or discourages the idea.
The primary tension is often between the Initiator and the Blocker. And that’s a good thing, says Ori. “You actually need people to be blockers or dissenters. You need people to challenge you,” he says. Without friction, it’s all too easy to become irrational as an organization. Once it’s called out, irrationality can be overcome with systems. “(But) if you don’t know the ways in which you’re irrational,” he says, “you’re in trouble.”
Perceived Value = Real Value?
“It doesn’t matter how good of a leader you think you are. If people who work for you don’t think you’re a good leader, you’re not a good leader,” says Ori. And once a value has been assigned, humans tend to remain attached to that perception – regardless of whether it’s rational. This is in large part the power of marketing and why raising prices sometimes has the counterintuitive effect of making a product more, not less, attractive. People don’t make choices based on pure economics. There are factors like a position in a pecking order or relative size (people tend to prefer the medium). Once a product or person has been pigeon-holed, it’s very challenging to change perceptions, which in turn makes it hard to change or retrieve status.
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The #1 challenge for organizations right now is how to attract and retain talent. Organizations are stuck in old ways of thinking about work and they are struggling! In my new PDF, I outline 7 ways the workforce is changing and what you and your organization need to do to adapt. The Great Resignation is The Great Opportunity if you are willing to take action! Click here to download the PDF.
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