In the past, I wrote about the organizations free themselves from management and running spontaneously, in many ways.

In this article, I’ll explain “why management sucks and why autonomy is lovely,” as a summary.

The times have changed

An important premise in talking about the paradigm shift from management to autonomy is that today’s society is quite different from the 20’s century, where Japan had a brilliant development with industrialization.

Particularly, Japan was one of the best manufacturing countries in the bubble economy period. Although people today still find it difficult to accept that it’s past, but the times have changed.

Manufacturing and hardware are not the leading industries anymore.

In the 21st century, the leading business players are service and software.

The 20th century was the times that asked to “do as the manual says.”

If everyone manufactured things in the ways they like, a business could never run.

Of course, improvement activities were welcome, but still, most of the work at that time was to follow the manual.

In contrast, the value of the “manual followers” is growing less and less in the 21st century times. This is because IT has been taking their roles over.

This trend will only be accelerated and won’t stop.

The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau’s quote from the Davos meeting in 2018 illustrates this situation.

“The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”

The following is my idea on “management versus spontaneity” based on this velocity of changes in today’s society.

Management will take away opportunities to think

If you belong to an organization where your supervisors always tell you what to do, you won’t figure out what to do you don’t receive orders.

It is fine as long as the organization only needs manual work and no individual thinking. However, these kinds of jobs are being replaced by computers.

At some organizations, I know people still do the work that they don’t necessarily have to. However, such inefficiency will cause a decline in their competitiveness and cause a collapse as a result.

Here, I set organizations that will last as a premise in my consideration.

Human’s work will become what manual cannot tell how.

That means organizations need to be groups of people who can think and act on their own.

Here lies the reason why I believe only spontaneous organizations can survive.

Organizations in the future will have no work options unless they think and act on their own.

The mindset of “lay management down, think and act on their own” will mean much more and more in the future for both individuals and organizations.

You can’t perform your 100% for an assigned order

Let’s think about this from a little different perspective.

It is something you can easily understand when applied to your context. You cannot perform your 100% for a given order.

If you want to present your 100% or even more of your capacity, carrying out what one thought by him/herself is a prerequisite.

Nobody enjoys being under management

In the past, management was necessary, but I don’t think many considered it to be “fun.”

Everyone in their childhood must have hated to be bound.

Nevertheless, when they start working and being under the imprinting that “being managed is a part of work,” they become insensitive to the pain.

However, that’s not because they came to enjoy it.。

Indeed, they just got insensitive.

Working on autonomy rather than under management is superb enjoyment.

Thus, I conclude my ideas on “spontaneity is the only option” and not a better one.

Next time, I will explain how an organization will move toward a spontaneous organization.

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