Frode Ødegård is determined that our world will be disrupted by shorter employee tenures and organization lifespans. This will be the norm rather than the exception, and it is happening right now. He calls it the Post-Lean Thinking.
Frode’s parents had a small tech company here in Norway, a process control company called Ødegård Elektronikk. Basically he grew up in his dad’s lab, and by age seventeen he did his first software startup. He tried to raise some venture capital, but you could not really find any money back then. Frode was building development tools, and there was a lack of investors that understood that space, so in 1990 he left for Silicon Valley.
- I tell people I grew up in theoretical computer science, because initially my career focused on software engineering research. But then somehow that expanded into looking at how organizations worked, because that was the bigger picture. If you are going to help people understand how to build better products and be more innovative, you have got to look behind the team and behind the technology. You have to look at the bigger picture, which is culture, governance, leadership style, organizational structure, strategy, what is happening to markets and all the other aspects of it.
- By early 2000’s I had figured out that the company that had done really well with building and learning was Toyota. But their methodology was so focused on manufacturing, so I had to kind of reinvent that for knowledge work, and that is how Lean Systems Institute was born. What we essentially did the first ten years was to reinvent traditional Lean for knowledge work. We did a lot of organizational redesign work with companies that wanted to become learning organizations.
The Post-Lean adventure
Two years ago everything changed for the company, and that is when the Post-Lean adventure began. With rapid advances in key technology areas, the nature of jobs and the shape of organizations are changing dramatically. Many of the assumptions behind traditional Lean are no longer as valid. This is referred to as the Post-Lean Thinking.
- The whole idea behind Post-Lean, which is our second reinvention of Lean, is that we are entering this transition to a postindustrial economy, and a postindustrial culture. The classical assumptions that Lean stated the outcome of is that stable organizations are well organized, preferably last a long time, and that employees would stay in their jobs for many years. Now a lot of the old assumptions about how to build organizations, what jobs should be like and what innovation really means are going out the window.
- We are entering a world where organizations will be more like pop-up restaurants. Institutions and organizations are becoming smaller, more automated, more “just-in-time”, and they will last for a much shorter time. Employee tenures are going down, for example in Silicon Valley the average employee tenure in tech startups are 10.8 months. I think as job are becoming more and more short term, the distinction between what we think of as freelancers today, and what we think of as employees, will start to blur more and more.
Tension between the old and the new
The entrance of this post industrial revolution in many ways favor startups, making it possible for them to grow and capture value with very modest capital requirements. With Post-Lean, Frode has reinvented Lean again, for the post-industrial transition humanity is now going through. But still, one of the toughest challenges they might meet is that a lot of the policies and the mindset in this country are based on industrial area thinking.
- The significant contrast with Norway compared to any other country, is that people’s expectations of jobs are higher. So people expect more social benefits, more welfare benefits, all of which are paid for by their employer. And for example if you are laying someone off you have to give 90 days notice. If you think about the fact that in Silicon Valley the average employee tenure is less than a year that seems kind of ridiculous in a way. Norway now is facing that sort of tension between the old and a newer more dynamic way of thinking about jobs and organizations, represented by Über (which still is semi-legal in Norway).