Endless Knots

Reorganizing the Executive Office of the President

While he has not used the word, President Obama's very first act, even before being sworn in, was to reorganize. As Jessica said yesterday, at the stroke of noon, January 20, 2008, the White House website changed, and with it a new, reorganized Executive Office of the President went into effect.

Having kept a close eye on the various Executive Branch charts over the past few months, I can now report on the major changes as I perceive them, including promotions, additions, and deletions to the president’s core staff structure. These reorganizations reflect profound changes in emphasis and priorities, adaptations to the external environment (literally), and a respect for the complexity of the job. All of this comes through in a number of new functions focused directly on the importance of organization itself.

Until today, our digital US Government organization chart used the Executive Office/White House structure of the Bush Administration as its basis. Each time, Pres-elect Obama made appointments and nominations, we entered those new names into existing positions, as we did when Larry Summers was named director of the National Economic Council. When a new position, such as Carol Browner’s remit to connect energy and climate, we engaged in some guesswork, trying to figure out how these new posts would hook together. Now we know.

President Obama's first appointment was Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff to the President, who now runs the Executive Office. From what we can tell, Emanuel has 19 people reporting directly to him--ranging from senior advisors such as David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett to James Jones, Director of the National Security Council. One of those 19 positions is that of the "White House Office" itself, which, in turn, is run, we think, by one of two Deputy Chiefs of Staff, either Mona Sutphen or Jim Messina. (This use of dual deputies is already a departure from the apparent Bush rule of one deputy.) While we can't quite determine yet whether Sutphen or Messina has this job, one of the two deputies has 23 people on staff, comprising a second group of advisors, offices, and councils that are two steps below the root of power.

Both the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff, with 19 and 23 direct reports respectively, are what we call “hub” positions in the US government, which we discuss extensively in our report and blog post on “Analyzing the Organization as a Network.”

Meanwhile, five organizations have been "promoted," their org-chart boxes having been moved up a level in the White House Office:

·        Domestic Policy Council (Melody Barnes);

·        National Economic Council (Summers);

·        Office of National AIDS Policy;

·        Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board; and

·        White House Military Office.

Then there are nine new boxes representing official functions that simply were not there before:

·       Chief of Staff's Office;

·       Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy (Browner);

·       Office of Management and Administration;

·       Oval Office Operations;

·       Office of Presidential Personnel;

·       Office of Urban Affairs Policy;

·       Office of Social Innovation (!); and

·       A splitting of the position of Advance and Appointments into two functions

And two organizations have been eliminated:

·        Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives; and

·        USA Freedom Corps.

Missing from the list (so far as I can tell) and unaccounted for is the announced, and highly unusual, Office for Health Care Reform and its Director, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Daschle.

Based on press releases from the Obama-Biden change.gov site and the newer, but not complete, list of Nominations & Appointments on the whitehouse.gov site, we've been able to map about 50 positions in the Executive Office of the President. This means that we've got about half of them as press accounts of the President’s January 21 briefing for his staff, (the one announcing a pay freeze and emphasizing transparency), indicate that the staff as a whole numbers around 100.

To carry transparency the next step and to set a good example for other government departments and agencies to follow, we believe that President Obama should immediately publish the org chart of his office. In our view, such a chart should include names and responsibilities, indicating where jobs have been filled and where there are empty spots still awaiting appointments. Although all the departments publish org charts (you can see these charts on our site), the Bush White House's chart never went deeper than the two-level structure we just discussed.

--Jeff Stamps

The day after: Who's responsible for what?

Among the wonders of Jan 20, 2009, i.e. yesterday, was the transformation of The White House website at precisely 12 noon. "Change has come to America," it trumpets, and for those who've been logging into the campaign site and its successor, change.gov, you can see how quickly change has come to this top-est of government sites. Lots of info, lots, easy to read, written in plain English. Well done, webbies, whoever you are.

Among the many useful aspects of the site is clarity as to what purpose is served by which office and who's running it. See, for example, the Executive Office of the President.

What's not here, and what Jeff Stamps and I have been harping on lo these many weeks of the transition, is an easily accessible org chart, as vibrant in its transparency as the rest of what's happening. Frequent readers already know that we've being following our new president's dictum and have taken matters into our own hands. As each new nomination and appointment has been made, we've thrown that person's name into the proper position in our US Government Map.

But volunteers like us can only take this so far -- and we, the people, really need a transparent org chart of the whole government, one that tells us who's doing what, whom they work with, what their agencies' purposes are, how large their budgets are...and so on and etc.

You get the idea. A map. A see-through, publicly available, easy-to-navigate, interconnected chart of the whole of government. Once you've got the basic map, then you can make wise choices about reorganization. Otherwise, as countless reorganizations of enterprises of any magnitude have shown us, the act of moving, merging, and deleting boxes is largely guesswork.

Over the past few weeks, Jeff Stamps and I have been posting a series of NetAge Reports about how to reorganize intelligently and relatively painlessly. (All the reports, compiled into one, are at this link: "Virtual Reorganization: How to Create Smarter, Better, Faster Organizations without Moving the Boxes Around.") Today, we're posting a summary here, hitting the high points about how to do this and why it's important.

We had a record number of hits on our site yesterday. Many people are pulling up the org chart we've compiled. Tells us something, something important: people want and need this information--fast. Here then a summary on the transparent, digital org chart and the express route to reorganization:

Virtual Reorganization
How to Create Smarter, Better, Faster Organizations
without Moving the Boxes Around

Done well, virtual reorganization is a low-cost, high-yield performance improvement strategy.

Good organization designs offer largely untapped resources for productivity in big hierarchies and bureaucracies. The right structures can be keys to unlocking performance potential trapped in the wrong ones. Poor organization carries great risks: it can lead to poor results, the inability to adapt to change, chronic proneness to instability, and, in some cases, complete collapse.

At a time when the web is nearly ubiquitous—as is information technology in general—organizations have the capacity to reorganize in ways that lead to their being collectively smarter, better, and faster. Such capacities are critical in meeting challenges and seizing opportunities in the tumult of change.

The collapse of so many institutions at the same time screams out for reorganization, now unavoidable and now underway in all sectors. But before you whip out your organization chart and start crossing off boxes or stripping out layers, you would be well advised to remember this: simplistic reorganization often makes things worse.

We recommend three interrelated actions, each with its own benefits that lead to smarter and more sustainable reorganization:

1^st, visualize in order to see the whole organization as it is and how it might be;

2^nd, analyze the organization’s positions to identify “hotspots” and reveal unexpected patterns ingrained in the system; and

3^rd, reorganize virtually, by quickly and intelligently drawing lines where none existed before, reorganizing physically only where necessary.

Visualize the Digital Org Chart

To start the process of smart reorganization, first the enterprise needs an accurate picture of itself. Ask anyone in an organization for its org chart and typically you’re handed a piece of paper—or sent to a website—with a box-and-wire diagram showing a few dozen positions. Whether the organization in question has fifty employees or 50,000, the charts generally look the same—and the request for one rarely, if ever, produces an accurate map of the whole thing.

What this means is that the vast majority of people in control are running organizations whose true size, shape, and structure they never really see. Thus, the initial act is to create and maintain an accurate digitized organization chart that represents the entire reporting structure, one that is visible, navigable, and analyzable (see live example). With such a chart in hand, the organization then can:

Jeff Stamps on today: From polarity to complementarity

Barack Obama becomes the Chief Hierarch today. What is uniquely different about President Barack Hussein Obama is that he is the Chief Complement as well. This is his genius.

Like presidents before him, he occupies the root position of the Executive Branch of the US government tree.  His position stands for the whole executive function, but is a part of a larger whole, whose genesis is the US Constitution. These United States are themselves a whole, comprising states, counties, localities, neighborhoods, and residencies such as ours where people gather on January 20 to witness an inauguration. Hierarchy, nested whole-parts, is a universal organizing principle.

Everyone knows about hierarchy. Few are familiar with its complement.

 Complementarity is the second great universal organizing principle, bringing opposites together into one process. Like red states and blue states, the whole "tao" process is stirred by yin-yang opposites of dark and light, yielding and firm, female and male, receptivity and creativity. Each opposite includes and interpenetrates the other.

Neils Bohr, who proposed the wave-particle solution in quantum physics, adopted the yin-yang symbol for his coat-of-arms along with the inscription “Contraria sunt complementa,” opposites are complementary.

From the beginning of his quest, Obama has been the voice of complementarity amid the din of dualism. Black and white. Liberal and conservative. Listen and act. Be firm and be open. He embodies both-and, not either-or.

While other politicians have promised to “bridge the gap,” for Obama it is simply part of who he is. In her excellent NY Times page one piece, “From Books, New President Found Voice,”  Michiko Kakutani links the power of voice, the love of learning and thinking, and the “quest to understand his roots.” This quest of a “divided child” for self-creation, lies at the “intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past,” themes elaborated by his inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander.

Self-creation at the intersection of opposites is emergent. From a polarized nation to a complementary one is a transformational step. This will be Obama’s theme this inaugural day. Bringing together while respecting differences. Finding synergies and creativities in new collaborations. Hope and hard work. You and me, working together.

This is the essence of networks: me and we, independence with interdependence.

-- Jeff Stamps

Inaugurate: to make a formal beginning

Why Barack won't break our hearts

Sitting in the warmth of my home, a fire burning, a house that's been here since 1723, since before there was a United States of America, miraculously watching Barack give his address on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Mac on my lap, hubby with his machine on the old pine chest, watching the TV...and thinking about the future.

We all share the concern that the aspirations we hold at moments of change will run into reality, float away in anger and dust. We're all in love with the future (when it isn't frightening us) but there's a way for this relationship with possibility not to end in heartbreak.

How? Because it's up to him, of course, to do what only presidents can do but it's never been more up to us. Without going all preachy on you, I truly believe that this is our time, our moment to do everything we can. To perform our own jobs as if they are the most important in the world, to come up with new ideas and execute them as fast as we can, and to help everyone we know who's hurting as much as we can. (Anyone need a house or office cleaner? I have a great referral for you!)

There are these inflection points in history, brief moments when grand vistas appear before us, ours for the decorating with our great visions.

What's yours?

Take a look at our website today

In honor of what's coming...

NetAge Report #3: Virtual Reorganization

How can we create better organizations that make it easier for us to get things done with superior results? One approach is "virtual reorganization," which avoids the pain of moving, merging, and splitting boxes on an org chart. So-called "physical reorganization," where groups are moved from one function to another, sometimes without the benefit of understanding the implications of the realignment, can be disruptive. While it sometimes makes for smoother operations, all too often it doesn't -- and it's hard to do. This proves particularly true in those organizations that are governed by rules, regulations, tenure, and a plethora of other bureaucratic restraints.

Yet swamped by a common crisis, nearly everyone, in nearly every sector, is in the process of reorganizing. No choice but to change, but how?

This series of reports on reorganization reflects our recommendations for how to do this easily and effectively in three steps.

First, visualize the organization. Produce a clear and comprehensive picture of the existing organization, visible to everyone involved (NetAge Report #1: The Digital Reorganization Chart).

Next, analyze what you've got by carefully examining the existing organizational design (NetAge Report #2: Analyze the Organization as a Network).

Finally, reorganize on the basis of thoughtful study. As changes are proposed and made, visualization and analysis go hand in hand, giving people both right brain and left brain ways to grasp both the whole and the details.

In NetAge Report #3: Virtual Reorganization, which we're posting here, we offer three strategies that help bureaucracies become more like networked organizations, gaining the benefits of reorganization without enduring the pain. These "virtual reorganization" strategies complement rather than replace hierarchy. They allow organizations to flexibly address pressing issues, improve results, and reduce costs as alternatives to or together with physical reorganization.

A good example of a virtual reorganization has just come up with the establishment of the new White House Task Force on Working Families led by Vice-President-elect (only six more days) Biden. This new network layer connects existing hierarchical positions into a new configuration. You can see this task force, and the DNI, in this version of our US Gov + Task Force map. 

Here, then, NetAge Report #3:

Virtual Reorganization

At the end of December, 2008, President-elect Obama’s pick for Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, made two critical picks of her own, naming dual deputy secretaries. James Steinberg, who served in the Bill Clinton administration as deputy national security adviser, will oversee foreign policy issues while Jacob Lew, Office of Management and Budget Director in the same administration, will have responsibility for day-to-day operations.

The decision to create two deputies signals a reorganization of the State Department. Naming two deputies is not only a departure from the current organization at State, but it is highly unusual with regard to all the current departmental org charts. Notably, however, two deputy chiefs of staff in the Executive Office of the President, Mona Sutphen and Jim Messina, were in the first wave of staff picks in mid-November. These actions are part of the impending “physical reorganization” of government, changes made by adding, moving, and merging boxes on an org chart. And that’s the way most reorganization happens—by rearranging the boxes.

During the same pre-Christmas news cycle, the transition team announced another kind of reorganization, naming a new White House Task Force on Working Families to be led by Vice President Biden. This coordinating body includes the secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Commerce, along with the directors or chairs of the National Economic Council, Office of Management and Budget, Domestic Policy Council, and the Council of Economic Advisors. The task force connects existing leadership positions—and by extension their organizations—into a new configuration, an example of the “virtual reorganization” of government. Instead of moving boxes, virtual reorganization connects them.

NetAge Report #2: Analyzing the Organization as a Network

In 2009, organizations have become reorganizations. Change is coming to, or already has arrived at, an organization near you, whether by force of sudden downsizing or by choice in an effort to adapt to the global economic crisis. If done properly and intelligently, reorganization promises to be a low-cost, high-performance improvement strategy. And we have a prescription, a three-step program: (1) visualize, (2) analyze, (3) reorganize.

NetAge Report #2: Analyzing the organization as a network is the second in our reorganization series. In it, we expose three prevalent myths about hierarchy, replace them with three realities, and turn our analytic skills on the US government to illustrate new thinking about how to design a great enterprise. This analysis shows what can be done to reveal the intelligence and power hidden within the organizational structure itself.

We have mapped the top levels of the US government using publicly-available org charts from the Bush administration (putting the new names and faces into the top jobs as Prez-elect Obama has named them). With simple network metrics, we've:

1. "Calculated" which of the government's most senior positions are the most heavily loaded, and

2. Compared and contrasted the organizational designs of different agencies.

Our key finding is that there seem to be "hubs in the hierarchy," a small number of highly connected, and very vulnerable, positions. This is consistent with our analysis of other hierarchies and findings from a broad range of physical, biological, and social networks. We have repeated Figure 3 of this report here to illustrate the distribution of reporting spans among the government's most senior executives. It is not normal, which in statistical terms means that it is not evenly distributed. In this chart, most managers ("# Managers" on the y-axis) have very few people reporting to them ("# Reporting Links" on the x-axis) while a few have a really huge number of people reporting to them. A "normal distribution" would have most managers having approximately the same number of people reporting to them.

As you read this, please keep in mind that we're operating without a license here. We don't have access to any special information about the government or the incoming Obama administration. And, what we do have is by its nature incomplete. Even so, we think there's some valuable information here for those very people who soon will be running our government. If you happen to know any of them, please direct them here. We deeply believe that better organizational designs lead to greater transparency and that we can work considerably better when we're operating in bureaucracies have intelligent configurations. If ever there has been a need for government to be more intelligent, it's now.

Click here for the first installment in our reorganization series, NetAge Report #1: The Digital "Reorganization" Chart. Also blogged it here.

Analyzing the Organization as a Network

If, in this difficult, resource-strapped, and uncertain environment, you have just been hired, elected, nominated, or appointed to lead a large, complex organization of hundreds, thousands, or, in Barack Obama’s case, millions of people, you face considerable challenges.

You must get up-to-speed very quickly, putting names to faces and matching those to responsibilities, become familiar with each of the sub-units and what their special missions are, and getting an overall feeling for the spirit and meaning of the whole organization. At the same time, you, as the one in charge, will certainly start thinking about how to improve things—by reducing expenses, improving performance, setting priorities (which also can mean considerable triage), and ultimately reorganizing.

It’s a truism to say that you don’t know what you can’t see. But, as we’ve seen in countless situations, the unseen can hurt you. This proves especially true when you reorganize, when you set out to deliberately change underlying organizational dynamics without clear views of what it is that you’re reorganizing.

Imagine that the standard mental model of organizations that most of us hold is actually wrong. Imagine that the quick cartoon in our heads of how organizations work is in fact an epidemic distortion of reality. If this is true, it’s no wonder that our large organizations don’t function very well, that bureaucracies rapidly grow out of control, and that frantic steering from the top seems to have so little effect.

We’ve spent most of this decade looking at, analyzing, and interpreting how our institutions actually are organized. We’re here to report that most of us hold a distorted view of organizations.

While people like to think the hierarchy is irrelevant, it is nevertheless unavoidable. If you doubt this, try to collect your paycheck without the hierarchy. Although many do in fact earn their living from networks, most people on earth are paid by formal structures.

Reorganization is particularly dangerous when blindness shrouds the real organizational design. Here, simple approaches, while laudable in many contexts, are sure to cause more harm than good. Take, for example, the recent report from a client: his company was going through a reorganization exercise prior to layoffs. In the new design, every manager would have approximately ten people on staff—regardless of function, level, or experience. Ten people per manager. Before smashing the hierarchy and/or issuing such one-size-fits-all reorganization edicts, we encourage you to look at the realities of your own organization.

Obama tops leadership picks with Intelligence

Intelligence is the bookend to President-elect Obama's nominating process that began with his naming people to key economic positions in November. Last week, PEBO named Leon Panetta as Director of CIA, Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan as both Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism.

While the CIA and National Intelligence are independent federal agencies, Brennan's outfit is part of the Executive Office of the President run by the Chief of Staff. Tracking down who reports to whom is its own intelligence operation so we think we've got this right when we submit that Brennan probably will report to Jim Jones, who, as National Security Advisor, is slated to run the National Security Council.

(FYI, all this national security apparatus is the result of the National Security Act of 1947. Perhaps it's time for an update as, shall we say, things have changed a bit in the subsequent years.)

Although these are by no means all of them, the DNI coordinates 16 intelligence-related agencies scattered throughout the US government, ranging from CIA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the US Coast Guard. On the US Gov map, we represent these agencies as having dotted-line/matrix reports to the DNI, relationships that show up as cross-links running from the cluster that we label "FEDERAL AGENCIES" (you can find it at about 2 o'clock when you lick on the map) to other parts of the government. While the position was touted as an "intelligence czar" when it was created, the relationship that the DNI has to its members is, as we understand it, more likely coordination than control. 

Launched in 2005, the DNI is a recent and very unusual structure in the formal org chart of the federal government, born as part of the post-9/11 overhaul in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The DNI's position is a dramatic example of the "virtual reorganization" of government, in this case a formal coordinating network set up by legislation and layered on the physical hierarchy-bureaucracy infrastructure.

In the next few days, we'll release "Virtual Reorganization" the third in our series of NetAge Reports, which focuses on the power of reorganization without moving the bureaucratic boxes around.

NetAge Report 1: The Digital "Reorganization" Chart

Between layoffs, mergers, downsizing, outsourcing, homesourcing, and fourteen other words that bring a bit of discomfort, nearly every enterprise is REorganizing.

This subject is dear to our hearts here at NetAge. Thus, we've been giving some thought to how to go about this intelligently.

NetAge Reports are mini-white papers that bring our network expertise to bear on the enveloping global crisis and how networked organizations can help people find better solutions more quickly.

The first three reports focus on reorganization: (1) The Digital Reorganization Chart; (2) Analyzing the Organization as a Network; and (3) Understanding Physical and Virtual Reorganization. To illustrate our perspective, we use the top levels of the executive branch of the US Government.

Today, we publish the first, the whole of which you can find at that link or jump to the next page to continue reading the whole thing here:

The Digital Reorganization Chart

They were words you don’t soon forget. “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area,” Aaron Broussard told Meet the Press’s Tim Russert a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coast. The president of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Broussard sobbed on national television as he recounted his mother’s drowning in a nursing home because, after five days of promises, no one rescued her or the other residents.

The catastrophic failure of government at all levels that Katrina left in its wake has become the emblem of systemic collapse and functional incompetence. It sharply underscores the need for large-scale reorganization. Poor organization carries great risks: it can lead to poor results, the inability to adapt to change, chronic proneness to instability, and, in some cases, complete collapse.