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Autonomous Working


Some recent studies highlighted that humans are more creative in solving problems and coming up with new ideas when they are allowed to work on their own, without any management control or guidelines. Though the concept sounds new and radical for technology professional like me, where management has major say on individual’s work, this isn’t new to the world of scientists and research professionals.
As technological revolution started after industrialisation most of the technology firms have an organisation structure similar to manufacturing companies which is a hierarchical structure where every person has a boss and he/she works according to what the boss decides. This caused innovation to stall and most of the innovations came from new start-ups or individuals who had the freedom of working on their own terms.
In todays’ world of patent wars technology companies can survive and outpace their rivals only if they can come up with futuristic technologies before their rivals does, or they should be bidding for new start-ups who has a better technology. This huge reliance on innovation has led to the above mentioned studies, whose results make us think ‘Isn’t it obvious’.
So the outcome of all the competition and these studies has resulted in some major organisation implementing ‘Autonomous Working’ as a pilot project. So, the employees who are part of autonomous working group can do whatever they want and in fact work whenever they want to. So, in essence they are their own boss, except that they don’t get all the money their work is going to generate, if it does generate anyway.
This new concept is slowly but surely gaining ground and today such autonomous groups are present in all the major companies who strive on innovations. But can this new concept ever be implemented across the board? I doubt that it would, at least I can’t see it happening in my lifetime. The main reason for my scepticism is that even though the new structure brings innovations it doesn’t work well in majority of other situations. For example if the new innovations have to take shape they need to be developed by a group of people and this group of developers have to work according to specifications of the new innovation. So, though autonomous work groups are a great idea it still needs the help of classic hierarchical organisation structure to get the innovation to market.
I might be wrong and some day there might be another research which makes me think ‘How did I miss that’. But for now I can’t see the death of management in the world of technology where innovation is the cog for survival.

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