Over the years, I have worked with many organizations, large and small. In one case, I implemented the exact same change in more than 15 organizations, whose size ranged from 35 to 35 thousand employees. But that is a story for another unit.
It led me to see patterns in decision making and trust. Who takes decisions in an organization? How do people even talk about decisions, especially when they concern digital technology? Who do you trust?
I have come to identify four major categories.
Individuals
First is the individual, who decides for themselves. They do not need to consult anybody. If they want a new app on their phone or laptop, they’ll just get it. And if it breaks, they will fix it themselves. Or a friend will. Or maybe not.
Small Companies
Second is the small company, with 10-100 persons. They agree on IT decisions around the lunch table. And if anything goes wrong, we know who the go to guy is to fix it. He/she has lunch too, after all.
Large Companies
Then we have the large company, more than about 150 people. Now 150 sounds like a random and weird number, but it is actually based on a scientific result by Robin Dunbar. It is called Dunbar’s number.
In groups with less than 150 people, you can know who you can trust, and who you can’t. When decisions are made, around the lunch table, for example, you can easily know who made the decision, how they made the decision, and why. And if it does not work out well, you know where your complaints go, who can fix your computer, or help you with that application.
You may not call a company of 150 large, but when groups are larger than that, you can’t keep track anymore of who you can trust or not. That really changes the social and power dynamics. Instead of knowing people by name, you know them by role. And the interactions between people are less governed by personal shared histories, but by company shared histories. Processes are established, which have to be followed, reviewed, and controlled. Bureaucracy sets in, and every request has to go through a lot of standardized paperwork. And it does not matter if this is a government organization, or a large business. Above a certain size, they all work the same.
Small companies run on trust, large companies run on control.
Society at Large
The fourth group is a bit different. This is society at large, or your social circles that are a part of it. They too make decisions on the technologies that will be adopted.
The technology and platform decisions of this category can be as fundamental as that of any of the other categories, but the forces driving them are a little harder to predict. For example, what is the social media platform that everybody uses? If all your friends are on a specific social media platform, sharing the fun they have and where the parties are, you are strongly encouraged to go there as well. And for reasons that we discuss elsewhere, these tend to be “winner takes all” situations, where one single choice dominates. Market forces are important here, but also regulatory pressures. Not to mention other circumstantial influences.
If you want to understand the differences and their impacts, start by looking out for the ways in which digital identities are managed. This differs widely between small and large organizations, as I have shown here.
In Real Life
In real life, these categories overlap and influence one another. Often, technology decisions begin as individual choices, which then moves to be adopted by a small group, and then the whole organization. Large organizations typically consist of a lot of small groups, within which there are different decision cultures. And small companies often try to sell to large organizations, while misunderstanding the cultural differences between themselves and their prospective customers.