A modern beehive is perfectly designed for the complex requirements and workings of a bee colony. In the height of summer up to 70,000 individual bees actually work as one single macro-organism with the beehive as the home base and their radius of foraging expanding to a circle of over six kilometres across. Deep in the hive lives the queen bee. She is about double the size of other bees and has only one job: to lay eggs. She sits at the top of the hierarchy and will lay up to 2,000 eggs a day: more than her own body weight, accompanied by an entourage of bees to feed and protect her. The eggs are laid in perfect hexagonal cells, the same as where honey is stored. They are all perfectly angled at six degrees up from the horizontal so that fresh runny honey doesn’t drip out. Every bee has its role, and every bee serves a purpose. Their organisational and physical design is impeccable.

Most large corporations today are based on a similar strict hierarchy. Early capitalist business owners, obsessed with structure, productivity, and systems believed you needed to monitor, observe, and control complexity and uncertainty. A command-and-control hierarchy was created. At the top of the hierarchy was the boss: someone paid more because they were meant to know more and be the most valuable. They were the one person who could decide everything.

In the new fast-moving knowledge economy of technology startups, we have a chance to design our own organisations to be lean and quick and more fit for purpose.

There are two dimensions to consider: structure and mindset.

A paradigm shift is required to create a structure that creates clarity, autonomy, and adaptability. We work with startups to restructure from organising people to

organising work. It’s still structured but in a totally different way. By organising work first, you bring clarity back to a role. Instead of asking, do I need five people or 10 people,

the question is, what’s the work? And what’s needed to get that done in the best way possible? And then who can do that and how can it be done most effectively? When you lead an organisation that is structured to create autonomy and clarity, it means a leader’s purpose is not to control and measure but to provide a vision and a direction. It means encouraging principle-based working, which means being really clear on the principles that the organisation operates by and then starting to trust people to operate based on these principles. However, having less control and less measurement can lead to more uncertainty for the individual.

For an organisation to survive, adapt, and become resilient, its members need to develop the skill of navigating uncertainty and discomfort and that will require a high level of self-awareness and learning for everybody. It’s important to emphasise this is about navigating uncertainty, not managing it. It's impossible to manage something you can’t control.

This must be supported by creating the right mindsets.

For the best people to do their best work they require the following five things:

1. Psychological safety and trust: we find the David Maister Trust Equation to be a great team discussion framework. Leadership teams should focus on developing a culture where everyone can speak up and share their best ideas, and also concerns
2. Space to think better: our competitive advantage will invariably come from thinking better about big problems, rather than focus on the volume of ‘stuff’ that we achieve
3. Quality conversations: where difficult topics and concerns can be raised. We recommend the work of Nancy Kline and the ‘Thinking Environment’ as essential reading for leadership teams
4. The above can be underpinned by the essential skills of coaching: saying less, asking more, and listening better
5. All team members and leaders can benefit from increased self-awareness of what their biases, beliefs, and behaviours are. An experienced team or individual coach can certainly help a team navigate the early roller-coaster days as they grow and mature.

A London Business School global survey of 640 chairs and NEDs (Harvey Nash Board Report, 2020) identified that leadership team dynamics were the highest cause of startup failure. The role of a leader and leadership board of a technology startup today should therefore focus on HOW they work as much as WHAT they do.

Let’s keep the bees in mind, and evolve our organisations to be fit for purpose.