RIYADH: If there is a time in history where he could be born, author Frederic Laloux said he would always choose now.
“We have extraordinary opportunities for reinventing what it takes,” Laloux told the Future of Education, Science and Culture forum in Riyadh during a livestream event.
The author said his best-selling book, “Reinventing Organizations,” “talks about how the current way we think about management … is reaching the end of its shelf life.”
“What is holding us back from enacting that future is that we don’t have don’t have the courage or don’t feel like we have the freedom to innovate and go where we need to go.”
Laloux, a Belgian, said that current management models cannot deal with the complexity of the future.
“I know that every organization is facing a world that is becoming more complex and more unpredictable,” he said.
He said humans have always changed in the face of new eras, and it is time to do so again.
“Every time that we have had a major change of epoch of era, when we went from hunter-gatherers to a tribal age and went from tribal to agricultural, and then when we made the leap from agriculture to science,” Laloux said.
He added that humans have invented new ways of managing that change “and the old management model was no longer working.”
Laloux said that the companies that innovated often ended up with more productive and agile management structures.
“I have researched a number of really amazing private or non-profit organizations, who were founded by leaders who … just fundamentally questioned the structures and governance methods that we use every day,” he said.
“I really invite you to look into researching these new management models that are coming about and where every day we learn more about how to achieve breakthroughs that are simply not possible in the old management mode.”
“I am sure that you’re able to imagine and reinvent, like these other leaders, new types of structures that work much better.”
