Default mode dictates a lot of dynamics inside an organization on three main levels:
personal default mode
processes
company culture
Personal default mode
Think about your company or any organization you’re a part of.
What modes do you have there? What modes do your colleagues have?
For example, if you work in an office, at least two of your main modes would be “talking with people” and “doing things on a computer.”
If you do more of the “talking”, most likely your main responsibilities include passing information, organizing people, and making decisions — you’re probably in a managerial or leadership position.
If you spend more time with a computer, you probably are one of those who do the actual work.
Every person has their own default mode at work, and this default mode is defined by the comfort zone of what they are used to doing the most.
There are multiple implications of the personal default mode in an organization, let’s consider the three most important ones:
Any task or activity that's not a part of the default mode of a person would require much more effort and control. So if you need someone to switch gears and do something new, this person wouldn't probably be happy about getting out of the comfort zone of their default mode.
So if you need to make someone do something outside of their default mode — start with small steps, and gradually introduce the new activity.
For example, if people in an organization are used to receiving tasks and doing what they’re being told — it is almost impossible to make them turn on critical thinking, take responsibility and set their own goals.
When hiring people, try to identify what's their personal default mode like. In addition to their skills and knowledge, they have big baggage of habits defining their default mode from the previous place, and it will be very painful and unproductive to change it if it doesn’t fit right away.
A few questions that you can ask to better understand their default mode, which you probably don't ask at the moment:
How does your typical day at work look like?
Where do you spend most of your time when working?
What kind of tasks would you prefer to avoid?
In absence of clear goals and instruction, most people would tend to focus on doing what they’re good at, and what they’re most comfortable with, instead of what the company actually needs.
This often leads to doing something that is not needed or even distracts and takes away focus and energy from meeting the goals of the organization.
A very typical example of this is the problem of overengineering in tech companies. Engineers, without a feedback channel with the end-users, would default to solving technical problems instead of working on user needs. And if their manager doesn’t have relevant knowledge and skills to be able to see through this — they end up following whatever the engineers tell them (this parody is so real).
Processes
You don’t have to be crazy to work here; we’ll train you.
Relying on default modes of individual people is rarely the best approach.
This is why most organizations need to have hardcoded processes. If the process works and the default mode of people is aligned with the process — the organization works as a well functioning machine.
An interesting aspect of processes is that they create habits.
The flip side of processes is that people who carry out a process stop thinking critically, since they’re getting used to most decisions being made automatically by the process, which leads to the process becoming the goal, instead of the goal being the goal.
Processes are the necessary default mode for any organization, but it’s a double-edged sword — too strict processes without a degree of autonomy and a feedback cycle is a sure way to an organization running entirely on old habits.
The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing.
— Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb
Company culture
Company culture is the default mode of how people behave in an organization.
There is a set of “how we do things here” type of patterns of behaviour that constitute a huge factor in the automatic decision-making, both on the team and organizational level.
There are some default acceptable behaviours in your organization, which people learn through osmosis and which become habits with time.
In organizations that don’t pro-actively define their company culture, the culture is defined by whatever default modes happen to be there.
Consider what are the default behaviors in your organization:
Do people trust their colleagues by default, or do they exercise caution?
What’s the default mood in the organization, are people excited to show up at work, or is it a business-and-nothing-personal kind of atmosphere?
Would anyone pick up a piece of trash from the floor, or would the default mode be “it’s not my job”?
Do people always do what their boss tells them, or they’re welcome to challenge their opinion?
If your work depends on other peoples’ work, can you rely on things getting done?
And most importantly, do people care about their work, or do they just check the checkboxes?
These are the kind of things that are not covered by “best management practices” and methodologies, they are rarely even considered at all.
However, these things define most of the invisible decisions which cumulatively define a multiplier to the organization’s performance.
The same people can show dramatically different behaviour and different performance only predicated on the company culture (Simon Sinek has a great example of this).
Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff, like great customer service or building a great long-term brand, or empowering passionate employees and customers will happen on its own.
— Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
Is designing the company culture a part of the default mode in your organization?