The Polymorphic Organisation

From Greek: ‘poly’ (many) + ‘morphe’ (form)

In the beginning

Since June of 2025, something’s been stirring in me. That the way we’ve evolved to construct organisations — entities where work happens — has stalled.

In the game of business, in whatever form (as we’ve defined them, sectors — for profit and non-profit) — we’re playing this endless Monopoly board with no real goal, end game or adapted tactics in mind. Rolling the same dice, with the same playing pieces and either hoarding or losing our property and/or cash.

Despite valiant attempts at more purpose-led mantras, more talk of people-first organisations and more alternative business, operating and organising models, we’ve become raging capitalists or frustrated philanthropists and worn-out volunteers. Using the same playbook that was decreed over a hundred years ago with some added nuances like digitisation, legislation and automation.

Hierarchical constructs — echoing back to religious and military institutions. Layered, stratified and fixed. Power still vested in the upper echelons and driven by ego, greed and the growth of that power over the growth of more prosperous outcomes for all.

Verticals and divisions — supposedly focusing on their core contributing factors to the overall goal, but in reality, warring factions that are desperate for their slice of the capital cake to feast on and prove their worth.

Teams and units — framed around the more detailed production of the work that delivers the goal but “managed” in increasingly heavy bureaucracy, with dubious management capability and distrusted systems of reward, balance, fairness and performance.

Individuals — boxed in to a psychological prison/trap of a job with tasks, competencies and fictitious key performance indicators that denote success. Confusingly crucial at times, yet too readily dispensable.

The soul of work has been on life-support machines for decades and is well overdue for a regenerative and sustainable form of life, not only to recover but to be rejuvenated.

How do we treat this patient and cure it of its diseases?

The answers are similar to the construction of our current predicament.

We Use What’s Lying Around — or UWLA for short.

In 2020, I read a fascinating article by Rutger Bregman: The Neoliberal Era is ending. What comes next?

Link here: https://thecorrespondent.com/466/the-neoliberal-era-is-ending-what-comes-next

In it, Bregman analysed how Neoliberal Capitalism and “trickle-down” economics came into being.

I did not know it was as far back as 1947, in the Swiss village of Mont Pélerin, that free-market “radicals” met and conceived what is still the prevailing economic philosophy of now: Small state, free markets, and a primacy of self-interest.

Amongst them, economist Milton Friedman and philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who wanted a radical departure from what was the economic philosophy of the day (based on John Maynard Keynes’s version), a strong state, high taxes and a robust social safety net.

We know where that’s got us.

What Bregman found out is that Friedman, Hayek and others formulated this economic philosophy based on “things that were lying around”.

So just as — arguably — our current state is stuck, so was it perceived that our economic systems were stuck in the 1940s and through into the 1970s. And the “rescue” or evolution was to use what was lying around.

And what’s lying around for us in the shape, form and flow of organisations that provide work and power the societies we live in, is pretty abundant. It’s just all a bit messy and being underutilised in the way it could be.

I don’t have the intellectual power of Bregman, Hayek and Friedman but I AM standing on the shoulders of giants.

Parker-Follett, Maynard-Keynes, Fuller, Graves, McGregor, Ackoff, Senge, Meadows, Weick — the list is long. And of late, Hamel, Laloux, Getz, Semler, Polman, Sisodia, Prahalad, Graeber, Mazzucato, Edmonson and Lee.

And reading someone else’s post as I draft this, Douglas Adams said this:

”…attack everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

So with all the extraordinary genius I possess and absolutely naive incompetence, here’s what I’m channeling from the greats of the world, my own learning and experiences and as much imagination and boldness as I can muster.

Polymorphic Organisations are our future for work, business, enterprise and impact.

Firstly, two quotes to frame what is behind the concept of a Polymorphic Organisation.

Peter J. Denning (Computer Scientist and author: The Innovator’s Way)

“Polymorphism lets you program in the present, with an eye to the future.”

Frederic Laloux (Author: Reinventing Organizations)

“We need organizations that are not machines but living systems.”

As I opened this initial piece — and it will be one of many — I used the construct of the word Polymorphism — poly (many) morphe (form).

Organisations are already in many forms. Micro (sole traders), small, medium, large, huge, community-based, sole ownership, public listed, charitable, governmental etc.

But largely, they are ultra-similar in construct even if not in size, product/service, scale and capitalisation/funding.

Hierarchical. Divisional. Unit-framed. Job-based.

That is the industrial model that has been with us since the advent of steam, electricity, and mass manufacturing.

Since 2016, the term Fourth Industrial Revolution has become a popularised term, framed by the World Economic Forum (Klaus Schwab in particular is credited with the phrase) due to the advances in digitisation, miniaturisation and virtualisation of “things”. Money isn’t so real anymore in the form of notes and coins. It’s digitised transactions held in digital ledgers being one example.

Also since 2016, the world has been hit by shockwaves of political unrest, shifts in political ideologies, conflict and war, scientific discoveries and of course, a global pandemic. And of course, continued extremes in the planet’s climate with freak weather, continued global warming and a perilous ecological balance.

Whether or not the unrest and uncertainty has hampered the progress of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (not everything’s on the Blockchain, cryptocurrencies have not negated the need for central banks, and 3D printing has not replaced production), the way organisations are constructed and largely operate is still as it was in the 1950s, 1970s, and 2010s. With some exceptions and deviations, but it’s hardly a bell curve, more a huge critical mass of orthodox constructs with a small band of outliers.

And herein lies both the challenge and the opportunity. And a big question framed from a revolutionary who really did change a paradigm:

Václav Havel (dissident, playwright, statesman)

“We live in the tension between the system as it is and life as it longs to be. The cracks appear first in the unnoticed places, and it is there that transformation begins.”

Many people in organisations (because organisations aren’t real things, they’re our construct of an amalgamation of things) aren’t alive to the fact that what it (the organisation) is, also has plausible alternatives. Yet we live in a myth that we’re transforming business/operations.

We’re awash with transformation programmes.

But in reality, they’re often digitisation or efficiency programmes. Not the true transformation people label things as.

Sure if you were a brick-and-mortar store now totally online and e-commerce, that’s pretty transformative from a product, location, service and employment perspective. But you’ll probably still have: Hierarchy; Divisions; Unit constructs; Jobs and all associated operation orthodoxies: just a smaller real estate function and no localised employment amd a bigger digital unit.

The cracks are there and aren’t always unnoticed.

Declining engagement, disruptive competition, new markets and opportunities underutilised, harder working and yet less fruitful outcomes.

We’re misfiring in real time, and we’re not really noticing it despite being absolutely deluged with data. We may have the data, but we’re light on wisdom and really transformative action.

Even worse than that, maybe, we think we’ve mastered “it”. And by “it” I mean organisational constructs and the paradigm of work.

Business Models, perhaps we’re stress-testing those a lot more now. However, Operating Models not so much, and Organisation Design and the commensurate operations of our enterprises, even less so.

• We look at the outliers and say “won’t work here”.
• We look at the research and failing systems and say “our transformation programme will fix that.”
• We look at leadership floundering and say “but we got here, so we’re capable.”

All of those answers are, at worst, totally wrong, and at best, unhelpful hubris.

So the answer does not lie in “the same but digitised more” or “let’s copy XYZ start-ups”.

The answer is in organisations becoming Polymorphic.

Over this series of posts, I’m going devote both this Substack space and Medium space (so a straight copy and paste there) to the following:

• What a Polymorphic Organisation is and where the concept has come from (if you know Object Oriented Programming/Design — you’ll get it)
• How a Polymorphic Organisation is made up and comes into being to replace orthodox and even outlying organisational constructs
• Why we’d want to shift to becoming a Polymorphic Organisation
• How we would create that evolutionary shift on our terms, in our context and with our impact and operations in mind
• What we can do to accelerate, tune, sustain and embed being a Polymorphic Organisation
• What it means to work this way in a Polymorphic Organisation and why its for every size, shape, form or flow of an organisation
• And when Polymorphic is the absolute norm everywhere, why won’t we even notice it; except when we look back and wonder at how long we continued in a stuttering, failing and inadequate mode without realising.

It may become a book — just as Adam Smith, F W Taylor, Michael Porter, Jim Collins, Ricardo Semler, Gary Hamel, Frederic Laloux and others did.

What it really needs to be is a movement of the sort that ushered in Neoliberal capitalism.

And for that, we ALL need to be activists. And be the authors of our own destinies.

I’ll give the concept of Polymorphic Organisations a voice. I won’t have all it needs, but for now, it’s coming through me. There’s no trademark, just as orthodox organisational constructs don’t have one. It’s a Creative Commons we can all get behind.

I’ll leave you with this: