The end of the job as we know it

For more than a century, the workplace was the basic piece of organizational design. Each person occupied a place within the organizational chart, with relatively stable responsibilities and a clear set of tasks.
This model allowed complex organizations to be built and managed in an orderly manner. Companies grew by adding positions, and the organization chart became the main map to understand how the organization worked.

For years, this system worked extremely well. But the context for which it was intended changed.

Organizations today are undergoing permanent technological transformations, markets are increasingly dynamic, collaborators rotate more and business problems rarely belong to a single area of concern. It is increasingly common that a company's relevant initiatives require specific knowledge that is not always available within a traditional position.

There begins to appear a tension and also an opportunity.

For a long time, when a new need arose, the answer was clear: create a position and find someone to fill it. The organization chart grew by adding new boxes.

Today many organizations start from another question.

From positions to capabilities

Instead of first asking what role they need to create, leaders begin to ask themselves what capabilities they need to activate to solve a challenge.

The difference may seem small, but it profoundly changes the way you think about work.

A position usually involves stability: responsibilities that are repeated over time. A capability, on the other hand, is linked to a problem that needs to be solved. It may be required for months, during a project, or even during some critical moments of an organizational transformation.

When companies start thinking this way, the organization chart is no longer the only starting point for designing teams.

Organizations continue to have stable structures, but around them they begin to mobilize more flexible combinations of talent that provide specific capabilities at the time they are needed.

An example can be seen in many technological transformation initiatives. When a company decides to modernize a platform, develop data analytics capabilities, or transform critical processes, traditional roles on the org chart are rarely enough. At these times, different specialists are usually activated, with or without full dedication, who provide specific knowledge for the duration of the initiative. What organizes the work, in this case, is not a permanent position but the capacity necessary to solve a specific challenge.

The new map of organizations

This change does not mean that the position logic will disappear. Many functions will continue to require continuity, accumulated knowledge and organizational ownership.

What begins to change is its centrality.

For much of the 20th century, the organization chart was practically the only possible map of an organization. If someone wanted to understand how a company worked, just looking at its positions and hierarchies would make a strong impression.

Today that map begins to coexist with another.

One where what is relevant is not only who occupies each position, but what capabilities are available and how they are combined to solve complex problems.

This second map is usually much more dynamic. Capabilities are activated, combined and reorganized as business challenges evolve.

Leading in capabilities-based organizations

This shift also transforms the role of leadership.

In the past, managing people primarily meant managing positions within a relatively stable structure. Today, in many contexts, the challenge is different: designing teams capable of mobilizing diverse knowledge and aligning them around a common objective.

The organizational question begins to change.

It is no longer just a question of who occupies each position, but of how the necessary capabilities are activated to make things happen, with our own collaborators and/or provided by other organizations.

The job will not disappear. But its place as an almost exclusive unit for organizing work is beginning to fade in a context of increasingly liquid organizations.

As business challenges become more complex, organizations are beginning to discover that their true competitive advantage lies not solely in the talent they have at their disposal, but in their ability to mobilize the right capabilities at the right time.

And when that happens, the organization chart stops being a still photograph.

It is beginning to look more like a living system that combines stable positions with capabilities that are activated where the business needs them.